Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sy Borg]

I don't think so, because the anatomies of (C)NS-less organisms are well known; so if there were such functionally equivalent non-neuronal structures, the scientists would have found them already.

That is only an assumption, and not of the kind that tends to play out well in history.

No, since if "the anatomies of (C)NS-less organisms are well known"—which is true!—, there are no hidden, hitherto undiscovered organs or systems "that fulfil the same functions as brains."

That is not the case, Consul. We know about organelles in the same way as we know about eukaryotic organs. We know what they are and what they do to some extent, but the synergies of life are extremely complex, with numerous unknowns remaining.

Whatever kind of (conscious) mind they have, birds do have brains. Nonhuman animals needn't have a humanlike brain in order to have a (conscious) mind, but they must have some kind of brain or other. For example, octopus brains are very different from human brains, but they are brains all the same.

Nonetheless, the assumption was made that they lacked higher mental functions due to their lack of a cortex. They knew about the pallium, but not about some of its functions in bird brains.

Being wrong about the capacities of nonhuman minds doesn't mean being wrong about the necessity for brains.

It's an equivalent mistake, where a capacity was believed to be missing due to assumptions made about necessary structures.

By the same token, other equivalences may be found in other organisms. The octopus's non-centralised brains alert us to the fact that configurations of consciousness-shaping organs can be unexpectedly different.

An octopus does have a central(ized) nervous system!
Brains come in various sizes and shapes, but there are no brainlike nonbrains in organisms that are functionally and informationally equivalent to brains.

Duh yes, sixth graders know that octopuses have a brain and CNS. Nonetheless, if we did not know of octopuses' brain configurations we would have assumed it not possible.

It is not the case that in the realm of speculation all hypotheses are equally (im)plausible or (im)probable. The hypothesis that nervous systems and especially central ones are necessary for conscious minds appears highly plausible and probable in the light of our scientific knowledge of nature, and there is no convincing evidence for its negation!

Yes, there's plenty of convincing circumstances for its negation - unexpected complexity and flexibility in the behaviours of non-brained organisms. It's not evidence, but it's real and often dismissed without investigation based on brain-based dogmas.

No, there isn't! There's just plenty of unjustified conclusions. For if complex and flexible forms of behavior are brain-independent, it by no means follows that phenomenal consciousness is brain-independent too.

"Most researchers accept that even quite complex perception, cognition, and control of action can go on entirely 'in the dark'."

And it's always assumed to be "dark" unless light is proven. Not that any researchers are trying to prove it, or could ever attract funding. Ultimately, it's not profitable to find out whether very simple organisms experience their lives or not. No one (with influence) cares.

Yet, there are numerous complex and flexible behaviours engaged in by microbes, and researchers are yet to understand how they do it.

There are levels of (intransitive and transitive) consciousness in the sense of levels of awakeness or alertness, or of awareness (perception, cognition) of oneself or one's environment, and there are levels of intelligence; but what is a "level of sentience"?

To experience the same kind consciousness as a tardigrade - to know what it feels like to be a tardigrade. My argument is that, to us, feeling like a tardigrade would feel like nothing, like deep sleep, but such feelings would be significant to tardigrades.

(By the way, being animals, tardigrades don't belong to the unicellular protozoa but to the multicellular metazoa.)

Duh yeah, as many schoolchildren know.

I chose tardigrades because their brains only have a few hundred neurons. From memory, tunicate larvae have about 120 neurons, which are absorbed back into the growing animal once it latches onto something and commences a sessile lifestyle. Previously, you assessed that the larvae are probably not conscious at all. So tardigrades sit at the edge and I wanted to see your reaction.

Is there anything it feels like to be a tardigrade? Anyway, if there is, they surely don't know what it feels like to be a tardigrade in the sense of having introspective knowledge of it. If you have a feeling without being cognitively aware of it, in what sense is it significant to you? For instance, when I am in pain but don't know I am, it means nothing to me.

Why on Earth would anyone assume that a tardigrade would have introspective knowledge? You keep on proving my claim that people find it impossible to "lower their standards" and imagine truly basic forms of consciousness. We always have a voice in our heads, yammering on in our native tongue.

Tardigrades have no language. No voice in their heads. They aren't interested in knowing anything. But they would pulse. They would tingle. They would feel warm and cold (albeit with famous levels of insensitivity). They would perhaps experience little chemical reflex reflexes. And who knows else.

I am saying that humans would be unable to perceive the simplest consciousnesses. They are too trivial as compared with our deeply complex psyches. We humans have long been dismissive of other organisms' capacity to feel and, while much improvement in this area his happened in the last century, it appears to me that we just lowered the bar, while remaining gatekeepers - of anthropocentric conceptions of what it feels like to be alive. It's hard not to be anthropocentric because it's all we have. There are still many researchers who believe that insects have no phenomenal consciousness - that being an insect does not feel like anything.
I am aware that you have a more nuanced view on this, and draw the line somewhere around brained nematodes. I am not convinced that we have solved as much of this puzzle as you are.

I am saying that natural consciousness is an exclusively zoological phenomenon, and there is certainly nothing anthropocentric about my saying so. I do not believe that all animals are phenomenally conscious, but I strongly tend to believe that all brained animals are, or at least those among them with non-primitive brains. (I know that "non-primitive" is an imprecise adjective.) It is uncertain whether insects are phenomenally conscious, but it isn't unlikely that they are—unless the higher-order theory of phenomenal consciousness is true, in which case the number of phenomenally conscious animal species is reduced drastically.

