Consciousness - meanings 1, 2, 4 and 5 (out of 5)

Posted by lanecove on September 16, 2003 at 08:49:42:

In Reply to: consciousness and lanecove posted by pelastration on September 16, 2003 at 03:31:45:

Dirk,

First, good job in finding a post in a now inaccessible board!

Second, thank you for your detailed and considered response; I was beginning to despair that there'd be a useful exchange of ideas on 'consciousness', it was just too amorphous and woolly a term, and seemed to mean pretty much what anyone wanted it to mean.

I'll return to meaning 3* (the totality of conscious states of an individual) later; just a few words on the others here:
1a, 1b, and 2 (for Dirk 1c is a special case of 1b): relating an internal state to external observations (EEG/Brainwaves; bloodpressure, eye-movements) is interesting; the immediate corollary is that consciousness in this meaning is tied to brains; in the narrowest sense, most of the ideas can be immediately disproved because 'brains are not supplied'.

It certainly would be interesting to see how 'consciousness' with this meaning could be inferred where there is no brain; i.e. how the extension/extrapolation is made.

4: no comment Dirk?
5: in this meaning, 'unconscious' (asleep, in a coma, etc) is the antonym of 'conscious'; my impression was that no one used the word 'consciousness' to refer to wide awake people only.

*for those who don't remember, or never read, the discussion in String and M Theory Duality XIV, Dirk, in answering my question "Just what does 'consciousness' mean in the posts to this board?" quoted from the Websters (I think it was Websters) definition, which had 5 main meanings, the first being sub-divided into 3. The post which Dirk quotes from has my response, which was an attempt to see which definitions seemed to be relevant to my program - testing the 'consciousness'-related ideas.

Regards
lanecove

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• Re: Consciousness - meanings 1, 2, 4 and 5 (out of 5) -- pelastration 9/16/03 (0)

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