On the Topic of Consciousness

[Divine Insight]

Maybe we should break this out.....

This topic is an offshoot from another thread which was on another topic altogether.

This thread is "On the Topic of Consciousness"

I wouldn't pass judgements. My biggest question is why you have a brain type that is willing to jump into the unknown with some assurance, while I seem to have a brain type that doesn't. If I don't know, I leave it at not knowing.

I don't think it comes down to just the brain alone. I think there are many other factors involved. Clearly even from a secular point of view it is recognize that the brain "evolves" as we grow as individuals based much on how we experience life, etc.

For example the very concept of the "unknown" may mean something entirely different to me than it does to you. I mean, sure we could get out a dictionary and look up the term, but that really wouldn't help much because what you believe you know and what I believe I know are going to clearly be two different things. Especially considering my last sentence of the above paragraph. Our knowledge and beliefs evolve in our own brains based upon our own experiences, which clearly are not going to be the same experiences.

Consciousness: I don't know of any scientist that makes his or her living studying it who declares they know what it is.

This is true, but there may be quite a few scientists who feel like Daniel Dennett. Even though he is just a philosopher.

[youtube][/youtube]

I don't disagree with much of what Dennett says about how the brain functions. I don't disagree at all. But he doesn't touch on the real issues as far as I'm concerned. Near the very end of the above video he state a kind of Deepity of his own, "It's not that the Emperor has no clothes, but rather the clothes have no Emperor". The idea intended to imply that we are attempting to push too much onto consciousness that doesn't need to be there.

But for me none of this is satisfying.

I don't disagree with the fact that the brain is indeed a functional portal for the experiences that we have in this incarnated life. Therefore everything he observes and states about how the brain functions and how it "creates" much of our experience, is not in question for me.

But none of that even begins to address the issue of exactly what it is that is actually having this experience. In other words, if the clothes have no Emperor, then what is it that is having an experience? The brain itself?

This becomes a problem for me, because insofar as we know, the brain itself is made of nothing more than matter and energy. If neither matter, nor energy are capable of having an experience, they why should a brain that is made of nothing more than matter and energy become an "Emperor" in its own right?

This is not an easy question, and I wouldn't hesitate to put this question to Dennett himself. In fact, I would like to hear his thoughts on this. Maybe he does address this sort of issue in one of his many lectures. If you find a lecture where he addressed this heart of the matter please share and I'll be glad to take a gander at it.

I've watched several of his lectures, and thus far I haven't been convinced of his conclusions.

To say it is supernatural vs natural seems a leap.

This is statement here goes back to what I had mentioned above, concerning how you and I may very well think differently due to our different experiences in life.

You speak of the term "supernatural" as though that's a meaningful term.

I have been a scientist my entire life. Isaac Newton, and certain Greek philosophies like Zeno and others were my childhood heroes. Albert Einstein was my next hero as I grew in my scientific knowledge. And today I hold many scientists in high regard and marvel at what they were able to discover and prove.

Just the same, in all of this, I have come to the profound realization that to date we cannot say what the true nature of reality genuinely is. Therefore does it even make any sense to speak of the supernatural, when we can't even say with certain what is natural?

So I'm not prepared to accept the insinuation that I'm "jumping off to assume something supernatural". All I'm doing is recognizing that we can't say where the boundaries of the natural world truly are.

So I don't feel that I'm actually leaping anywhere. I'm just recognizing that we can't know that things need to be restricted to what we believe to be a finite physical existence.

In fact, if you go back to Dennett's very argument perhaps you can see an irony there. He is proclaiming that we can't know nearly what we think we can know, yet he seems to think that he can make very clear conclusions from this evidence that our brains clearly trick us.

That's almost an oxymoron right there. If what Dennett says is true, that our brains can fool us considerably, then perhaps the entirety of physical reality is itself an illusion that we are being tricked into believing. What we believe to be "brains" may not be physical entities at all.