"Most generally, then, higher-order theories of phenomenal consciousness claim the following:
Higher Order Theory (In General): 
A phenomenally conscious mental state is a mental state (of a certain sort—see below) that either is, or is disposed to be, the object of a higher-order representation of a certain sort."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... ss-higher/

Such higher-order representations require a highly developed cognitive apparatus enabling an inner awareness of one's conscious states, which most brained animals lack.

No, I am not saying that microbes have higher order consciousness. They don't read Goethe or Dawkins. They don't learn musical instruments, reason or wonder. They don't play Yahztee. Nor do they form tribes that coordinate hunts. They don't form family bonds. They don't care for their young. Heck, in a way, asexual microbes ARE their young!

So why are you talking about "higher order theories of phenomenal consciousness? This is anthropomorphism, with animals acting as ersatz humans. That is, animals are more humanlike.

Again, think of pulses and tingles, not the cleverness of animals.

When I conduct the thought experiment I think of blind pulses within, like breaths or heartbeats, and tingling on the outside where the environment is sensed. There is no emotion, no care. Just sensations, attraction and repulsion, excitation and slowing. We call such things "biological machines" but that's just an analogy because they are obviously not machines - they are simple living, sensing beings.

One meaning of "machine" is "a combination of parts moving mechanically, as contrasted with a being having life, consciousness and will" (Oxford Dictionary of English). Given this meaning, living organisms aren't machines. But in the broadest sense a machine is a mechanism or dynamic system of any kind; so given this meaning, living organisms are machines too.

It's an analogy that, I believe, stems from human predatory instincts. It is normal for predators to objectify their prey. That's how they can kill without hesitation. Humans do this too with any organism that they routinely kill (including, often, even enemy combatants). Their innerness is denied. It always seems absurd to imagine innerness in that which is assumed to be a "biological machine".

Not so long ago, scientists questioned whether DOGS were actually conscious of if they were "biological machines". The notion, of course, is completely bonkers. In its odd "blindness", this example makes clear just how strong the tendency towards objectification can be. Neuroscience has since somewhat come to the aid of organisms that - like humans - have brains. But again, we focus on that which is like us.

[NickGaspar]

Is It Time to Give Up on Consciousness as ‘the Ghost in the Machine’?
https://neurosciencenews.com/consciousn ... ine-18566/

Yesterday neurosciencenews published an article on this old debate and explained why the available science doesn't leave any room for ghost stories any more.

Interesting, thanks! Here's the paper mentioned:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8121175/

yes, thank you!

[Consul]

"Most researchers accept that even quite complex perception, cognition, and control of action can go on entirely 'in the dark'." – Peter Godfrey-Smith

And it's always assumed to be "dark" unless light is proven. Not that any researchers are trying to prove it, or could ever attract funding. Ultimately, it's not profitable to find out whether very simple organisms experience their lives or not. No one (with influence) cares.

Not all is lost! There are quite a few philosophers and scientists who do care:

Animal Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... ss-animal/

Dimensions of Animal Consciousness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116194/

QUOTE>
"A conscious being has subjective experiences of the world and its own body. Humans are conscious beings, but are we alone? In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness crystallised a scientific consensus that humans are not the only conscious beings and that ‘non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses’ possess neurological substrates complex enough to support conscious experiences. This consensus has allowed debates about animal consciousness to move on from the old question of whether any non-human animals are conscious to the questions of which animals are conscious and what form their conscious experiences take.

In the past 5 years, an interdisciplinary community of animal consciousness researchers, drawn from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, animal welfare science, and philosophy, has begun to coalesce around these questions, as shown, for example, by the founding of the journal Animal Sentience in 2016. The aim of this field is to study the inner lives of animals (their subjective experiences and feelings) in a scientifically rigorous way, on the model of the scientific study of human consciousness.

The field faces significant methodological challenges because non-human subjects cannot verbally report their experiences. But if you think the absence of verbal report precludes any scientific investigation of animal consciousness, you should be prepared to say the same about consciousness in preverbal infants and patients in a minimally conscious state. Animal consciousness research rests on the idea that, by synthesising the insights and methods of multiple disciplines, and by identifying a battery of behavioural, cognitive, and neuronal criteria for attributing conscious states, these challenges may be overcome."
<QUOTE

I chose tardigrades because their brains only have a few hundred neurons. From memory, tunicate larvae have about 120 neurons, which are absorbed back into the growing animal once it latches onto something and commences a sessile lifestyle. Previously, you assessed that the larvae are probably not conscious at all. So tardigrades sit at the edge and I wanted to see your reaction.

Tardigrade brains may well be too primitive to become organs of subjectice sentience, but I remain agnostically neutral here.

Why on Earth would anyone assume that a tardigrade would have introspective knowledge? You keep on proving my claim that people find it impossible to "lower their standards" and imagine truly basic forms of consciousness. We always have a voice in our heads, yammering on in our native tongue.
Tardigrades have no language. No voice in their heads. They aren't interested in knowing anything. But they would pulse. They would tingle. They would feel warm and cold (albeit with famous levels of insensitivity). They would perhaps experience little chemical reflex reflexes. And who knows else.

