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Whaleboy
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Please make all cheques payable to Whaleboy
Jan 2003
time: 05:17
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quote:
first, their brains are practically similar to mean, and since self-awareness is an emergent property of the functioning of the brain,
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This works on the presumption that a similar brain is a sufficient condition to consciousness and knowable consciousness, a latter term that's under debate in the first place.
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second, other humans have come up with the concept of self-awareness before me - and I've adopted the convention that if something TELLS me it is self-aware, without obviously being "rigged" to (like a program that's just printf("I am self-aware"), then it is self-aware. I find it highly unlikely that a nonsentient being would come up with the concept of self-aware.
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Well is consciousness the only pre-requisite? If you break it down to a matter of contextual perception, namely yours, then you could be projecting your own feelings of consciousness onto others. But it is almost impossible to provide a counter which proposes a reason for Solipsism (namely that I am the only consciousness) since that argument only relies upon their being doubt... so you need to attack (or concede to) the notion of doubt here... thus far you have failed to provide a sufficient refutation.
The best reasonable answer to Cartesian doubt is provided by Wittgenstein, that is that context (yay) of a statement provides the means by which it should be interpreted. I could talk about "morality" or "freedom" in, shall we say, a piece about computer science... both of those concepts are demonstrably false but that's something a red herring to the context itself. By this, it makes no sense to talk about doubt of consciousness since we all agree that I am conscious, as are you.
In my opinion however this fails to account for the fact that contexts as Wittgenstein uses them are fluid and not static, a change in one effects the other, which accounts for the limitations of language rather than uses them as a premise, so doubt still holds.
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Snotty
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I did actually read your arguement before criticising it 
The reason it is thin is because you are basing it on an assumption, and one that is easily countered because we have no way of proving it either way. Your assumption is based on similar biology, but we really do have similar brains to the primates at least (perhaps our frontal lobe development is the key, but we have no way of knowing really).
Your other reason is based on the ability for other humans to express their self awareness, which is a product of language. We have never fully figured out what animals have got to say for themselves, if anything, but their inability to accurately communicate (in a way that we can understand!) does not make them de facto un-self aware. I am sure humans are self aware, then I see no reason why a feral child would be un-self aware. Unless perhaps conciousness is a product of language after all.....
Overall, your justification is weak when measured against the seriousness of what you are justifying, which would be consigning entire species/races to enslavement and an untimely demise due to their lack of language or lesser intelligence. A little over dramatic I know, but thats the moral point behind my arguement. If you guys want to play philosophy to squeeze out the narrowest of logical reasoning then I will leave you to your fun 
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:17
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Originally posted by Boris Godunov
I'm still waiting for your explanation of how self-awareness just magically appeared in man. Did homo erectus have it? Australopithicus? The logical course of your claim that self-awareness is binary does not make any sense in the light of evolution. Was one human born one day with full self-awareness from non self-aware parents? |
That has to happen at some point. Either an organism is self-aware or it is not. While clearly there may be degrees of awareness (presumably lesser degrees would be like being asleep, or simply not being aware of as much sensory information), there is a complete gap between self-aware and not.
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And since you admit it's a property of language, did man not become self-aware until he had the actual language to say, "I am?" That's a pretty meaningless definition of self-awareness, as it's just contingent on having the right vocabulary. |
I never said it's a property of language. Where'd you get that idea?
Something could be self-aware without language, but if it lacks language then I have no way of telling - so I assume it isn't. Just like, absent evidence, I assume there is no God.
In advance of your argument: babies, before they can speak, are self-aware, because I know of many, many humans that present what I consider primary evidence of self-awareness - communication of the concept - and so I assume all things with a brain practically similar to those that have presented this primary evidence should also be self-aware. However, no monkey has provided me with this primary evidence - it doesn't matter that they can't, since my default assumption is non-self-awareness and one way or another I do NOT have evidence for them - so I have no reason to presume that their lesser similarity to my brain is sufficient for self-awareness.
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If self-awareness is biological trait (rather than a metaphysical one), then it had to have evolved, as all biological traits do. |
It's an emergent property of matter. Dualism is incoherent idiocy.
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So therefore the fact that we have self-awareness, that we evolved from other species and that other species exhibit behavior that is congruous with self-awareness all lead one to the likelihood that other species do indeed possess it, at varying levels of cognizance. |
That it had to evolve doesn't mean that it had to exist in some "lesser form" in our ancestors going all the way back to the last branching off of species.
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:17
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Originally posted by Whaleboy
This works on the presumption that a similar brain is a sufficient condition to consciousness and knowable consciousness, a latter term that's under debate in the first place. |
Actually, it works on the presumption that it's an emergent property of matter - so all that matters is the configuration. Now, if it weren't for the fact that I have what I consider direct evidence of self-awareness from OTHER humans, too (they came up with it before me, so it's highly likely they actually were self-aware), then I wouldn't say that other humans' brains are necessarily sufficiently similar. But I do so I do.
