by entropyfails » Mon 26 Mar 2007, 19:59:06
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('threadbear', 'E')ntropy, I think, that in many respects animals are more conscious than man.
Consciousness is a funny thing. We don't know that much about it. No good model of consciousness exists because if a good one did, we would be able to use it to create a true computer consciousness. The first team to create true machine intelligence will be the first people to fully and truly understand consciousness.
I think that SmallPoxGirl's link points out well, (Thank you very much for that excellent link spg!) We really don't have that good of a model of consciousness. In that paper, they used neural pathway termination at the perception layer of the cortex to define "consciousness of pain," but is that really the general metric we want to use? Many unconscious people have full pathways from nerve to brain that work, but the perception inputs get ignored by the larger, self-aware consciousness that we are actually talking about. So while the termination of nerves is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient for consciousness. So the conclusion of the paper holds, below 30 weeks it is impossible to be "conscious" of pain because the appropriate hardware is missing. But even AFTER the hardware is there, the software of "self-consciousness" doesn't load until far after.
Animals don't have self-reflected consciousness, and good for them. Self-reflected consciousness is a very destructive thing. Look what it has done to humans on this planet! It makes you fear the future because self-reflected consciousness demands its own continuity above all other things. The other forms of life live within nature, using their natural intelligence to protect themselves in the present moment. This is intelligence and "consciousness" used well.
We self-reflected conscious beings, on the other hand, live entirely outside of nature. We live in the functional mathematic domain where everything is divided up into "sets" and you can apply "truth" and "falsehood." We match neural input patterns with old learned patterns to try to "decide" what to do. And we always choose in the direction of "self", however we choose to define that direction. THAT process kills everything.
That process, I call "civilization". And thus YOU are civilization. And you have no other tools other than "civilization" to help you.
So tying that into abortion, we recognize that when "civilization" comes into being inside a human, we then require them to submit to the general laws of civilization. THAT is the point in which the laws of "civilization" should apply as opposed to the kill or be killed laws of the animals. Thus a few months after birth is probably appropriately consistent with that definition.