Spider mandala

Spider mandala.

Oh no, spiders don't have consciousness. Don't be silly. These items just arranged themselves on its web. Of course. Of course.

Not.

The extraordinary artist is the second 'unit' from the top. Kinda hard to see, because like most of us he's a bit shy and, naturally, afraid of creatures more than 100x his own size.

Consciousness. We humans believed for the longest time that we were the only ones with 'it,' but I disagree, and none too respectfully either. I see evidence of consciousness almost everywhere, and yeah, I'm prepared to argue with you about it if you don't. It is imperative that we treat the rest of the world -all of it-- as conscious. And consciousness deserves a little respect. It's not an easy ride, as you know.

What is consciousness? If you make a decision, you are experiencing it. If you're aware -of anything-- then you're experiencing it. Beyond that, it's difficult to define. That bug you see crawling around- it's making decisions about where to best find food, a mate, or shelter (just like you). Conscious, deliberate decisions. Sure, maybe they're bad decisions, maybe they don't get him anywhere, maybe he even forgets them ten milliseconds after he makes them, but I assure you, he is conscious. If he wasn't -if he was just crawling around randomly responding to random stimuli-- evolution simply would not favor his species' reproduction unless food and population density was so high that reproduction was inevitable (which is not the case for any species of any kind of which I am aware). And even if food and population density was that high, he'd still have to be aware enough not to eat his own kind (i.e. cause his own extinction) before mating (i.e. providing for his own replacement). He is here: he is conscious.

It seems funny to me that Scientific Materialists -those people who believe that Everything That Is, Can Be Measured-- are often the first to dismiss the idea of Consciousness in non-humans. They will assert that even we humans are nothing but the sum total of our physical parts + electricity generated by chemical reactions within us, and that our Consciousness is a special result of -or even a by-product of-- intelligence.

The Null Hypothesis here is illustrative: if Consciousness is the result of intelligence, then it follows that the unintelligent are not Conscious. Some humans, therefore, are not Conscious. This is an unacceptable conclusion in the international Scientific community, so their hypothesis, that Consciousness is the result or by-product of intelligence, is void. The narrowest possible conclusion to draw from this is that Consciousness is not solely a human experience.

So this being the case then, all living things share consciousness -not just us "higher" animals-- because all living things operate more or less the same way: on the basis of these electrochemical impulses. You see something funny, and you smile, though you don't know why or how it happened. In the exact same way, the sunflower experiences sunlight and turns to face it, though it doesn't know how, or why. It just "likes" the sun, in the same sense that you like to laugh or smile or eat donuts.

One conclusion is inescapable: Consciousness is everywhere, though nowhere quite the same. Embrace it -embrace yourself- in all its -all of your-- forms.

On this day in 1942, American musicians went on strike, in a struggle with record companies over royalties. Contractual obligations would keep the then-very-popular big bands off the road (and out of the studios) effectively stopping the Big Band era in its tracks, until Columbia and Victor records succumbed more than two years later. Musicians got around their band contracts by playing in small ensembles in small clubs. This intimacy encouraged self-expression, in contrast to a big band setting with a conductor, and thus be-bop was born.

GOP: rotten to the core.