Mithrae wrote:
Rather, I suggested three broad plausible frameworks for consciousness which I'm aware of, yours and two others: "...there's currently no scientific way to distinguish between [1] the brain's activity being identical with consciousness, [2] the brain merely serving as a conduit or host for consciousness, and [3] the brain providing a formative stage or gestational period for human consciousness." None of those imply that human consciousness normally exists exterior to the brain, and all three are consistent with the "overwhelming, verifiable evidence" you presented in post #188. However a key difference is that the first is not compatible with (for example)
Mithrae wrote:Strictly speaking no-one has ever shown you a consciousness at all, since it cannot be observed or directly detected, only inferred by analogy from similarities of structure (eg. neural networks) and behaviour (eg. appropriate response to stimuli). Such analogy becomes increasingly weak as similarities decrease; we reasonably suppose that dogs are conscious, and probably fish, but insects...? However even if all widely accepted examples of consciousness were represented by a strong, clear-cut analogue, the reasoning still wouldn't work in reverse; that would simply be denying the antecedant.
Thus unless we one day either a) find some way of directly detecting consciousness, or b) fully understand how it comes to be such that we no longer rely on inference to guess at its presence, the view that consciousness is absent from an amoeba or tree or planet or galaxy is simply an unsubstantiated assumption. It differs from the assumption that consciousness is universally present primarily in the fact that consciousness is the most basic and certain fact known to us, whereas the notion of some other type of stuff - "fysical" stuff - seems to be pure speculation. Even physicists have spent the better part of a century trying to disabuse us of the notion that what we see and touch bears any but the most tenuous similarities to the level of reality which they're able to study.
