Theories of Consciousness

[anonymous66]

Ehh how do you know what other organisms feel? But I don't think nervous systems are all that dissimilar, they are electric. Pain is obviously not a singular feeling, but a range/continuum of similar feelings, or multiple continuums (different pains).

Let's consider this for a while.. Do you accept that an octopus feels pain?

Yes

All right. Now imagine that you're part of a team exploring deep space and you come across a creature that appears to made of a rock-like solid substance (do a Google search for Korg if you like). Your equipment confirms what you see - it has no brain. However, it also appears to be sentient - you can communicate with it, and you notice it appears to feel pain, emotions, etc. Do you accept that it is conscious, or you do conclude, "this being must not actually be conscious, because it has no brain"?

[Atla]

Well of course when you don't really try to understand something, you can try to boil it down to something that sounds really silly. That's not hard.

Maybe I just haven't found the right explanation of how emergence is supposed to work.

After typing this I began to consider... Perhaps what Dennett did in his book Bacteria to Bach... could be considered to be an explanation of how consciousness emerges in the human brain. If so- I find his ideas to be plausible.

But his ideas are still lacking in that they don't explain how it is that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter in the first place.

Consciousness emerging from matter is imo hard emergence ie. magic. It's not a serious idea..

[anonymous66]

Maybe I just haven't found the right explanation of how emergence is supposed to work.

After typing this I began to consider... Perhaps what Dennett did in his book Bacteria to Bach... could be considered to be an explanation of how consciousness emerges in the human brain. If so- I find his ideas to be plausible.

But his ideas are still lacking in that they don't explain how it is that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter in the first place.

Consciousness emerging from matter is imo hard emergence ie. magic. It's not a serious idea..

Umm. Then how do you explain the existence of conscious physical beings?

[Atla]

Let's consider this for a while.. Do you accept that an octopus feels pain?

Yes

All right. Now imagine that you're part of a team exploring deep space and you come across a creature that appears to made of a rock-like solid substance (do a Google search for Korg if you like). Your equipment confirms what you see - it has no brain. However, it also appears to be sentient - you can communicate with it, and you notice it appears to feel pain, emotions, etc. Do you accept that it is conscious, or you do conclude, "this being must not actually be conscious, because it has no brain"?

Ok I disagree with the whole scenario - a Korg-like entity isn't even possible. A rock-like solid substance has no internal structure that can make it display sentient behaviour (neither real nor fake one).

[Atla]

After typing this I began to consider... Perhaps what Dennett did in his book Bacteria to Bach... could be considered to be an explanation of how consciousness emerges in the human brain. If so- I find his ideas to be plausible.

But his ideas are still lacking in that they don't explain how it is that consciousness emerges from unconscious matter in the first place.

Consciousness emerging from matter is imo hard emergence ie. magic. It's not a serious idea..

Umm. Then how do you explain the existence of conscious physical beings?

Without hard emergence (magic).

[Flannel Jesus]

Consciousness emerging from matter is imo hard emergence ie. magic. It's not a serious idea..

Umm. Then how do you explain the existence of conscious physical beings?

Without hard emergence (magic).

He didn't ask how don't you explain it. He asked how do you.

[Flannel Jesus]

just reposting this for you once because i'm not sure you saw it. especially the last paragraph:

Are you alluding to emergence? The idea that neural processes arise from a physical brain?

Yes, anything that's not fundamental must be emergent. So minds must also be fundamental or emergent. Some materialists might think minds might be fundamental (which may disqualify them from being materialists, but who am I to say?), some may think minds are illusory (odd hypothesis, as it kind of presupposes a mind to experience an illusion, to have the illusion of a mind no?), and the rest are going to think it's emergent. Probably the majority, but I haven't run a survey.

Looking back at my OP - Galen Strawson accepts property dualism and panpsychism.

But - Galen Stawson (he wrote a paper with the title Physicalism entails Panpsychism) identifies as a materialist (or physicalist) - he agrees that there is only one type of matter - it's just that he accepts that Qualia are real, so physical stuff has mental properties. I find it hard to refute that sentiment.

I don't think physical stuff needs to have mental properties, in order for physical processes to result in mental properties. In general, I don't think any large-scale thing that's composed of tiny things needs those tiny things to have the same properties as the large thing they compose. I don't think the things that make up a chair need chair-like properties. I don't think the things that make up a penis need penis-like properties. I don't think the things that make up a cell need cell-like properties, etc.

Emergence isn't an explanation, it's a category of explanations. Maybe that's why you feel unsatisfied by it - you're putting too high expectations on it being something it's not trying to be. It's just a category. Emergent explanations are explanations in which the component pieces don't have the same properties as the large things they compose, but yet the large-scale properties are still the natural consequence of the small component pieces anyway. Any explanation for which that is the case is an emergent explanation. So the word 'emergence' is not *the explanation itself*, just a description of the kind of explanation.

If you've ever tried to explain a large-scale behaviour based on the behaviour of interacting component pieces, you've done an emergent explanation.