"Truly basic forms of [phenomenal] consciousness" are kinds of subjective sensations. Tardigrades may be capable of conscious perception (through subjective sensations); but if they are, they are arguably incapable of what Leibniz calls apperception, what Locke calls reflection, and what is nowadays called introspection:

"It is well to make the distinction between perception, which is the internal state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness or the reflexive knowledge of this internal state itself and which is not given to all souls, nor at all times to the same soul."
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 1714)

"By reflection…I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding."
—John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690)

It is uncertain whether insects are phenomenally conscious, but it isn't unlikely that they are—unless the higher-order theory of phenomenal consciousness is true, in which case the number of phenomenally conscious animal species is reduced drastically.

"Most generally, then, higher-order theories of phenomenal consciousness claim the following:
Higher Order Theory (In General): 
A phenomenally conscious mental state is a mental state (of a certain sort—see below) that either is, or is disposed to be, the object of a higher-order representation of a certain sort."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... ss-higher/

Such higher-order representations require a highly developed cognitive apparatus enabling an inner awareness of one's conscious states, which most brained animals lack.

No, I am not saying that microbes have higher order consciousness. They don't read Goethe or Dawkins. They don't learn musical instruments, reason or wonder. They don't play Yahztee. Nor do they form tribes that coordinate hunts. They don't form family bonds. They don't care for their young. Heck, in a way, asexual microbes ARE their young!
So why are you talking about "higher order theories of phenomenal consciousness? This is anthropomorphism, with animals acting as ersatz humans. That is, animals are more humanlike.
Again, think of pulses and tingles, not the cleverness of animals.

There's a misunderstanding, because the higher-order theory of consciousness is not a theory of higher-order consciousness, but of first-order, phenomenal consciousness.

QUOTE>
"One question that should be answered by any viable theory of consciousness is: What makes a mental state a conscious mental state? That is, what transforms a nonconscious mental state into a conscious one? There is a long tradition that has attempted to understand consciousness in terms of some kind of higher-order awareness. For example, John Locke (1689/1975) once said that “consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” This intuition and attempt to explain consciousness has been recently revived by a number of philosophers (Rosenthal 1986, 1990, 1993a, 2000, 2004; Armstrong 1968, 1981; Lycan 1996, 2001). In general, the idea is that what makes a mental state conscious is that it is the object of some kind of higher-order representation (HOR). A mental state M becomes conscious when there is a HOR of M. A HOR is a “meta-psychological” state, i.e. a mental state directed at another mental state. So, for example, my desire to write a good introduction becomes conscious when I become “aware” of the desire. Intuitively, it seems that conscious states, as opposed to nonconscious ones, are the mental states that I am“aware of” in some sense. Any theory which attempts to explain consciousness in terms of higher-order states is known as a higher-order (HO) theory of consciousness. It is best initially to use the more neutral term ‘representation’ because there are a number of different kinds of higher-order theory, depending upon how one characterizes the HOR-state in question. Moreover, to be clear, the sense of ‘conscious state’ that I have in mind is the same as Nagel’s (1974) sense, i.e. there is “something it is like to be in that state” from the subjective or first-person point of view. When I am, for example, having a conscious visual experience, there is something it “seems” or “feels” like from my first-person subjective perspective."

(Gennaro, Rocco J. "Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Overview." In Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness: An Anthology, edited by Rocco J. Gennaro, 1-13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. pp. 2-3)
<QUOTE

[Sy Borg]

"Most researchers accept that even quite complex perception, cognition, and control of action can go on entirely 'in the dark'." – Peter Godfrey-Smith

And it's always assumed to be "dark" unless light is proven. Not that any researchers are trying to prove it, or could ever attract funding. Ultimately, it's not profitable to find out whether very simple organisms experience their lives or not. No one (with influence) cares.

Not all is lost! There are quite a few philosophers and scientists who do care:

Animal Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... ss-animal/

Dimensions of Animal Consciousness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7116194/

QUOTE>
"A conscious being has subjective experiences of the world and its own body. Humans are conscious beings, but are we alone? In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness crystallised a scientific consensus that humans are not the only conscious beings and that ‘non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses’ possess neurological substrates complex enough to support conscious experiences. This consensus has allowed debates about animal consciousness to move on from the old question of whether any non-human animals are conscious to the questions of which animals are conscious and what form their conscious experiences take.

In the past 5 years, an interdisciplinary community of animal consciousness researchers, drawn from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, comparative psychology, animal welfare science, and philosophy, has begun to coalesce around these questions, as shown, for example, by the founding of the journal Animal Sentience in 2016. The aim of this field is to study the inner lives of animals (their subjective experiences and feelings) in a scientifically rigorous way, on the model of the scientific study of human consciousness.

The field faces significant methodological challenges because non-human subjects cannot verbally report their experiences. But if you think the absence of verbal report precludes any scientific investigation of animal consciousness, you should be prepared to say the same about consciousness in preverbal infants and patients in a minimally conscious state. Animal consciousness research rests on the idea that, by synthesising the insights and methods of multiple disciplines, and by identifying a battery of behavioural, cognitive, and neuronal criteria for attributing conscious states, these challenges may be overcome."
<QUOTE

Cheers! Hopefully they keep drilling down and don't stop when traits without obvious human equivalents are encountered.

