Theories of Consciousness

[Skepdick]

Everyone on here is so fucking exhausting.

Perhaps you want to unpack this on a couch. With a therapist.

You feeling of exhaustion doesn't make others exhausting.

Fuck off and learn some writing skills. Insinuations and gibberish are no substitute for clear communication of thoughts.

And yet you seem to have received the message loud and clear.

Communication successful.

[accelafine]

So glad you 'know' it. No one else does.

[Skepdick]

So glad you 'know' it. No one else does.

Did read everyone elses' minds; or are yo speaking on behalf of all the voices in your head?

[accelafine]

So glad you 'know' it. No one else does.

You read everyone else's minds already?!?

Wow.

No. I can read English. Have the guts to say what you mean, coward.

[Skepdick]

No. I can read English.

What good is reading if you can't understand?

Have the guts to say what you mean, coward.

What gives you the impression that I am not doing that already?

[accelafine]

No. I can read English.

What good is reading if you can't understand?

Have the guts to say what you mean, coward.

What gives you the impression that I am not doing that already?

Ok. Right. You are communicating on some 'deeper level' that mere mortals can't understand without special translating skills. Got it. Well I don't have those special skills. I'm just a humble mortal who can only read English on the human plane.

[Skepdick]

Ok. Right. You are communicating on some 'deeper level' that mere mortals can't understand without special translating skills. Got it. Well I don't have those special skills. I'm just a humble mortal who can only read English on the human plane.

Great! So you posess the skill of reading; but not the skill of comprehension?

[accelafine]

Ok. Right. You are communicating on some 'deeper level' that mere mortals can't understand without special translating skills. Got it. Well I don't have those special skills. I'm just a humble mortal who can only read English on the human plane.

Great! So you posess the skill of reading; but not the skill of comprehension?

Exactly. I don't 'comprehend' your deep and exotic level of written communication. I assume you also have basic language skills. Perhaps you could simplify your complex and deep use of language to accommodate us mere mortals. I'm sure it will be well worth the wait.

[Skepdick]

Ok. Right. You are communicating on some 'deeper level' that mere mortals can't understand without special translating skills. Got it. Well I don't have those special skills. I'm just a humble mortal who can only read English on the human plane.

Great! So you posess the skill of reading; but not the skill of comprehension?

Exactly. I don't 'comprehend' your deep and exotic level of written communication. I assume you also have basic language skills. Perhaps you could simplify your complex and deep use of language to accommodate us mere mortals. I'm sure it will be well worth the wait.

So you want me to be shallow? Shrink any big words to fit your small mind, perhaps?

[accelafine]

Great! So you posess the skill of reading; but not the skill of comprehension?

Exactly. I don't 'comprehend' your deep and exotic level of written communication. I assume you also have basic language skills. Perhaps you could simplify your complex and deep use of language to accommodate us mere mortals. I'm sure it will be well worth the wait.

So you want me to be shallow? Shrink any big words to fit your small mind, perhaps?

I didn't see any 'big' words. Just ordinary words that made no sense as a collective. I hope this helps.

[Skepdick]

I didn't see any 'big' words. Just ordinary words that made no sense as a collective. I hope this helps.

If you don't tell me what confused you I can't unconfuse you.

[anonymous66]

Anyone else enjoy exploring the different theories of Consciousness? I'd like to be able to understand as many of them as I can.

...

Have you considered the possibility that your approach is misguided?

Any adequate theory of consciousness would have to account for the theorizer; and the process of theorizing.

Such a theory would have to acount for itself.

Sounds interesting. What is your proposed solution?

[anonymous66]

Thoughts can be the consequence of material processes, rather than just "material things". A process doesn't have to have a weight right?

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 can see a possible progression of the terms materialism and phsyicalism. At one time, those who rejected all types of dualism were referred to as "materialists". But then as time went on - the term was changed to "physicalists" because of the advances in topics like spacetime, physical energies, forces, and exotic matter. Perhaps in the future, as we learn to accept the reality of Qualia, we can develop a new term that incorporates mental properties into our understanding of matter.

I want to elaborate here... As I mentioned above, Galen Strawson considers himself to be materialist/physicalist, and yet accepts the reality of qualia (and minds) - but he's not saying "minds are fundamental" - he's saying some form of 1st person experience (aka mental phenomena) (an aspect of consciousness - not necessarily mind) is fundamental. I don't know of anyone, materialist claims or no, who makes the claim "minds are fundamental".

[bahman]

Anyone else enjoy exploring the different theories of Consciousness? I'd like to be able to understand as many of them as I can.

For the most part, they can be broken down into 3 main theories.

Materialism - the mind is the brain (or created by the brain). Brain states=mind states. It appears that for this to be the case, consciousness itself would have to be some kind of illusion. I've read some Daniel Dennett - including Bacteria to Bach.

