Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

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Tamminen
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Tamminen »

Atreyu wrote:So nothing that can be verbalized could be said to be consciousness, because anything for which a word has been invented is already a product of consciousness, not consciousness itself. And this shows the difficulty, the virtual impossibility, of defining consciousness. For consciousness cannot define itself until it escapes its own boundaries, comes outside of itself, for only then can it even see, let alone define, what it really is. Until it goes outside of its own boundaries, everything it perceives and cognizes will simply be a reflection if itself, much like you can only see a reflection of yourself when you look in a mirror. The reflection is not really you, it's only a image of you. Similarly, anything that can be verbalized will only be reflection of consciousness, not the thing-in-itself.
Well said. Consciousness cannot be defined or explained. I have said elsewhere that it does not even need explaining, because its being is self-evident, but you disagreed on that. Why does it need explaining although it cannot be explained? How can we get outside of consciousness in order to explain it?
Steve3007
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Steve3007 »

Tamminem:
Well said. Consciousness cannot be defined or explained.
But, apparently, it can be referred to, as you've shown here by example. When you use that word, what is it that you are referring to? If you can answer that question, isn't there at least some sense in which you are defining consciousness, albeit in an imperfect way?
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Ranvier
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Ranvier »

RJG

I see that Atreyu is seduced by this line of reasoning...

"Consciousness is the 'experience' of recognition, made possible by memory.
Without recognition, there can be no consciousness. Without memory, there can be no recognition".

Again, there are two meanings to the word "recognition" but the real problem is in that the wrong word is in "bold type".
It comes down to the 'experience', doesn't it?
In your interpretation of the unremarkable "subjects" (acorn squirrel machines), an 'experience' is any event taking place in "subjects" with memory, which is true for the analogy with the facial recognition software on the PC. An event or 'experience' took place and yet no computer consciousness. The only solid word in that line of reasoning is memory, that can be purchased at a low cost these days.
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RJG
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by RJG »

Ranvier wrote:In your interpretation of the unremarkable "subjects" (acorn squirrel machines), an 'experience' is any event taking place in "subjects" with memory, …
Not quite, but close. Our ‘non-memory friends’ (such as worms and plants) can also ‘experience’ and auto-react accordingly, but they just don’t “know” it. Without memory, there is no means to “know” (recognize) what one feels (experiences).
Ranvier wrote:...which is true for the analogy with the facial recognition software on the PC. An event or 'experience' took place and yet no computer consciousness. The only solid word in that line of reasoning is memory, that can be purchased at a low cost these days.
You make a good and interesting point, and this is the topic of many discussions. But I don't know if computers are, or can be, conscious. If I had to guess, I think two things have to happen before a computer can ‘experience’ consciousness. One -- its ‘experiences’ (reactions) must be of the same type/quality as those felt by biological beings. Secondly -- there needs to be a means of capturing/storing/replaying these ‘experiences’ within the memory system. Until all this happens, I think a computer is still just another non-conscious tool.
Tamminen
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Tamminen »

Steve3007 wrote:But, apparently, it can be referred to, as you've shown here by example. When you use that word, what is it that you are referring to? If you can answer that question, isn't there at least some sense in which you are defining consciousness, albeit in an imperfect way?
Yes, it can be referred to. We find it in reflection a´la Descartes and in seeing that there are other conscious subjects. I myself have tried to define it by saying that it is the temporal present of subjective time, but that is more like trying to describe the key structures of consciousness rather than defining it by other than itself. Heidegger described the ontological structure of Dasein using expressions like temporality and "worldhood", but he never tried to define consciousness, because he understood its fundamental nature.
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Papus79
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Papus79 »

One thing I'll say at this point - I've noticed a lot of people are more or less sharing their own philosophies, such as idealism and the like. That's fine, just that I won't be making any direct comments to these points because they're not really interfacing with the contents of my OP. I'm not saying I mind it, just understand if there are a lot of posts that I'm not responding to that I consider the content somewhat orthogonal to my proposal.

