• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!
  • Welcome to our archives. No new posts are allowed here.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Skeptic Bob said:
I have been watching a lot of David Chalmers videos on youtube lately. I'll have to check out his book.
Click to expand...

Basically, Chalmers approach is to assume that it exists as a phenomenon separate from the brain without justification and build a 'scientific' apologetic around that.

It's an assumption too far.
 
Visbek said:
Meh

His ideas are/were influential, and it is a good effort to accept that traditional dualism violates physics, while trying to assert some other route to non-physical consciousness. He also seems more open-minded than many involved in the debate over the ontological status of consciousness. However, the book is riddled with problems, and exploring the challenges facing his ideas requires reading lots of other literature in the field.
Click to expand...

Any other recommendations I might read in conjunction, then?


I did study philosophy long ago, so I know I can at least get fully into it again if I spend the time.
 
William Rea said:
Basically, Chalmers approach is to assume that it exists as a phenomenon separate from the brain without justification and build a 'scientific' apologetic around that.

It's an assumption too far.
Click to expand...

It definitely isn't science as it can't be tested. Kind of like assuming there are more than 3 spacial dimensions in order to get string theory to work. Sure, it could be the case, but it is currently, and perhaps forever, outside of what science can test.

There is a reason I didn't post this in the science and technology forum. Science is objective. Consciousness is subjective. Because of that, the type of certainty I want may not even be possible.
 
William Rea said:
Basically, Chalmers approach is to assume that it exists as a phenomenon separate from the brain without justification and build a 'scientific' apologetic around that.

It's an assumption too far.
Click to expand...

You have to develop a theory before you can come up with a way to test it.
 
RAMOSS said:
Usually , you have at least some data first.
Click to expand...

Consciousness presents itself as an unexplained phenomenon. The only way to explain something that cannot be currently explained is with a new theory.

I'm really shaken, sometimes, with the relentlessness with which we assert the present base of scientific knowledge with certainty to the exclusion of all other possible explanations. We need to encourage people to be creative and produce new ideas, not simply even if they're wrong, but especially when they're wrong.

Imagination and creativity are vital to the continued exploration of science. Closing ourselves off to new ideas isn't just skepticism, it's a recipe for stagnation.

"There are an infinite number of possible explanations for a given observation set."
 
Absentglare said:
Consciousness presents itself as an unexplained phenomenon. The only way to explain something that cannot be currently explained is with a new theory.

I'm really shaken, sometimes, with the relentlessness with which we assert the present base of scientific knowledge with certainty to the exclusion of all other possible explanations. We need to encourage people to be creative and produce new ideas, not simply even if they're wrong, but especially when they're wrong.

Imagination and creativity are vital to the continued exploration of science. Closing ourselves off to new ideas isn't just skepticism, it's a recipe for stagnation.

"There are an infinite number of possible explanations for a given observation set."
Click to expand...

Bingo, the money shot arrives!
 
Skeptic Bob said:
I am not a dualist. But I do feel like there may be a fundamental property of the universe we may be missing. There are certain properties of the universe that are irreducible, that we just accept as fundamental. Space, time, gravity, energy. Maybe there is another fundamental that when matter is arranged in a particular way or information is process in a certain way, consciousness just arises. Maybe a much, MUCH more basic form of consciousness exists at all levels. Maybe there is something that it is "like" to be an electron that is different than what it is like to be non-existent and that difference is consciousness at the most fundamental.

I'm not saying I believe that, but it is an idea that has been thrown around in philosophy. It is called panpsychism. Another theory I have encountered is the integrated information theory of consciousness.
Click to expand...

Yeah I disagree with chalmers that panpsychism offers any kind of explanation here. It just transfers the problem up a level, off of particular objects (brains) and onto objects in general. Because it's still vulnerable to the same line of questioning - why is there something that it's like to be an electron, why are there not just 'electron zombies' going about doing everything electrons do, etc. IOW what we understand electrons to be doesn't seem to entail experience, so this demands an explanation.

Skeptic Bob said:
Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.
Click to expand...

Right, this is known as collapsing the appearance-reality gap. Arguments alleging a distinction between how reality is and how reality appears to be fall into incoherence when the bit of reality we're considering literally is the appearance.

