Alva Noe – What Things are Conscious?

42 thoughts on “Alva Noe – What Things are Conscious?”

1. from the smallest particle to the biggest.

2. what a lockdown can do for a person. 😀 free study and knowlege.

3. Maybe something conscious can sense motion.

4. Interesting …BTW inanimate matter , like an AI can only FAKE consciousness . Like an NPC in a video-game , no matter how sophisticate its.

5. An organism takes in needed sensory information. It computes based on the information and acts to increase survival or propagation rate. The AI machine could do the same and be called conscious by the definition.

6. I would think at the very least, something would have to have a central nervous system in order to be conscious. So earth worms might be at the very bottom of biological organisms that might have some rudimentary conscious experience, but I don't think paramecium do.

7. It's becoming clearer that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

8. Things exist as they are. They will be as they exist. They have conciousness even if theirs are different from ours.

9. Survival are conscious

10. look up the dog that knows its owner is on its way.. quantum strings of everything including the loud cancerous human..

11. props to alva by coming to a christian channel and engaging respectfully. i like how the presenter pressed him on his hesitation in a gentle, professional way. i also like that he felt confident and comfortable to share his naturalistic worldview. the world needs more of this!

12. Each and everything to the smallest sub-particle has consciousness but only biological being has a living/life consciousness…. only us failed to communicate to each and every of them but of course God The All-Living Almighty Creator certainly can!

13. Conscious one to conscious, a glimpse of consciousness

14. Maybe a good marker for consciousness would be curiosity. Is the paramecium capable of curiosity, or does it just run entirely on instinct.

15. First off all what is consciousness ?
    Consciousness is GOD or we can say that GOD is the Supreme consciousness which operates the conscious reality, GOD is timeless, compassion, turth, positivity, knowledge power, infinite , everything . GOD completes everything nothing is beyond or before GOD everything starts from GOD & ends with GOD. GOD is permanent .
    Consciousness is the ultimate reality from which material universe or our world origins. Consciousness is the fundamental from which every thing origins i mean everything e.g – humans, animals , plants , microorganisms & lot more. So things which origins from conscious are conscious things. So everything in material universe is directly or indirectly related to or originated from Supreme consciousness.

16. The table is getting warmer or colder, reflecting light and processing information that unfolds in entropy. Not so sure what being a table entails…
    it is even worse with things like planets or stars that have a very different time frame of reference in their process.
    regular life and consciousness as I see it has no free will so the distinction is now weaker. I have no further comments to make.

17. There’s a few types of consciousness, and that means , spiritual, fundamental, and natural, and even philosophical, specially, when you’re searching for truth, from your childhood, and that’s takes, year’s, of experiences to finally , you feel that you can understand the things better and much clear , but the mostly important is that you should up to date your scientific knowledge at any areas of science.

18. I would make a difference between conscious and self-conscious. The more you have the capacity for abstraction, the more you can be self-conscious. A rock has a minimum of consciousness required so it can exist as a rock – all the atoms that make it a single thing – while a tree is a bit more conscious; it grows, it adapts, it lives. Some animals know at some level what self-conscious is – like dogs, cats, squids, dolphins, I would say many – but not at the level of humans. Now, it is in the nature of consciousness to know like it is for fire to burn. That is why evolution's will tend to develop self-consciouss beings in other to achieve consciousnes goal; to know more, to be more and more self-aware. Not only it gives you an advantage for survival, it allows you to think about meaning, purpose, morals and ultimately; about God, how to go back where you come from.

19. Imo If we trace back the species tree we come from and at some point there was first species with primitive consciousness, could be a bug or a fish!?
    But wat seems clear is that consciousness can’t appear in any network unit that simply processes a lot of information because sub regions of this network would have separate consciousnesses. So a special configuration is needed and a centralization which usually works produces a single thread. That’s because there are people with DID that actually have multiple threads of consciousness so if the network configuration is disturbed multiple threads occur but not hundreds at the same time, which would try to control the body at the same time and would create a total chaos.

20. Of all the people who you've asked this question, this to me is the most intellectually honest answer.

21. ARE YOU CONSCIOUS IF YOUR DELUDED,,,,HOW DO YOU KNOW?

22. We are limited within our own "awareness" therefore to know what else is conscious is pretty much a mystery.
    One thing is for sure, what we see is not reality and there are many levels to consciousness. In fact, monks who meditate will tell you they have experience "pure" consciousness …consciousness without limitations.
    As AMAZING and beautiful as the brain is, you could say in another sense it limits our perception.
    Such as when a person has a profound Near Death Experience or Out of Body state, they talk about truly understanding existence and they are sent beyond the "physical" aspects of existence and return completely transformed.
    Trust me, mind and consciousness is MORE than just matter.

23. Such bold assumptions. None of us can claim certainty of any but their own consciousness. We have suspicions that life is involved in consciousness, but consciousness may have preceded life.

24. Teilhard De Chardin's The Human Phenomenon comes to mind. He has written about the degrees of consciousness in nature.

25. If a conscious being is uncomfortable in one place it stands up and moves elsewhere. Using all the means made available to it by the Creator.

    How do you expect AI to declare its conscious state?

    Send you an email and introduce itself?

    Yes, perhaps if it is a mail bot, that's exactly what I would expect!

    OK, then all you need to do is teach it how to speak English, explain to it its purpose in an existence that you have created for it and also declare yourself somehow, because I have no idea how the most intelligent of mail bots would perceive a human being!

