In simple sense, Consciousness keeps us aware of things/work we are doing and things happening in our surrounding.

Regards,

Nitish

Thanks, Nitish, That would be one category:

1. activities that keep us aware of the world around us.

I'll add another one:

2. activities that imagine how the world could be different/better.

That's a good start, what else does consciousness do?

Awareness of the self.

What do you think about the adaptational function of (at least some levels/ parts of) consciousness?

Your assumption seems to be that consciousness is a process or set of processes rather than a state, container, or emergent property of the process you are trying to catalogue. Is it possible that consciousness is something separate from these processes (categories of activities) that you are trying to identify?

Because it does not involve efficient causes, consciousness makes possible a relation to the other that leaves both relata unchanged and, hence, constitutes a the possibility of a relation between entities as they are: strictly speaking, it is the any only possible relation that can obtain between different items.

gph

A more interesting question would be if we ask:

Why do we need consciousness? Are there any ideas in the community??

Hi Wilfried

If you are not personally experiencing a need for your consciousness there are various ways of eliminating it.

If you are then you have your answer. (What is the active verb I could use instead of 'are', I wonder?)

My guess is that your body IS experiencing the need to produce your consciousness. It appears you aren't conscious of that need or that experience, however. I am not aware of my body's need for vitamin B but I can't think of any way that this addresses the nature of vitamin B or affects my need for it.

These questions don't really seem "more interesting" to me.

Frank,

your answer is very good (smile) and I think reaction is because my question is not so clear than I meant. I would like to ask for the role of consciousness in the evolution. I think, nothing in the evolutionary way could be successful if there is no need to have. But where is the need for consciousness? The zombie discussion in a threat here in RG meet this point but it was unsatisfactory.

Quite. It's would just be boring to merely say "your question is not so clear".

I am not sure we can reach the conclusion whether consciousness is a successful product of evolution.

We may be better off in evolutionary terms if we were merely intelligent, powerful and adaptable.

Personally, I hope that beings with a conscious sense of right and wrong beyond their reasonable picture of right and wrong are the ones that survive.

Frank,

your last sentence is quite right. To be intelligent, powerful and adaptable is not enough because we only have the talent to be rational.

In nature, the speed of evolution corresponds to the speed of productive changes. Forms optimizing speed of productive changes are likely to evove. If conscousness iof an natural entity is its level of productive change generation in its interaction with the world then then your question Wilfried has to be modified.

Louis,

I agree - you know ( ;) ).

We, as human beings, know the worth of consciousness (we wouldn't be humans without it).

Evolution is a blind mechanism. We should not argue top down, but bottom up. In this way I miss a good argument, why an organism should develop qualia or later consciousness to be fitter then without such things.

Wilfried,

In the context of biological evolution, a productive change is one which natural selection favors. To be productive, a change need to correspond to a behavioral change from the organism. Lets call consciousness the level of change allowed by the structure of the organism, its level of productive indetermination. Then you see that it is not something that evolve but was always there and correspond to the openess to evolution. What evolve is the level of consciousness or level of evolutioness allowed for a given organism. A bacteria is probably as fit to its environment than a typical human being is but to be fit in the umwelt of a bacteria does not require a speed of adaptability or level of consciousness as high as it is necessary in the human umwelt.

Louis,

yes, I know that all. If I understand you fully consciousness was always a part of organisms. I don't think so. My problem in this sentence is, that a bacteria or a nematode would have a low level conscious and a human a high level conscious.

My opinion in this case is that nematodes and other lower life forms don't have qualia or something like consciousness because this concept is very complex and we do not need such heavy guns to understand the behavior of such organisms. In this point the question is a matter of faith. So the question is still open.

How about if we say nematodes, in their less complex way, have proto-qualia and proto-consciousness? Or perhaps they have nema-qualia and nema-consciousness. Does a better name make any difference for you?

Frank,

the expression "qualia" means a subjective experience. Such an interpretation of the behavior of a nematode is not necessary because we need only simple reflexes do explain. Why do you propose such non-sense expressions like nema-qualia? Why do you need qualia or consciousness in the context of such organisms?

I am sure that qualia and consciousness too, are gradually evolved skills in the evolutionary path of organisms, but not needed in the low developed ones.

For a natural entity to be conscious that entity needs to have a behavior which require it to have a behavior coordination center. A tree is like a human city, it is a colony of living cells sharing an infrastructure but I do not think (I am not sure) that it needs a behavior coordination center and so would not have a consciousness. A natural entity with a coordination center has a will or a consciousness to the extend that it is open to undertermined novelty. The more complex is the umwelt of the entity and the more it needs to be open to undertermined novelty and has to be endowned with mechanisms constraining in productive ways the increasing indeterminacy. All natural mechanisms have evolved for this purpose and are thus consciousness boundary conditions.

