Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Now, do you think asking questions in some way answers questions?
what makes you think a dragonfly has "consciousness" ?
What makes you think it doesn't have "consciousness?
If he knew he would not have asked the question in the first place. And you would have answered if you knew the answer, but you didn’t either.
I know
why I think a dragonfly is conscious, what I don't know, is whether or not
3RU7AL is actually conscious, since he doesn't appear to be aware or in any way responsive.
Dictionary definitions of consciousness refer to “awareness”, a sensate
being is “aware” and therefore posseses consciousness to some degree. To avoid philosophical or
metaphysical implications, lets define consciousness as the ability to perceive
sensory stimuli and respond by purposeful action or by a behavioral change, and
therefore an organism that demonstrates those abilities can be said to possess
consciousness.
Seen the way
evolution demands that we see it then; there is a direction to life, towards greater
complexity and higher forms of sentience. At the historically base level of life we have the
prokariotic single celled organism, the bacteria, which demonstrate a rudimentary form of
consciousness as sensate
beings with complex behavior responses well beyond contrived mechanistic
explanations regarding “robots” or “data processing”.
Bacteria can respond to a broad range of stimuli,
demonstrate elementary forms of “memory”, and engage in purposeful activities.
They have shown themselves to be extraordinarily perceptive, demonstrating
elaborate behavioral responses and adaptations to a wide range of attractants
and repellants and other environmental stimuli such as light. They have complex
signaling capabilities, show the ability to communicate, and change their
behavior based on population size, which implies some kind of quorum sensing
ability and clearly demonstrates social behavior on at least a rudimentary
level. They have been proven to have some form of memory and a rudimentary
ability to learn, and the discriminatory ability to “choose” among
alternatives, regarding among other things, gene expression. They clearly
integrate these capabilities into a self-organized and sensate being that in at
least an extremely attenuated way is perceiving, discriminating, remembering,
and even “thinking”, on some level it is conscious.
On the developmentally
increasing spectrum of sensate beings, a dragonfly falls somewhere between
bacteria and human beings both evolutionarily and in terms of complexity, so I consider it to be aware, sensate, and therefore
conscious.