PS. an example of this would be how a car engine functions. You have a lot of component pieces, and every single one of those pieces is composed of molecules and atoms and chemicals, and - presumably - they're all individually following the laws of physics, right? Car engines don't require any component piece to break the laws of physics to make the engine work. The engine works *precisely because every element of that engine follows the laws of physics*. So if every atom of the car is following the laws of physics and the laws of chemistry to make the engine as a whole work -- that's emergence.

[Atla]

Umm. Then how do you explain the existence of conscious physical beings?

Without hard emergence (magic).

He didn't ask how don't you explain it. He asked how do you.

You guys don't even know what you're asking. "Conscious" means 2-3 different things, not 1.

[anonymous66]

Yes

All right. Now imagine that you're part of a team exploring deep space and you come across a creature that appears to made of a rock-like solid substance (do a Google search for Korg if you like). Your equipment confirms what you see - it has no brain. However, it also appears to be sentient - you can communicate with it, and you notice it appears to feel pain, emotions, etc. Do you accept that it is conscious, or you do conclude, "this being must not actually be conscious, because it has no brain"?

Ok I disagree with the whole scenario - a Korg-like entity isn't even possible. A rock-like solid substance has no internal structure that can make it display sentient behaviour (neither real nor fake one).

That appears to be a problem for your position. You're okay with 2 very different physical things (a human and an octopus) that both are capable of consciousness - but you reject a third - for no apparent reason other than a pre-conceived notion that consciousness can only arise in some physical systems (humans and octopus) but not others (rock-like beings). That chauvinism is one of the criticisms of the idea that brain states = mind states.

[Atla]

All right. Now imagine that you're part of a team exploring deep space and you come across a creature that appears to made of a rock-like solid substance (do a Google search for Korg if you like). Your equipment confirms what you see - it has no brain. However, it also appears to be sentient - you can communicate with it, and you notice it appears to feel pain, emotions, etc. Do you accept that it is conscious, or you do conclude, "this being must not actually be conscious, because it has no brain"?

Ok I disagree with the whole scenario - a Korg-like entity isn't even possible. A rock-like solid substance has no internal structure that can make it display sentient behaviour (neither real nor fake one).

That appears to be a problem for your position. You're okay with 2 very different physical things (a human and an octopus) that both are capable of consciousness - but you reject a third - for no apparent reason other than a pre-conceived notion that consciousness can only arise in some physical systems (humans and octopus) but not others (rock-like beings). That chauvinism is one of the criticisms of the idea that brain states = mind states.

How is that a criticism? You don't even know what you're talking about when you keep conflating different meanings of 'conscious'.

[Atla]

As I said, any Western philosophy of mind argument can be refuted in seconds. This is because all current Western philosophers of mind are braindead morons.

To start, 'conscious' means at least two things: phenomenal consciousness (the capacity for first-person-view experience) and individual sentience (of a brain or an artificial intelligence etc.)

The Western philosopher will always conflate the two, even though they have nothing to do with each other. The first one is universal, the second one is a finite structure.

[anonymous66]

As I said, any Western philosophy of mind argument can be refuted in seconds. This is because all current Western philosophers of mind are braindead morons.

To start, 'conscious' means at least two things: phenomenal consciousness (the capacity for first-person-view experience) and individual sentience (of a brain or an artificial intelligence etc.)

The Western philosopher will always conflate the two, even though they have nothing to do with each other. The first one is universal, the second one is a finite structure.

What is this non-Western theory of consciousness that you would have us consider?

[Atla]

As I said, any Western philosophy of mind argument can be refuted in seconds. This is because all current Western philosophers of mind are braindead morons.

To start, 'conscious' means at least two things: phenomenal consciousness (the capacity for first-person-view experience) and individual sentience (of a brain or an artificial intelligence etc.)

The Western philosopher will always conflate the two, even though they have nothing to do with each other. The first one is universal, the second one is a finite structure.

What is this non-Western theory of consciousness that you would have us consider?

Just nondualism, nondual thinking (without any extra stuff like Advaitan texts etc.) It's not really a theory though, it's fact.

[anonymous66]

As I said, any Western philosophy of mind argument can be refuted in seconds. This is because all current Western philosophers of mind are braindead morons.

To start, 'conscious' means at least two things: phenomenal consciousness (the capacity for first-person-view experience) and individual sentience (of a brain or an artificial intelligence etc.)

The Western philosopher will always conflate the two, even though they have nothing to do with each other. The first one is universal, the second one is a finite structure.

What is this non-Western theory of consciousness that you would have us consider?

Just nondualism, nondual thinking (without any extra stuff like Advaitan texts etc.) It's not really a theory though, it's fact.

How is it different from the Western idea of materialism/physicalism? - which adherents claim is nondualist.

[Atla]

What is this non-Western theory of consciousness that you would have us consider?

Just nondualism, nondual thinking (without any extra stuff like Advaitan texts etc.) It's not really a theory though, it's fact.

How is it different from the Western idea of materialism/physicalism? - which adherents claim is nondualist.

Adherents of materialism claim that it's monist because the braindead Western philosophers told them so. But materialism was born from the original material/mental duality, and then the mental part was made not-fundamental or non-existent. This however preserved the original duality on a deep level. Materialism is a dualism-based pseudo-monism.

Eastern nondualism really has no dualism in it.