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Old 1st January 2018, 06:13 PM   #189
IanS
Philosopher
 
Join Date: Jun 2011
Posts: 5,692
Originally Posted by RecoveringYuppy View Post
How does that lead to consciousness? And why doesn't it always lead to consciousness assuming it ever does?

It doesn't "lead" to consciousness. Instead what I'm suggesting (it's only a suggestion), is that, that is what consciousness actually is. That is ...

... what we call "consciousness" is just that continuous rapidly updating set of sensations and responses that we experience/undergo as a result of the chemical, electrical and physical changes from the sensory input, to reactions in the brain, to signals going back from the brain to the muscles and other organs and back to the sensory system in a continuous cycle ... the effect of that is what we call "consciousness".

If you don't understand how that could be what you think of as consciousness as you perceive it in your own daily life, then that may simply be because the effect has become so refined and so efficient in humans after billions of years of evolution, that to us as functioning apes, it now seems like “magic” … as if there must be some other reason different from the purely physical/chemical reactions that define how all living things function …

… but since all known evidence is against such “magic”, I expect the explanation for the effect that we call “consciousness”, is indeed just a highly evolved and very efficient (seemingly “very efficient” on out time scale at least, and where we are unaware of the underlying chemical, electrical processes that go on all the time in our cells and nerves etc.) sequence of perfectly natural chemical and electrical changes that occur in all “living things” (they occur to different extents, and with more or less complexity going from simple organisms such as plants, to the most complex such as mammals inc. apes and humans).

You could think about it another way – if you were able to travel back to the time when the first living things appeared on the Earth (e.g. you are the only human alive, but you actually know nothing about modern science or the modern world … all you can detect is what your senses see, hear, smell etc., and what your thinking human mind says to you about the single-celled “life” before you and the landscape of the planet that you perceive), then you would probably think it was impossible, even completely unimaginable, that a process of evolution would lead eventually (after billions of years) to humans that could make aircraft, computers, discover quantum field theory, develop language etc., or indeed experience an effect that we call “consciousness” …

… but the explanation for how humans came to have all those characteristics & abilities today (inc. “consciousness”), is certainly that it has been the inevitable result of 3 billion years of evolving life becoming more and more highly developed, more sophisticated, refined and more capable in everything associated with our life and existence.
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