I'm interested in how we measure consciousness because of the issue that has been brought up by MysticKnight. Here is one of MysticKnight's thoughts on consciousness and evolution.
My thought is that there is no way to know if other living things have consciousness or not. If consciousness is an awareness of the decisions we make, how are we to know that a dog is not aware of the decisions they make. The split brain experiments demonstrated that humans with severed corpus callosoms were not aware of specific information that they possessed. We could say that these subjects were less conscious than the average human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo
Quote:"I don't think this an argument of ignorance, but through knowledge of what we know consciousness is. There has to be a step where consciousness appears out of non-consciousness, but it's to complex of a step to happen in transition step. It doesn't matter how much years you give, natural selection is not leading towards consciousness out of non-conscious, there is no process leading it."
My thought is that there is no way to know if other living things have consciousness or not. If consciousness is an awareness of the decisions we make, how are we to know that a dog is not aware of the decisions they make. The split brain experiments demonstrated that humans with severed corpus callosoms were not aware of specific information that they possessed. We could say that these subjects were less conscious than the average human.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo
