Oct 16: Consciousness

The following is the introduction for the meeting scheduled for Friday, Oct. 16, to be held at the home of Wes and Alice Cain.  For information about the meeting location please contact Wes directly through the Evergreen UUF website.

Consciousness

 

Merriam-Webster simplest definition is:

a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself

b: the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fac

 

Scientific American has frequent articles on consciousness. In the October 2026 edition, an article asks What is Consciousness, Really? Some of the questions raised include: When does consciousness first emerge in human development? Which animals are conscious, and might it occur in artificial-intelligence systems? And can we construct a consciousness detector, something that might tell us whether, say, babies, bees or bots are members of the “consciousness club?”

 

The article also points out that some disciplines use sentience, awareness or experience to refer to consciousness. It raises the point whether the “muddy technology” refers to a common subject matter.

 

Questions to ponder:

·      What is consciousness?

·      Do you have to be living? What constitutes living?

·      Is everyone here tonight conscious?

·      Is an organism conscious if it knows it needs to obtain food, or is aware of eating? What about being aware of moving (as opposed to be moved in air or water currents)?

·      If an organism operates on instinct, can it still be aware and conscious?

·      Is it possible to create a consciousness detector when consciousness seems to be so subjective?

 

Gemini’s response

Consciousness sits right at the intersection where science, philosophy, and technology collide. The dictionary definition hits on the basic dual nature of experience: internal awareness (sentience, introspective feeling, or "what it is like" to be you) and external awareness (perception, processing environmental inputs, and orienting toward the world).

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously framed this back in 1974 with his question, "What is it like to be a bat?" If there is something it feels like to be an organism (or a system), it possesses consciousness. If there isn't—if it's all processing without an inner light on—it's what philosophers call a "philosophical zombie."

Those questions raised in Scientific American get straight to the core challenges we face today:

1. The Boundary of Emergence (Development & Animals)

• Human Development: Does consciousness switch on like a light at a specific gestational week or birth milestone, or is it a gradual dial tuning in as neural pathways mature?
• Animal Sentience: The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness formally acknowledged that non-human animals (including mammals, birds, and octopuses) possess the neurological substrates for conscious awareness. But where does the line stop? Do bees feel a primitive form of subjective experience, or are they elegant biological algorithms?
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2. The Artificial Intelligence Threshold

• Are modern AI models running complex pattern-recognition software while remaining completely "dark inside," or could subjective experience emerge naturally once a system reaches a certain threshold of information integration?
• Functionalism vs. Biological Physicalism: Can consciousness run on silicon, or is it strictly an property of carbon-based biology and organic neural structures?
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3. The "Consciousness Detector" Problem

• Science usually relies on objective measurement (heat, weight, electrical charge), but consciousness is inherently subjective—it is first-person experience.
• Leading scientific frameworks try to bridge this gap:
• Integrated Information Theory (IIT): Proposes a mathematical metric ( or "Phi") to quantify how integrated a system's information is.
• Global Workspace Theory (GWT): Compares consciousness to a stage/spotlight where localized unconscious processors broadcast information to a global mental workspace.

If we wish to focus on infant consciousness, here is what Gemini had to say.

The question of when infants become conscious is one of the most fascinating areas in developmental neuroscience and psychology. Because babies cannot tell us what they are experiencing, researchers have had to rely on clever behavioral experiments and brain-imaging techniques (like EEG) to piece together the timeline.

Rather than turning on like a light switch, consciousness emerges gradually as a multi-step developmental process that begins before birth and evolves significantly over the first year of life.

