Soulman wrote:
Plant life, like brain life, strives to survive, and interacts in self-directed ways to its surroundings. Dave is saying look, I raised my hand and the fly flew away, that proves it. Proves what? That flies react just like under-evolved men? He’s saying that the fly is aware enough, or “smart” enough, to avoid an obvious threat, therefore the fly is “conscious” like a man, just on a lower level. In other words, the fly is like a tiny man. A tiny man with a tiny brain, and stupid as a fly.
That's not what I'm saying at all. That's you, and you alone, trying to over-simplify what I wrote, because as I wrote it, you cannot understand or successfully attack it. You have to oversimplify it before you can attack it, which is a sad statement on your ability.
What I **WAS** saying, was that a "brain" is a collection of neurons that thinks. On the simplest levels, a brain links sensory input, and coordinates that information to allow an organism to adapt and survive to it's environment. The larger the brain, the more thinking power it has. A fly's brain is magnitudes less powerful than a man's brain, and only capable of instinctual reactions. Saying that "a fly is like a tiny man" does not even come close to anything I was implying. It was simply you, and you alone.
It was just bad luck for the flies that flies failed to evolve into the earth’s dominant, biggest brained species.
There is no luck in the real universe. Luck is a human-created concept.
Flies are still flies because their niches in the natural world have not changed radically enough to force them to change or die as a species.
Maybe one day they will. In terms of relative levels of consciousness, a man could be described as a kind of giant, big-brained fly. Dave is saying that the fundamental difference between the “consciousness” level of humans and flies is that humans’ brains are firing on more cylinders. If that’s true, then obviously the solution to all our problems is bigger brains. Our brains are holding us back. What if we had a brain twice the size of the brain we have now, would we be twice as smart, or twice as self-aware? How high is high?
I find it interesting that you would merge several concepts into one in order to attempt to make what I said sound silly. You didn't succeed.
How you charicaturized what I wrote is not even close to what I was saying. It's sort of like You just took a bunch of my stuff which i had organized neatly on shelves, threw them haphazardly about the room in a big mess, and then blamed me for the mess that you made, because the stuff you made the mess with belongs to me.
So do you expect anyone to take what you wrote seriously?
Obviously, larger brains function on higher levels of order and complexity than smaller brains.
Yipee! You understood one fact that I wrote, and presented it here, accurately!
And the space shuttle has more moving parts than my lawnmower.
Ooops, I think you lost it... oh, well...
A fly is aware of its surroundings. A man is self-aware in his surroundings. In other words, if the fly’s brain was big enough, it would be self-conscious like a man.
Not quite. Larger is not the answer. MORE COMPLEX is the answer. It's not just a question of large brains. The brains need to be more organized and more complex, too. In nature, larger brains generally ARE more complex, but large is not the only part of the equation.
But there’s no way Dave can link higher levels of chemical activity in the brain to -- presto-chango! -- self-consciousness! Self-consciousness and a capacity for abstract thought and self-reflection could just as easily be an attribute unique to man for a reason or reasons other than brain size, not to mention that men of equal sized brains can be dumb as dirt or compose a sonata, in which case the “size” of the brain is irrelevant.
Soulman, you obviously did not read the whole article, nor did you read any of the material on the links I provided. Neurophysiology has explained consciousness, including self-consciousness. I tried to summarize volumes of material in a couple of paragraphs, but it's never an adequate way of encapsulating so much material. The fact that you chose to ignore it and charicatureize it into an even more over-simplified mess of irrational, emotional crap, is not my fault, but yours.
Dave has arbitrarily assumed that brain size initiates self-consciousness. Proving that a man’s brain is more complex than a fly’s does not prove that self-awareness is the RESULT of brain activity.
Well, on one level you are correct. Brain size and complexity does not PROVE self-awareness. I never said that, really. That's just you messing up what i said so that you can more easily attack it.
Neurophisiologists, in decades of experiments, modeling, and data-colelction, have proven that consciousness is caused by brain activity.
Please give us information where someone proved scientifically, that consciousness can exist without a brain to create it.
All it proves is that a man’s brain is more complex than a fly’s. How are we to distinguish between a rudimentary mechanical reflex to the environment -- a plant’s response to sunlight, or a fly startled by a sudden movement -- from a completely different sort of response called “self-awareness?”
We study it. We open up brains, probe them with instruments, conduct experiments, create working models. We get in touch with the MIT artificial Intelligence lab, and apply that information to the construction of computer models and robots. We share that information with other scientists. Since the idea of scientific research is an alien concept to you, and since you never demonstrated any knowledge of neurophysiology, How do you expect any intelligent people to buy what you wrote? Do you even know what a Turing test is?
How many brain-cell cylinders are required before “self”-awareness kicks in?
Soulman, the brain has no cylenders, and your cylender-analogy is severely flawed.
Whales have the largest brains on the planet, thus, by Dave’s reasoning, whales should be “smarter” and exist on a higher level of consciousness than man.
I never said that. Complexity is part of the equation. Indeed, Whales are highly intelligent, and so aren't Dolphins. We haven't even been able to accurately calculate their limits, yet. What we do know is that whales and dolphins have a highly evlved sonar sense. They have a whole section of brain dedicated to sonar, and it uses almost as much brainpower as our sight does.
But size is nothing without complexity. They have to go hand in hand.
If Dave could somehow “prove” that whales have a capacity for abstract thought and self-reflection, he would still need to establish a causative link between brain activity and self-consciousness.
Why whales? Why not apes? Apes are self-conscious. They can understand the concept of abstract ideas, modeling, and know themselves in a mirror when they see it. They can be taught to use human sign language, and they have been observed communicating with it.
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