Let’s be honest with ourselves and start at the beginning.
For us and many other animals it starts with a unique egg and sperm and not so much a plan as an imperative.
Grow, survive, prosper.
The imperative within me came out of the momentum of half a billion years’ worth of 100% successful generations building upon each preceding generation. Always learning and refining.
“Self” begins with your biology interacting with the physical world around us. Senses + body + brain, constantly interacting with the real world, exterior and interior.
Let’s be realistic, how could any creature possibly feel like anything other than what it is? How can any creature not feel itself, since itself, and its own needs, are all that it knows?
Can Other Things Be Conscious?
Panpsychism makes no sense.
What is the point of consciousness, when there aren’t any decisions to be made? Which is the case out in the cosmic realm of particles and energy and gravity.
Besides, panpsychists have yet to address the reality of Earth’s Krebs cycle. That momentous invention when Earth and chemistry tamed electricity. In turn the Kerbs cycle gave birth to biology, and life was off to the races.
That is where you’ll find the difference between animate and inanimate. This is also what the origins of awareness and consciousness sprang forth. Why do so many philosophers ignore it?
For details, see Nick Lane’s Transformer and his previous books. Also David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, among others.
Biology, together with chemistry, geology (Earth), time, created life, followed by the amazing Pageant of Evolution into this cornucopia of living creatures we once knew upon this planet.
Evolution holds all the lessons, because it’s the process of building new stuff on top of old stuff, along with repurposing old stuff and ditching useless stuff. That is how we came to be.
The point being, consciousness is part of an evolving continuum driven by the ever-increasing complexity of environment and creatures.
As for plants and fungi, they too have been proven to be aware. Most probably an awareness unlike anything in the animal kingdom, but an awareness nonetheless — suited to the creatures particular biological processes, even if we aren’t able to conceive of what that might be at this point.
Bringing it Back to the Earth-Centric Perspective.
Appreciating that your body possesses half a billion years’ worth of 100% successfully evolving generations under its bellybutton, so to speak, makes it easy to appreciate that one’s body possesses levels of awareness, goals, and strategies light-years beyond our self-conscious mind’s ability to know.
I was lucky to get my first inklings of that in high school, because it set up a partnership situation between my mind (the endlessly jabbering storytellers in my head) and my physical body’s sensibilities and impulses, that made a mockery of my highfalutin thoughts with all their resolutions and plans.
Since then I’ve learned to explicitly understand myself as a product of constructive evolution — deep-time evolution — appreciating the mind-boggling reality of it unfolding one day at a time. A filament in Earth’s pageant of Evolution, puts me on an entirely different footing.
The “Hard Problem”?
As for Chalmers’ Hard Problem, I believe that says more about the questioner than it does about the topic being questioned. It’s a human-centric construct that, to my mind, is more theological than serious science.
For the record, I exist at street level — never pretended to be an academic scholar. I’m an enthusiast — and I only know Chalmers from his speaking performances, and what fans pass along in articles. Mark Solms has forced me to acknowledge there is a lot more to the academic scholar, beyond my reach.
Still, I don’t think that forgives for how he has confused and hobbled the lay-public and obscured the path to a sober understanding of our body via evolutionary biology and how the process produced ourselves!
Parting Thoughts
All of us look at this information through our own eyes, filtered through our own experiences and learning. That’s why working in a bubble isn’t good. We have our bandwidths and need others to help us expand them. Fortunately, I’ve had some damned good authors for company, still, discussion would be fun (linked to a plug for CFI online Forum).
These things matter, especially in these weird days heading at us. Having a healthier grip on who ‘me, myself & I’ actually is, does make one’s day go better.
I firmly believe only through a serious personal connect to the Evolutionary process and learning about how our bodies were developed, while rediscovering our personal link to Earth, along with gaining a respect for the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide, do we have a chance of getting some foundation under one’s Self.
At least it has worked for me, the Earth Centrist. What’s really cool is that it is all based on bona fide scientific evidence and findings. No need for magical thinking. What it needs is a sober new found respect for being a biological animal, for Earth, and for her systems, along with a desire to keep doing one’s homework. The answers are in Evolution and science, and every season brings new lessons for us to add into our respective mindscapes.
As they say, what will you be present to?
Here’s an introductory science author’s list
Biology together with time, and chemistry and geology, that is, Earth’s processes, created creatures and environments and competition, in short, evolution.
Honorable mention, author David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree of Life, a front and center history of the ‘70’s genetics revolution, that ushered in this golden age of biology.
Of course this list is incomplete. These are simply some leading lights, though I never forget they require the support of thousands to help this work move forward.
PS. Here's some information I just became familiar with.
“… Dr. Newen and Montemayor begin their paper with a blunt observation about how theories of consciousness have overlooked evolution from the start. “The evolution of consciousness is a neglected topic that plays a surprisingly insignificant role in all major theories of consciousness,” the researchers write. …”
“Consciousness should not be deemed as an ‘all-or-nothing’ cognitive function but rather as a graded and multi-dimensional process,” Dr. Maldarelli and Dr. Güntürkün write. “The presented results add to the growing body of evidence that consciousness may be present in many parts of the animal kingdom, across species that are phylogenetically distant from each other and have remarkably different brain structures.”
Best wishes,
Peter Miesler
https://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/
Citizenschallenge — gmail — com
This has been condensed from Considering Things Science Can Explain About Consciousness
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