My position is that we know consciousness is affected by natural events, and we know nature exists... seems a very small slide to presume consciousness is a natural phenomenon. But not knowing, sure, I can't say it's not - but I haven't been offered ONE example of the supernatural. So, I simply can't presume it's supernatural. I can't even think of why I'd consider the supernatural when the supernatural has such a horrible track record.

Well, our difference of views here may indeed amount to the extremely different way we view the "supernatural". For you to say that the supernatural has a bad track record implies that you associate the term with just about any guess that anyone might come up with (and especially specific claims that have indeed been shown to be false).

Whilst those do indeed qualify as "supernatural", they may not qualify as the type of "supernatural" that I consider. In fact, the type of "supernatural" that I consider is actually quite natural. It simply amounts to nature that we haven't yet discovered or understood, so it's only in that sense that it seems to be supernatural to us, when in reality it may be perfectly natural.

Given this, there only seems to be the natural. Just because we don't know how consciouness works doesn't means it's because of the gods, or the supernatural or something else, or even "natural vs. I don't know".

Nature exists.
Consciousness exists.

Given these two facts, why presume we can't explain consciousness eventually?

I already gave my answer to this earlier in this post. I'll repeat it here for clarity.

Copy and pasted from earlier in this very same post:

But none of that even begins to address the issue of exactly what it is that is actually having this experience. In other words, if the clothes have no Emperor, then what is it that is having an experience? The brain itself?

This becomes a problem for me, because insofar as we know, the brain itself is made of nothing more than matter and energy. If neither matter, nor energy are capable of having an experience, they why should a brain that is made of nothing more than matter and energy become an "Emperor" in its own right?

This is not an easy question, and I wouldn't hesitate to put this question to Dennett himself. In fact, I would like to hear his thoughts on this. Maybe he does address this sort of issue in one of his many lectures. If you find a lecture where he addressed this heart of the matter please share and I'll be glad to take a gander at it.

End of copy and paste

Yes, consciousness exists. And something is having an experience.

But what is it that is having an experience?

Energy and matter?

Electromagnetic fields?

Something else? Many people have suggested that the thing that is having an experience is some sort of "emergent property of complexity".

I suppose this is a valid philosophical idea, but it seems pretty strange to me that an abstract idea of an emergent property could have an experience.

So I'm still left with a deeper mystery.

To simply say that "consciousness" is a natural result of nature, still leaves me asking, "Who is the Emperor that is having this experience?"

If the clothes have no Emperor, then what is it that is having the experience of conscious awareness? The clothes?

It just seems strange to me that the clothes (i.e. matter and energy) should be able to have an experience.

So this simply leaves the door to the "supernatural" (i.e. nature that we simply don't yet understand) wide open.

I'm not saying that the secular view is necessarily wrong. I'm simply saying that the purely secular view seems every bit as strange to me as the supernatural view.

In other words, that view doesn't "hit the spot" as being an obvious conclusion to accept either.

I'm not going to automatically accept Dennetts "Deepity" that "The clothes have no Emperor" as being the profound answer to this question. That's just as absurd as any other Deepity, IMHO.

So this is where I'm coming from.

I'm not claiming that the supernatural necessarily has to exist. But I am claiming that, insofar as I can see, it's on precisely equal footing with any other conclusions at this point.

Seeing that they are on the same footing, I don't mind using intuition and gut feelings to consider one over the other. So with that in mind, I confess that I lean toward the mystical view. But clearly I could be wrong.

[instantc]

But communication is just another type of behaviour. Humans often communicate in a manner which does not correctly reveal the presence of conscious attributes; falsely giving the impression of pleasure or love or the like. Animals by their behaviour can communicate the (presumed) presence of conscious attributes like hunger or fear. And we can readily envisage - could probably even create - a computer programme which communicates its experience of consciousness indistinguishably from a human. How would we know whether or not it's lying?

Right, I partly agree with you. I would propose that perhaps communication is sort of a middle step here between merely observing someone's behavior and experiencing the world in the first person. That is, inferring consciousness from the behavior alone is an educated guess at best, but through a deep conversation it is possible to know for near-certainty that one experiences the world in the same way you do.

