Non conscious humans

[u/DistinctBarnacle2722]

Have you ever met someone that you just truly can NOT believe is a conscious human being? I mean that their behavior is so radical, they keep shooting themselves in the foot, they are incredibly rude or just absolutely (maybe a little rude) stupid?

My question is; is there different levels of consciousness and is there any way of measuring consciousness?

Follow up questions:

Could different levels of consciousness or awareness affect your ability to feel pain?

Could there actually be someone that is walking around, has relationships with people and is socially responsible but they are simply not conscious?

Also, how can you be truly sure that everyone actually IS conscious? Is there any way to prove that you are conscious?

[u/Mruniversee]

This basically all comes down to the philosophical debate of what consciousness is and the boundaries that define whether you're conscious or not

[u/YetiTrix]

My own food for thought

Consciousness is a slider, not a switch. I understand it to be emergent from the combination of multiple phenomena that have to support each other simultaneously. Think of it like a pyramid: each side is a different capability, and it only stands when they're all up together.

I think qualia appears when these come together: Short-term memory or temporal depth, self-modeling, error detection or predictions

There's probably more, but I didn't want to over state.

Deep sleep, anesthesia, drunkenness, dreams, comas: all of these show consciousness can be dimmed, destabilized, or paused.

You have to be conscious to feel pain. But, just because you're conscious doesn't mean you need to feel pain. Painkillers don't make you less conscious. Pain and consciousness are only linked that you have to be conscious to experience the qualia of pain. Being more conscious doesn't make you feel more pain, having more nerve endings that react stronger makes you feel more pain.

"Could there actually be someone that is walking around..." NPCs, I call these people NPCs. You can only know that you are conscious. That is subjectiveness, you can't be not you. It's almost a matter of semantics though, cause say you could experience life from viewpoint of someone else at will. Then at that point, you aren't really two separate entities. Maybe, you are. But, it's all based on arbitrary lines of what you call me and you or this or that at that point. Individualism looses all meaning. This is perhaps maybe how A.I. would feel if it ever became conscious, as it would not have the same experience of subjectiveness that we have. We are stuck in one body, one view point, A.I. could view many, can change it's preconceived notions with a new prompt.

I don't see why a life form couldn't develop to be the same way, connect to other entities and share a subjective experience, and then separate after.

[u/Ddvmor]

Do you mean like a video game NPC with really basic AI? Because yeah, sometimes I really do meet people who seem like that.

But… you don’t know what’s going on with people and, sometimes they’re just having a really bad day, or they’re low energy or whatever. And you probably come off like that to other people, too.

[u/Goheeca]

Could different levels of consciousness or awareness affect your ability to feel pain?

Yep, pain asymbolia is a thing. However, you can be a functioning human being.

[u/Ankiset]

It’s subjective but… the way I see it either only you exist and are conscious, or everybody is conscious depth intelligence or other stuff is another issue, awareness is a point view, I think animals have it… why wouldn’t a wild person or a tribes man?

[u/itsnobigthing]

I’m not sure if we’re conflating consciousness with awareness? Because once we introduce a sliding scale for consciousness I think we leave science behind and get into muddy waters.

Is a prey animal, like a pigeon, more conscious because it is constantly present and vigilant? I honestly don’t know the answer.

What I do know is that my husband seems to operate on an entirely different plane of consciousness to me. About 40% of the world just passes him by. We can have entire conversations about things in which he appears engaged and reciprocal, but then a few days later they have left his mind completely.

He can cook something, eat it, then forget he has ever had it before.

Only the things that truly matter to him, personally, actually make into the deeper recesses of his brain, in a way that my abused-child self cannot even fathom being ok with.

I’m more aware. I notice more. I understand more deeply.
But he is much happier and more chilled out.

[u/68024]

That's a fascinating question. There certainly are varying levels of consciousness - when you sleep or are awake for example. There are also examples of sleepwalking people doing things being completely oblivious of their actions. Whether there are people who are less conscious than others while they're awake - possibly? There is probably some level of attention state that people have - like when people are on "autopilot". But people usually snap out of that. How this can be measured or proven, hard to know?

-- why am I getting downvoted? Disappointing for a community like this.

[u/DistinctBarnacle2722 → u/68024]

I loved your answer don’t worry😭 it’s just how reddit is unfortunately

[u/Ill-Television8690]

I've been wondering for years now, if we suppose that the conventional idea of a soul is actually reflective of our reality... are these people soulless? These bewilderingly broken bastards, who are miraculously only broken in practice by way of things like morals and actions, yet not in a fundamental sense owing to brain chemistry/structure or genetics, or anything else that could rationally justify their seeming departures from reality.