Notes - exhibiting primitive consciousness

         You went to bed but couldn't sleep, Carol is sleeping soundly. So, you are up sitting in the living room chair thinking about the day. You and Carol talked most of the way up to Kim and Paul's, stopped at Panera on Rt. 23 not far from the Powell Road intersection north of Worthington. Snowing began and when you finished lunch the roads were lightly covered. Not long after you arrived Carol and Kim drove to Polaris for shopping. You took a nap as did Paul, the boys were outside playing in the snow. Early supper at Olive Garden then a relaxing evening. Not much to be thinking about boy?  - Amorella

         2344 hours. I did find this commentary below on Quora this afternoon. It's a couple years old but interesting.

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From Quora

Is consciousness a step change or a continuous spectrum?

Paul King, fmr UC Berkeley Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Updated Dec 28 2015

The emerging view among neuroscientists who study consciousness is that consciousness is a spectrum, both within a given organism and across species.

Human consciousness for a given human can range from dreamless sleep (unconscious) to awake and alert (conscious). In between these extremes are various semi-conscious states such as mild anesthesia (conscious sedation), or the feeling you have when you just wake up, called the hypnogogic state. Dreaming and especially lucid dreaming is a state that is conscious in some ways and not in others. Lastly, someone with extreme dementia is somewhat conscious, but not in a way we would really recognize, with limited awareness and understanding of their environment.

At the species level, it is starting to be accepted that animals are conscious to varying degrees. Mammals, for example, have the same extremes of dreamless sleep to the fully awake alert state. If sleep is unconscious, then what is awake? At the very least, this is a conscious state in the medical sense, and animals can be sedated with general anesthesia just as humans can.

But how conscious is an animal?

If consciousness is defined as "perceptual awareness" -- some understanding of the environment that includes short-term memory and an ability to comprehend the environment and make decisions to act -- then monkeys are fairly conscious. Dolphins and whales are regarded as conscious in some sort of "intelligent" sense. Dogs seem conscious but less so. Birds such as parrots even less. And lately octopuses are being regarded as exhibiting primitive consciousness in an invertebrate with a distributed nervous system and without a typical brain. Insects are sufficiently mechanistic without much ability to learn, so they are probably not conscious at all. Honeybees are able to memorize pathways to flowers and communicate the path with a dance that is recognized by other honeybees, so perhaps they push the boundary at the lower edge somewhat.

Selected and edited from Quora dot com

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         2347 hours. I underlined the sentence that intrigues me the most -- octopuses exhibiting a primitive consciousness without a typical brain. My question

 is: how is this so? I will sleep on it and do further research in the morning. Why? I am not sure.

         Why? Here is why. If consciousness does not need a typical brain to exist, what does it need, a body? What format? Why? Would consciousness exist without a body? Is the 'seed' of a heartansoulanmind all that is needed, that is, does consciousness exist in its own right. Do we and all living creatures 'pick it up' innately? Is consciousness different than how we presently preceive it? Post - Amorella