Lou Sasmor said he started thinking about consciousness while watching a TV program about goldfish.
He said goldfish have a seven-second memory, which is why they’re happy in a small bowl of water. But they can be trained to navigate mazes, according to the TV show.
Are goldfish conscious? Sasmor said yes, to a degree.
A former biomedical engineer and technical school dean, Sasmor presented a talk on the subject of consciousness Monday at the Savannah Center to members of The Villages Civil Discourse Club.
He said the subject has baffled philosophers and theorists for centuries.
Aristotle said consciousness is the soul or spirit that inhabits organic matter. French philosopher Rene Descartes said consciousness occurs when human sensations meet in the pineal gland of the brain.
In more recent times, Gordon Gallup, a University of Albany psychologist, devised a mirror test to determine self awareness.
Chimpanzees first see their mirror reflection as a threat, but use it for grooming after a while. The test found that elephants, dolphins, apes and humans over age 2 were among those species able to recognize a mirror reflection as themselves.
“As the nervous system gets more interconnected, better levels of consciousness seem to arrive,” Sasmor said.
Consciousness in humans seems to be characterized by an ability to recognize causal relationships and to perceive the past and future, which is absent in other animals, he said.
Views on consciousness vary. Sasmor said a New York organization called the Non-Human Rights Project, for example, is seeking legal recognition for a chimp named Tommy as a person with a right to liberty.
He said some kind of consciousness is present in all forms of life, including bacteria and flowers, which seek the sunlight and seem to grow better when exposed to rock music.
Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist and author of “The Future of the Mind,” defined several levels of consiciousness. At the most basic level, animals create a model of their world. At a higher level, they are aware of relationships. Only humans can simulate future events.
“Man is the only animal that can contemplate its own death,” Sasmor said.
Is Siri the iPhone companion conscious? Sasmor said no, but it’s questionable whether artificial intelligence will ever rise to the level of consciousness.
“Even if you have an intelligent computer, is it conscious?” he asked. “Is it going to be aware of its own mortality? And if it is, how do you turn it off?”
