Where does consciousness come from?
pygy: First one has to define consciousness as subjective experience, not as being awake.The only consciousness one is able to experience is his own. But solipsism is a point of view that is both depressing and not really explanatory of anything.Let's assume that people around, who are similar to us, are conscious too. The problem in the last sentence is the word "similar". A few centuries ago, Black people were considered soul-less animals by their "enlighted" European peers. We recentlty came to realize that most traits that we thought made us unique, like symbolic language for example, or "theory of mind" ie realizing that other creatures have other thoughts and other beliefs than our own, are shared by other species (eg bonobos).Even if they don't recognize themselves in the mirror, in most animal species that I know of, individuals are able to recognize their own smell.Assuming personnal consciousness can be mapped to some part of the brain processing, can a dog, a frog, a worm be conscious? How many neurons make a conscious brain?Let's keep on recursing.Are plants conscious? At least, some of them seem able to compute. The opening and closing patterns of stomata (the pores that allow the gaz exchanges on leaf) are not statistically different from those of some 2d cellular automata. (Evidence for complex, collective dynamics and
emergent, distributed computation in plants http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0307811100 )Can a monocellular animal be conscious? Not only do they sense and react to their environment, but some are able to anticipate periodic variations of their surroundings, and memorize stimuli patterns. (Amoebae Anticipate Periodic Events http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101 )Now please be confused :-)I don't think that consciousness is related to the ability of having explicit self referential thoughts (how do we define thoughts, BTW? are they language related or not necessarilly?), nor to symbolic language.From the "mapism" point of view, something that really puzzles me is the fact that identity is preserved overnignt, despite the extensive plasticity that occurs while one is sleeping.Could identity rely on the statistical properties of a brain rather than on a strict material mapping? Cognition at least, and possibly conscious access to information relies on bayesian processing of the information (see Hakwan Lau's work).As long as we don't have proper formal models of these concepts, we'll keep on speculating.I really wonder whether it's possible to find a Gödel-like paradox regarding statements about consciousness pronounced by conscious beeings... :D/rambling.