Ignorance in a practical sense

[Johnny Dangerous]

All that’s needed for survival on the simplest level is something like the most primitive version of a nervous system, just basic aversion and attachment and reproductive ability really.

You can have ‘survival’ with almost no possibility of something like meta cognitive awareness.

[PadmaVonSamba]

We just talked about experimental evidence that information is not maintained in a brain of a regenerating planaria and you equivocated and effectively ignored it in the interest of your argument.

But do you understand the difference between:

‘Awareness can occur
without a brain in basic life forms’
-and-
“Humans rely on brain function to process the sensory information that we experience as objects of awareness”
???

Michael Levin’s research proved the first statement.
It did not disprove the second statement.

[SvatahSiddha]

‘Awareness can occur without a brain in basic life forms’

Sure but Michael Levin's research has nothing to do with that.

What Michael Levin's research shows (among many other more interesting things) is that if you cut off the brain of a planaria from the tail, the brain that regenerates knows the maze that the tail learned when it had the original brain.

The information (memory) is maintained outside of the brain and is available behaviorally when the new brain regenerates from the tail.

Both halves of the planaria know the maze; we would expect only the head to remember it if memory, and correspondingly the brain, works the way we historically might have assumed it does

That is what his research shows.

“Humans rely on brain function to process the sensory information that we experience as objects of awareness”

There are always assumptions that are useful; I don't think I've heard Michael Levin say anything to contradict this hypothesis has been shown from his work.

When we can regenerate our heads (aka make clones) we will know more about how the relationship with the human brain and identity (memory) works; scientifically, what we will have will be a refined hypothesis or at least fresh data allowing for fresh hypotheses.

Experimentally who knows what that might be like!

I had a dream once where I was part of a collective awareness.

You could feel the other parts of you in the distance as being related to you.

In this dream some of us were being carried away by some crane like feature from overhead like a claw machine in an arcade.

The whole thing was rather tron-esque.

When they were picked up they were no longer 'there' in the self awareness.

We didn't really understand what was happening as far as I could tell.

Anyway, this research with planaria shows it's not a cut and dry matter for brains that operate under the same neurotransmitic regime that ours do.

Science is always hypothesis; if you cling to it as fact, then you are simply confusing what is being said by it.

I think it's safe to say even from the scientific perspective, his work shows that the situation with the brain is not the way the traditional dogmatic view has prescribed it.

Regardless we are the experience of the conditions of having a body; there are various ways to hold that experience.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend physicalism or even the veneer of it.

Again, the merit is found in not knowing (being convinced) of your conditions being a particular way.

Why?

Because then your conceptual consciousness is not tempted to turn forward on those conditions and leave you trapped within them.

Causation doesn't flow in the direction that physicalism suggests; this just happens the way we have eventually understood it does.

It is the knowing of conditions that 'establishes' them; they do not exist otherwise; they are never, at any point, fixed this way or that.

This is all what we 'enjoy'; it is our habit energy unfolding within the complete freedom of choice.

[SvatahSiddha]

‘Awareness can occur without a brain in basic life forms’

Sure but Michael Levin's research has nothing to do with that.

A correction: his research with planaria has nothing to do with that, at least not the research I'm aware of and bringing up here.

He does look at intelligence in multiple scales, including scales and scopes that do not include brains.

It's all rather interesting stuff.