(Aug 3, 2020 11:33 AM)zhangjinyuan Wrote: [ -> ][...] Why is it that animals are born conscious, while human babies need to sleep long enough to wake up and replenish their energy before they become conscious? Elephants, after all, have very large brains, but they are also conscious from birth.
If consciousness is formed from memories in the brain, how does a newborn baby produce memories and consciousness even when his eyes are closed? Amnesiacs awaken with consciousness, which may not necessarily have to do with memories and memories stored in the brain
"Consciousness" was arguably an umbrella term in the past that also had knowledge-based awareness subsumed under it (the latter falling out of innate templates and acquired memory, learning, and reasoning). That still may be the case when referencing the
zombie consciousness of say, robots or autonomous machines which navigate through their environment.
But "consciousness" as increasingly used by scientists and philosophers today seems to discretely refer to phenomenal experience. They do an awful job of clarifying or simplifying what is meant by "experience", ranging from talk about
qualia to "
what it feels like to be something".
In the context of anti-supernatural materialism or "scientism" as Alex Rosenberg
favorably defines it, death would be an exemplar of what non-consciousness is. Non-consciousness isn't even a presentation of nothingness and silence, much less conceptual or verbal apprehension of the latter. When one is dead, not only does one's personal thoughts and body sensations disappear, but also everything else: The whole world that was represented/constructed from electrochemical impulses from the various sense organs.
So flip that around to the opposite and there is the basic meaning of consciousness (or what the term has often become limited to nowadays): It is a presentation or showing of anything -- whether visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory or unknown alien possibilities.
Cognition, OTOH, is the understanding and identification of what is manifested (including a primary acknowledgment that "something is exhibited" to be classified, comprehended, and reacted to). Cognition is indeed dependent upon memory or information retention, as well as the capacity to infer general concepts, principles, and conclusions from repeated instances of specific things.
Quote:If biological sleep refers to the death of the old consciousness, sleep is the process by which the brain creates new consciousness, and when it wakes up the new consciousness invokes the brain's memory to continue working, this theory seems impossible to disprove
If the consciousness before sleep and the consciousness after sleep are not 1 consciousness, no matter what kind of consciousness, as long as the same brain memory, I do not feel the difference, then there seems to be no difference between consciousness and consciousness [...]
There's phenomenal experience (the manifestations) and then there's the cognitive/memory apparatus that personality or self is dependent upon. As mentioned above, consciousness today (especially in argument territory) is often narrowed to refer to the former rather than both.
The pattern of "self" associated with an individual human or organism does rely upon "proper" utilization and maintenance of data storage. Which can get disrupted in dreams or under the influence of psychoactive substances, and via brain damage -- to where one acts and decides and has interests different from the usual personal identity. However, the one generic constant is that introspective and extrospective affairs are still being displayed, in contrast to matter events occurring in the "dark" or the absence of everything as exemplified by non-consciousness. Some naturalists have gone so far as to espouse experience as being a kind of "generic subjectivity" distributed and underlying all brains associated with it, in contrast to the distinct selves dependent upon the local memory and cognitive processes of each particular neural organ:
Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity.