tar

a doozy of a hangover, or a doozy of a response? (my dad taught me to drink a glass of water for every drink of alcohol. Cuts down on the dehydration which is a major factor in the headache and blah feeling the morning after a good drinking.)

dimreepr, I started this topic to discuss consciousness and instinct from the dopamine perspective, as to not derail or hijack Ten Oz's thread. But crucial to me is to gain understanding of our common addiction to dopamine, and to praise it for its value in terms of our enjoyment of life, our desire to fix things, to improve things, to create things, to complete things, to please others, etc. in terms of how we like to do these things, enjoy these things and aim to do them again, hence survive, but to be conscious as well of the downsides of dopamine, where we can overeat certain quickly metabolized wheat starches and watch too much TV and gain our dopamine rushes in dangerous. destructive and unsavory, expensive (unlawful) and harmful ways, to the detriment of our own selves and those around us. Regards, TAR

Ed Earl, I agree people are nuanced and complex. And nobody can tell somebody else what should or is going to make them happy, feel right, feel alive and OK. But in my readings and discussions, with professional in the field of addiction, through my association to both a town alliance and a county prevention organization, I know that dopamine plays a role, both in human happiness and motivation and purpose, and in addiction. The common element goes directly to the OP. No matter how you were brought up, educated, socialized and no matter who it is you wish to please in your actions and thoughts and plans, you are operating in order to obtain dopamine, and this fact is completely outside human planning. That is it is built in, innate, instinctual stuff, that exists in Ed Earl, and Ten Oz and TAR and anybody and everybody else, and possibly to certain degrees in animals, and maybe even plants. So through consciousness and thought and agreement and institutions we can decide which ways of surviving, of feeling right, of feeling victorious are preferable to others, but nobody can shake the need to survive, to want that feeling of dopamine existing in your synapses. It is built in. Regards, TAR

Evginia, I like your approach. We have many ways to obtain dopamine, free and easy, or at least inexpensive, and readily available, legal, helpful to others or unobtrusive to others, ways. So good approach. However, I am mixed on providing dopamine, and blockers and reuptake inhibitors and such in a mechanical, chemical approach. I don't think our consciousness is clever enough to out think our own subconscious, much less someone else's. Consider the oxycodone problem came about because the medical profession wanted to lessen human pain and suffering. We technically have the way to provide dopamine in a safe manner. Except providing it too much makes it an unwise method. Better not to fool with mother nature, and just feel bad when you are hurt. and feel good when you have healed. In moderation of course. Fentanyl was made for people in severe pain dying of cancer, to make their last moments of life bearable. It might be highly inappropriate to apply this satisfaction mid stream, since you have not actually reached the other shore, there is no useful reason to feel that way ahead of time. I learned that addicts in withdrawal feel like they are dying, feel like they are not surviving, feel that the only option, to stay alive is to get their drug of choice. They will steal money from their mom's purse to buy another hit. Not good to be able to buy happiness like this, to buy the feeling that you are alive. Better to have good, clean fun. And MUCH better to actually engage in behaviors that help yourself and your family and your team and your company and your friends and your school and your church and your neighborhood and your county and your state and your country and your species survive. Then the dopamine you get, for pleasing yourself and your loved ones is real and actually works toward survival, as its supposed to. Regards, TAR Karl Marx I think it was, called religion the opiate of the masses. Perhaps today opioids are the opiate of the masses. Wrong I think to make others dependent on you for their survival/happiness, unless of course they are your loved ones. Perhaps it was wrong to provide our inner cities with crack instead of jobs. Two ways to provide happiness, or the feeling of, but one way slavery and the other is freedom.