There isn't anything that animals do, which couldn't also be performed by an advanced machine. But expressing oneself through a deep conversation is something that a machine could perhaps never do, at least it's very hard to imagine. Thus, the ability to communicate one's perceptions could be the distinctive feature between conscious and unconscious beings.

But since we all, even you, do suppose that some other things are conscious, I'm asking why we should suppose anything to be nonconscious.

What would be the function of human consciousness if one would have never perceived the world in any way. What would be going on in one's mind, or what would one be conscious of, if we didn't have any sensory machinery to perceive and process the world with? This is why I think it is rather meaningless to speak of the consciousness of a rock, for example.

[JohnA]

Welcome to the forum JohnA. Not sure why (in the two threads I've looked at) you're picking on InstantC but as a bystander I've gotta say that you're coming off 2nd best For example:

1) Thought experiment is superior, as it provides 100% certainty because it is logical. (And you offer no evidence for this claim/premise. People use to think that the earth is flat as it was logical at the time...people use to argue that heavier objects logically will fall faster...)

InstantC explicitly said "Yes, a thought experiment outweighs the scientific experiment in this context" because "there is a logical contradiction in Aristotelian gravity theory."

Could you explain your decision to ignore context?
Could you provide your reasons for believing that a flat earth or faster-falling objects are concluded on the basis of avoiding logical contradiction?

Failing that, it seems you've misrepresented InstantC's views and provided an obviously faulty counter-example

2) Scientific experiment is not superior, as it shows that at the time of the experiment. (And you offer no evidence for this claim/premise, completely ignoring falsification and the fact that today we know )

Therefore you are now arguing that scientific experiments is faith based, but thought experiment is not faith based.

Again, InstantC explicitly denied saying that scientific experiments are faith-based. What he said was that believing "the scientific method being superior over everything else" is unjustified faith.

In the 17th century scientific experiment showed that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 17th century. It didn't show that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 18th century. Now that we're in the 21st century we can confirm by experiment that objects of different mass still fall at the same speed. But we can't confirm by experimentation that they'll fall at the same speed in the 22nd century.

This is known as the problem of induction. So is inductive extrapolation from scientific observations (ie, our belief that Newtonian/Einstinian gravity will remain the same in the 22nd century) superior to deductive proof that Aristotelian gravity always leads to logical contradiction? Maybe it's not, maybe it is - but I'd have to agree with InstantC that such an assertion does seem very similar to faith.

(Though, admittedly without having looked at it too closely, I'm not yet certain that Galileo's thought experiment did actually demonstrate a necessary logical contradiction.)



Good to have another enthusiastic poster in our little community here. Just thought you might appreciate a third perspective on your early contributions

Mithrae,
What a strange post of yours.

How can I come second best if:
i) this is not a contest, I am not a contender.
ii) user InstantC is contradicting himself.

Could you explain your decision to ignore context?

I am not ignoring context, hence I asked for his clarification? Can you please now state where I have not done this?

Science is either base don faith or not.
Though experiment either outweighs physical experiment or not.
Though experiment either outweighs physical experiment or not in this context or not.

"Could you provide your reasons for believing that a flat earth or faster-falling objects are concluded on the basis of avoiding logical contradiction? "

But I have. Did you not read it?

Again, InstantC explicitly denied saying that scientific experiments are faith-based.

It seems me you chose not to read. Do you know what is a contradiction, what is a dichotomy?
I want you to explian this to me, or else I know that the reason why you think InstantC is correct to contradict himself.

In the 17th century scientific experiment showed that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 17th century. It didn't show that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 18th century.

You just contradicted yourself.
Maybe you should get educated on the scientific method.
Look at scientific facts and sceintific theory. Also, try to spot the reference of predictability in it. While you at it, please highlight to me where it says that though experiment outweighs physical experiment. Can you do this please?

