Quote:
Originally Posted by Venom 
Myself I see things like a continuum. We are at the end of the spectrum, with the langage, but animals (with feelings and sensations and some raisoning skills) do have a consciousness at a lesser degree (apes beeing really close to us of course, and so on).
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I certainly agree with that - and indeed an interesting question is just how far back it really goes. Even very simple creatures such as ants seem to behave as if they were conscious, but everyone says "Oh they are just following chemical commands!". Does that mean they are not conscious - it is hard to say, isn't it!
I am, however much more cautious about Susan Blackmore's ideas. She seems to put too much store on some very simplistic notions of consciousness. For example, at one point she was very keen on the idea that there was no such thing as a stream of consciousness. She explored this idea by asking her students to stop at some signal and report what was in their minds at that instant! Often her students found they could not answer that question! From this somewhat flimsy evidence, she concluded that there was no such thing as a stream of consciousness, and used it as evidence that consciousness is somehow not what we think it is! I was so exasperated by this idea that I wrote to her. To be fair to her (because this is, for me, only an armchair interest, so I was not known to her), she wrote back and we shared several e-mails on this subject. I pointed out that there was really nothing new about her 'discovery' because everyone knows that consciousness has a characteristic time scale in which it can act - it does not operate on a timescale of microseconds, for example.
Notice also that in her piece regarding the relevance of Ψ to consciousness, she manages to mention Libet's timing data and not mention Radin's data - even to refute it!
David