Evginia, I like your approach. We have many ways to obtain dopamine, free and easy, or at least inexpensive, and readily available, legal, helpful to others or unobtrusive to others, ways. So good approach. However, I am mixed on providing dopamine, and blockers and reuptake inhibitors and such in a mechanical, chemical approach. I don't think our consciousness is clever enough to out think our own subconscious, much less someone else's. Consider the oxycodone problem came about because the medical profession wanted to lessen human pain and suffering. We technically have the way to provide dopamine in a safe manner. Except providing it too much makes it an unwise method. Better not to fool with mother nature, and just feel bad when you are hurt. and feel good when you have healed. In moderation of course. Fentanyl was made for people in severe pain dying of cancer, to make their last moments of live bearable. It might be highly inappropriate to apply this satisfaction mid stream, since you have not actually reached the other shore, there is no useful reason to feel that way ahead of time. I learned that addicts in withdrawal feel like they are dying, feel like they are not surviving, feel that the only option, to stay alive is to get their drug of choice. They will steal money from their mom's purse to buy another hit. Not good to be able to buy happiness like this, to buy the feeling that you are alive. Better to have good, clean fun. And MUCH better to actually engage in behaviors that help yourself and your family and your team and your company and your friends and your school and your church and your neighborhood and your county and your state and your country and your species survive. Then the dopamine you get, for pleasing yourself and your loved ones is real and actually works toward survival, as its supposed to. Regards, TAR

Ed Earl, I agree people are nuanced and complex. And nobody can tell somebody else what should or is going to make them happy, feel right, feel alive and OK. But in my readings and discussions, with professional in the field of addiction, through my association to both a town alliance and a county prevention organization, I know that dopamine plays a role, both in human happiness and motivation and purpose, and in addiction. The common element goes directly to the OP. No matter how you were brought up, educated, socialized and no matter who it is you wish to please in your actions and thoughts and plans, you are operating in order to obtain dopamine, and this fact is completely outside human planning. That is it is built in, innate, instinctual stuff, that exists in Ed Earl, and Ten Oz and TAR and anybody and everybody else, and possibly to certain degrees in animals, and maybe even plants. So through consciousness and thought and agreement and institutions we can decide which ways of surviving, of feeling right, of feeling victorious are preferable to others, but nobody can shake the need to survive, to want that feeling of dopamine existing in your synapses. It is built in. Regards, TAR

DrP, The UK does not have the opioid epidemic prevalent in the U.S. due to the over prescription of Oxy. You totally misread my feelings about addiction. I in no way feel superior to my wife, because she still smokes and I do not. The draw of the dopamine exists in us all. That is my only point, I was not making any discriminatory statement. If somebody has only one thing that makes them happy, they probably have a problem. To me it is better to be home, making dinner for the family then to be lying in the street with a needle in your arm. The first is workable, sustainable dopamine, the latter is expensive, destructive, illegal obtaining of the exact same dopamine. The point is not that I live in the suburbs and others do not, the point is that certain life choices yield sustainable happiness and survival and others work against that goal. But my only point, is that it is the same dopamine. And whether a doctor prescribes it, or you get it winning a game of solitaire on the computer, you are satisfying a survival need, a drive that evolution has built into us. So concentrate on what gives you dopamine, that will also give me dopamine. Why concentrate on how virtuous you are, compared to me? Gives you dopamine, but portrays me as a heel, which I am not. Regards. TAR

But we absolutely should not think our conscious mind can master our Id. The ego is a go between, a moderator between the Id and the Superego. The master of ones own condition, able to put the body/brain/heart group in the best position for survival and happiness...but as the opioid epidemic shows us, we are very subject to the emotions, to misreading the pleasure, and life and victory we feel while high as actual victory. An addict, high on his drug of choice can "feel" on top of the world, victorious, and alive, while lying penniless, friendless and loveless in his own filth in the gutter.