I guess if I were to consider where I'm coming from, I'm probably not exactly a materialist (I haven't made any commitments as to what 'matter' is and for the most part I tend to feel like most of the arguments on that are both interchangeable and unknowable much like I've been considering for a long time that materialism/physicalism is a somewhat vacuous concept when the whole universe is based on fields). I do tend to try and find answers though based on the mechanics of what we have and as perhaps my screen name and avatars might tend to show I'm as much up for internal empirical roads as I am external - as long as I can ultimately take what I'm able to find internally and somehow map it to the external.

That's where, though, I'm also coming up with the notion that consciousness - as it feels almost flame-like in its activity - also seems to be a holder of something like a complex/compound optionality. While I do strongly suspect that it's heavily braced by matter I don't necessarily think it's 100% bound to matter, I tend to think we still don't know what 'matter' is and some of the things I've seen throughout my life really indicate that consciousness is neither fully tethered to matter, nor does it likely fully arise from matter (I really think dynamic and stackable systems are the key here) although matter clearly gives it a scaffolding for its integrity/stability.
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The Beast
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by The Beast »

Of the many parts of the mind, consciousness is one. There is also the subconscious with the dreaming states. In addition, the unconscious like getting knock out or going under anesthesia and there is death of the mind when conscious and subconscious processes stop and they will not come back. Within the processes mentioned there is many capacities new and old relating to their functioning and intercommunication. Death of the mind is the most perplexing. It is a state of trance created by the living cells as they are alive on their own due to artificial life-support… like going under anesthesia forever… Of course many (mea culpa) would interchange unconscious and subconscious in a dance of meaning. It is understood that consciousness cannot operate 24/7. Some humans have tried it with results of losing rationality. From this result, I could manage to say that rationality is a property of consciousness and that rationality depends on known mechanisms one of which is knowledge. I could proceed with imagination (another property) to see the spectrum of possibilities which are too long for this paragraph. Consciousness as the manager of resources could assign a task… “Know thyself”
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Papus79
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Papus79 »

The Beast wrote:Of the many parts of the mind, consciousness is one. There is also the subconscious with the dreaming states.
I think this is actually what happens to self-conscious awareness as well if it's not pushed into one point, ie. the different pieces, parts, or networks start turning to their own sort of alive-but-mechanical affairs, it's part of why dream logic seems simultaneously bizarre and technical/mathematical in its nature. I think in border states a lot of what you see is the stuff that your regulatory systems keep you from seeing during the day. It makes me actually glad that I take maybe an hour of hitting the snooze button on the alarm because that enables me to keep going back and forth and catching more odd little pieces.

I'm also taking a breather from esoteric work that I'm hoping to be over soon. Dream yoga seems like it's something that would be right up my alley and I've got a great book on that, ie. Between the Gates, that I need to get started on just that I know the last endeavor (One Year Manual) was a bit of a letdown and I want to examine my motivations to make sure I don't have any rotten timber in my motivations before I get going.
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Burning ghost
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Burning ghost »

Papus -

Mysticism and more "esoteric" subjects are riddled with traps and illusions. My best recommendation from what I've seen you saying would be to look more into psychology, and especially Jung (again though, caution is needed so you are not seduced too easily.)

I would recommend "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious". Some people find it very difficult, but I think you may be of the mindset to take many of the ideas onboard without being either too dismissive or getting too carried away (at least once you've given it some time to sit in your head!)

Other than that I would suggest looking at neurogenesis and infants psychological development. Both of these fields have benefited a great deal over the past few decades due to the ease of use of video cameras. If you look into the development of infants over the first few months you'll see some very distinctive patterns (that any parent would notice too) that hold for all children. These stark outlines of early development, which can be predicted very well week by week, should hopefully give you an idea of the innate human qualities that help up discover the world around us and understand it. This is of course very useful when considering such terms as "consciousness" and "memory".

Not so long ago scientists assumed all sorts of things about the development of infants brains. Many of the things they assumed have been shown to be wrong. You'll still find today that many are still stucj in the "blank slate" idea of the human brain. We know this is false now, but some still cling to the idea regardless of the information that contradicts it.

