Assuming that humans are at the top of the heap?

Question

Assuming that humans are at the top of the heap in terms of consciousness, where does the bottom lay? Is there consciousness in lower life forms, animals, plants, bacteria, fungi, and could consciousness possibly extend further to exist in non-living matter or even as a mass-less, body-less energy? What are your thoughts?

Answer 1

Top of the heap, eh?

I strongly suspect it is a characteristic of a higher level brain - and that lets out the plants, fungi, and certainly non-living matter as well as the beam of mass-less, body-less energy from your flashlight.

I think that it is in direct proportion with the level of intelligence.

Answer 2

well, this is definitely a difficult question to answer, as we must first define what consciousness is, is it simply being aware of your surroundings? if so, i think that discovering how conscious anything is is impossible, because we can never really be sure that animals feels pain or that the ground we step on never knows it is being stepped on. Things we are not even aware of may be conscious, as we define it, but ultimately i think we have no control over it and no way of finding out the truth behind consciousness. therefore, i think it is interesting just to speculate, but obviously there are no right answers to this question, and neither i nor any other answerers can really give you a straight answer you could call correct. In my opinion, i think that consciousness is impossible to measure and, thus, we should not really spend our time trying to figure out things like that, of course i guess the only way to figure if it is in fact impossible or not is to try to find out, but that would not be in my interest to do something like that, but you sound like someone who would be interested. Good and interesting question. I hope I helped you answer it slightly at least...

Answer 3

i think there is some level of consciousness among other higher animals, but it is probably on somewhat of a continuum, kind of like, when does a human have consciousness? at 6 months? 12 months? similarly, as you go down the chain, animals have less and less amounts of conciousness, i dont believe bacteria have any or inanimate objects

Answer 4

at the bottom of the heap is whatever waw there at the big bang....or mabey there is no bottom...conscience in the way humans experince it probalby doesnt exist anywhere besides the human brain, since that our conscienceness is generated in the brain. but i do belive that we are connected with, well everything, in a deeper way then we normaly realize....its drives all science.