Gee, Your last sentence seems to be the best way to look at this. It is not a matter of showing we are better than reality or that we must be manufacturing reality, but it is, in my opinion required that we accept we are in and of reality. And as you said, part of a continuum following the "spark", that put layer upon layer of workable "life" into the next generation of a particular species, and it all, by definition had to "fit" reality, as it evolved. And the rational mind part of humans, the science and the math, and the technological advances and the Turing machines, laws and religions, came only recently on this planet...in the last 10,000 years or so, and can rightly be thought of as consciousness, outside that that a Zebra is capable of. And still, even with the advantages that the structure of the human brain brings humans, over Zebras, and the value of the institutions that humans have built using our natural brains and emotions, we still are, more than 90 percent Zebra, probably. and the various pheromones and hormones and neurotransmitters and body parts and brain parts found in a human are also there in a Zebra. The differences are slight, but important, and still we have the 90 percent of "instincts" that the Zebra has. Yet we probably have our first 90 percent of consciousness in common with the Zebra, as well. Regards, TAR

Gee, In the case of your idea about consciousness, that it is based on feeling or emotion, I totally agree and this is consistent with my thought that one can functionally interchange the idea of (feeling) "good" (or alive, or feeling right or victorious) with the flow of dopamine in the human brain. Regards, TAR

in other words, I think everything that occurs requires a reason or cause or mechanism, and neurotransmitters (or a chemical functionally similar) are that mechanism in the case of sentience

personally I think sentience can be understood through looking at the reasons for and activity of neurotransmitters...things that make us aware of the need to respond to a situation in a manner useful for maintaining the "self" whether that self be a single celled organism or a complex organism with a brain stem

Gee, Might be good, in using various definitions of consciousness to separate sentience out as a word similar to and associated with consciousness but meaning the things we are talking about as innate, that might well be common attributes we have with plants and animals, but where it is not required that other aspects of human consciousness, like introspection and language be carried through into the "minds" of the plant in question. From wiki article on sentience. Philosophy and sentience[edit] In the philosophy of consciousness, sentience can refer to the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences, or as some philosophers refer to them, "qualia".[2] This is distinct from other aspects of the mind and consciousness, such as creativity, intelligence, sapience, self-awareness, and intentionality (the ability to have thoughts about something). Sentience is a minimalistic way of defining consciousness, which otherwise commonly collectively describes sentience plus other characteristics of the mind. Some philosophers, notably Colin McGinn, believe that sentience will never be understood, a position known as "new mysterianism". They do not deny that most other aspects of consciousness are subject to scientific investigation but they argue that subjective experiences will never be explained; i.e., sentience is the only aspect of consciousness that can't be explained. Other philosophers (such as Daniel Dennett, who also argues that non-human animals are not sentient) disagree, arguing that all aspects of consciousness will eventually be explained by science.[3] Regards, TAR

and left in the lurch would be anyone, religious or scientific, that thinks their consciousness is going anywhere, without their body/brain/heart group

Gee, I actually am in strong alignment with certain aspects of your understanding of consciousness, as I have discussed certain aspects with you, concerning hormones and pheromones and the thrust of some of your ideas have played important roles in my personal theories surrounding the serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine complex we have that establishes desire, motivation and reward in humans across the board, in a similar manner. The survival instinct, you are talking about is heavily bound to this complex, in my estimation. So it is not helpful in segregating instinct from consciousness because the neurotransmitters are, according to my muses, bound to both these innate phylum wide survival instincts, and our consciousness and thought and language, and problem solving abilities found in humans more than our relative mammals. It is not that I don't believe other animals are conscious, they are, and its probably for similar reasons that we are, but we have taken it further, then other species, and can think, be conscious, as a group, more successfully than other species. Other mammals, having similar brain construction, and being relatives on the evolutionary tree, probably have analogs to our serotonin norepinephrine dopamine system...a leap I make without evidence or knowledge, as a test of my theory. If we developed our survival instinct and maintained it, passed it on through our genes to our children, through the development and passing on of the serotonin norepinephrine dopamine desire, motivation, reward system then it would be required that other lifeforms, displaying a survival instinct similar to ours, would have something close to, or something with the same working components, as our desire, motivation, reward system. That is the people arguing on this thread for instinct and innate to be considered the same idea would be satisfied. And the people arguing that other mammals have consciousness would be satisfied. Left in the lurch would be creationists that do not believe in evolution or our relationship to the apes, and those scientists that think they are operating on some higher plane that does not require animal desires, motivation and reward. Regards, TAR ,