But I don't think this quite stops eliminativism dead in the water. The Churchlands, for instance, aren't troubled by this and say that the problem is we don't have the right language for talking about this at all. That speaking of "illusion" is just as wrongheaded as speaking of "consciousness". That this is all a kind of outdated 'folk-psychology'. Not unlike speaking of evil spirits or the Greek humours. And that we need a complete overhaul of the language and conceptual framework here before we can make any progress.

Now I'm not an eliminativist, but I do think there's something to the idea that we're going to need a profound reconceptualization of 'mind' before this is all over.
 
William Rea said:
Bingo, the money shot arrives!
Click to expand...

You're free to believe that there's nothing in the universe that we don't yet understand, but the idea that you would expect other people to take that on faith in a world of abundant evidence to the contrary is absurd.
 
Absentglare said:
Consciousness presents itself as an unexplained phenomenon. The only way to explain something that cannot be currently explained is with a new theory.

I'm really shaken, sometimes, with the relentlessness with which we assert the present base of scientific knowledge with certainty to the exclusion of all other possible explanations. We need to encourage people to be creative and produce new ideas, not simply even if they're wrong, but especially when they're wrong.

Imagination and creativity are vital to the continued exploration of science. Closing ourselves off to new ideas isn't just skepticism, it's a recipe for stagnation.

"There are an infinite number of possible explanations for a given observation set."
Click to expand...

When you say we should encourage wrong ideas, I hope you don't mean wrong from a scientific standpoint. Science is a discipline with certain restrictive requirements, not a guessing game. Science does not discourage new ideas, as long as there is a scientific basis for the ideas.
 
I liked Douglas Hofstadter's books on this, I think he's on the right track from a technical perspective.
GEB and I Am a Strange Loop

I like your questioning of the relevance of consciousness, it may give insights into consciousness when it's approached that way.

The way our consciousness loops back on itself seems to be the trick, and by trick I mean it's present and fundamental in many systems we use and observe throughout reality (hence GEB). It's not so mysterious when you look at it from the perspective he presents...but it is still always going to be not-very-intuitive, and thinking about yourself thinking about yourself..well, feedback loops are indeed screwy by design.

Your remark that consciousness is fundamental, is indeed axiomatic to reasoning. It is self-evidently true, and is accepted as such else one is literally "unreasonable". Similar to admitting that Reality Is (reality exists).

Nihilists may tell you that consciousness is the single greatest screw up in the universe, a broken vase that cannot be put back together. We suffer and die...for what? As an expression of the cosmic joke of consciousness. But a Zen Buddhist might say put down the vase and remember that there is no vase.

You mention consciousnesses itself being necessary, that seems to be a part of what Zen Buddhism also explores:
[A] pure consciousness without concepts, if there could be such a thing, would be a booming, buzzing confusion, a sensory field of flashes of light, unidentifiable sounds, ambiguous shapes, color patches without significance.
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōan

But with concepts, (which I take to mean once we grant identity to this, vs that), it becomes the human experience of consciousness.

Personally I think we have the tools to answer these and all other questions, we just need to invent AI and let it tell us what we're missing... ;)
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Bob said:
Don't get me wrong, when it comes to consciousness I am far more interested in "how". What is the mechanism by which subjective conscious experience emerges from purely physical processes. Not only do I think that is more interesting, it also almost certainly has an answer. "Why" doesn't always have an answer.

To me, reconciling this apparent duality is akin to reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity. We know they both are correct but it also defies logic that they are both correct unless, of course, there is some fundamental property or concept that we haven't yet fully grasped. I have no doubt that there is a scientific explanation. Whether that is M-theory or something completely different, it is out there. Likewise, I think there is a scientific explanation for consciousness. But I don't think the difficulty in finding it is just because we haven't put the pieces together correctly yet. I think it is because we are completely missing the pieces needed to understand it.

Apologies if I am not expressing myself well.
Click to expand...

I read a lot on the subject some years back and at the time English physicist Roger Penrose was of the opinion that we can't know the how because our physics is fundamentally not up to the task. He believes that consciousness is tied to quantum wave function collapse but hasn't - at least when I read him - hadn't been able to get beyond that.

It's a fascinating question and I have to admit that a good portion of what I read at the time was over my head. Maybe it's time to revisit the subject
 
devildavid said:
When you say we should encourage wrong ideas, I hope you don't mean wrong from a scientific standpoint. Science is a discipline with certain restrictive requirements, not a guessing game. Science does not discourage new ideas, as long as there is a scientific basis for the ideas.
Click to expand...