Why on Earth would anyone assume that a tardigrade would have introspective knowledge? You keep on proving my claim that people find it impossible to "lower their standards" and imagine truly basic forms of consciousness. We always have a voice in our heads, yammering on in our native tongue.
Tardigrades have no language. No voice in their heads. They aren't interested in knowing anything. But they would pulse. They would tingle. They would feel warm and cold (albeit with famous levels of insensitivity). They would perhaps experience little chemical reflex reflexes. And who knows else.

"Truly basic forms of [phenomenal] consciousness" are kinds of subjective sensations. Tardigrades may be capable of conscious perception (through subjective sensations); but if they are, they are arguably incapable of what Leibniz calls apperception, what Locke calls reflection, and what is nowadays called introspection:

"It is well to make the distinction between perception, which is the internal state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness or the reflexive knowledge of this internal state itself and which is not given to all souls, nor at all times to the same soul."
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace, 1714)

"By reflection…I would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to be ideas of these operations in the understanding."
—John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690)

I too very much doubt the existence of introspective tardigrades. I can imagine tardigrades that pulse and tingle, feel hot and cold, hungry or sated, lively or tired, and so forth.

No, I am not saying that microbes have higher order consciousness. They don't read Goethe or Dawkins. They don't learn musical instruments, reason or wonder. They don't play Yahztee. Nor do they form tribes that coordinate hunts. They don't form family bonds. They don't care for their young. Heck, in a way, asexual microbes ARE their young!
So why are you talking about "higher order theories of phenomenal consciousness? This is anthropomorphism, with animals acting as ersatz humans. That is, animals are more humanlike.
Again, think of pulses and tingles, not the cleverness of animals.

There's a misunderstanding, because the higher-order theory of consciousness is not a theory of higher-order consciousness, but of first-order, phenomenal consciousness.

... "there is something it “seems” or “feels” like from my first-person subjective perspective."

That's what I think is possible, although "first-person" is not a term I would use here. It's possible that it feels like something to be a tradigrade or even single-celled creatures like stentors, rotifers and paramecia, which have quite complex and interesting behaviours. Rather than "I think therefore I am" it would be "I pulse and tingle, therefore I am".

[Consul]

There's a misunderstanding, because the higher-order theory of consciousness is not a theory of higher-order consciousness, but of first-order, phenomenal consciousness.

... "there is something it “seems” or “feels” like from my first-person subjective perspective."

That's what I think is possible, although "first-person" is not a term I would use here. It's possible that it feels like something to be a tradigrade or even single-celled creatures like stentors, rotifers and paramecia, which have quite complex and interesting behaviours. Rather than "I think therefore I am" it would be "I pulse and tingle, therefore I am".

A basic question in the philosophy/science of consciousness is whether first-order theories or higher-order theories of it are correct: Is the having or undergoing of an experience independent of its subject's awareness or knowledge of it? Are "pure experiences", i.e. uncognized, unperceived, unintrospected, unreflected, unattended, unnoticed experiences possible?
Is there still something it is like for you to have an experience when you don't pay any attention to it or don't take any notice of it? If there is, how do you know?

[Sy Borg]

There's a misunderstanding, because the higher-order theory of consciousness is not a theory of higher-order consciousness, but of first-order, phenomenal consciousness.

... "there is something it “seems” or “feels” like from my first-person subjective perspective."

That's what I think is possible, although "first-person" is not a term I would use here. It's possible that it feels like something to be a tradigrade or even single-celled creatures like stentors, rotifers and paramecia, which have quite complex and interesting behaviours. Rather than "I think therefore I am" it would be "I pulse and tingle, therefore I am".

A basic question in the philosophy/science of consciousness is whether first-order theories or higher-order theories of it are correct: Is the having or undergoing of an experience independent of its subject's awareness or knowledge of it? Are "pure experiences", i.e. uncognized, unperceived, unintrospected, unreflected, unattended, unnoticed experiences possible?
Is there still something it is like for you to have an experience when you don't pay any attention to it or don't take any notice of it? If there is, how do you know?

I expect that basic experiences are possible, but it's not known. The most basic sense of being would not include pain, rather disequilibrium or agitation.

Emotion is still fairly basic, given this recent fruit fly study https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... hout-food/, where fruit flies were found become aggressive when they were hungry.

“I think we can all relate to feeling hangry after periods of food deprivation, and what our study shows is that these feelings extend across even very distantly related animals,” says Perry. “They share lots of genes for their physiology and behaviour with vertebrates, including humans. They’re a good model [for aggression] in that way.”

Even animals as seemingly simple as a fruit flies have complex social lives and respond to changes in their environment that affect the costs and benefits of social behaviour like aggression, she says.

Relatable emotions and responses achieved with just 100,000 neurons. A tardigrade has only about 200, yet it is still capable of scavenging, hunting and has surprisingly complex mating behaviours:

Our study presents new insights into the mating behaviour of a bisexual tardigrade, including videos(Video S1). These observations revealed a mating process much more complex than expected. Semen ejaculation and oviposition were preceded by stimulation in which both male and female ensured that the partner was willing and able to mate.

Females used their stylets to gently poke the male abdomen and only deposited eggs if these males ejaculated spermatozoa.Males, on the other hand, showed no interest in non-gravid females. These observations suggest a trade-off in which successful reproduction is ensured to prevent both sexes from wasting energy. In Milnesium cf.tardigraduma possible pre-mating behaviour was reported, in which males noticeably and repeatedly walked around gravid females (Suzuki, 2008).