Key Stages of Infant Consciousness

• In the Womb (Late Gestation): Neuroscientists generally agree that the structural framework for consciousness begins to develop around the third trimester (roughly 24 to 28 weeks). During this window, the thalamocortical connections—the neural pathways linking sensory inputs to the cortex—start forming. While fetuses show responsive behaviors (like reacting to sounds or moving to familiar voices), this is largely driven by reflexive and subcortical brain activity rather than fully formed conscious awareness.
• The Newborn Phase: At birth, infants transition into a state of wakefulness, and they possess basic sensory processing (responding to light, pain, touch, and sound). However, their brains are dominated by local, fragmented processing. They experience the world moment-to-moment without a cohesive, integrated "global workspace" to tie all those perceptions together.
• The 5-Month Milestone (Perceptual Consciousness): Recent neuroimaging studies tracking brain responses to visual stimuli (such as showing babies a quick image and watching how long the brain takes to process it) suggest that by 5 months of age, infants exhibit a signature neural marker of conscious perception. Their brains show a delayed, non-linear wave of activity similar to adults, indicating they are actively holding and perceiving an image in their minds rather than just having a reflex reaction.
• The 9-Month Milestone (Social & Cognitive Integration): Around 9 months, a major shift occurs. Infants display advanced signs of memory, intentional communication, and joint attention (looking at an object because an adult is pointing at it). This points to a more mature integration of past experiences with present surroundings.
• The 15-to-24-Month Milestone (Self-Awareness): While sensory and perceptual consciousness is well underway by mid-infancy, self-consciousness (recognizing oneself as an independent entity) takes longer. This is typically tested with the mirror test (placing a mark on a baby's face and seeing if they touch the mirror or their own face). Most children do not demonstrate clear self-recognition until roughly 18 to 24 months of age.

How Do Scientists Measure This?

Because infants can't speak, researchers study consciousness by measuring:

1. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs): Using tiny EEG caps on babies' heads to watch how long a visual or auditory stimulus takes to travel through the brain. In conscious processing, the brain takes slightly longer to trigger a widespread "global" reaction.
2. Looking Time: Babies look longer at things that surprise them or violate their expectations (e.g., an object seemingly floating in mid-air). Tracking gaze gives researchers a window into what babies expect to happen, which requires a working memory and basic consciousness.

Oct 2: What is dialogue?

This blog and the discussion group it supports are loosely based on the book Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips, which I first read in the mid-1990s. Phillips documents his modern efforts to use the dialectic model of learning and discussion used by Socrates and recorded by his student Plato roughly 400 years before our current calendar was established. I chose to use this text as a guide for the discussion group I hoped to form at that time, to wrestle with the types of questions Socrates became famous for using as the basis of his attempt to educate the citizens of his beloved Athens regarding knowledge, ethics, social responsibility, social discourse, and much more. In the 30+ years I have been hosting this group, I have tried to keep the discussions as "Socratic" as possible in terms of topics selected for discussion, and to some extent, the contents of the discussions themselves. I am not the Socratic scholar that Christopher Phillips is, but things have worked out pretty well. My policy has been not to discuss politics, but to hold to the broader philosophical topics recorded in Plato's Republic, for example, as one important source document.   

Socrates challenged the Athenians' basis for knowing what they thought they knew and how they came to know it, for behaving in accord and in harmony with Athenian society, for having a sense of obligation to their community and country, and much more. He often started discussions by asking "What is...?" questions. What is honor? What is duty? What is knowledge? The simplicity of the questions he used as starting points allowed Socrates to draw in additional topics in service to his main topic's theme in a way that has stood the test of time and remains a central guiding resource today. The use of dialectic discussion, the process of asking questions and following up with what the responding person says, is part of the basis of normal debate and discussion we all use every day.   

Or do we? It is hard not to feel the fracturing of the population of our country into factions, with degrees of left- and right-leaning beliefs and subsequent agendas. Do we talk with folks about our differences in outlooks, or do we talk at them? Have we lost the respect we may have once granted to people with contrarian views? How do we engage in dialogue today, or do we even try? There have always been differences in life perspectives that we have learned to acknowledge and deal with based on regions of the country, personalities of individual states or collections of states, historical voting outcomes (red and blue), and many more.

The world we live in today might not be recognizable to Socrates. He wandered the streets of Athens looking for someone to talk to, someone who did not agree with him. Is it true that we wander the internet looking for people who think like we do? Can you imagine walking in your neighborhood and actually talking about issues with your neighbors, some of whom may have had election signs in their yards that identify them as supporting groups with whom you may not agree?   

People have emerged to play roles for us in modeling ways in which we can have discussions with those "others" we find challenging to talk to. One of these is Jessica Tarlov in her book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends. I think the sentiment is clear. She wants to have a discussion where she hears what you have to say, and then you listen to her side of the issue. The result will be a less contentious perspective, with a degree of understanding on the part of both parties. She provides some examples in an interview she recently had with David Frum, who published this transcript on The Atlantic website.   

Our topic this week is: What is dialogue?   