No, but, for example, Star Trek's warp drive is "wrong". That doesn't mean it has no value or should be discouraged. It's wonderful for us to use our imagination, descriptions of things that are not part of objective reality, and it can even serve as fuel for science, itself. Alchemy was "wrong", but chemistry was not.

We shouldn't shame scientists who discover that their hypothesis is false. There's no shame in that. Knowing what is not true has real value in science.

I feel like part of this relentlessness with which we value "having the right answer" stems from our academic training. For some reason, we seem to think it's better to reach the peak of Everest by helicopter than it is to try to climb it on your own and fail.
 
Skeptic Bob said:
Compelling theory. I can certainly see the advantage of empathy in a social species. But it still leaves me with the problem of why consciousness is required for such empathy. All those social cues are interpreted at the subconscious level before you become consciously aware of their impact. It seems you can just cut out the step of being conscious and the brain can decide to act based on the cues it receives from its sensory input. I feel the end result would be the same. Your brain picks up on the fact your friend is sad before you are consciously aware of it. Your brain decides to go comfort your friend before you are consciously aware of the decision to go comfort your friend. Your brain subconsciously goes through your memories in search of something that will cheer them up, and your brain instructs your mouth and vocal chords to produce the output.

That is of course an oversimplification. Thousands of things happen in the brain for any particular action. But it isn't apparent why consciousness or subjective experience is necessary for any of those actions to occur.



Our brain is certainly a product of evolution. And mutations can affect the number, arrangement, and nature of the neurons in our brain. More and more neuronal connections have been accumulated as our species has evolved to be more and more intelligent. It is easy to imagine how such changes lead to more processing power, problem solving abilities, and social structures.

We can imagine how such actions would work. The brain calculates a better solution to a problem than it would have have been able to do prior to a given mutation. The brain triggers specific muscles to act in conjunction with sensory input to act on this calculated solution. But at no point can such a mutation explain how these physical processes result in the non-physical, subjective experience.

To me it seems there is nothing humans do that couldn't be accomplished without consciousness. Hell, the subconscious handles around 99% of the workload already. And I would even argue that the few things your conscious self handles are first handled by the subconscious.

In fact, the only thing I can think of that the human brain couldn't conceivably do without input from your consciousness is, in fact, think about consciousness.
Click to expand...

Make no mistake: I don't suggest that consciousness is required for life. Just that by having it, it gave us an evolutionary advantage. And who knows? Maybe there are still plenty of humans out there who don't. And since they don't, the wouldn't be able to begin to comprehend what those of us who do have it are explaining. I don't suggest this is true, but acknowledge the possibility.

All of that being said, I think having a consciousness allows our brain to do quite a bit more than think about consciousness. It is a fundamental requirement for empathy. That alone could have been the evolutionary advantage.

Lastly, your statement that the subjective experience of consciousness is not physical and cannot therefore be explained by random mutation is a belief. I agree that we have not discovered the physical component of consciousness, but there is still much to be discovered regarding the human brain. My belief is that it is a physical trait and we will eventually learn it.
 
Skeptic Bob said:
But why would subjective experience be needed for such an error correcting/task optimizer? It doesn't seem that consciousness is needed for decision making seeing as how the vast majority of decision making our brain does is done subconsciously. In fact, depending on how short you set the lag, ALL decision making is probably done subconsciously and then momentarily later becomes known to the conscious mind.

It doesn't seem as though there is anything the brain does that actually would require that last step of becoming consciously aware. So we are left just saying it is a byproduct or side effect. But all other byproducts or side effects or emergent qualities still have a theoretically plausible mechanism for how they come to be. No matter how hard I try I can't seem to conceive of such a mechanism that would even theoretically result in subjective experience. I can understand an organism acting like it has subjective experience, but to actually have it boggles the mind.

I am not a dualist. But I do feel like there may be a fundamental property of the universe we may be missing. There are certain properties of the universe that are irreducible, that we just accept as fundamental. Space, time, gravity, energy. Maybe there is another fundamental that when matter is arranged in a particular way or information is process in a certain way, consciousness just arises. Maybe a much, MUCH more basic form of consciousness exists at all levels. Maybe there is something that it is "like" to be an electron that is different than what it is like to be non-existent and that difference is consciousness at the most fundamental.