Louis,

this is quite in my sense.

Wilfried

Thank you for getting to the point and stating your proposed description of what consciousness is. You suggest that consciousness is a skill that an organism develops.

I can see how this lines up with my preference to use the word 'consciousness' to talk specifically about the conscious experience and behavior of humans.

However, most of the posts here have expressed a tendency to use the word 'consciousness' to mean some kind of universal energy field (my words) that is embedded in all of reality and existence or a part of all lifeforms.

I think perhaps it is incorrect to use the word 'consciousness' without designating the level that one is referring to, as in 'human consciousness'. Where you apparently think that we would be best to use the word only to represent consciousness as we see in humans.

I would hope that the difference in our semantic approach will not prevent us from making any further progress toward agreeing on an understanding of the actual nature of consciousness.

If we talk of human consciousness, I see it as a combination of things that the body, our human form, does combined with something else as yet unidentified. Our form supplies perception, cognition, action and thinking, which is a combination of various instinctual and rational information processing and storage. The additional aspects, which don't come from the form, are awareness, imagination, intuition, choice and intention. This what I propose as a very general model to further analyse the nature of our experience.

Regards

Frank

Frank,

We often use the word ''living' without specifying the level or the type of living organism because we have a sense that it is meaningfull to do so. And if we try to understand what distinguish the inanimate matter from the living then we do not try to establish the different between human beings and rocks or chemical soup because we know that the living has evolved and so to understand the distinction we try to do so for the most simple living organism. In the same fashion if we what to understand the distinction between a conscious entity and a non-concious one it is not a good idea to try to make this distinction for human being, the most complex conscious entity that we know. It is better to try to try to go down to the most simple conscious entity we can find.

Frank and Wilfried,

There are level of realities and there are level of consciousness. The world is hieararchically organized but it is not a big machine ruled by the laws of physics and chemistry. The laws of physics do not specify all what is happening at the chemical level. All that happen at the chemical level is constrained by the laws of physics but what is happening even at the simple chemical level is under constrained. Michael Polanyi has described how the world is hiearchically structure as boundary condition layers; it is a theory of emergence and it help explain why complexity evolves and it might help us here to understand level of consciousness and level of reality.

Life’s Irreducible Structure

Live mechanisms and information in DNA are boundary conditions with a sequence of boundaries above them

http://www.compilerpress.ca/Competitiveness/Anno/Anno%20Polanyi%20Lifes%20Irreducible%20Structure%20Acience%201968.htm

Transcendence And Self-Transcendence

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_does_consciousness_do2?cp=re68_x_p2&ch=reg&loginT=-7sTFtcGxdyvbhv_51oJfzuBooTqNjgZ3eOSjenBFM8%2C&pli=1#view=528ce53ad039b1ca7b8b4649

Polanyi's philosophy is an philosophy of science at the same time as a theory of artistic creation, a participatory epistemology, a theory of emergence, a theory of kwowledge. Before moving to philosophy is one of the top chemical physicist. In a word he is one of the top genius of the 20th century and probably the less known of them.

 Louis,

chemistry and even physics are models to describe perceptions. There is no objectivity (the real thing) in such formulas. The universe does not know physics, it is much deeper. This is not the problem of consciousness but a philosophical problem. Consciousness evolved in biological systems. I am sure we can understand but it is a bit tricky ...

Wilfried,

''The universe does not know physics, it is much deeper.''

 Physics is an approximate representation on how certain aspect of the world works.  We should not confuse these representations and models as reality.  

''Consciousness evolved in biological systems.''  It is certain that we are conscious and that higher animals are.  But it is less certain where it begin.   Science is about about model of things that exist while consciousness is what it is like to someone like me to exist.  You see it is not at all knowledge but existence.  It is a fundamental difference.  We cannot reduced existence to knowledge.  Your consciousness is what it is like to be you.  My consciousness is what it is like to be me.  Knowling all about the process going on in me is not going to tell you.  For example, I stamp on your finger with my feet and I scan your brain to see what is going on.  Suppose that I have all the knowledge possible about the information from your finger and how it affect your brain and make you feel pain.  Do you think that this allow me to know what you feel.  I will know what you feel by looking at you and seeing your expression but the scientific knowledge will not tell me anything about what it feel like to have your finger sceeze.

Louis,

I agree and I hope you will not stamp on my fingers.

Perception is subjective and you will not know what I feel but you can imagine it because of your mirror neurons. I trust your empathy.