    Its entire existence consists of receiving commands in binary sending out commands in binary, compiling reports in binary, the works…and for all we can logically derive those mean entirely different things to it, than they do to us…assuming they do mean anything at all.

    Finally, you'd have to convince it why it needs to spend whatever resources are available to it, to declare its conscious state to you!

    Phew!

    While we are at it, why not teach our dog some English as well? He probably already knows a few verbal commands, why not go all the way?

    I don't know about everyone else but I'd always wanted to have a meaningful conversation with my dog…

26. I am the God of many chances, Closer to Truth, be my angels, tell Fake President Joe Biden i will give him chances to enter my Heavenly Kingdom,Tell Joe to stop abortions,stop wars, stop the Covid Vaccines, stop depopulating the world, stop abortifacient contraceptives pills, stop implant contraceptives,stop illegal drugs,be Prolife, then all who will obey my commands will enter my Heavenly Kingdom !Love Peace to mankind !

27. Panpsychism is attractive to me because it implies that there is no hard on/off state for consciousness; that it is instead always functioning at a non-zero value. I think this makes more sense because, although the universe might ultimately be quantized, there is a tendency for gradations to occur within all phenomena. So something like consciousness probably doesn't just blink off below a certain organismic level, it probably just becomes less complex.

28. If every information-processing agent is conscious, consciousness is not limited to living beings: it encompasses AI, atoms and fundamental particles

29. All flowing from faith in the "scientific" belief that life came from non-life.

30. Brain is the transducer that converts sensory pulses coming from the sensors of sight, taste, touch, smell, sound, into datum. Mind is the algorithm that translates the data into intelligence, and then generates responses, based on genetic, social, and other “learning”. None of this is consciousness. This is essentially an automaton. Of a kind that material can amount to anytime. An automaton, like a star, a galaxy, and a river, is intrinsic to the design of the material universe.

    Consciousness is what makes us aware of the states of mind, AND OF OUTSELVES. The concept of self is not a mental state. It is an essential and separate quality of the spiritual universe. Like the reality of relativistic and quantum worlds is different, so also the reality of consciousness is different from the quantum and classical worlds. An electron powering this display is also, at once, capable of reaching the ends of this universe probabilistically. There isn’t a causative computational basis for this reality. Similarly, consciousness isn’t a computational reality. It isn’t a sufficiently complex algorithm, it isn’t a result of our brain being better than Watson, the super computer in a computational sense. Even if EVERY computational match was won by a collection of transistors and diodes, they will not be conscious because of that computational complexity.

    What utility is there to consciousness? There is only spiritual utility to it. Self-awareness doesn’t produces wealth or any material good. So why this jealousy of this poorly defined, undetectable, and immeasurable entity?

    There is only one consciousness, atomized through ego and deluded through attachments. The burden, the cross it bears is to see its identify with the One. Once it can say the “The One and I are one”, then it loses material, mortal identity. It is anti worldly in that sense. The One is expressed as all that exists, and beyond (all that is potential, latent, and nonexistent). That’s who our “selfness” comes from.

    Consciousness, like matter, space, energy, and laws of nature, is a real, and and a distinct entity. It resides in our body, and animates our ego, but is not emergent from our physiology.
    It is not a subject of the laws that apply to matter and energy in space.

31. This guy talks about evolution and primordial soup as they are scientific facts. Scientifics can't even explain the most simple cell, and significant macroevolution and yet they are so arrogant with their own believes or theories, they blind themselves with what they hope it would be real just to be right… c'mon… Life coming from a soup, that requires more faith than Believing in God… Life as it is, is a script writtem in a very specific DNA language that does not seem random at all… It is just like reading the code of rendering models in a graphic engine software. The whole universe is… And you can't deny that.

32. What Things are Conscious? Interesting question. First though, what is a thing ?

33. Entire universe is a conscious being.

34. What about the artificial creation of simpler consciousness, like that of a microbe, roach or a bat? AI need not replicate human mentality.

35. Answer: Besides humans, we don't have any idea whatsoever. I think any other answer is pure speculation.

36. Brains that have a lot of information processing going on in them does not necessarily experience the life with its full intensity. A simple neurological mechanism (taste of lemon), compared to solving a difficult mathematical equation can have a strong phenomenal quality to it. I'd argue, a simple organism may have an intense experience world.

37. For answers go to Harold Percival: "Thinking and Destiny" or "Man and Woman and Child."

38. I believe that consciousness exists in the same way that light exists or gravity exists. It has always existed and because all things are made of atoms it then follows that atoms are conscious, therefor everything is conscious and able to interact with consciousness in various degrees, Humans may have the greatest capacity to experience consciousness as far as we can tell but that remains to be seen.

39. Assuming that Information permeates reality, and that all things within reality are exposed to the same information, would our consciousness not be more influenced by what we filter out than by what we allow in? Our brains filter massive amounts of information, but that processing is not necessary to the experience. A less complex organism could filter information mechanically, rather than through a brain, thereby receiving the same amount of information and achieving the same level of consciousness. Taken further, what limits that experience of information to biological machines or informational databases, and what dictates the amount of “time” a consciousness must exist for?

40. What I will tell my beloved as her ears become within the range of my voice, "when you are here with me it is like the world shows up for the first time". and "for you I am glad to be a bearer of consciousness." Thank you both!

41. Things is Not Conscious,
    Only the Eternal Life can be Conscious, have Consciousness.

42. alva noë is my professor at uc berkeley right now in philosophy of perception, and he's the best professor i've ever had, hands down. i'm so glad i've had the opportunity to have him as an instructor for the semester.

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