Consciousness without [the majority of] a brain?

[Consul]

There was no contradiction, monistic and dualistic mean something else in the nondual paradigm than what they mean in the dualistic paradigm. Nondualism is a different, wider form of human thinking altogether, or rather: dualistic thinking is a special case of nondual thinking.

I noticed that in addition to the dualism I formally defined as the view that the number of Xs/kinds of Xs/basic kinds of Xs is two—which can be called numerical dualism—, there is also a dualism of opposites or contraries that can be called binarism (e.g. white vs. nonwhite, white vs. black) so as not to confuse it with dualism in the former sense. Nondualism qua nonbinarism raises logical questions concerning the law of noncontradiction and the law of excluded middle.

By the way, I still haven't seen any comprehensible expression of your nondualistic/nonbinaristic solution to the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness!

[Atla]

...
By the way, I still haven't seen any comprehensible expression of your nondualistic/nonbinaristic solution to the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness!

There is no hard problem in nondualism, as we never make the original mental/material split. It's that simple, but can take some time to process.

[Consul]

There is no hard problem in nondualism, as we never make the original mental/material split. It's that simple, but can take some time to process.

But there is at least a conceptual dualism between mind and body, isn't there?

[Atla]

There is no hard problem in nondualism, as we never make the original mental/material split. It's that simple, but can take some time to process.

But there is at least a conceptual dualism between mind and body, isn't there?

One way to put is that the human mind is a part of the human body, in other words the human body is the human mind plus outer parts. And mind as in P-consciousness/fundamental subjectivity, is universal.

[Consul]

What exactly does it mean to say that consciousness C1 is "simpler" or "weaker" than consciousness C2? In what respects is C1 simpler or weaker than C2?

There are three main dimensions of (phenomenal) consciousness:
1. its experiential/phenomenal content
2. its level (or "global state"): the degree of wakefulness (alertness, arousal)
3. its form or structure: the spatiotemporal order and unity of the items which are part of the content

I'd add:
4. its metalevel—mental self-consciousness: cognitive (introspective/reflective) awareness of 1,2, or 3.

1*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that the number of (kinds of) experiences it contains or can contain (simultaneously) is lower than the one C2 contains or can contain (simultaneously).

2*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that the degree of wakefulness/alertness of C1's subject is lower than the one of C2's subject.

3*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that C1's contents are less ordered, less connected, less united than C2's contents.

4*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that C1's subject is less cognitively aware of C1's content, level, or structure than C2's subject.

I imagine that the smallest, weakest fragment of consciousness is what we think of as reflexive. Most reflexes feel like nothing mammals, whose reflexes and numerous and constant.

Consider the first sensation to appear in nature. Maybe it arrived a worm, or a microbe, or a molecule or atom. There's many opinions about that, whatever their quality, but we can still consider the first ever sensation, and for the purposes of this chat I'll assume it arrived in an organism.

In #1, the simplest C1 would be a single type of experience. Maybe a pulse or twitch.

#2 would be the weakest possible sensation, the faintest possible pulse. Just enough to be retained through selection.

#3 will not apply to individual sensations. However, the first sensations would have probably been chaotic, in that the first sensation was probably different to the first and so on.

#4 is obviously already high level consciousness, awareness of self and other minds. The sensation of being logically precedes mentality, which is an interpretation of the sensation of being.

Such is my guess, which is necessarily wrong because we famously don't even know what it's like to be a bat, let alone a microbe. Still, until a device is created that allows researchers to know what it feels like to be another entity, there's only theory and supposition.

For me, this topic is simply interesting, but the ability to perceive the contents of another's consciousness will be a critical issue in future AI research, with possible ethical ramifications.

Unless experiences are neural processes, they are externally imperceptible; and even if they are externally perceptible (with the help of neuroimaging technology), they are not externally perceptible as experiences. For externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself.

#2. Wakefulness as a state of a subject is one thing, and the intensity of an experience is another. An experience E1 can be weaker than an experience E2 in the sense being less intense, but this meaning is different from my 2*! You can be fully awake and have very feeble experiences.

