That may be your view. I'd asked how you concluded *I* said what you ascribed to me. It certainly wasn't evident at the transmitter!
Why?
No, I doubt that. Animal consciousness--whatever it is--is surely more complex than the "tween time".
For instance, my dog's image of the world is *vastly* different from mine. Her sense of smell is on par with my sense of sight, and she receives information about the world from it as I do from sight (it's always funny to watch her "search" for something I can see quite plainly). She also has better night vision.
Thus, her world picture is quite different from mine.
------------------------ I'm bright enough to realize that imagining myself in a lion suit is not the same as being one. The rest of you I'm not too sure about.
--------------------- Cognitive researchers tend to agree with ME, actually!! In fact, that's where *I* GOT this stuff!
---------------------- That wouldn't be some variety of nature-boy tree-hugger.
That would be someone who wants to be a robot when he grows up and who doesn't believe in the Feudal Xtian God, but instead in something resembling an ElectricAcidZen Paradoxical Reality.
------------------------ Altered consciousness, not stupid consciousness.
-------------------------- Which I have done, and which you really didn't like. You see, that's the problem. I don't think you have examined it closely enough internally, and I would recommend you resolve this by careful introspection. That is the only experiment that needs to be done.
--------------------------------- It says "I love you" because it was taught that by being fed nuts, NOT because it knows what "I" means. I have carefully followed that.
---------------------------------- Indeed. How perceptive, and to think, people had only been believing that was true of parrots for 100,000 years now. They simply didn't realize that they could be taught to rote-speak programmable output of their pattern/color/texture recognition mechanism.
--------------------------------- No, actually you simply don't understand it.
--------------------------------- Nothing so facile. It's the Truth about Life and Perception. Nothing else can be shown to be True other than that fact. But be accurate about it, the Self is no unary thing, that itself is but a western superstition. For there to be other entities which apparently act as though they are additional beings like myself, I must understand Beingness as a MWI QM phenomenon except modified, a Many Lives Interpretation, namely ALL POSSIBLE LIVES AND EXPERIENCES. Existence is Infinite, and the "I" that is OurSelf is/was/will be all of it, taken each at its timeless turn. In other words, the Self is not one OR many, it is numberless, the concept of number is but part of the unary illusion. And not ONLY that, but that in some manner, some of the Infinity of Lives must include Lives in which other real Lives overlap into it as other people. In other words, it's much more complicated than any puny Solipsism, really more of an Omnipsism.
----------------------------- Proof and disproof aren't finally important to philosophy. Remember, philosophy contains proof and disproof WITHIN itself as its province. Thus it is no more subject to them than you can lift yourself into the air by your own belt.
--------------------------------------- Quite the reverse. You're abyssmally and backwardly mechanistic.
--------------------------- Sure. Fine. The thing is, that you could be fooled for a finite time that MIGHT exceed your longevity.
------------------------------ Sure. But others might regard you as obtuse.
-------------------- Tee-hee.
---------------------------------- If you continued to be obtuse you COULD insist that, but others who are more rational and reasonable might disagree, and you'd be a fool, unbeknownst to you. You can always take your marbles and go home, but then you don't get to play with others.
We don't need some "machine" to measure consciousness, we need only look at how the entity functions, and how likely it is that Nature would be able to cram a much higher overhead PLD version of an only emulated awareness into a brain-sized container, than it managed the SelfAware engine in your same sized brain made of the same material as the other guy.
-------------------------- Now you're merely equivocating, also lame. It WOULD be, if you could decide.
------------------------------------ Me too, they deserve it. But that's merely wishful play.
----------------- But that's not because they're right, but because they're stupid. It has nothing to do with any kind of proof anyway!
---------------------- No, their reports later are. Awareness is the Continuity Memory of Self-referenced Self-Existence.
Fetuses aren't, because they haven't been yet. We abort them at will.
But comatose elders may be, because they have been and thus may be again! Thus we preserve them, though unconscious, as we do sleeping and anaesthetized persons.
-------------------------- Awareness is a cheap way to get around the need for an otherwise very extensive bit of programming to undertake some very complex responses for what might seem otherwise as present for no reason. Nature found that the cheap way to do it on an ongoing basis was to install a self-modeling witness as internal planner in the device. It may not do the perfect thing, but it does enough things right that it is okay, for now, like most evolved structures.
------------------------ The motion isn't important, what the person will be again later, is!
------------------------- We protect the unconscious being who has previously been conscious. We do so because it is the continuity of self-awareness, or the apparent continuity of Selfness, even interrupted by sleep or unconsciousness, that we value as the key ingedient the OurSelf. We do NOT protect the not-yet-been-conscious, i.e., fetuses.
Ah, there's the rub! Its empiricism or metaphysics... and never the twain shall meet. Go read up on Henri Bergson vs Bertrand Russell.
While you are reading, perhaps I can interject the simple fact that science is about repeatable observation, not theory. Its about facts, which are defined as events that can be observed by more than one person. If you care about science, which is our rational age sets the standard for truth, then you care about facts. If you don't care about science, then I'd say its time to join a religion... or start one.
I'll borrow your response, below: "Google, ten minutes, your time, not mine."
Except that it won't take ten minutes. A simple search on "neanderthal art" will do it.
I said "less information." Are you disagreeing with that? BTW, don't most authorities date the Neanderthals between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago? What is the million or million and a half years you're talking about?
How do you know? Do you actually know any cats? What would you expect to see in their minds? How does thinking in "hieroglyphics" differ from thinking in English? Does one have to think in a particular form to be self-aware? What sort of symbols would you have seen in Einstein's mind when he was thinking about things there was no language to express? What would I see if I read your mind? Nothing but fully-formed English sentences?
I was hoping he would answer the title question, but instead he concludes, basically, 'we can never REALLY know'. (Which I would have said is self-evident.)
Yet, his 8th footnote does say, "It may be easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid of the imagination."
Which is largely what I was thinking while reading the essay. (-:
I'd also question whether his idea of a language that transcends subjective experience is possible. As he says, there are facts humans simply can't access.
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