I'm not saying I believe that, but it is an idea that has been thrown around in philosophy. It is called panpsychism. Another theory I have encountered is the integrated information theory of consciousness.

None of them really satisfy me. I just feel like there is something missing in every possible explanation I hear. No matter how you arrange the atoms, I just don't see the connection in how qualia emerges.
Click to expand...

Every now and then - actually more often than that - something comes up to remind me how useless is philosophy. If every Philosophy faculty in every University in the world had been closed down in, say, 1850 the progress of science and technology would have continued on its untroubled way. As you say philosophers throw ideas around, quite pointlessly. But never mind as soon as they get bored with one another, new and shiny and bright, comes along.
 
Sweden said:
Every now and then - actually more often than that - something comes up to remind me how useless is philosophy. If every Philosophy faculty in every University in the world had been closed down in, say, 1850 the progress of science and technology would have continued on its untroubled way. As you say philosophers throw ideas around, quite pointlessly. But never mind as soon as they get bored with one another, new and shiny and bright, comes along.
Click to expand...

Hey, who needs careful and deep thinking about complicated issues, or those dimwits who invented science, eh? Damn the thinking! Ramming speed!
 
ashurbanipal said:
Hey, who needs careful and deep thinking about complicated issues, or those dimwits who invented science, eh? Damn the thinking! Ramming speed!
Click to expand...

It was scientists who invented science not bloody philosophers. The former construct hypotheses on a base of observation until they have a theory that works for the time being. The latter are slaves of fashion, in thrall to the deliberately incomprehensible meanderings of the latest Big Name until they get bored with him and someone more exciting come along.

For the sake of clarity perhaps I should make myself a little clearer: Not so much "careful and deep thinking" more like useless and pretentious twaddle.
 
Sweden said:
It was scientists who invented science not bloody philosophers.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm...science as it is currently practiced began in the 16th century with Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Galileo (well, those are the "big names," anyway). The first three are classified as philosophers usually unproblematically, and the fourth should be called a philosopher by anyone who has read the Two Systems of the World. Newton, Leibniz, Pascal--all philosophers. Indeed, the vast majority of people we call "scientists" from that time understood themselves as philosophers, thought they were doing essentially what other philosophers were doing, and got their ideas to do what they did on philosophical grounds.

Why think, for example, that the world might be consistent? Science depends on it; Plato thought the world could not be consistent, while Aristotle (another philosopher) thought it might be. This issue was fought out in the medieval period by such philosophers as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Peter Abelard.

Why think that observation could tell us anything useful? Science again depends on the idea that it can, and it was once again philosophers who developed this notion. Ditto such concepts as nature and natural law, the existence of matter and substance, etc. etc.

Sweden said:
The latter are slaves of fashion, in thrall to the deliberately incomprehensible meanderings of the latest Big Name until they get bored with him and someone more exciting come along.
Click to expand...

Scientists do the same thing. There are intellectual fashions in science just as there are in philosophy, and factions among the fashionable.

Sweden said:
For the sake of clarity perhaps I should make myself a little clearer: Not so much "careful and deep thinking" more like useless and pretentious twaddle.
Click to expand...

One thing I would say is this: only about a quarter of contemporary philosophers ever learn the true lesson of philosophy, which is odd because it's usually one that is presented in the first semester of instruction: intellectual humility. But that's a lesson that ought to benefit everyone.

I agree with your statement as it literally reads. I doubt you and I would agree about what counts as useless and pretentious twaddle. If you think it's useless and pretentious to wonder about the nature of consciousness and its place in the domain of what exists, that strikes me as arrogant. Plenty of really smart people have devoted their lives to philosophy; the notion that they can all just be dismissed by calling them useless and pretentious twaddlers is probably hubris.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Hmmmm...science as it is currently practiced began in the 16th century with Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Galileo (well, those are the "big names," anyway). The first three are classified as philosophers usually unproblematically, and the fourth should be called a philosopher by anyone who has read the Two Systems of the World. Newton, Leibniz, Pascal--all philosophers. Indeed, the vast majority of people we call "scientists" from that time understood themselves as philosophers, thought they were doing essentially what other philosophers were doing, and got their ideas to do what they did on philosophical grounds.

