One quick thing is to consider animals—I bet my dog is conscious, but I’m not sure she has “thoughts” as we conceive of them.
I bet you can have thoughts without consciousness though. I’m imagining consciousness as something like a computer program. The program is written such that various sub-modules probabilistically pitch “ideas” based on inputs from the environment, etc. (“Pay more attention to that corner of the room!” “Start running!”) Another module sort of probabilistically “evaluates” these ideas and either initiates behavior or not. With enough complexity and inter-connectedness, consciousness emerges.
In theory, you could write a program where there are only a couple of commands that are being “evaluated.” These are thoughts, but the system isn’t complex enough to be conscious.
Obviously this is all massive bull-shitty conjecture and there a million caveats but that’s my immediate reaction.
Thinking more about the animal example, I might say that you can’t have consciousness without thoughts, but it depends how you define “thoughts”. So I bet that an iguana is conscious, but I bet its thoughts are mostly “ah fuck I hate how this feels” or “oooh nice I like how this feels”. Obviously not in words. I would basically consider these to be thoughts, and as long as you define thoughts like that it seems impossible to have consciousness without thoughts. My guess is that ppl who have taken drug trips would say consciousness can exist without thoughts, but I bet it’s a semantic thing—those trips might create a state of consciousness totally alien to me for instance but I bet it’s still a “thought” given how widely I would define what a thought is.
Thank you fo this reply! As you mentioned, it is mostly about how we define thoughts. In this case, I would define it as you did. It does not have to be expressed in words, it can be mostly feelings. I think consciousness then seems to be way of processing thoughts.
One quick thing is to consider animals—I bet my dog is conscious, but I’m not sure she has “thoughts” as we conceive of them.
I bet you can have thoughts without consciousness though. I’m imagining consciousness as something like a computer program. The program is written such that various sub-modules probabilistically pitch “ideas” based on inputs from the environment, etc. (“Pay more attention to that corner of the room!” “Start running!”) Another module sort of probabilistically “evaluates” these ideas and either initiates behavior or not. With enough complexity and inter-connectedness, consciousness emerges.
In theory, you could write a program where there are only a couple of commands that are being “evaluated.” These are thoughts, but the system isn’t complex enough to be conscious.
Obviously this is all massive bull-shitty conjecture and there a million caveats but that’s my immediate reaction.
Thinking more about the animal example, I might say that you can’t have consciousness without thoughts, but it depends how you define “thoughts”. So I bet that an iguana is conscious, but I bet its thoughts are mostly “ah fuck I hate how this feels” or “oooh nice I like how this feels”. Obviously not in words. I would basically consider these to be thoughts, and as long as you define thoughts like that it seems impossible to have consciousness without thoughts. My guess is that ppl who have taken drug trips would say consciousness can exist without thoughts, but I bet it’s a semantic thing—those trips might create a state of consciousness totally alien to me for instance but I bet it’s still a “thought” given how widely I would define what a thought is.
Thank you fo this reply! As you mentioned, it is mostly about how we define thoughts. In this case, I would define it as you did. It does not have to be expressed in words, it can be mostly feelings. I think consciousness then seems to be way of processing thoughts.