Beautiful article. But I sincerely hope you are incorrect. I can't bear the thought of so many conscious beings capable of suffering and grief. The solipsist route has less heartbreak.
Diodorus Siculus records a piece of ancient “barbarian” wisdom attributed to the Scythian sage Anacharsis, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. When asked by Croesus: "Whom do you consider to be the bravest of living beings?" he replied, "The wildest animals; for they alone willingly die in order to maintain their freedom."
Then when asked: "Whom do you judge to be the most just of living beings?" Anacharsis answered, "The wildest animals; for they alone live in accordance with nature, not in accordance with laws; since nature is a work of God, while law is an ordinance of man, and it is more just to follow the institutions of God than those of men."
Then Croesus was sure he would stump him: "And are the beasts, then, also the wisest?" And Anacharsis agreed that they were: "The peculiar characteristic of wisdom consists in showing a greater respect to the truth which nature imparts than to the ordinance of the law."
Perhaps, as you suggest, there are trade offs that come with our heightened complexity, and not all of them necessarily enhance our general consciousness.
I think it depends on how we define consciousness. One definition is "awareness of being aware". Surely the rabbits are aware, but the next level of self-awareness is more debatable. Descartes, I think, honed in on self-awareness. We could all agree that Tolstoy was more self-reflective than the garden variety rabbit. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the retort, if it's not a paraphrase, "I feel therefore I am". Those are as if 2 different sensibilities about what it means to be conscious.
I feel similarly to you in your statement that there may not be a spectrum of consciousness -- if we are going with the more Rousseauian take -- but either one simply is or is not conscious. If we define consciousness as being aware and having feeling [without the need to be able to think about it] and if consciousness is an either-or phenomenon, then it would appear very much that animals are conscious. How many people really think their dog isn't? And I'm not sure it's all just blind instincts with animals, either. There may be a lot more going on than we like to tell ourselves.
I always chuckle realizing the highly valued *human* virtues like love or self-sacrifice are to large extent caused by the *robotic* (neocortex) part of us.
This question is deeply interesting. In memories of childhood, in dreams and in certain altered states of consciousness, we may feel almost like those innocent animals, losing inhibitions and crystalizing experience in certain ways.
Consciousness may have dimensions like awakeness, intensity, resolution and it can be difficult to find the right measures and how they might relate and connect with things like higher intelligence and the valuable things that we care about.
When we think a lot we can get the feeling that experience gets blunted, and similarly if we are lost in self-talk or certain constellations of concepts or even just mobile notifications, it certainly seems that it drains our awareness sometimes.
I have some faith that while humans can use their mind to get trapped and fall into a depressed, inattentive or detached state, there is an upside to the extent that the rational mind can serve and amplify awareness, ultimately perhaps even enabling new dimensions of consciousness.
Enjoyed this article! Came across this topic while reading "Less is More" by Jason Hickel recently. So much of modernity is built on Descartes Dualism and in the process we've lost the Animism that's been part of humanity for ages.
I experience, therefor I am, I told myself the other day on my way to find where humanity lost their sensibility in exchange for the illusions of freedom in that strange class play of loosening the leashes enough to get us to innovate, develop and produce evermore while restraining our realization that we could do even infinitely better without class exploitation. Descartes drive to remove causality from common logic played a big part in addition to the removal of feeling as a driver of cognition.
Together with a whole range of other programming through language type of indoctrination I've seen what made me the machine and of course.. I see it in others.. But there is hope, but one must learn to observe and experience in silence, abject of opinions, judgement, need to respond in anyway, unfiltered. Sometime later, through reviewing attention grabbing parts of the experience as it combines with memories and knowledge, insightful things could be said of them, seen and learned.
This occasionally happened in the past but I dismissed the derision of such insights as paranoia (mainly because some of them were utterly insane) - The blinding judgement from the language prison of acceptable things to say in society that narrows our view of the world and bigger thinking for ourselves. A shame.. billions of heads could've figured out how to live in peaceful abundance as a big family with natural balances and utter respect for freedom.
Wonder how much diversity of mind there could be among rabbits. All things being equal, if Rabbit A was reincarnated as Rabbit B, but kept intact Rabbit A memories, what are the chances that being Rabbit B would feel jarring?
Maybe the less phenomenological fungibility among individuals, the higher the score on the conscious-o-meter?
The author just basically compared a human with Down's syndrome to a rabbit. Try bringing a rabbit into the NYC subway and see what happens. The consciousness of a patient with down's syndrome is still miles above that of a rabbit's in pretty obvious ways. There are plenty of people with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression and Down's syndrome that still find rational, complex and even religious meaning in life in ways a rabbit never could.