The view of "origins" is a funny one. Better to assume things are just nascent and leave the "origin" as a placeholder in order to ground understanding.
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Papus79
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Papus79 »

Burning ghost wrote:Mysticism and more "esoteric" subjects are riddled with traps and illusions. My best recommendation from what I've seen you saying would be to look more into psychology, and especially Jung (again though, caution is needed so you are not seduced too easily.)
I tend to look at esotericism from a couple of angles, one as an active experiment and exploration (mainly to be able to cross the line between taking things on hearsay, which can sound cogent to most people no matter how wrong the assumptions are, vs. solving the puzzles myself and coming to know things properly one way or the other) and the other as finding levers to change one's way of feeling, thinking, etc.. on a long term basis with levers that wouldn't present themselves in the world around us. One of the other reasons I tend to go here - I don't think positive psychology, in the academic sense, is well developed enough yet to get the same results and over the years I've seen way too much of the easy resignation - ie. that people can't do anything with what they are, or about who they are, no free will (which I agree with but they send it toward defeatism), etc.. We're living through a really strange time where people seem to be dutifully nihilistic and that dutiful nihilism seems to to be deprecating a lot of the value in what most people really should be able to rely on - and I hope they will be able to one of these days - with respect to fields of inquiry such as psychology.

As for the traps I see them more as puzzles, things that are really worth getting under. To that extent it's as much a hobby and a way to keep a geek occupied as it is self-development.
Burning ghost wrote:I would recommend "Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious". Some people find it very difficult, but I think you may be of the mindset to take many of the ideas onboard without being either too dismissive or getting too carried away (at least once you've given it some time to sit in your head!)
TY. I know Jung is seen as one of the most credible thinkers out there at the nexus between the mystical and genetic archetypal. Jordan Peterson's dug into his work quite a bit and he seems to have extracted quite a bit of the goods in terms of making sense of our cultural narratives, stories, etc.. from a Darwinian perspective.
Burning ghost wrote:Not so long ago scientists assumed all sorts of things about the development of infants brains. Many of the things they assumed have been shown to be wrong. You'll still find today that many are still stucj in the "blank slate" idea of the human brain. We know this is false now, but some still cling to the idea regardless of the information that contradicts it.
Even more terrifying - we have a significant swath of the population who takes the ire they once had for God and religion and they've turned that against biology and genetics, standing behind some strange watered-down variant of postmodernism. They'll rebel against anything they don't want to hear and they're so strong-willed in that rebellion that they seem to be forming a sort of pseudo-Marxist authoritarian religion in college humanities, they seem to seek out HR influence in large companies, and they're pulling on the levers of power in government and law both here in the states and across the west quite aggressively. IMHO the only possible 'safe-space' from reality is death, and even there I'm not so sure.
Burning ghost wrote:The view of "origins" is a funny one. Better to assume things are just nascent and leave the "origin" as a placeholder in order to ground understanding.
I'm not exactly sure what origins you mean here. If it's with respect to my OP I guess the flow of the thread is suggesting that the description is too abstract/free-floating and needs a lot more development to really spur much conversation. I'm not going to commit myself to thinking it's right, it's just that it hit me persuasively enough that I do feel obliged to explore it to its completion and hopefully along the way I'll be able to converse about it in a way that's more portable and available to content criticism.
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Burning ghost
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Burning ghost »

I was just referring to the general concept of "origin", nothing specific.

Look forward to hearing what you post in the future. My first impression is we're reasonably similar in our views of things (I just hope not TOO much though.)

The two figures of the 20th century that stick out to me are Jung and Husserl. Sadly I think a lot of Husserl's ideas slipped when other people tried to take them on, as did many "new age" folk with Jung. Prior to both of them Nietzsche seems more and more to have been the driving force to some degree.

