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.

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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.

[olavisjo]

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In a similar way you can map the integers to the set of all positive real numbers.

Characteristic X Mantissa

• [mrow] [mcol]0.0 [mcol]0.1 [mcol]0.2 [mcol]0.3 [mcol]0.4 [mcol]0.5 [row] [b]1.0[/b] [col]1 [col]2 [col]4 [col]7[col]11 [col]16 [row] [b]2.0[/b] [col]3 [col]5 [col]8 [col]12[col]17 [row] [b]3.0[/b] [col]6 [col]9 [col]13 [col]18 [row] [b]4.0[/b] [col]10 [col]14 [col]19 [row] [b]5.0[/b] [col]15 [col]20 [row] [b]6.0[/b] [col]21

The set of all real numbers would be a trivial exercise.

[keithprosser3]

In a similar way you can map the integers to the set of all positive real numbers

Well, you'd upset the last 150 years of mathematics you had done that.

You have indeed mapped the integers to the reals, but have you mapped the integers to all the reals?

1 - 0.000
2 - 0.100
3 - 0.200

I've just taken the top corner of your list and 'squared it up', so we have the same number of decimal places as rows.

The bold digits are the ones I am going to use to create my diagonal number d.

The rule is that the Nth digit of d is the Nth digit of the number at row N, plus 1 (9 wraps round to 0, not 10).

That means d is nice and simple: 0.111.

Now, if we compare d with the number in row 1, it is different at the 1st decimal place (and at the others places as well as it happens, but that doesn't matter right now). It is different at the 1st decimal place because we made damn sure it is different by our cunning trick of taking digits along the diagonal and adding 1.

I can sum things up like this:
d certainly differs from the number at row 1 at the 1st decimal place.

similarly,
d certainly differs from the number at row 2 at the 2nd decimal place.

and
d certainly differs from the number at row 3 at the 3rd decimal place.

You get the idea (I hope!). All the above can be summed up by saying
"d certainly differs from the number at row N at the Nth decimal place."

Now that is true not only for the tiddly 3x3 square above. It is also true for the infinitely long and wide square you spent an infinity of time making a few minutes ago.
So if d is the diagonal number of your infinite list, which row does it appear in?
Cant be row 1, because its different in the first decimal place.
Can't be row 2, because its differnet in the second decimal place.

In fact, it can't be on row N, because its different in the Nth decimal place there.
But N can be any integer. So there is a real number - d - that can't be in any row after all. There is at least one real number you have missed. In fact there are lots of them. There is another diagonal number you get by adding not one but 2 to the diagonal digits. There are any number of other ways to make diagonal numbers. In fact, there are an infinite number of reals not in your list.

Sorry if I've burst anyone's bubbles!

PS - as you have created your list quite regularly, it should be passible to work out what the infinite diagonal number is and may be even why it is missing from the list. But that seems like a big job and I don't fancy trying it until I get very bored one day.

[olavisjo]

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That means d is nice and simple: 0.111.

Now, if we compare d with the number in row 1, it is different at the 1st decimal place (and at the others places as well as it happens, but that doesn't matter right now). It is different at the 1st decimal place because we made damn sure it is different by our cunning trick of taking digits along the diagonal and adding 1.

But, it is on the list, it is the 111^th member of the list in post...

http://debatingchristianity.com/forum/v ... 535#607535

Every positive real number is on the list.

Well, you'd upset the last 150 years of mathematics you had done that.

Sorry if I've burst anyone's bubbles!

Don't worry about it, I am sure Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor will get over it.

[keithprosser3]

Every positive real number is on the list.

I can see I am going to have to actually work out what the missing number explicitly! Yuck. I might have a go on Sunday. If I fail then your should expect a Fields Medal in the post.

[olavisjo]

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I can see I am going to have to actually work out what the missing number explicitly! Yuck. I might have a go on Sunday. If I fail then your should expect a Fields Medal in the post.

No, I am too old for that.