The position of the male curled around the anterior end of the female still present in the exuvia may be advantageous as it allows direct physical contact between male and female. With our present knowledge, it can-not be determined whether this method is superior in an evolutionary sense to the mating behaviour of I. nodosus and Hybsibus convergens described by Marcus (1929) and Baumann (1961), in which the eggs had already been deposited when the male curled around the posterior end (cloaca) of the female exuvia without being stimulated repeatedly by the female’s stylets ...


First detailed observations on tardigrade mating behaviour and some aspects of the life history of Isohypsibius dastychi Pilato, Bertolani & Binda 1982(Tardigrada, Isohypsibiidae)JANA BINGEMER*, KARIN HOHBERG and RALPH O. SCHILL Senckenberg Museum of Natural History G€orlitz, Am Museum 1, 02826 G€orlitz, Germany Received 31 August 2015; revised 9 March 2016; accepted for publication 21 March 2016

[Consul]

A basic question in the philosophy/science of consciousness is whether first-order theories or higher-order theories of it are correct: Is the having or undergoing of an experience independent of its subject's awareness or knowledge of it? Are "pure experiences", i.e. uncognized, unperceived, unintrospected, unreflected, unattended, unnoticed experiences possible?
Is there still something it is like for you to have an experience when you don't pay any attention to it or don't take any notice of it? If there is, how do you know?

I expect that basic experiences are possible, but it's not known. The most basic sense of being would not include pain, rather disequilibrium or agitation.

I think the higher-order thought theory of consciousness is false, because I don't think that my having of an experience depends on my thinking that I am having it. But I do think that some cognitive function is necessarily involved in experience; and my #1 candidate is attention: Some degree of attention is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, so totally unattended (unnoticed, unheeded) experiences are nonexperiences.

An important point is that attention can but needn't be an intentional, voluntary mental act, and that it is presentational rather than representational. That is, attention presents its objects directly without any mediating representations. This is not to say that acts or events of attention are never accompanied by mental representations such as thoughts, but only that the former aren't constitutively, essentially representation-involving.

QUOTE>
"The 'organ' of introspection is attention, the orientation of which puts a subject in an appropriate relation to a targeted state."

(Goldman, Alvin I. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 244)

"[T]he leading contemporary cognitive and neurological theories of attention are unanimous in suggesting that attention is not intentional and does not intrinsically involve higher-order representation."
(p. 365)

"The tight connection between internal awareness and ordinary attention suggests a simple hypothesis: attention is the mechanism that enables subjects to become aware of their mental states. We shall call the view that attention is what constitutes internal awareness the ‘attention view’ (AV)."
(p. 367)

"We think that AV is a promising theory of internal awareness. There is much more work to be done, but to us the current evidence suggests that awareness of one’s own mental states is best understood as the activity of ordinary attention. Higher-order representations are superfluous. Of course, there may be other person-level capacities that require us to posit higher-order representation – for example, introspective beliefs, which are uncontroversially higher-order representations. Our present contention is only that such representations are not needed to account for our basic awareness of first-order mental states"
(pp. 368-9)

(Sauret, Wesley, and William G. Lycan. "Attention and Internal Monitoring: A Farewell to HOP." Analysis 74/3 (2014): 363–370.)
<QUOTE

Emotion is still fairly basic, given this recent fruit fly study https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... hout-food/, where fruit flies were found become aggressive when they were hungry.

The question is whether the fly's aggressive behavior really involves a subjective feeling of anger. Unfortunately, an empirical answer is very hard to come by.

[Sy Borg]

A basic question in the philosophy/science of consciousness is whether first-order theories or higher-order theories of it are correct: Is the having or undergoing of an experience independent of its subject's awareness or knowledge of it? Are "pure experiences", i.e. uncognized, unperceived, unintrospected, unreflected, unattended, unnoticed experiences possible?
Is there still something it is like for you to have an experience when you don't pay any attention to it or don't take any notice of it? If there is, how do you know?

I expect that basic experiences are possible, but it's not known. The most basic sense of being would not include pain, rather disequilibrium or agitation.

I think the higher-order thought theory of consciousness is false, because I don't think that my having of an experience depends on my thinking that I am having it. But I do think that some cognitive function is necessarily involved in experience; and my #1 candidate is attention: Some degree of attention is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, so totally unattended (unnoticed, unheeded) experiences are nonexperiences.

An important point is that attention can but needn't be an intentional, voluntary mental act, and that it is presentational rather than representational. That is, attention presents its objects directly without any mediating representations. This is not to say that acts or events of attention are never accompanied by mental representations such as thoughts, but only that the former aren't constitutively, essentially representation-involving.

QUOTE>
"The 'organ' of introspection is attention, the orientation of which puts a subject in an appropriate relation to a targeted state."