Why think, for example, that the world might be consistent? Science depends on it; Plato thought the world could not be consistent, while Aristotle (another philosopher) thought it might be. This issue was fought out in the medieval period by such philosophers as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Peter Abelard.

Why think that observation could tell us anything useful? Science again depends on the idea that it can, and it was once again philosophers who developed this notion. Ditto such concepts as nature and natural law, the existence of matter and substance, etc. etc.



Scientists do the same thing. There are intellectual fashions in science just as there are in philosophy, and factions among the fashionable.



One thing I would say is this: only about a quarter of contemporary philosophers ever learn the true lesson of philosophy, which is odd because it's usually one that is presented in the first semester of instruction: intellectual humility. But that's a lesson that ought to benefit everyone.

I agree with your statement as it literally reads. I doubt you and I would agree about what counts as useless and pretentious twaddle. If you think it's useless and pretentious to wonder about the nature of consciousness and its place in the domain of what exists, that strikes me as arrogant. Plenty of really smart people have devoted their lives to philosophy; the notion that they can all just be dismissed by calling them useless and pretentious twaddlers is probably hubris.
Click to expand...

Science does not depend on consistency or anything at all. Science does not require physical reality to fit any pre-conceived notion at all. Science was not waiting for philosophers to tell them observation was useful. Man always was scientific by nature, before any of this was even formalized. The physical senses are man's only windows to reality, seeing how man is a physical being in a physical world. Science only studies what is physical because that is all there is. You can't study what isn't there. Philosophy is about opinions and uses words to express them. Philosophy has a lot of opinions about reality but concludes nothing definitive. Science mundanely explores the only reality we experience and plods along making progress that continues to broaden our understanding of this reality. Philosophy is pretentious because it talks about the Big Questions, but never questions the assumption that there even are really any Big Questions.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Hmmmm...science as it is currently practiced began in the 16th century with Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Galileo (well, those are the "big names," anyway). The first three are classified as philosophers usually unproblematically, and the fourth should be called a philosopher by anyone who has read the Two Systems of the World. Newton, Leibniz, Pascal--all philosophers. Indeed, the vast majority of people we call "scientists" from that time understood themselves as philosophers, thought they were doing essentially what other philosophers were doing, and got their ideas to do what they did on philosophical grounds.

Why think, for example, that the world might be consistent? Science depends on it; Plato thought the world could not be consistent, while Aristotle (another philosopher) thought it might be. This issue was fought out in the medieval period by such philosophers as Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Peter Abelard.

Why think that observation could tell us anything useful? Science again depends on the idea that it can, and it was once again philosophers who developed this notion. Ditto such concepts as nature and natural law, the existence of matter and substance, etc. etc.



Scientists do the same thing. There are intellectual fashions in science just as there are in philosophy, and factions among the fashionable.



One thing I would say is this: only about a quarter of contemporary philosophers ever learn the true lesson of philosophy, which is odd because it's usually one that is presented in the first semester of instruction: intellectual humility. But that's a lesson that ought to benefit everyone.

I agree with your statement as it literally reads. I doubt you and I would agree about what counts as useless and pretentious twaddle. If you think it's useless and pretentious to wonder about the nature of consciousness and its place in the domain of what exists, that strikes me as arrogant. Plenty of really smart people have devoted their lives to philosophy; the notion that they can all just be dismissed by calling them useless and pretentious twaddlers is probably hubris.
Click to expand...

Several posts back I said that Philosophy faculties might been closed down in about 1850 without loss. This someone random date was chosen to exclude from condemnation such as those in your first sentence and, in particular those who brought about the Enlightenment.

Yes there are fashions in science. But they come up against a hard reality: that scientific statement is one which can be disproved. This is not a test which constrains the philosophers, who can maunder on for a hundred turgid pages without once writing about anything so mundane as a fact.

As is so often the case one must recognise exceptions. For example A J Ayer, the only phlosopher of any note that I have ever met. In the early sixties we had a conversation that may have lasted as long as ten minutes. Ayer's interest was logical positivism - and the 'verification principle' which means that statements for which here is no objective evidence are worthless.

Which of course proves your point. Meanwhile I fear that I will, sometimes, continue to over-generalise on DP for effect. This is not, for better rather than worse, an academic forum where words must be carefully weighed.