Gee, I call your calling my definition of instinct from high school hogwash, hogwash. I read the wiki article and it said exactly what I said. It must be (FAP), a complex series of behavior, it must exist in most members of the species (species wide), and must be unlearned. So far I am not seeing where you see my definition as outdated. We use the same one we had in 1980. And the article did not provide me with the hundred human instincts you say scientists have isolated in the last 37 years, that I have not been informed about. Can you provide a link? Please also provide the definition of instinct, different from our 1980 definition (and wiki's current definition) that you wish to go by in a non hogwash fashion. Regards, TAR

Ten Oz, I would think life and consciousness might be more closely aligned than to allow consciousness to arise without life accompanying it. I am particularly thinking of people's conception of heaven. That the consciousness can continue on, once the body has died, or perhaps the AI thought that one's consciousness could be recorded and reestablished in a computer. I am pretty much of the belief that heaven is not a workable plan, as you cannot have pleasure without the dopamine that stopped flowing and affecting how you felt, when you died. How are you going to walk through the gates without legs, see God without eyes, or be in a rapture condition, without the neurons or the neurotransmitters, to make it happen. And if heaven is a state of mind and you don't have a functioning one anymore, where does the consciousness reside. What real thing is having the conscious experience, and what is it that the conscious thing is conscious of. The hopes of transferring your consciousness to a machine that will continue for a lot longer than a human lives, is a hope or thought that many have had, but that is just because we would rather live. survive, be alive, be conscious and happy forever, rather than dying and not having life and consciousness any more. So some have considered Heaven and crossing the Rainbow Bridge and being reunited with the dog you had to put to sleep, and such, but these thoughts are of the same type as hoping for an AI piece of equipment to house your consciousness. The ghost in the machine idea, I think is incorrect. We actually are alive and conscious, and it is not permanent or magical. And the two are not completely separate things that can exist independently. To some extent, on this board, I have seen an illogical downplay of life after death thoughts, when espoused by religious people, and an illogical upholding of wishes and dreams for consciousness to be replaced by technology. I don't think you can have it both ways. Either the soul is bound to the body and stops when the body stops, or there is a reality beyond this life, that we can and will experience when our bodies stop. Personally I don't think heaven makes any sense, but I am sort of hoping that I will be alright, after I die...whatever that might mean. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, So, in terms of instinct and consciousness, are you suggesting you are closer to your dog in consciousness, while being closer to Stalin in instinct? That is you can put yourself in your dog's shoes, and understand his or her motives and thoughts, more easily than you can put yourself in the shoes of an adversary human, that has your same brain construction? If I may, not to move the goalposts, but to parse in TAR language (me trying to figure out my dopamine theory) it is important to us humans to be right. We get dopamine from having a correct model of the world. When it matches, we like it. We like to align ourselves with other peoples thoughts, and we like it when other people understand our logic and our thinking. We don't like it when others get us wrong. But politically we align ourselves with others that we think, think like us. We have to be actually wrong about what others think, as in it is impossible that all people that voted for Trump think alike, or that all people that voted for Sanders think alike, or that all people that voted for Hillary think alike. In fact it is almost a sure thing that somebody you agree with on climate change you would disagree with on a religious issue. But in terms of the instinct v consciousness idea, it is my feeling that we are closer to Stalin in our consciousness than we are our dog. Even though we understand our dog and not Stalin. Regards, TAR We are also closer to Stalin than our dog when it comes to instincts. iNow, Your suggestion earlier that consciousness varies in amplitude and vibrancy rather than kind, reminds me of the term "consciousness raising". That is, consciousness determined as a qualitative judgement. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, Well we actually can put ourselves in Stalin's shoes, and determine where he did it differently than he should have. And we can ascribe intentions that are incorrectly ascribed, as I did iNow, just before. But we can still converse with each other, and believe that the other actually has a mind that has intentions and thoughts in it. We can do this with other humans, because we have done it with ourselves, and allow that what our mind seems to be like, is something similar to what is going on in the other. Difficult to do with Zebra. We can make allowances and imagine that if we were a human in a Zebra body, what might we be thinking. But we cannot imagine what a zebra consciousness is actually like, having never been a Zebra. We can put ourselves in the shoes of the creator of the Universe, and imagine what he/she/it is thinking...that is the reason why we, some of us, believe in an anthropomorphic god. Or if we are mathematicians, imagine Pi taken to infinite digits, or if we are physicists, imagine all molecules in the universe obeying a simple gas law, but the exercise is occurring in a finite, chemical brain. Just a bunch of synapses and neurotransmitters and arrangements of cells with different ion concentrations, but that is all we are, and that is everything we are. There again, is no shame in being human. It is something rather central to our existence. We can be no other entity than the one we are. Regards, TAR