(Goldman, Alvin I. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. p. 244)

"[T]he leading contemporary cognitive and neurological theories of attention are unanimous in suggesting that attention is not intentional and does not intrinsically involve higher-order representation."
(p. 365)

"The tight connection between internal awareness and ordinary attention suggests a simple hypothesis: attention is the mechanism that enables subjects to become aware of their mental states. We shall call the view that attention is what constitutes internal awareness the ‘attention view’ (AV)."
(p. 367)

"We think that AV is a promising theory of internal awareness. There is much more work to be done, but to us the current evidence suggests that awareness of one’s own mental states is best understood as the activity of ordinary attention. Higher-order representations are superfluous. Of course, there may be other person-level capacities that require us to posit higher-order representation – for example, introspective beliefs, which are uncontroversially higher-order representations. Our present contention is only that such representations are not needed to account for our basic awareness of first-order mental states"
(pp. 368-9)

(Sauret, Wesley, and William G. Lycan. "Attention and Internal Monitoring: A Farewell to HOP." Analysis 74/3 (2014): 363–370.)
<QUOTE

Interesting. The above ideas appear to be more favourable to the possibility of microbial qualia than not, given that at least some microbes pay attention to prey, potential safe niches and potential threats.

The question is then how microbes and sense and respond without brains, or even nerves. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 142320.htm

Swimming Caulobacter bacteria have a rotating motor in their cell envelope with a long protrusion, the flagellum. The rotation of the flagellum enables the bacteria to move in liquids. Much to the surprise of the researchers, the rotor is also used as a mechano-sensing organ. Motor rotation is powered by proton flow into the cell via ion channels. When swimming cells touch surfaces, the motor is disturbed and the proton flux interrupted.

The researchers assume that this is the signal that sparks off the response: The bacterial cell now boosts the synthesis of a second messenger, which in turn stimulates the production of an adhesin that firmly anchors the bacteria on the surface within a few seconds. "This is an impressive example of how rapidly and specifically bacteria can change their behavior when they encounter surfaces," says Jenal.

An example of how evolution sometimes repurposes body parts to perform new functions, the most famous example being bird feathers, which started out being used for warmth and protection.

Given the range and complexity of microbial behaviours, it would seem likely that other organelles would similarly be multitasking.

Emotion is still fairly basic, given this recent fruit fly study https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... hout-food/, where fruit flies were found become aggressive when they were hungry.

The question is whether the fly's aggressive behavior really involves a subjective feeling of anger. Unfortunately, an empirical answer is very hard to come by.

Anger is pretty basic. If a highly mobile hunting or scavenging organism does not have enough to eat, it can be expected that it will increase its activity to increase its chances of find some. Anger in essence is a quickening, a burning of energy to facilitate action. Interestingly, they slow after about a day. Natural selection must favour fruit flies that initially respond to a lack with greater intensity but, if that doesn't work, they probably start saving energy by slowing again.

As always, it's difficult to imagine what how such a basic consciousness might feel. We have already been equivalently simple-minded during gestation, but too basic (and, I assume, monotonous) to form memories.

[Consul]

Interesting. The above ideas appear to be more favourable to the possibility of microbial qualia than not, given that at least some microbes pay attention to prey, potential safe niches and potential threats.

Two different questions:

1. Is attention necessary for consciousness?
2. Is attention sufficient for consciousness?

See: Attention and Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/#AttCon

As far as I know, most psychologists deny that attention is sufficient for consciousness.

QUOTE>
"Numerous studies have shown that attention can operate on or be directed towards an item that is not consciously perceived. For instance, temporal, featural, and spatial attention increases the amount of priming or adaptation caused by stimuli that fail to reach consciousness because of visual masking or crowding. In addition, attention can also be drawn towards a stimulus that is made invisible because of continuous flash suppression or sub-threshold presentation. This was even found in patient GY, whose attention could be drawn to an invisible stimulus in his contralesional (i.e., blind) visual field. Together, these important studies demonstrate that (i) varying degrees of attention can determine the extent to which stimuli will be unconsciously processed and (ii) attention can be deployed and directed to stimuli that are not consciously perceived."

(Cohen, Michael A., Patrick Cavanagh, Marvin M. Chun, et al. "The Attentional Requirements of Consciousness." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16/8 (2012): 411–417. p. 413)
<QUOTE

The question is then how microbes and sense and respond without brains, or even nerves. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 142320.htm

It's fascinating to see what nerveless organisms are able to do. However, one basic theoretical question is whether their physiological abilities literally fall under psychological concepts such as "cognition" and "perception". Do they literally have minds? Are their abilities literally mental or cognitive abilities? Of course, the answers depend on our definitions of the psychological concepts in question. Unfortunately, there doesn't even seem to be an official scientific definition of the central concept of a mind. If mind ≠ consciousness, then there's a distinction between conscious minds and nonconscious minds; and then the question arises as to what makes the difference between a system which is a nonconscious mind and a system which is a nonconscious nonmind.

The question is whether the fly's aggressive behavior really involves a subjective feeling of anger. Unfortunately, an empirical answer is very hard to come by.

Anger is pretty basic. If a highly mobile hunting or scavenging organism does not have enough to eat, it can be expected that it will increase its activity to increase its chances of find some. Anger in essence is a quickening, a burning of energy to facilitate action. Interestingly, they slow after about a day. Natural selection must favour fruit flies that initially respond to a lack with greater intensity but, if that doesn't work, they probably start saving energy by slowing again.
As always, it's difficult to imagine what how such a basic consciousness might feel. We have already been equivalently simple-minded during gestation, but too basic (and, I assume, monotonous) to form memories.

Yes, anger is a basic emotion. However, in psychology the concept of emotion has several aspects or dimensions, only one of which refers to emotions qua subjective feelings (or moods). So one must look carefully when flies are said to be angry, because there may be nothing more to their anger than a certain type of objective physiological processes and behavioral reactions that don't involve any subjective feelings of anger.