Anyway, blah, blah! The history of ideas is interesting stuff :)
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Atreyu
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Atreyu »

Tamminen wrote:
Atreyu wrote:So nothing that can be verbalized could be said to be consciousness, because anything for which a word has been invented is already a product of consciousness, not consciousness itself. And this shows the difficulty, the virtual impossibility, of defining consciousness. For consciousness cannot define itself until it escapes its own boundaries, comes outside of itself, for only then can it even see, let alone define, what it really is. Until it goes outside of its own boundaries, everything it perceives and cognizes will simply be a reflection if itself, much like you can only see a reflection of yourself when you look in a mirror. The reflection is not really you, it's only a image of you. Similarly, anything that can be verbalized will only be reflection of consciousness, not the thing-in-itself.
Well said. Consciousness cannot be defined or explained. I have said elsewhere that it does not even need explaining, because its being is self-evident, but you disagreed on that. Why does it need explaining although it cannot be explained? How can we get outside of consciousness in order to explain it?
I mean it cannot be explained using ordinary terminology, otherwise, we'd already have a standard accepted definition by now and would not be discussing this on a philosophy forum. It can be explained in the sense that it can be differentiated from mere "awareness". Just "being aware" is not the same as "being conscious", and the proof is that we have awareness while we're dreaming at night, while in a comatose or hypnotized state, and while in a delusional state. It's obvious that "consciousness" implies much more than simply "being aware".

As far as how we can get outside of ourselves, entire systems throughout the ages have been invented specifically for that purpose, the remnants of which we see in many practices today, such as yoga, meditation, the martial arts, tai chi, religion, occultism, the Tarot, ancient works of art (Stonehenge, the Sphinx), and many many other things. The important point here is that ordinary knowledge and methods are not sufficient. Only extraordinary (not well known, "esoteric") knowledge and methods will suffice for such an endeavor.
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Present awareness »

All definitions are based on language and all languages are based on sounds. The sound “tree” represents something we may point to outside and say “tree”.

Consciousness, is an abstract concept and we must use our own consciousness to try to define it. What is consciousness, why does it arise and where does it come from? Regardless of how we define consciousness, it will never be anything more then an abstract concept with people agreeing or disagreeing with the definition.

We all know what consciousness IS, because we experience it, but some experiences may not be put into words. It would be like trying to explain the colour blue or red, to someone whom has been blind since birth.
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Papus79
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Papus79 »

I think the reason why I have a hard time taking the mysterian approach to heart is that it doesn't seem like many things in history that we said we'd never understand or be able to do held long-term. I know that when certain kinds of knowledge are unobtainable in the interim, especially if they're politically or theologically loaded, we tend to as cultures either agree to disagree or agree to some sort of assumed agnosticism for all. While I clearly don't think consciousness is an easy to thing to get at, the last several thousands year seem to display that quite well, I really won't be surprised if more precise scientific equipment becomes available to researchers and significant clues, even breakthroughs, could come for no other reason than having the equipment.
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Re: Could this be an incisive definition for consciousness?

Post by Sy Borg »

Papus79 wrote:
Greta wrote: (Nested quote removed.)

Papus, an immediate issue. Probability fields are mathematical models, not actual realities. Electrons are said to exist in a "probability field" but they don't because probability fields don't exist.
That's the intuitive 'feel' of life - ie. that probabilities should be none other than our inability to capture data accurately or give detailed reports, so to say 80% chance of rain on Tuesday in a given area means little in the sense that it certainly will rain in certain areas, not others, each place in various degrees, and the raining or not raining thing is a clear thing. We're used to seeing that and therefore we're used to seeing probabilities as highly pre-digested material that's fed to us for public consumption by such authorities.
The probability cloud is real in terms of better representing reality than alternative models but it's still a map, a means of predicting the future. In this case, the probability cloud predicts of the immediate future of the smallest kinds of negatively charged fluctuations in the fabric of reality.

An example of how anything can be effectively mapped as a probability cloud, due to chaos and uncertainty, there would be no way of exactly predicting the future position of a water molecule in the air over a minute, but you could map the likelihoods into a probability cloud.
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