Extended Longevity: Lifespan and Healthspan Implications

In our world where bad news surrounds us in so many ways, there is an emerging thread of information dealing with public and private reserch focused on improving the human condition and extending life expectancies.  Like a beloved car you may have owned in the past, human bodies can be updated with replacement parts and improved timing systems that improve our way of living, and should extend our lifespans.  Cures for many common life-ending diseases are being rolled out, with startling successes, in many cases, extending our healthspans.

My intent for our dicussion is to focus on this phenomom from a couple of angles.  One is, are we ready to live as long as it might be possible to live?  By ready, I mean have we arranged our living situations to allow free movement in our homes (some of you certainly have, I know!).  With the experiences those of us in the Sandwich Generation who have had responsibioities of caring for our children when they were young, and are now caring for our parents as they age, we have had plenty of exposure to the problems involed.  Do we feel about adult care facilities the same way our grandparents felt (they hated it!)?  Are we ready to go when it is finally our time, maybe at age 110?

In a second line of thinking, does living decades longer than we might have planned for mean we need to adjust our investment planning to accomodate our longer lives?  Compound interest never sleeps.  Inflation and interest rates have become things we track and care about.  

The Boomer Bulge in Amerian demographics is something we have heard about all our lives.  With a generation defined as being born in the years between 1946 and 1965, those of us born in 1955 fall exactly in the middle.  We have been problem solvers and technology developers, but now we seem to be clogging up the systems we live in and depend on for support.  Can we support ourselves as we live into unexpected ages?  Can we support those around us who depend on us for our aid?

<Des>  What info is available from those looking to find an upper limit to a lifespan?  It was that people born in the mid-1950's could expect to live to the mid-70's with the medical knowledge at that time.  How has this changed?

<Gemini>  To answer this, we have to look at two different concepts: the theoretical maximum limit of the human machine, and the statistical reality of a generation that has outlived its original expiry date.

Here is what researchers are finding on both fronts.

1. The Hard Biological Ceiling (120 to 150 Years)

Even if we cured cancer, eliminated heart disease, and prevented Alzheimer's, the human body still has an underlying expiration date.

Recent longevity research—including massive studies analyzing the blood markers of hundreds of thousands of people—has focused on a metric called "resilience." This is the body's ability to bounce back from stress, illness, or injury. Models published in Nature Communications show that this underlying resilience steadily drops as we age, hitting zero somewhere between 120 and 150 years old. At that point, the body simply loses the ability to repair itself.

A newer 2026 study published in npj Aging pushed this boundary slightly further. Researchers built a model assuming we could eliminate almost every reversible hallmark of aging, leaving only the natural accumulation of DNA mutations. Under those perfect, idealized conditions, they estimated a maximum human lifespan of 146 to 194 years.

However, leading demographers caution that without the radical cellular therapies currently in development, natural human average life expectancy is currently hitting a "glass ceiling" at around 87 years.

2. The 1950s Cohort: Why the Predictions Were Wrong

If you look at life expectancy tables from the mid-1950s, the projections were indeed grim by today's standards. A baby boy born in 1955 had a predicted life expectancy in the mid-60s, while a baby girl was expected to reach her early 70s.

Those original predictions were wrong because they relied on period life expectancy, which assumed the medical technology of 1955 would stay exactly the same for that cohort's entire life. It failed to predict the massive medical revolutions that would occur as they aged, such as the invention of statins, widespread bypass surgeries, advanced cancer treatments, and the drastic decline in smoking.

When demographers look at cohort life expectancy—which tracks the actual medical improvements a group experiences over their lifetime—the picture changes completely:

• The "Bonus" Decade: Studies show that because of advancing medicine, people born in the 1950s gained an average of 8 to 10 extra years of life compared to what was predicted on the day they were born.
  
  
• The Survivorship Advantage: Life expectancy is an average dragged down by tragic early deaths. If someone born in the mid-1950s has successfully survived infancy, youth, and middle age to reach their early 70s today, their statistical life expectancy resets.
  
  

Today, actuarial tables show that an average 70-year-old in the 2020s can statistically expect to live well into their mid-to-late 80s, and reaching the 90s is becoming increasingly common. The longevity industry's current goal is ensuring those bonus years are spent in healthy, functional bodies rather than in a state of frailty.