QUOTE>
"Typical examples [of emotions] are anger, joy, love, grief and fear. Tokens of emotions can be characterized by a large set of different characteristic properties:
1. automatic appraisal that is tuned to: quick onset, brief duration, and typically
unbidden occurrence
2. distinctive physiognomic and physiological reactions
3. distinctive cognitions: thoughts, memories, images
4. distinctive subjective experience
5. interpersonal/interactive orientation
6. characteristic behavioral and motivational features"

(Zinck, Alexandra, and Albert Newen. "Classifying Emotion: A Developmental Account." Synthese 161 (2008): 1–25. p. 9)

"Essentially the set of emotions on the level of basic emotions comprises fear, anger, sadness, and joy. As opposed to other emotions that always necessarily involve characteristic cognitions and evaluations, these basic emotions—not requiring conscious processing of stimuli—can be triggered independently of slower cognitive processes that are underlying, e.g. a conscious consideration of a belief, enabling a fast shift of attention and a fast onset. The necessity to introduce a class of emotions which operates without cognitive processing is supported by the empirical findings of two different ways of processing emotional cues for fear, namely the ventral path via the limbic circuit and the dorsal path via the neocortex (LeDoux, 1996). These neurobiological findings confirm the strong intuition that humans share many emotional reactions (such as basic fear) with other mammals: emotions for which we do not need to suppose complex cognitive processing. Furthermore, the exclusion of complex cognition allows faster, though less varied reactions in situations of basic survival than is the case when conscious considerations are involved. Basic emotions are each characterized by coordinated, automated and complex changes. These establish a complex interplay of characteristic expressive facial changes, physiological reactions (musculoskeletal responses, endocrine/hormone system changes, autonomic nervous system changes), and vocal expressive changes. They are short-term, highly stereotypical responses that only involve limited cognitive processing with focus on the actual situation."

(Zinck, Alexandra, and Albert Newen. "Classifying Emotion: A Developmental Account." Synthese 161 (2008): 1–25. pp. 11-2)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Contemporary philosophers differ widely on how they understand the nature of emotion. There is no consensus on what emotions are, nor any agreement on how to individuate emotions and distinguish them from other affective states such as moods, sentiments, and feelings. Even the idea that emotions form a distinct class, or natural kind, is suspect. To complicate things, there is no methodological agreement on how to address these issues. It is therefore not surprising to find there is no uniform position on the relation between consciousness and emotion in contemporary philosophy of emotion. Paradoxically, many philosophical discussions of emotion ignore consciousness entirely while others consider it their daily bread."

("Emotions, Philosophical Perspectives." In The Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Tim Bayne, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken, 259-262. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 259)
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"A widely shared insight is that emotions have components, and that such components are jointly instantiated in prototypical episodes of emotions. Consider an episode of intense fear due to the sudden appearance of a grizzly bear on your path while hiking. At first blush, we can distinguish in the complex event that is fear an evaluative component (e.g., appraising the bear as dangerous), a physiological component (e.g., increased heart rate and blood pressure), a phenomenological component (e.g., an unpleasant feeling), an expressive component (e.g., upper eyelids raised, jaw dropped open, lips stretched horizontally), a behavioral component (e.g., a tendency to flee), and a mental component (e.g., focusing attention).

One question that has divided emotion theorists is: Which subset of the evaluative, physiological, phenomenological, expressive, behavioral, and mental components is essential to emotion? The answer to this “problem of parts” (Prinz 2004) has changed at various times in the history of the subject, leading to a vast collection of theories of emotions both in philosophy and in affective science. Although such theories differ on multiple dimensions, they can be usefully sorted into three broad traditions, which we call the Feeling Tradition, the Evaluative Tradition and the Motivational Tradition (Scarantino 2016).

The Feeling Tradition takes the way emotions feel to be their most essential characteristic, and defines emotions as distinctive conscious experiences. The Evaluative Tradition regards the way emotions construe the world as primary, and defines emotions as being (or involving) distinctive evaluations of the eliciting circumstances. The Motivational Tradition defines emotions as distinctive motivational states."

Emotion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/
<QUOTE

There are theorists who regard the "phenomenological component", i.e. the subjective experiential quality, of an emotion as inessential, in which case unfelt or unexperienced emotions can occur. Siding with "the Feeling Tradition", I reject this conception of emotions. For I think that emotions properly so called are always subjective feelings (or moods). I also think that the subjective feeling is the only part of an emotion, in the sense that an emotion itself is nothing over and above a subjective feeling (or mood). This is not to say that there is nothing nonconscious (nothing neurophysiological, cognitive, or behavioral) over and above a conscious emotion, but there is a relevant distinction between an emotion as such and an emotion-complex that comprises the emotion and other, non-/transemotional aspects or factors (physiological, cognitive, or behavioral ones).

"For me, the subjective experience—the feeling—is the emotion."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 200)

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Typical examples [of emotions] are anger, joy, love, grief and fear. Tokens of emotions can be characterized by a large set of different characteristic properties:
1. automatic appraisal that is tuned to: quick onset, brief duration, and typically
unbidden occurrence
2. distinctive physiognomic and physiological reactions
3. distinctive cognitions: thoughts, memories, images
4. distinctive subjective experience
5. interpersonal/interactive orientation
6. characteristic behavioral and motivational features"

(Zinck, Alexandra, and Albert Newen. "Classifying Emotion: A Developmental Account." Synthese 161 (2008): 1–25. p. 9)
<QUOTE

1-6 are what I call an emotion-complex rather than an emotion. For, as I said, I think 4 is the whole emotion rather than just a part of it.
(By the way, I like the alternative term "sentiment" for emotions; so if people insist on using "emotion" for an entire emotion-complex, then I can insist on using "sentiment" for its experiential/phenomenal component.)