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Well is consciousness the only pre-requisite? If you break it down to a matter of contextual perception, namely yours, then you could be projecting your own feelings of consciousness onto others. But it is almost impossible to provide a counter which proposes a reason for Solipsism (namely that I am the only consciousness) since that argument only relies upon their being doubt... so you need to attack (or concede to) the notion of doubt here... thus far you have failed to provide a sufficient refutation.
The best reasonable answer to Cartesian doubt is provided by Wittgenstein, that is that context (yay) of a statement provides the means by which it should be interpreted. I could talk about "morality" or "freedom" in, shall we say, a piece about computer science... both of those concepts are demonstrably false but that's something a red herring to the context itself. By this, it makes no sense to talk about doubt of consciousness since we all agree that I am conscious, as are you.
In my opinion however this fails to account for the fact that contexts as Wittgenstein uses them are fluid and not static, a change in one effects the other, which accounts for the limitations of language rather than uses them as a premise, so doubt still holds. |
Eh, there are a number of key terms there that I don't know. English, please? 
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Thanks for addressing my post Kuci, really I'm not an attention whore |
I never saw it until you mentioned it.
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JimmyCracksCorn
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Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:17
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Originally posted by Odin
Kuci is stuck in the Platonic,Typological, Essentialist, Cartesian, BS view of human self-awareness and consciousness.
F*ck you Plato for putting a strangle-hold on science with typological thinking.  |
Its understandable, he's still in High School. In HS they teach you things in the most sweeping, broad, generalizing manner possible. Its no surprise that HS kids also happen to be some of the most arrogant, know-it-all ****** around.
Once he gets to University he will, like we all did, realize that nothing is ever as simple as 1+1=2.
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Whaleboy
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Please make all cheques payable to Whaleboy
Jan 2003
time: 05:17
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quote:
Actually, it works on the presumption that it's an emergent property of matter - so all that matters is the configuration. Now, if it weren't for the fact that I have what I consider direct evidence of self-awareness from OTHER humans, too (they came up with it before me, so it's highly likely they actually were self-aware), then I wouldn't say that other humans' brains are necessarily sufficiently similar. But I do so I do.
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An emergent property, but then other’s consciousnesses would be knowable, at least in the sense that we use it. That it could be a logical singularity emerging from the brain, yes that would seem self-evident and neuroscience bears us out there but if you cannot get around the singularity issue, then any attempt at direct knowability is flawed. I do not accept that others have described “self-awareness” is satisfactory, that presumes that language is objective, your perception of it also since you have no guarantee that you mean the same by “self awareness” as everyone else, or at least perceive it thus. Consider this:
I have a rather gay pink beaker on my desk that was filled with strawberry milkshake and chopped bananas before I downed it in the mistaken belief that it contained some kind of biblical elixir. I see it as pink, but how can I know that you see it in the same way? For sure we can subject each other to colour-blindness tests and confirm that pink is a hybrid of red and white, but then we have to talk about those colours, and if we establish that there are no ocular differences between us, we have to conclude that our perception of colour in that respect is a fundamental and incommunicable constant of consciousness, since it is implausible to communicate colour as we experience it in any way to each other. This ignores the idea of shared consciousness but that somewhat defeats the point no? You recall our old debates about internally consistent logical systems? Well 2+2=4, and that can’t be changed in this ICLS, but that does not refute the possibility of another independent ICLS where 2+2=5. We can establish no evidence pro or no for that but then we are subjective. Similar situation exists here… indeed one might say that the consciousness is a singularity: an ICLS. That we can communicate is solely a result of the fact that we have shared “assumptions” behind our ICLS’s, which is easier to do for continuous systems like ourselves rather than discrete ones like mathematics.
If you accept that the consciousness is a singularity then it by definition refutes any notion of knowing 100% the existence of others, Cartesian doubt therefore holds firm.
As for an emergent property of matter, in the same sense as a cars motion is that of an engine, but it makes consciousness no more essential to neurons as metal is to an engine, as opposed to motion, hence the gap between (for want of better words) epistemology and neuroscience.
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Eh, there are a number of key terms there that I don't know. English, please?
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Yish! Solipsism is the belief that only oneself exists and that existence is just a mental state. Other versions are more closely related to the Cartesian (as in, of Descartes) cogito ergo sum, that I am the only irrefutably existing consciousness in the universe.
The rest you should know.
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Kuci is stuck in the Platonic,Typological, Essentialist, Cartesian, BS view of human self-awareness and consciousness.
F*ck you Plato for putting a strangle-hold on science with typological thinking
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If he gets into panpsychism I won’t be amused (if my keyboard is conscious I don’t even want to think about the abuses I’ve put it through! 
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Snotty
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Oops, didnt mean to kill the thread or anything!
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07-03-2005 10:16
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