Now that we're in the 21st century we can confirm by experiment that objects of different mass still fall at the same speed. But we can't confirm by experimentation that they'll fall at the same speed in the 22nd century.

Your lack of science is showing now.
Suggest you read up on the theory of gravity. The details of the theory works for both Newtonian and Einstein facts. We do not as yet a a QM theory of Gravity or can not explain it (the mechanisms of gravity - force vs curved spacetime vs 'other'), but we for sure can predict that objects with similar mass will fall at the same speed in a vacuum as they do today.

This is known as the problem of induction.

Your philosophical bias is showing now. We are talking about science here, not philosophy that can not prove anything.

Good to have another enthusiastic poster in our little community here. Just thought you might appreciate a third perspective on your early contributions

It is ok for you philosophical scholars to reflect on science and the findings. But please do not make ignorant statements (we can not predict that matter with mass will fall at the same speed in a vacuum) if you do not understand science.


You can also answer my questions if you want to, but suspect you and I know that it will be silence as an acceptance of said representation of your claims or I will proceed to highlight the logical blunders therein.

Unfortunately I will have no further interest in watching InstantC embarrass himself (and yourself) with circular self-promotion.


Thank you.

[instantc]

Welcome to the forum JohnA. Not sure why (in the two threads I've looked at) you're picking on InstantC but as a bystander I've gotta say that you're coming off 2nd best For example:

1) Thought experiment is superior, as it provides 100% certainty because it is logical. (And you offer no evidence for this claim/premise. People use to think that the earth is flat as it was logical at the time...people use to argue that heavier objects logically will fall faster...)

InstantC explicitly said "Yes, a thought experiment outweighs the scientific experiment in this context" because "there is a logical contradiction in Aristotelian gravity theory."

Could you explain your decision to ignore context?
Could you provide your reasons for believing that a flat earth or faster-falling objects are concluded on the basis of avoiding logical contradiction?

Failing that, it seems you've misrepresented InstantC's views and provided an obviously faulty counter-example

2) Scientific experiment is not superior, as it shows that at the time of the experiment. (And you offer no evidence for this claim/premise, completely ignoring falsification and the fact that today we know )

Therefore you are now arguing that scientific experiments is faith based, but thought experiment is not faith based.

Again, InstantC explicitly denied saying that scientific experiments are faith-based. What he said was that believing "the scientific method being superior over everything else" is unjustified faith.

In the 17th century scientific experiment showed that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 17th century. It didn't show that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 18th century. Now that we're in the 21st century we can confirm by experiment that objects of different mass still fall at the same speed. But we can't confirm by experimentation that they'll fall at the same speed in the 22nd century.

This is known as the problem of induction. So is inductive extrapolation from scientific observations (ie, our belief that Newtonian/Einstinian gravity will remain the same in the 22nd century) superior to deductive proof that Aristotelian gravity always leads to logical contradiction? Maybe it's not, maybe it is - but I'd have to agree with InstantC that such an assertion does seem very similar to faith.

(Though, admittedly without having looked at it too closely, I'm not yet certain that Galileo's thought experiment did actually demonstrate a necessary logical contradiction.)



Good to have another enthusiastic poster in our little community here. Just thought you might appreciate a third perspective on your early contributions

Mithrae,
What a strange post of yours.

How can I come second best if:
i) this is not a contest, I am not a contender.
ii) user InstantC is contradicting himself.

Could you explain your decision to ignore context?

I am not ignoring context, hence I asked for his clarification? Can you please now state where I have not done this?

Science is either base don faith or not.
Though experiment either outweighs physical experiment or not.
Though experiment either outweighs physical experiment or not in this context or not.

"Could you provide your reasons for believing that a flat earth or faster-falling objects are concluded on the basis of avoiding logical contradiction? "

But I have. Did you not read it?

Again, InstantC explicitly denied saying that scientific experiments are faith-based.

It seems me you chose not to read. Do you know what is a contradiction, what is a dichotomy?
I want you to explian this to me, or else I know that the reason why you think InstantC is correct to contradict himself.