Substance dualism - there are 2 types of stuff - mind stuff (or soul stuff) and physical stuff. This appears to be the least popular right now - but there are a few reputable philosophers (i.e. Richard Swinburne) who defend the idea. This is the traditional idea that humans have an immortal soul.

Property dualism - I tend to lump this in with panpsychism. Panpsychism is the idea that everything has some kind of consciousness. Property dualism is the idea that in addition to the "regular" physical attributes like mass and size, there also exist mental properties. In reality, one could accept that property dualism is the case, but reject panpsychism... but I don't think that one could accept panpsychism and reject property dualism. I've read Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and Galen Strawson.

I've read a few articles about Integrated Information Theory - and I'm aware of the idea of Neutral Monism - they both appear to be either very similar to or are a form of panpsychism.

There are more. You may find this link interesting.

[anonymous66]

Thoughts can be the consequence of material processes, rather than just "material things". A process doesn't have to have a weight right?

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.

Galen Strawson wrote quite a bit about the problems of emergence in his book Consciousness and it's Place in Nature, and an article titled “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.”

Here are some high points that detail some of the problems with the idea of emergence, and Galen Strawson's position, from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/panpsych/#H4

The Non-Emergence argument resurfaced in the late twentieth century with the work of zoologist Sewall Wright. In his 1977 article “Panpsychism and Science” he argued that brute emergence of mind would be a kind of inexplicable miracle in the natural order of things: “Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic” (p. 82). Thomas Nagel flirted with this argument in his “Panpsychism” essay (1979), but opted not to follow through on all the implications.

The basic problem is this: emergence seems, at first glance, to be a reasonable enough idea, but when pressed for details it comes up sorely lacking. In fact, emergence of mind is very difficult to sensibly explain. Mind is not like five-fingered-ness, or warm-bloodedness. These things, which clearly did emerge, are ontologically unlike mind. They are simply reconfigurations of existing physical matter, whereas mind is of a different ontological order. It is too fundamental an aspect of existence to be comparable to ordinary biological structural features.

Furthermore, emergence of mind is not just some fact of the distant evolutionary past; it must recur every day, in, for example, the development of a human embryo. That is, if a human egg is utterly without mind, and a newborn infant has one, when in the ontogenetic process does mind emerge? Why just there? So in addition to the phylogenetic (historical) emergence problem, we have the related ontogenetic problem as well.

Given that there are very few panpsychists in the world, most everyone is an emergentist. But, as Galen Strawson (2006) has recently emphasized, emergentism is not a forgone conclusion. In fact, it is highly dubious. His piece “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism” presses this point with notable urgency, and offers the most detailed and complete version of the Non-Emergence argument to date. If one is not a panpsychist, then one necessarily believes that only some subset of creatures is privileged to possess mind. The vast remainder of nature, then, is utterly non-mental. This, Strawson observes, is pure presumption: “there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever” (p. 20) for a non-mental component of reality. We simply assume it to be so.

Strawson’s argument, in a nutshell, is this:

• There is one ultimate reality to the universe (“realistic physicalism,” as he calls it).
  Mental (that is, experiential) phenomena are a part of this monistic reality. Therefore, experiential phenomena are physical phenomena, rightly understood.
  Radical-kind, or brute, emergence is impossible; mental phenomena cannot arise from any purely non-mental stuff.
  Therefore, the one reality and all things in it are necessarily experiential.

If we are to be physicalists, Strawson says, then let us be real physicalists and take the implications seriously. When we do so, we find that “something akin to panpsychism is not merely one possible form of realistic physicalism, but the only possible form, and hence, the only possible form of physicalism tout court” (p. 9).

Strawson tackles head-on those who implicitly endorse emergence. He asks, “Does this conception of emergence make sense? I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking of emergence has acquired an air of plausibility…for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of a seeming mystery” (p. 12). He gives a number of examples of putative emergence, showing that each is really unintelligible. His slogan: “emergence can’t be brute,” that is, higher-order mind can emerge from lower-order, but mind cannot possibly emerge from no-mind. “Brute emergence is by definition a miracle every time it occurs,” which is rationally inconceivable.

Panpsychism thus offers a kind of resolution to the problem of emergence, and is supported by several other arguments as well. The viability of panpsychism is no longer really in question. At issue is the specific form it might take, and what its implications are. Panpsychism suggests a radically different worldview, one that is fundamentally at odds with the dominant mechanistic conception of the universe. Arguably, it is precisely this mechanistic view—which sees the universe and everything in it as a kind of giant machine—that lies at the root of many of our philosophical, sociological, and environmental problems. Panpsychism, by challenging this worldview at its root, potentially offers new solutions to some very old problems.