How to measure consciousness?

[The_Flying_Skeptic]

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.

"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

[Shell B]

I think of consciousness as simple awareness. If you are self-aware, aware of your needs, etc., you are conscious. Of course, it can also mean awake.

I do think we can tell if other animals have consciousness. Sadness is a sure sign of being self aware and plenty of animals are known to express that.

I do not think consciousness is awareness of decision making or that it could possibly be that simple. Nonetheless, I assume many animals are aware of the decisions they make. I find animals helping other animals in their species and outside of their species to be proof positive of that. Why would a pod of dolphins protect a human being from a shark without awareness of the decision they were making? That would have to know that there is a possibility they can get hurt, hence the protective position to begin with. They would also have to know that they were protecting something. That is a lot of insight and insight such as that does not happen without the type of consciousness you speak of.

[The_Flying_Skeptic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vueDC69jRjE about minute 8:30 richard dawkins says that one of the most important unanswered questions is "what is consciousness?"

[The Grand Nudger]

I'd ask anyone of a religious bent what they meant by consciousness before I even indulged them. If it's just a smokescreen for "soul" it's not a discussion worth having. If they mean human consciousness it's a simple answer, our own brand of consciousness didn't appear out of nowhere, or from non-consciousness. What a hilarious question by the way. Assuming that something can't happen because he can't imagine how it could have happened (especially in light of the fact that it did, as evidenced by the increasing complexity of nervous systems as we go through the timeline leading up to ourselves and a whole host of other shit displaying levels of consciousness that correspond to that increasing complexity). For example, worms have brains. They're capable of learning behaviours, sometimes even when their brains are removed, hilariously. So exactly how difficult is it to maintain the "consciousness" of a worm, how complex is this system? Not very, apparently. If, on the other hand, you so much as shake your head to hard you could do damage to your own "consciousness". So there's a wide gap between us with regards to consciousness. This gap corresponds, again, to our respective levels of complexity and specialization with regards to our brains. That alone makes measuring consciousness more a task of setting a definition that suits your experiment and then moving forward from there. Worms, by the way, are the simplest organisms with brains but definitely not the simplest organisms with nerves. A worm can use it's brain, it doesn't have to. It's brain is a more evolved piece of machinery than the nervous system of a jellyfish (used to open and close it's skirt), but much less complicated that our own. Is a Jellfishy conscious? A worm? How about a human being?Further, the notion that there was some line in the early dawn of life whereby one group of things was plainly conscious while another was not is also problematic. While mystic may not be fond of grey areas, nature absolutely is.

One has to ignore a fantastic wealth of information to suggest that consciousness is a complete and utter mystery, or that it just couldn't have come part and parcel with our evolutionary journey.