In the 17th century scientific experiment showed that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 17th century. It didn't show that objects of different mass fall at the same speed in the 18th century.

You just contradicted yourself.
Maybe you should get educated on the scientific method.
Look at scientific facts and sceintific theory. Also, try to spot the reference of predictability in it. While you at it, please highlight to me where it says that though experiment outweighs physical experiment. Can you do this please?

Now that we're in the 21st century we can confirm by experiment that objects of different mass still fall at the same speed. But we can't confirm by experimentation that they'll fall at the same speed in the 22nd century.

Your lack of science is showing now.
Suggest you read up on the theory of gravity. The details of the theory works for both Newtonian and Einstein facts. We do not as yet a a QM theory of Gravity or can not explain it (the mechanisms of gravity - force vs curved spacetime vs 'other'), but we for sure can predict that objects with similar mass will fall at the same speed in a vacuum as they do today.

This is known as the problem of induction.

Your philosophical bias is showing now. We are talking about science here, not philosophy that can not prove anything.

Good to have another enthusiastic poster in our little community here. Just thought you might appreciate a third perspective on your early contributions

It is ok for you philosophical scholars to reflect on science and the findings. But please do not make ignorant statements (we can not predict that matter with mass will fall at the same speed in a vacuum) if you do not understand science.


You can also answer my questions if you want to, but suspect you and I know that it will be silence as an acceptance of said representation of your claims or I will proceed to highlight the logical blunders therein.

Unfortunately I will have no further interest in watching InstantC embarrass himself (and yourself) with circular self-promotion.


Thank you.

It's okay to have a loud mouth, and it's okay to have nothing to say, but to have both is a very bad combination, especially in a debating forum.

[JohnA]

[Replying to post 143 by instantc]

Did you just embarrassed yourself again with another circular self-promotion?
The moderators will penalise you for making personal attacks against other forum users, especially your friends.


Thank you.

P.s. Please do address your contradictions in your posts, especially in this thread. It does not look good leaving people to think all toy offer is circular arguments via self-promotion.

[micatala]

Unfortunately I will have no further interest in watching InstantC embarrass himself (and yourself) with circular self-promotion.


Thank you.

It's okay to have a loud mouth, and it's okay to have nothing to say, but to have both is a very bad combination, especially in a debating forum.

Did you just embarrassed yourself again with another circular self-promotion?
The moderators will penalise you for making personal attacks against other forum users, especially your friends.

Moderator Comment


I will ask JohnA and instantc to cease with the personal tit for tat. Address the issues being debated without the insults and posturing.



Please review the Rules.


______________

Moderator comments do not count as a strike against any posters. They only serve as an acknowledgment that a post report has been received, but has not been judged to warrant a moderator warning against a particular poster. Any challenges or replies to moderator postings should be made via Private Message to avoid derailing topics.

[scourge99]

Perhaps you are right and conceivability doesn't entail possibility, can you show this to be the case?

Please don't misrepresent or misunderstand what i said. I don't give a damn about possibility.

You said, to quote you directly, that we can imagine logical impossibilities. If this is the case, then conceivability doesn't entail possibility. So how am I misrepresenting your position?

My point is that i don't care if we can imagine possibility because what we can imagine may or may not be actual possible. So any talk about "imagining a possibility" is pointless. So i don't care about imagining possibilities.

Here are some examples of things that i can conceive that are impossible: that i can time travel

I'm guessing you mean that you can imagine yourself in the setting of, say, 1935 Germany.

No, I'm saying that we can't build machine to go back in time because its against the laws of physics as we know them even though i can imagine it happening. We have lots of movies about time travel.

that there is an even integer greater than 0 that is not the sum of two primes

This is interesting. Defenders of the conceivability argument claim that you cannot in fact imagine such integer. You are merely conceiving the context in which you are supposed to find that integer. You can imagine how you would feel if you found such integer, but you cannot imagine the integer that doesn't exist. I find this a fairly convincing counter-argument.