Beautiful article. But I sincerely hope you are incorrect. I can't bear the thought of so many conscious beings capable of suffering and grief. The solipsist route has less heartbreak.
Diodorus Siculus records a piece of ancient “barbarian” wisdom attributed to the Scythian sage Anacharsis, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. When asked by Croesus: "Whom do you consider to be the bravest of living beings?" he replied, "The wildest animals; for they alone willingly die in order to maintain their freedom."
Then when asked: "Whom do you judge to be the most just of living beings?" Anacharsis answered, "The wildest animals; for they alone live in accordance with nature, not in accordance with laws; since nature is a work of God, while law is an ordinance of man, and it is more just to follow the institutions of God than those of men."
Then Croesus was sure he would stump him: "And are the beasts, then, also the wisest?" And Anacharsis agreed that they were: "The peculiar characteristic of wisdom consists in showing a greater respect to the truth which nature imparts than to the ordinance of the law."
Perhaps, as you suggest, there are trade offs that come with our heightened complexity, and not all of them necessarily enhance our general consciousness.
I think it depends on how we define consciousness. One definition is "awareness of being aware". Surely the rabbits are aware, but the next level of self-awareness is more debatable. Descartes, I think, honed in on self-awareness. We could all agree that Tolstoy was more self-reflective than the garden variety rabbit. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the retort, if it's not a paraphrase, "I feel therefore I am". Those are as if 2 different sensibilities about what it means to be conscious.
I feel similarly to you in your statement that there may not be a spectrum of consciousness -- if we are going with the more Rousseauian take -- but either one simply is or is not conscious. If we define consciousness as being aware and having feeling [without the need to be able to think about it] and if consciousness is an either-or phenomenon, then it would appear very much that animals are conscious. How many people really think their dog isn't? And I'm not sure it's all just blind instincts with animals, either. There may be a lot more going on than we like to tell ourselves.
Nice reading Erik.
I always chuckle realizing the highly valued *human* virtues like love or self-sacrifice are to large extent caused by the *robotic* (neocortex) part of us.
Great article Erik!
This question is deeply interesting. In memories of childhood, in dreams and in certain altered states of consciousness, we may feel almost like those innocent animals, losing inhibitions and crystalizing experience in certain ways.
Consciousness may have dimensions like awakeness, intensity, resolution and it can be difficult to find the right measures and how they might relate and connect with things like higher intelligence and the valuable things that we care about.
When we think a lot we can get the feeling that experience gets blunted, and similarly if we are lost in self-talk or certain constellations of concepts or even just mobile notifications, it certainly seems that it drains our awareness sometimes.
I have some faith that while humans can use their mind to get trapped and fall into a depressed, inattentive or detached state, there is an upside to the extent that the rational mind can serve and amplify awareness, ultimately perhaps even enabling new dimensions of consciousness.
brothers?
Enjoyed this article! Came across this topic while reading "Less is More" by Jason Hickel recently. So much of modernity is built on Descartes Dualism and in the process we've lost the Animism that's been part of humanity for ages.
I experience, therefor I am, I told myself the other day on my way to find where humanity lost their sensibility in exchange for the illusions of freedom in that strange class play of loosening the leashes enough to get us to innovate, develop and produce evermore while restraining our realization that we could do even infinitely better without class exploitation. Descartes drive to remove causality from common logic played a big part in addition to the removal of feeling as a driver of cognition.
Together with a whole range of other programming through language type of indoctrination I've seen what made me the machine and of course.. I see it in others.. But there is hope, but one must learn to observe and experience in silence, abject of opinions, judgement, need to respond in anyway, unfiltered. Sometime later, through reviewing attention grabbing parts of the experience as it combines with memories and knowledge, insightful things could be said of them, seen and learned.
This occasionally happened in the past but I dismissed the derision of such insights as paranoia (mainly because some of them were utterly insane) - The blinding judgement from the language prison of acceptable things to say in society that narrows our view of the world and bigger thinking for ourselves. A shame.. billions of heads could've figured out how to live in peaceful abundance as a big family with natural balances and utter respect for freedom.
Wonder how much diversity of mind there could be among rabbits. All things being equal, if Rabbit A was reincarnated as Rabbit B, but kept intact Rabbit A memories, what are the chances that being Rabbit B would feel jarring?
Maybe the less phenomenological fungibility among individuals, the higher the score on the conscious-o-meter?
The author just basically compared a human with Down's syndrome to a rabbit. Try bringing a rabbit into the NYC subway and see what happens. The consciousness of a patient with down's syndrome is still miles above that of a rabbit's in pretty obvious ways. There are plenty of people with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia and depression and Down's syndrome that still find rational, complex and even religious meaning in life in ways a rabbit never could.