Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[bennyboy]

I don't believe there's a critical mass, per se.  My belief is that consciousness is "built on top of" processes like perception and language, that it is a very specific way of tying these systems together, but I suspect that consciousness arose very early in the evolution of brains.

So consciousness literally arises out of tying things together-- for example, the data from multiple sense, and various other functions?

If you could temporarily turn off all those various systems, would that "bridge" still be there as a kind of nebulous contentless consciousness (a la say an "englightened" Buddha or something), or is there something in the act of connection itself which makes us conscious?

Anyway, I don't view consciousness as a thing which requires a certain amount to "turn on."  Rather, a companion set of neural circuits evolved on top of our neural circuits controlling body behavior and perception in order to tie our behavioral responses to our perceptions.  This likely occurred very early on in the evolution of highly mobile animals, and is largely an all or nothing process.  In a fish, it would be used to make behavioral decisions based on perception of the environment.  My suspicion is that an animal like a black fly doesn't have this extra layer of decision making apparatus, and has more or less pre-programmed responses to light, shadow, smell, and sound in its environment.  That a fly has an algorithm, whereas a fish has true consciousness.  But I could be wrong.  Perhaps a fly has consciousness, too.

Would you agree with Rhythm, then, that a non-organic system (say a computer) which can do this kind of complex coordination, is conscious?

On another note, it seems likely to me that any organism which is capable of motivated behavior (in other words, 100% of living things), have a kind of consciousness. They have some built-in sense of how the world should be for them, and a strong motivation to bring themselves to that state. I think (again, I can't claim to know), that when you try to swat a fly, it knows it doesn't want to be swatted, and takes a very deliberate evasive action.