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Comment by yan | Hacker News Reader

I find that some people (hooray weasel words) are so driven to find that something special that can put humans in a completely different realm from other things and animals that they won't accept that the same processes that run us also run most other living things, just more progressed.

I don't know why people need a clear, binary difference of what makes one "human" to appreciate how beautiful life and the mind is.

Am I in the minority that has no problems with being categorizes as a mammal, just more progressed, not different altogether?

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Actually, philosophers who think that there's something special about consciousness (i.e. it can't be explained by structure and dynamics, but might be due to another fundamental physical property that the scientific community has so far ignored) don't think that only humans are conscious. David Chalmers once described how thermostats might have a dim form of it, although he just mentioned it as an unlikely possibility.

So do some physicists: http://chaos.swarthmore.edu/courses/phys6_2004/QM/19_CatsFri...

The problem is a lack of tools to explore this further. Where are the testable predictions?

The question also makes one mistake: the first neuron fires long before birth. Develop meant is a gradual process, so the emergence of consciousness probably is too.

Well I don't believe that you need to posit a fundamental consciousness-property to explain collapse. There are clearer explanations that rely only on what physicists (mostly) already accept, which David Albert explains well: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Alb... But maybe you do need to posit that to explain things like thoughts and feelings.

There doesn't seem to be such a big chasm between humans and the most evolved mammals. It's more a difference of degree.

We have language. So do the dolphins, albeit less complex. We are self-aware. So are chimps, dolphins, etc. Perhaps their self-awareness is not as sharply defined and perceived like ours, but it's there.

etc. etc.

Chimpanzees have actually genetically progressed more than us since divergence. http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5808

"Progressed" is not the right word. They changed more to adapt to their environment. Or, at least, they changed more genetically.

I think that defining difference could be language. While on a biological level we are not much different than primates and other mammals, what we do have that no other animal so far has exhibited is language. Humans communicate on a level above and beyond anything else in the animal kingdom.

This leads into my biggest question regarding consciousness: how does one think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in one language or another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?

Does language define consciousness?

No. I often think without language. It's a different mode.

thinking and consciousness are different things. Thinking implies that you are evaluating your surroundings as all other animals do. Consciousness is the idea of self awareness: not only are you thinking about the situation, but you're thinking about yourself in the situation in relation to everything else around you.

how does one think without language? We all have an inner self speaking in one language or another, but what if we had no knowledge of any language?

When you cross the street, do you narrate the situation to yourself ("One car approaching at about 25 miles per hour, currently two hundred feet away, decelerating at...") or do you model them visually?

But crossing the street does not require a heightened sense of consciousness. In fact, you are probably not even conscious of nearly everything that's going on as you cross the street, you are just doing it.

Now if you were sitting on your couch in dead silence in a pitch black room, what would be going on in your head with no language?

I can't track how much of my thought is visual versus verbal -- because, of course, if I did so I'd switch to verbal mode -- but there are plenty of thoughts one can consciously have that don't require words. The category that most readily comes to mind is sexual fantasies. They don't require consciousness, I guess, but I suspect that many beings we think of as conscious have such thoughts, consciously.

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