tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21863552.post115507372851783460..comments2023-11-25T01:52:56.999-08:00Comments on Philosophical Pontifications: Consciousness by degrees? The Phenomenal and the SoritesAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06892913480992228908noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21863552.post-16056130718596615932007-08-09T14:55:00.000-07:002007-08-09T14:55:00.000-07:00Clearly, "consciousness", whether that of a human ...Clearly, "consciousness", whether that of a human or a chimp or a dog, is an *emergent* property; the question is, how much of the requisite entity (neurons or something more metaphysical) do we need to get (a) consciousness? For example, the phenomenon of sound is an emergent property: you can have a very thin gas with, say, 1000 molecules of air: that's not enough to transmit sound. So how many air molecules do you need to get sound? one million? or maybe a number in the vicinity of Avogadro's number, on the order of 10^23 air molecules? It would have to be established by experiment. Perhaps these experiments have been done. You could keep adding air molecules to a vacuum until sound would be transmissible. You could keep assembling neurons until you got some kind of consciousness, but even then, following Martin Heidegger, this proto-consciousness would have to "have some kind of world" for it to have a self-meaning, rather than just be a pointless assemblage. After all, even a housefly has a crude Identity and a World, as it belongs to a species established over millions of years of evolution and co-evolution. The simple housefly "carries its own idiomatic baggage", we could say.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com