Conscious Perception Of Vision Occurs Outside The Visual Cortex

Post by wildmusings » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

treljherthj wrote: post #5

pygy_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that animals are not conscious comes from religion, not science. The only conscious entity that I’m 100% positive exists is myself. If you reject solipsism, none of the traditional criteria that tell apart humans from animals (e.g. language or ethics) hold up to scientific scrutiny as far as consciousness is concerned. The criteria that have been scientifically vetted (based on information theory among other…

While you are right that we can't exclude the possibility of animals being consciousness, it's well accepted that their conscious level is very low compared to ours.

The problem is that the term "consciousness" has too many meanings, and any debate about it seems to devolve into people talking past each other.

Post by jhallenworld » Tue, Dec 17, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #17

jhallenworld wrote: post #12

My personal definition of consciousness is tied up with memory. What I mean by this is that you can only be conscious of potentially remembered perceptions and that you never remember things that you were not originally conscious of. Maybe the act of implanting the memory is somehow consciousness. Perhaps it's the data compression of the perception prior to storage- replacing the actual data of the perception with sm…

So I’ve got an interesting question - how does this fit with the subjective experience (insofar as we can tell) of an Alzheimer’s patient? If they can’t remember the last 20 years say, does that mean they were unconscious for those 20 years? Every time I follow this train of thought, I also end up pondering time’s arrow. I also wonder - since I’m conscious of typing this right now, can I assume that I will never get…

I guess it depends on what gets damaged.. but you could imagine that the mechanism for consciousness exists even if the memory forming final stage is broken.

Also there are some non-experiential memories which do not require consciousness- I mean stuff like "muscle memory" for skills, and even perhaps location memory.

Re: Conscious Perception Of Vision Occurs Outside The Visual Cortex

Re: Conscious Perception Of Vision Occurs Outside The Visual Cortex