Btw plenty of smart people have devoted their lives to theology. Every life, without exception, totally wasted. Freddie Ayer would agree with me on that - if he was still around.
 
Skeptic Bob said:
There is definitely a distinction between the two, though in some cases the line is fuzzy.

So you believe all living things have consciousness. What about:

An ant?
A fungus?
A bacteria?
Click to expand...

Every living thing has consciousness. It has to realize what it is before it knows what to do.
 
devildavid said:
Science does not depend on consistency or anything at all.
Click to expand...

Sure it does. Suppose, for example, every measurement of the speed of light turned out to be radically different, such that the speed of light itself seemed to vary randomly. Suppose every observation that had supported, say, the laws of thermodynamics suddenly stopped exhibiting any predictable pattern at all. Suppose such were the case with all natural laws, and that not only was past behavior unreliable, everything just behaved randomly. There would obviously be no science then.

devildavid said:
Science does not require physical reality to fit any pre-conceived notion at all. Science was not waiting for philosophers to tell them observation was useful. Man always was scientific by nature, before any of this was even formalized.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by that, exactly?

devildavid said:
The physical senses are man's only windows to reality, seeing how man is a physical being in a physical world.
Click to expand...

Prove it.

devildavid said:
Philosophy is pretentious because it talks about the Big Questions, but never questions the assumption that there even are really any Big Questions.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm...this gets things exactly backward. In science, there are certain things you have to accept--for example, that there are such things as natural laws, that the experimental method is worthwhile, that the subject matter of physics is real, and so on. Question those (and similar) points seriously enough, and you can no longer be a scientist.

On the other hand, in philosophy, there are no questions that are off the table (including whether philosophy is worth anything or not). There are literally thousands of papers and books written by philosophers questioning some of the most basic ideas of philosophy. Here's one full of papers by philosophers considering whether metaphysics is a valid area--whether such questions as "what is real?" or "how do we account for change over time?" are meaningful or valid questions:

https://www.amazon.com/Metametaphys...id=1512154715&sr=8-1&keywords=metametaphysics

Here are two by philosophers questioning whether the entire history of epistemology has been mistaken:

https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Pu...12172326&sr=8-3&keywords=Kvanvig+Epistemology

https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-It...1-1-fkmr2&keywords=Timothy+Williams+Knowledge

Here's one asking if a fundamental concept in philosophy of language isn't contradictory:

https://www.amazon.com/Semantics-Re...-1&keywords=Has+Semantics+rested+on+a+mistake

Here's one questioning practically all of previous philosophy (including whether there are any "big questions"):

https://www.amazon.com/Language-Tru...2689&sr=1-1&keywords=Language+Truth+and+Logic

And so on. These are just the ones I could think of in a few minutes. This last one, incidentally, was in a certain strain of philosophy known as logical positivism. There were quite a few logical positivists, and one way to phrase their program was to do away with about 90% of philosophy: metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics (sorta), epistemology (mostly), and about half of political philosophy. It turned out they couldn't do so, because the attempt was inherently contradictory. Logical positivism finally died in the 1960s after several valiant attempts to save it, and that's why you won't find many philosophers today embarking on such a radical critique of philosophy itself. We went down that road. It didn't work.
 
Last edited:
Skeptic Bob said:
It doesn't seem as though there is anything the brain does that actually would require that last step of becoming consciously aware. So we are left just saying it is a byproduct or side effect. But all other byproducts or side effects or emergent qualities still have a theoretically plausible mechanism for how they come to be. No matter how hard I try I can't seem to conceive of such a mechanism that would even theoretically result in subjective experience. I can understand an organism acting like it has subjective experience, but to actually have it boggles the mind.
.
Click to expand...


In my opinion, consciousness is what gives meaning and value to all the brain physically can accomplish.

While the brain processes data and sends out instant impulses, the consciousness determines what we choose as goals and how we feel about the world around us. Consciousness is certainly affected by experiences stored in the brain, since much of our reactions can be influenced by our formative years, but our brain cannot enjoy what it does -- only our consciousness can.

A brain without consciousness is like eating without taste buds. The mouth goes through the motions but pleasure is not anticipated nor experienced. Only the physical need for nourishment is satisfied.

Just my two cents.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom