Monday, June 11, 2018
More on consciousness: individual v cosmic
On p 60 of the June 2018 issue of Scientific American, there
is a detailed article “What Is Consciousness?: by Chrisitof Koch; it can be compared to similar articles
reported here at the end of Oct. 2017 (also work of Koch).
One theory, called GNW, presumes a system becomes conscious
when a “blackboard” of information is broadcast to an appropriate larger
network.
But the Integrated Information Theory, or IIT, makes more
sense to me. A non-countable set of
information, like an aesthetic experience, requires consciousness to contain
it; if the container is sufficiently
sophisticated, the container becomes aware of the information and of itself.
Putting this together with earlier articles, it sounds as
though individual awareness for higher animals is marked off by a kind of
“event horizon”, where consciousness is regarded as a basic component of the
Universe comparable to gravity. But with most living things (plants, colony
animals, slime molds, even social insects), the group consciousness (or hive)
is more pertinent than any individual’s.
It would sound as though religious or spiritual practices involving
selflessness, at odds with normal workplace values, would enable moving the locus
of awareness to some sort of medium that could survive an individual’s physical
death.
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