Well, it would seem I struck a nerve.
If bacteria changing the motion of their flagella in response to light is possible without consciousness of the light being there, how does it happen?
How would you know any alternative you pretend to come up with was what it was instead of consciousness?
I will assert that there is no experiment you could do to determine the presence of any alternative which can dispose of the far simpler and more comprehensible identification of what is happening as being a demonstration of consciousness. How would you describe such a state of non-consciousness that accounts for a demonstrable awareness of light like that, leading to purposeful behavior? Even if such a state exists, I doubt it is comprehensible to people and could never enter into science. And what experiment could dispose of the explanation that the bacterium is conscious?Unlike you, I admit that science can't answer questions about such entities and we will most likely never have generally held answers to them.
But it is possible to say, definitively, that this is a huge problem for your "brain only" dogma, that the phenomena we observe in such bacteria reasonably leads to the conclusion that bacteria are conscious of light and act with intention in response to it, just as we do.
It is MORE REASONABLE to conclude that that is consciousness than to conclude it isn't and, so, it is ENTIRELY MORE REASONABLE to conclude that your theory of consciousness as a product of the evolution of the brain is baseless on the evidence as seen in nature.
The further problem that, if you can't identify the physical location of consciousness in one-celled organisms that it is reasonable to conclude that consciousness may not be a physical entity and so isn't bound by the restrictions that are an intrinsic aspect of physical objects.
That isn't a scientific question since science couldn't deal with it on that basis. It is subject to conclusions drawn from evidence, however and there is nothing you can do if people freely choose to come to their own conclusions on those questions.
I'm trying to pin some of this down, so forgive the ramble:
ReplyDeleteIf consciousness is response to stimuli, like light, then it is, at root, a very simple thing.
If consciousness is more complex than that, then from whence does this complexity arise? Multi-celled organisms, v. single-celled? Haven't we almost learned to stop thinking of mutli-celled organisms as "advanced," and single-cell as "primitive"? It's an ungainly metaphor when applied to societies (anthropology certain eschews such categorization), and it hardly seems fit in biology, either.
So complex consciousness (like self-consciousness; but then we have to ask "What is the self?" You don't want to go there without a guide, believe me) arises from multi-celled organisms? Why? Because we observe it to be so?
Yet we don't observe consciousness in animals, because we are convinced such observations are anthropomorphic and so to be disregarded. And yet is it any more valid to say animals cannot have consciousness (because anthropomorphizing) than to say they can? Both assertions are based on observations and the limitations thereof because yes, to the man with the hammer, the whole world DOES look like a nail.
Unless it doesn't. Every rule has it's exceptions. That's were free will enters in.
If it enters into anything at all. But if it doesn't, what made me curious enough to explore these topics thoroughly enough I could write this just now? A concatenation of circumstances colliding in just the right causal chain to produce this tiny bit of alliteration?
Really? And I'm the guy who believes in fairy tales?
But consciousness exists because we observe it? And love? Love exists because we invented it in order to sell movies and greeting cards and candy and flowers? But consciousness exists because it just does?
Something about this materialist argument is going 'round and 'round in circles, chasing its own tail.
I would say that what is apparent, if not obvious is that 1. the bacteria and one-celled organisms that respond to light are clearly conscious of the light on their bodies, 2. that they can change the motion of their bodies in response to the light to make them move in a direction which 3. they clearly decide to move in in response to the light.
ReplyDeleteI would go on to say that if there is not some consciousness in these mobile beings that is the source of the organisms' ability to sense the light, change their body's orientation in their environment to move (making use of the water or other fluid they live in, sensing that and "knowing" that much about it as well as the light) then there is something there which produces that effect. If there is something other than consciousness that creates the phenomenon, I doubt we could really conceive of it. You would think if materialists were going to ever, as Francis Crick put it, rather crudely, "drive the final nail in the coffin of vitalism (or "organicim" or anything other than materialism)" it would be easy for them to find it to explain this phenomenon. Since they claim it would be material, it would be rational to expect it to be in the ability of science to find it. I doubt it is.
I'll point out that if you begin by suspecting that consciousness is not physical, you would not expect science to be able to even begin dealing with it.
We can only, really, know our own consciousness, even that of those we love must be believed in because we can't experience another consciousness, directly. Our own knowledge of our consciousness isn't dependent on the observation of consciousness in others but anything we can know about the consciousness of other people or beings is dependent on observation, just as our experience of the material universe is dependent on observations informing our consciousness of those things.
Make that, the fascinating idea of "organicism". Which I've never written before so I left a couple of letters out.
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