I thank you for your thoughts on allowing users of language the freedom to use words with whatever meaning they have adopted in their usage. But while I do not wish to limit the user any freedoms, I must emphasize that any effective communication of any idea requires that any two parties communicating agree on the meaning intended by the other party. Otherwise, as we would say, we are not talking about one and the same thing. Any degree of agreement or disagreement between the two parties may just be an illusion. So my point is, that while I agree on giving the speaker as much freedom of usage as desired, we nevertheless do need to be transparent about which meaning we chose in a specific statement. Transparency, such as the use of a glossary in a document, does not limit any semantic freedom. It just ensures clarity of what meaning was chosen, and leads to clarity in a dialog. This may seem very obvious, but this is what numerous discussions fail to ensure.
While I broadly agree, my point is that in many/most cases definitions don’t work. Meaning is usually established by a conversation or multi-party dialog, in which understanding of terms is arrived at by mutual understanding and consensus. Documents are inherently unidirectional, and simply adding a glossary does not immediately resolve the problem (even if anyone bothered to read it). Some of the words you use (freedoms, illusion, transparent, very obvious) I find open to interpretation, but if you provided definitions I doubt it would help. I repeat: meaning by definition is not how language works.
Every organism has the ability to remember the past? I would say no. However, what I would say is that most organisms may have the ability to be influenced by past occurrences in ways that would influence its future behavior. This would even be true of single-cell organisms.
“Remembering” implies cognition, reasoning from recalled memory, employing agency to determine its future behavior.
Every organism ‘that’ has the ability to remember the past.
Got it.
Infantile Amnesia occurs because prior to the development of consciousness we have no episodic, self-reflective memory.
Foulkes, D. (1999). Children’s dreaming and the development of consciousness. Harvard University Press.
in the link it says, its the inability to retrieve episodic memories before 4 years. weirdly I’m on my 20’s I can remember stuff of when I was 2 (specially memories about when I got new toys) and I have a single fragment of episodic memory of when I was still younger than 1yr and unable to speak properly.
I wonder if thats right.
There are all sorts of theories regarding Infantile Amnesia, including false memories, where you think that you have an early memory, but you really just made it up. I found Foulkes description consistent with my own theories of Consciousness and his explanation makes perfect sense to me. Of course, we are talking psychology here and dream science no less. You might find the last chapter of his book, (8 Consciousness) interesting and you can read it for free on the Internet Archive.
As an aside, my earliest memory occurred when I was 3. I found a piece of zip cord, the kind of two conductor wire that is used for lamp cords, that had a two-prong plug attached to each end. These sorts of cords can be used to test electrical wiring. My dad taught vocational electronics and also had an electricians license and so there were electrical tools and parts around the house. Of course, I had no idea about any of that, but I was fascinated by electrical outlets and cords. I had seen cords plugged into outlets and the fact that this cord had two plugs and a wall outlet typically has two sockets made perfect sense. I plugged the two plugs into a nearby outlet and at that moment discovered Arc Flash. Apparently the resulting sparks did not dissuade me and in fact may have had an influence on my eventual career in electrical engineering. his memory is quite vivid for me and far too complex to have been made up.
However, even given that “that” (!), I wonder just how many organisms would qualify?
We don’t have enough information about the animals consciousness (or anything about consciousness), so whatever i say is more like a gossips… and due to that I can’t say that for sure, but i believe there more no. Of species with that ability w.r.t homo species.
I too have very early memories from when I was 2 or 3. I recall putting clay or PlayDough in my mouth and what it tasted like. And other things too…
I don’t think there is any agreement on when episodic memory “begins”, and it probably varies greatly from one person to another.
Nor am I able to verify my memories from that time as “correct”. But from time to time throughout my life I have recalled the early memories. But this is so subjective!
Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately. And this can happen on a nonconscious level, as I have tried to describe in driving a car. Another way to look at the problem is to remember the behavior of white blood cells, which certainly perceive bacteria and respond appropriately by devouring them. To equate consciousness with perception is thus tantamount to saying that we have six thousand conscious entities per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in our circulatory system — which I think is a reductio ad absurdum.
Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and accessed by it.
Julian Jaynes
Yes… that’s true… but perception can be well defined if we know the details about the ‘sensing’ and ‘responding’ part. Also i see most of them have different definitions on consciousness, without understanding consciousness we can’t clearly make a definition about it. So its clear we must try to understand what is inside the bottle before labelling it.
Jaynes is probably as good a read as any on the topic, although it is getting a bit long in the tooth. He makes the mistake of talking about the ‘science of consciousness’ (there is none) and having it rely on introspection (which is never objective), but he does make the interesting observation that (based on ancient writings) consciousness as we know it is probably a cultural invention of relatively recent times.
It’s a bit like gods and rights and morals etc: they don’t exist at any objective level but they are strongly present in what Hari calls the ‘virtual subjective reality’ we now all inhabit. Talking about the ‘science’ of consciousness is very much like talking about the ‘science’ of gods, for very much the same reasons.
I think almost every organism has the ability to remember the past. Past is a function of time therefore every past behavior of an organism that seems to be repeated in the present can be thought of as a memory recall. The absence of this repeated behavior is an organism that behaves with highest degree of randomness which my poor brain cannot provide an instance of because I know even a worm repeats some of its behaviors. The problem here is that internally, we cannot know if it was actually recalled from memory.
Any organism that has the ability to move can recall the past. But the recalling process were different (visual, auditory, olfactory things like that). So consciousness can be defined as the process of being in time.
If you’ve read Jeff’s Book the Thousand Brains Theory, there is a movement in the neocortex which is not what we perceive normally as a physical movement. This movement is analogous to the physical movement that is required for learning (sensorimotor).
Maybe, it’s movement which is the core characteristic of life, and which ultimately leads to intelligence through consciousness.
And a consciousness could be any set of sense-making and meaning-making processes within a given context, which enable the continuation of that life.
Yes and also I have a weird idea of organisms that has the ability to move with utilizing various muscles tend to have better capacity of acquiring and manipulating the given information. Eg - unicellular < multicellular - better capacity
We tend to call the organ in the head as a brain, but actually the entire body of any organism can be regarded as a brain(atleast if we care about the function of brain then the entire body contributes much to be called as a brain).
Interesting… Will look into that