(March 23, 2009 at 6:21 am)Kyuuketsuki Wrote: Um ... not trying to be funny here but what on Earth makes you think no one is acknowledging conciousness?
At my last count (admittedly some time ago) there were something like 300 peer-reviewed journals on brain function, mentality and so on, there are numerous popular science books on the subject (I believe Stephen Pinker is an author who writes on the subject) so it's not like we don't know anything ... it is just, like any other area of science, an ongoing area of research.
Yeah, but it's treated like a red-headed stepchild. Case in point: A neurologist I was talking to about a year ago said she didn't believe in psychiatry, and believed eventually all of psychiatry would be rolled into neurology. Currently, both neurologists and psychiatrists are certified by the same board. And why did she believe this? Because no matter what the psychiatric condition, it still only had to do with the functions of the brain.
Consciousness is treated as a kind of anomaly of the brain. But I'm suggesting it's more like a force of nature similar to the other forces. I propose that consciousness is actually out there, and we receive it. We don't generate it.
Of course I can't prove that yet. I may be able to make some philosophical arguments for it, but I want more than that.
Quote:Personally I believe that all advanced animals have levels of conciousness and that humans only happen to be the ones that have made larger strides in that area (presumably due to evolutionary luck).
So, you think evolution is just kind of expanding without any direction. In other words, you don't believe there is any goal in mind when it comes to the evolution of species. We are just here for no reason at all? But that can't be what you believe, because you said "luck." You seem to believe it's lucky that humans have advanced consciousness. Why?
Quote:I think there is no verifiable evidence for precognition and no, I do not think nature or the universe is in any way becoming self-aware.
I don't think there can be any verifiable evidence for precognition. (1) It occurs randomnly to those who experience it. (2) There doesn't seem to be anything that stimulates it. So based on 1 and 2 it can't be duplicated, which puts its determination and measurment outside of the scientific method.
Also, I'm not sure it can be tested in the sense of using it as a predictive tool. If one has a precognitive episode, they wouldn't know it until it happened.
Case in point: I had a dream that my wife and I and our dogs were in a terrible car accident. It seemed like the type of dream I had had in the past that turned out to be precognitive. We delayed our trip 15 minutes, and in so doing we came up to the Hoover damn 15 minutes later than we would have at around midnight. We stopped our car to look at our map to make sure we were on the right track and a car came from the direction of the damn, stopped and told us the road was out over the damn. Thus we turned around and went an alternate way.
If that dream was precognitive, I'll never know. Actually, I do know. It wasn't precognitive. The event never happened. But would it have happened?
I've had many instances of precognition, but I can't convince anyone of them, because I didn't know it was precognition until the event occurred and then it was too late to say I knew it before hand. So, I'm not trying to convince anyone that I've had precognition. That's why I pose the question as a hypothetical: if precognition was true, how would that change our ideas of consciousness.
I ask you to entertain the possibility, not believe one way or another. If you can't do that, okay. But it's not unusual to ask you to. Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment; that's all I'm asking you to do is a thought experiment.
I must say, though, as for the universe becoming self-aware, you seem dichotomous. You say it is not, yet you admit consciousness exists within the universe. Thus the universe contains consciousness. How is it then that the universe is not becoming conscious (assuming consciousness is self-awareness)?
