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.

[keithprosser3]

I am not sure I go 100% with the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain if I was inclined to be totally anal emergent properties, but I get what you mean.

With so much agreement, it's surprising there is so much animosity on these threads, isn't it? As an aside, have you watched the BBC doc about solving Fermat's Last theorem? I ask because its a salutory lesson in what it took to solve a problem that is probably a lot easier than explaining consciousness. Compared to that, a DCR debate sometimes seems as productive as one on History Today.

[instantc]

With so much agreement, it's surprising there is so much animosity on these threads, isn't it?

The disagreement is probably due to the fact that the subtle difference between property dualism and property reductionism is of a different nature than most scientific questions. Empirical evidence we have is equally consistent with both views. Most people here like to only discus empirical evidence, and I am guessing it's their previous materialistic convictions that make them vow for property reductionism by default. The whole reason the idea of property dualism exists is because reductionism doesn't seem to add up logically, there's no agenda or wishful thinking behind it.

One way to test reductionism would be to see if a person could be mentally induced to experience, say pain, maybe with hypnosis or something else. If one could be induced to have an experience of pain without fibers firing in his brain, then that would prove conclusively that property dualism is true. Then again, this test wouldn't be verifiable by third persons, which is why it probably wouldn't be a big deal, as the experimentee could well be lying in order to disprove reductionism for whatever reason.

As an aside, have you watched the BBC doc about solving Fermat's Last theorem? I ask because its a salutory lesson in what it took to solve a problem that is probably a lot easier than explaining consciousness. Compared to that, a DCR debate sometimes seems as productive as one on History Today.

I haven't seen either one yet, I'll have a look.

[Goat]

Materialism and property dualism are effectively the same thing so what's the problem?

That's what I'm often wondering as well. We all agree that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. My question is whether mental events can be reduced to the physical brain activity that we observe. I don't even know how to approach this question scientifically, nor have I ever heard of anyone trying. I think this is a conceptual problem that belongs to the field of philosophy.

Yes, we can. We can figure that out by observation, by stimulating the brain, by comparing brains to each other, by observing the effects of chemicals on the brain, and things like that..

I don't see any use of trying to make a 'conceptual problem out of something without real world input of data.

[instantc]

I don't see any use of trying to make a 'conceptual problem out of something without real world input of data.

That's the disagreement here, isn't it? You don't think that discussing the distinction of property dualism and reductionism is useful, as it is not an empirical problem. I'm well aware of your position and of the very standard empirical arguments you provide. I am not disagreeing with any of them, there is no disputation there.

I am asking whether a mental event is a physical event, and you are not even attempting to answer the problem. I'm guessing again that it's your materialistic convictions that cause you to vow for reductionism, since the arguments you give don't point to one direction anymore then the other.

[keithprosser3]

If one could be induced to have an experience of pain without fibers firing in his brain, then that would prove conclusively that property dualism is true.

I think it would prove full-blown dualism if people have conscious experiences with no neural correlate occurring. It would be a disaster!

No criticism intended - quite the opposite because I think it shows you must be genuinely interested in this stuff because you have flopped from suggesting it is a conceptual problem for philosophers to one requiring experimental investigation by scientists! Probing around the problem and looking for a way to attack it is not to be inconsistent, or if it is, it's better than being consistent in this context!

The approach I favour (because I can actually do something rather than wish I had an EEG machine and a steady supply of willing subjects) is to ignore what goes on in the brain and do what you originally suggested - treat it as a conceptual problem.

We know (or can be fairly sure) that brains produce consciousness somehow, and we know quite a bit about how neurons work, about how data can be stored and manipulated, how we can use feedback and stuff. If materialism (or whatever ism you want to call it) is true, then there should be a way to cobble these elements together and get consciousness out.

We can use what we know about the brain to give us hints, but I am more interested in creating consciousness in an artificial way rather than elucidating how the brain does it - although the two endeavours can obviously assist each other.

The problem is that people have been trying to produce artificial minds for over 60 years and have got no-where. Early on there was an excuse - computers were feeble toys. But today even kids in African mud huts play with computers that have speed measured gigahertz, gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of disk space. But there is still no HAL9000 in the wings.

So we need a new big idea, and I don't think sticking probes in peoples heads is going to give it to us. Our lack of understanding of consciousness means either that we need of a breakthrough or - heaven forbid - dualism is true after all. Some people would be delighted if dualism triumphs over science, but I wouldn't be.

[keithprosser3]

..

[Philbert]

The answer is simple, he arrogantly bloviated from the peanut gallery.

Thought is inherently divisive.

Thought divides in to "me" and "my thoughts" and consciousness is born.

Imho, instead of focusing so much attention on the content of thought (this idea vs. that idea) we should be focusing more on the nature of thought itself.

I propose that all of religion arises from the inherently divisive nature of thought, that which we are made of. That's why religions arise in every time and place.

As we observe reality through this inherently divisive medium, we experience reality as being divided between "me" and "everything else".

This perception creates fear and isolation etc, which we try to remedy by "getting back to God", or reuniting with reality.

The irony is that we are never separate from reality in the first place, it just feels that way due to the divisive nature of thought, the instrument we are using to make the observation, the medium we are made of.

[otseng]

What a nice subtle insult you offer, just because I pointed out your ridiculous drivel of claims.

How can someone debate with you when you are in denial of your own authorship and content?

Surely if you do not understand something then you should ask for clarification, not launch into stifling attack mode?

I know you can not answer my questions since you have a very different understanding of evidence or claims; a complete lack of comprehension of anything science (given your post content).

Keep on making incoherent claims, and I will keep on questioning them. We know you will never admit your mistakes or appreciate your own incoherency; your belief is grounded in fallacies - you have pointed them out yourelf. Hypocrisy at its best, swimming in it. You.

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[keithprosser3]

So you recommend avoiding thought?

[keithprosser3]

So you recommend avoiding thought?