Is Consciousness Everywhere?

I agree an evolutionary approach seems a good way of looking at the thing. Being conscious of what is going on around you is obviously an advantage over not.

Also from a how the brain works point of view you have billions of neurons recognising things in parallel and the data seems to narrow down from that to awareness of a small number of things which you can logically reason about. I'd imagine a lot of the conscious experience comes from that - the neural net highlights as it were.

Like if you're in the woods your pattern recogniser bits may be going there's a leaf there, there's a twig there, there's a bear attacking, there's some moss on the tree etc. and then the bear bit will get highlighted so you can think 'ah pepper spray' or what have you. The highlights being what we experience as consciousness.

It implies you get human like consciousness from that kind of mechanism so yes for a mouse, no for a carrot.

It also differentiates stuff going on in your brain that you are aware of and respond to but are not consciously aware of to that which you are. Say you are being chased by the bear and run. The logistics of running - path dips 2cm, raise left leg 5cm... you will not be consciously aware of because the highlights and logical reasoning bit will be busy with 'shit -there's bear what next?' type issues.

I love this idea, and yet it seems completely useless, untestable, unfalsifiable. Maybe everything has experience. Maybe every subset of everything has experience. We can't know.

I think there's a sort of definitional sleight of hand going on here, a type that I see often these days:

1. [Word A] means [Concept X] to most people.

2. [Concept X] doesn't apply to [Item K], but [Concept Y] does.

3. By creating a new definition, finding an obscure definition, or twisting a current definition I can argue that [Word A] technically can mean [Concept Y], and then apply the term to [Item K].

4. Now that I'm using [Word A] for [Item K], most people will associate [Item K] with [Concept X].

So when we say "consciousness," most people conjure up some concept about human like thought and communication. That's the reason why most people find the word compelling, and it obviously (almost by definition) doesn't apply to most of the stuff talked about in this article.

When coming across arguments that rely on this type of sleight of hand, I think it's best to ask yourself what the article would actually be saying if the loaded term was replaced by another term or phrase that makes it explicitly clear what the other means. So when the author of this article writes something like this:

> This is utterly frigid, hundreds of degrees colder than any temperature terrestrial organisms can survive. But the fact that the temperature is non-zero implies a corresponding tiny amount of heat in deep space. This of course implies a corresponding tiny amount of experience.

It seems that he's arguing that consciousness is experience and experience is any activity, even at the atomic level. So if we remove the sleight of hand and ask "Is there some level of activity, even sleight activity at the atomic level, everywhere?" The answer might be affirmative (if we're using a loose sense of the word "everywhere"), but it's not a particularly surprising or even interesting question to answer.

Just because a structure is larger and contains complex structures does not mean the larger system is more complex. For instance, I can create a logic gate with some friends. The logic gate is way simpler than the people composing it.

Neurons can have millions of mitochondria [1], which they dynamically move about the cell. Neurons are like amoeba with dozens of pseudopods when young. Amoeba are more complicated than worms, in terms of degrees of freedom, no?

Check this video of fetal neurons movin' about. So cute! https://youtu.be/hb7tjqhfDus

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2016.0002...

first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win :)