iNow, But Zebra consciousness and human consciousness are different, in that you can put yourself in another person's shoes, but you cannot put yourself in a Zebra's shoes, because you are not a Zebra. Regards, TAR iNow, What examples must I give you to show you that we also are subject to the laws of physics, and are equally inanimate as all other lumps of chemicals extant. Except for the "spark of life" which has to be not magically or divinely inspired, but something which occurred and is occurring because of the physics of the universe. That is, we have to understand how we pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, from inanimate to animate. There is no category error. Life has to come from non-life. We are a lump of chemicals. Particularly arranged to grab life and form and pattern and structure from a universe, otherwise heading toward entropy. We are already victorious, by being alive, by surviving, by being us. There is no shame in being human. It is good. Regards, TAR

ridiculous? Except we actually do know how to metabolize sugar. We get hungry, we search out the hive, we get the honey, we eat it, and we metabolize it. All on purpose.

no, I am suggesting that our DNA conspires to metabolize sugar

Ten Oz, I perhaps think of these discussions more as brainstorming then arguments. It is not important for me to be right, when I am wrong I see it and move on. But it is important to me that I get it right in the end. That is, that we all have it right. Regards, TAR dimreepr, while no particular snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche, there would not be an avalanche of snow, without particular snowflakes being involved

Ten Oz, I don't agree with your suggestion that I walk away when an idea of mine fails. I instead, as you correctly state, move the goal posts accordingly. I spent 3 years in my 12 sections of the sphere thread to determine the divisions I proposed were of equal area. In all discussions I take part in, I attempt to fit the various aspects of my understanding of the world into one consistent worldview. That is, whatever I believe, it has to explain religion, politics, scientific evidence, how I feel about my wife, neurochemistry, language and the meaning behind language, and why people get addicted to stuff. It is all one puzzle to me. I do not ever walk away from attempting to solve it. Regards, TAR dimreepr, A certain knowledge of how to metabolize sugar must be held within you, or you would not be able to do it. Regards, TAR A human does not accidentally eat honey. A human does it on purpose.

Ten Oz, Was thinking this morning about your example of life/non-life being a binary thing, as consciousness is in your view. I had incorrectly thought you were binding life to consciousness, and thought perhaps the two conditions should not be bound, but I think now, perhaps there is a connection. There are patterns all over the place. A wisp of smoke creates a meaningful curve as convection currents twist it this way and that...but it, the wisp, makes no effort to maintain its pattern. It is and then it is gone. No children, no identity, no pattern brought to the next wisp. Your example of crystal growth as non-life is interesting to me, because I used it once to explain how perhaps life can come from non-life in stages. A crystal does grow, and repeats its pattern...says this is how reality is going to look right here, right now and it is going to be this shape and this color with this garnet geometry. There is a level of life, that is chemical in nature. Certain patterns of amino acids, repeated in certain order that create a certain specific chemical or positional reality. The complex grows, and maintains itself. Causes a border to form between what is the entity and what is not. But on a certain level, the entity is "trying" to be the entity, at the expense of, or in opposition to, any and all other entities trying to establish themselves. Weeds growing in the garden are "trying" to live, without much evident concern over the life of the petunia or the tomato plant. The pattern is repeated in the offspring of the lifeform. A certain knowledge, of how to be a weed is required for this to happen. Regards, TAR