[Sy Borg]

Interesting. The above ideas appear to be more favourable to the possibility of microbial qualia than not, given that at least some microbes pay attention to prey, potential safe niches and potential threats.

Two different questions:

1. Is attention necessary for consciousness?
2. Is attention sufficient for consciousness?

See: Attention and Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/attention/#AttCon

As far as I know, most psychologists deny that attention is sufficient for consciousness.

QUOTE>
"Numerous studies have shown that attention can operate on or be directed towards an item that is not consciously perceived. For instance, temporal, featural, and spatial attention increases the amount of priming or adaptation caused by stimuli that fail to reach consciousness because of visual masking or crowding. In addition, attention can also be drawn towards a stimulus that is made invisible because of continuous flash suppression or sub-threshold presentation. This was even found in patient GY, whose attention could be drawn to an invisible stimulus in his contralesional (i.e., blind) visual field. Together, these important studies demonstrate that (i) varying degrees of attention can determine the extent to which stimuli will be unconsciously processed and (ii) attention can be deployed and directed to stimuli that are not consciously perceived."

(Cohen, Michael A., Patrick Cavanagh, Marvin M. Chun, et al. "The Attentional Requirements of Consciousness." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16/8 (2012): 411–417. p. 413)
<QUOTE

The question is then how microbes and sense and respond without brains, or even nerves. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 142320.htm

It's fascinating to see what nerveless organisms are able to do. However, one basic theoretical question is whether their physiological abilities literally fall under psychological concepts such as "cognition" and "perception". Do they literally have minds? Are their abilities literally mental or cognitive abilities? Of course, the answers depend on our definitions of the psychological concepts in question. Unfortunately, there doesn't even seem to be an official scientific definition of the central concept of a mind. If mind ≠ consciousness, then there's a distinction between conscious minds and nonconscious minds; and then the question arises as to what makes the difference between a system which is a nonconscious mind and a system which is a nonconscious nonmind.

Much to go through with your quotes on emotions, so I'll have a good look later.

When it comes to the basics of consciousness or qualia, I'm consider responses that could be considered pre-emotional, eg. feeling an itch or other irritation and unthinkingly scratching it. It's a fascinating notion, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious minds. I am think the opposite in a way. That is, qualia seems to be involved in the basic sense-response dynamics of microbes, as distinct from emotional dynamics. In essence, I am not sure that a mind is needed for organisms to experience being - in a very, very, very basic way, I must stress.

When it comes to actual emotions, however, would agree that that would need a brain. Emotions are basically the bridge between body and mind, and one can't expect brainless organisms to have minds as such.

That qualia can exist in lieu of a mind to shape it. So while a microbe will not have the apparatus needed to feel, say, pain, they have aversive sense-response mechanisms, which are assumed by many not to be qualia, but I am not so sure.

One can feel things while not caring, feeling unemotional about sensations. A few months ago I had two root canal therapies while affected by some drug that took away my care. I could feel the dentist hacking away in there with pneumatic drill, bulldozer, pick axe and shovel (subjective impressions :) but I had no opinion or thoughts about it as I lolled relatively mindlessly in the chair. Of course, even this diminished human experience is exponentially more complex than the simple pulses and tingles that may be at the evolutionary root of qualia in the biosphere (wherever those limits may lie).

[Consul]

…If mind ≠ consciousness, then there's a distinction between conscious minds and nonconscious minds; and then the question arises as to what makes the difference between a system which is a nonconscious mind and a system which is a nonconscious nonmind.

To be more precise, the phrase "nonconscious mind" is ambiguous between "phenomenally nonconscious mind" and "phenomenally conscious mind of which its subject is not conscious". Above, I'm using the phrase in the first sense.

[Consul]

To be more precise, the phrase "nonconscious mind" is ambiguous between "phenomenally nonconscious mind" and "phenomenally conscious mind of which its subject is not conscious". Above, I'm using the phrase in the first sense.

If "nonconscious experience" means "phenomenally nonconscious experience", it's a contradiction in terms; but it isn't if it means "(phenomenally conscious) experience of which its subject isn't introspectively/reflectively conscious".

[Sy Borg]

To be more precise, the phrase "nonconscious mind" is ambiguous between "phenomenally nonconscious mind" and "phenomenally conscious mind of which its subject is not conscious". Above, I'm using the phrase in the first sense.

If "nonconscious experience" means "phenomenally nonconscious experience", it's a contradiction in terms; but it isn't if it means "(phenomenally conscious) experience of which its subject isn't introspectively/reflectively conscious".

The way I'm thinking about this, there would be no conscious sense of I. There would be no stable, central consciousness, but a shifting sense of being that depends on what the organism does. If it's pulsing like a jellyfish, for instance, then, during each pulse the organism subjectively is the pulse. This, admittedly speculative, notion can only be understood abstractly because there is nothing even nearly as simple in known human consciousness. A near-blind, relentless, emotionless drive that perseveres until it can't.