Ok, so suppose we find an even integer greater than 0 that is not the sum of two primes. If i imagined this was possible and it turned out to be possible was i just imagining the context? If I am just imagining the context then doesn't that kick the legs out from under ANY possibility argument? Because anytime you say "I can imagine X is possible!" I can just retort by saying "no, you are just conceiving the context in which you think X is possible."

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

They are two sides of the same coin.

No, they aren't. You are profoundly mistaken if you think showing something as false is equivalent to showing something as true. There are significant differences.

Yes they are. Galileo's thought experiment showed us (1) that Aristotelian gravity theory was flawed, and (2) that the speed in which an object falls doesn't depend on its weight. So it both disproved a theory and proved a true proposition about the very world we live in.

I'm not going to go through this again. I disagree as explained in another htread but we are going to have to leave it there.

I don't understand Noether's theorem. Its way over my pay grade as far as I can tell. I have a feeling the same goes for you.

We cannot personally verify each bit of information we use in our arguments. If a peer reviewed scientific article states that Noether's theorem can (1) be mathematically proven and (2) show that the law of conservation of energy holds with any given set of laws of physics, then I can use that information to make a plausible argument on a debate forum.

I would say you can't claim to know something if you don't actually understand it. You are just repeating some talking point you have about Noether's theorem when you don't know anything about it except superficially.

[instantc]

My point is that i don't care if we can imagine possibility because what we can imagine may or may not be actual possible. So any talk about "imagining a possibility" is pointless. So i don't care about imagining possibilities.

Surely we can imagine things that are not physically possible. My question was, can we imagine something that contradicts the laws of logic? Can you imagine a round square? Can you imagine a world where your kitchen table both exists and doesn't exist at the same time? I still don't know which side you are on here, since you gave a bunch of examples of how we can imagine something that merely contradicts the laws of physics, which is not the issue here. If you claim that we can conceive something that contradicts the laws of logic, please provide an example.

If I am just imagining the context then doesn't that kick the legs out from under ANY possibility argument? Because anytime you say "I can imagine X is possible!" I can just retort by saying "no, you are just conceiving the context in which you think X is possible."

I don't think so. Can you imagine an even integer greater than zero that is not a sum of two primes? I certainly can't, it seems just as inconceivable as a rock that is not a rock or something else that contradicts the laws of logic. That's why I suggested that perhaps you are not imagining the said integer, but just the context of what it would feel like to find one.

Does this undermine the conceivability argument for the mind? It don't see how. I am quite certain that we are able to actually imagine pain without any brain activity, for example, which would entail that it doesn't break any laws of logic.

I don't understand Noether's theorem. Its way over my pay grade as far as I can tell. I have a feeling the same goes for you.

We cannot personally verify each bit of information we use in our arguments. If a peer reviewed scientific article states that Noether's theorem can (1) be mathematically proven and (2) show that the law of conservation of energy holds with any given set of laws of physics, then I can use that information to make a plausible argument on a debate forum.

I would say you can't claim to know something if you don't actually understand it. You are just repeating some talking point you have about Noether's theorem when you don't know anything about it except superficially.

We were debating about whether purely logical arguments can give us any information about the real world. I pointed out that logic and mathematics can show that the law of conservation of energy is true without feeding in any data from the real world. Now, you say that this fact, which is backed up by the scientific consensus, has to be left out of the debate, since neither of us fully understands the mathematical theorems behind it.

Seems like you have now amended your position into 'Any purely logical arguments that are not above your paygrade cannot give us information about the real world'. Now, here I am happy to agree with you.

[keithprosser3]

Let me suggest something.

Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, but when we see something as red or blue we do not perceive that to be a difference in the wavelength of the reflected light - we see it as a difference in colour.

What consciousness does is allow its possessor to access and process a great deal of information about its environment. (The same processing might be possible in an unconscious way, but nature has chosen to make us conscious to achive that end.)

Consciousness works by translating the objective into the subjective. What is objectively a difference in wavelength becomes a subjective difference in colour. There is no colour in the objective world. UK phone boxes are not red and New York taxis aren't yellow... only their representations within consciousness are coloured. The objects differ in the quality of the light they reflect, but not in colour because colour does not exist objectively, colour exists only subjectively, that is within consciousness.

So something that we perceive - such as colour - may not exist objectively although it does relate to something that does exist objectively; in this case, colour with wavelength.

We do perceive our own consciousness. We are 'self-aware'. But what we are perceive as our conscious of may not be what exists objectively. That is to say, what we think of as our consciousness is like 'colour' - ie something that doesn't exist except as a perception. What exists - ie what corresponds to wavelength - is a mechanism that translates the objective into the subjective (a brain?).

That mechanism when applied to itself translates its objective nature (ie a reality translator) into the subjective form of what we perceive our consciousness to be.

[keithprosser3]

Let me suggest something.

Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, but when we see something as red or blue we do not perceive that to be a difference in the wavelength of the reflected light - we see it as a difference in colour.

What consciousness does is allow its possessor to access and process a great deal of information about its environment. (The same processing might be possible in an unconscious way, but nature has chosen to make us conscious to achive that end.)

Consciousness works by translating the objective into the subjective. What is objectively a difference in wavelength becomes a subjective difference in colour. There is no colour in the objective world. UK phone boxes are not red and New York taxis aren't yellow... only their representations within consciousness are coloured. The objects differ in the quality of the light they reflect, but not in colour because colour does not exist objectively, colour exists only subjectively, that is within consciousness.

So something that we perceive - such as colour - may not exist objectively although it does relate to something that does exist objectively; in this case, with wavelength.

We do perceive our own consciousness. We are 'self-aware'. But what we are perceive as our conscious of may not be what exists objectively. That is to say, what we think of as our consciousness is like 'colour' - ie something that doesn't exist except as a perception. What exists - ie what corresponds to wavelength - is a mechanism that translates the objective into the subjective (a brain?).

That mechanism when applied to itself translates its objective nature (ie a reality translator) into the subjective form of what we perceive our consciousness to be.

[JohnA]

Let me suggest something.

Red light has a longer wavelength than blue light, but when we see something as red or blue we do not perceive that to be a difference in the wavelength of the reflected light - we see it as a difference in colour.

What consciousness does is allow its possessor to access and process a great deal of information about its environment. (The same processing might be possible in an unconscious way, but nature has chosen to make us conscious to achive that end.)

Consciousness works by translating the objective into the subjective. What is objectively a difference in wavelength becomes a subjective difference in colour. There is no colour in the objective world. UK phone boxes are not red and New York taxis aren't yellow... only their representations within consciousness are coloured. The objects differ in the quality of the light they reflect, but not in colour because colour does not exist objectively, colour exists only subjectively, that is within consciousness.

So something that we perceive - such as colour - may not exist objectively although it does relate to something that does exist objectively; in this case, with wavelength.

We do perceive our own consciousness. We are 'self-aware'. But what we are perceive as our conscious of may not be what exists objectively. That is to say, what we think of as our consciousness is like 'colour' - ie something that doesn't exist except as a perception. What exists - ie what corresponds to wavelength - is a mechanism that translates the objective into the subjective (a brain?).

That mechanism when applied to itself translates its objective nature (ie a reality translator) into the subjective form of what we perceive our consciousness to be.

Consciousness is just a process of the mind (which is a function of the brain). We do not need to see it or test for its substance, we only have to observe it.
It's like taking a picture with your digital camera. You do not see the process of recording or capturing the image, but we know the process.
Process:
Taking a picture, the shutter opens and each pixel on the image sensor records the brightness of the light that falls on it by accumulating an electrical charge. The charge from each pixel is measured and converted into a digital number when the shutter closes to end the exposure. You then see the picture on the camera screen because of the color and brightness of matching pixels on the screen that was set by a series of numbers that we used to reconstruct the image.

Stating consciousness is a "thing" (material or immaterial) is as vitriolic as belief in magic beings that can exist outside existence.