#3. As for the temporal form of consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... -temporal/

#4. If by "mentality" you mean the cognitive, intellectual, or "noetic" department of the mind, I doubt that experientiality is independent of mentality. I think there is no entirely "anoetic" experiencing of experiences; that is, totally cognitively non-accessed or non-apprehended experience is non-experience.
I think the global-workspace theory of consciousness is basically correct: There is nothing experiential/phenomenal about an inner process which doesn't enter working memory and becomes a target of attention. This is true even of the most primitive subjective sensations, so phenomenal consciousness (affective consciousness) isn't independent of "access consciousness" (cognitive consciousness). There is no first-order experiential consciousness without any intellectual consciousness of it.
This is not to say that experience depends on explicit and deliberate self-reflection in the form of linguistic thought about it, in the sense that you cannot have an experience without thinking you're having it; but some degree or level of inner awareness (cognition, perception) of it through attention is necessary for its occurrence.

[Faustus5]

Fact is, you aren't scientifically literate enough to understand how there is no conflict between P-consciousness and science.

Consciousness as people with your bizarre, utterly fringe view want to understand it, is by definition impossible to explain or characterize by science. Aren't you the one who in this or another thread made the hilariously ignorant but triumphant claim that science knows nothing about it?

Again, I believe fully that people have conscious experiences. They just happen to be mundane biochemical information processing in the end and bad philosophers and New Age crackpots want them to be something more.

Scientific literacy, and understanding that it's bad to believe in X and not-X at the same time, can be useful.

You couldn't document so much as one instance of me saying x and not-x at the same time. But of course, you have a history of desperately turning to reprehensible dishonesty in characterizing people you disagree with. Quite sad, and pathetic.

[Sy Borg]

What exactly does it mean to say that consciousness C1 is "simpler" or "weaker" than consciousness C2? In what respects is C1 simpler or weaker than C2?

There are three main dimensions of (phenomenal) consciousness:
1. its experiential/phenomenal content
2. its level (or "global state"): the degree of wakefulness (alertness, arousal)
3. its form or structure: the spatiotemporal order and unity of the items which are part of the content

I'd add:
4. its metalevel—mental self-consciousness: cognitive (introspective/reflective) awareness of 1,2, or 3.

1*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that the number of (kinds of) experiences it contains or can contain (simultaneously) is lower than the one C2 contains or can contain (simultaneously).

2*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that the degree of wakefulness/alertness of C1's subject is lower than the one of C2's subject.

3*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that C1's contents are less ordered, less connected, less united than C2's contents.

4*. C1 can be said to be simpler/weaker than C2 in the sense that C1's subject is less cognitively aware of C1's content, level, or structure than C2's subject.

I imagine that the smallest, weakest fragment of consciousness is what we think of as reflexive. Most reflexes feel like nothing mammals, whose reflexes and numerous and constant.

Consider the first sensation to appear in nature. Maybe it arrived a worm, or a microbe, or a molecule or atom. There's many opinions about that, whatever their quality, but we can still consider the first ever sensation, and for the purposes of this chat I'll assume it arrived in an organism.

In #1, the simplest C1 would be a single type of experience. Maybe a pulse or twitch.

#2 would be the weakest possible sensation, the faintest possible pulse. Just enough to be retained through selection.

#3 will not apply to individual sensations. However, the first sensations would have probably been chaotic, in that the first sensation was probably different to the first and so on.

#4 is obviously already high level consciousness, awareness of self and other minds. The sensation of being logically precedes mentality, which is an interpretation of the sensation of being.

Such is my guess, which is necessarily wrong because we famously don't even know what it's like to be a bat, let alone a microbe. Still, until a device is created that allows researchers to know what it feels like to be another entity, there's only theory and supposition.

For me, this topic is simply interesting, but the ability to perceive the contents of another's consciousness will be a critical issue in future AI research, with possible ethical ramifications.

Unless experiences are neural processes, they are externally imperceptible; and even if they are externally perceptible (with the help of neuroimaging technology), they are not externally perceptible as experiences. For externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself.

#2. Wakefulness as a state of a subject is one thing, and the intensity of an experience is another. An experience E1 can be weaker than an experience E2 in the sense being less intense, but this meaning is different from my 2*! You can be fully awake and have very feeble experiences.

#3. As for the temporal form of consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... -temporal/

#4. If by "mentality" you mean the cognitive, intellectual, or "noetic" department of the mind, I doubt that experientiality is independent of mentality. I think there is no entirely "anoetic" experiencing of experiences; that is, totally cognitively non-accessed or non-apprehended experience is non-experience.
I think the global-workspace theory of consciousness is basically correct: There is nothing experiential/phenomenal about an inner process which doesn't enter working memory and becomes a target of attention. This is true even of the most primitive subjective sensations, so phenomenal consciousness (affective consciousness) isn't independent of "access consciousness" (cognitive consciousness). There is no first-order experiential consciousness without any intellectual consciousness of it.
This is not to say that experience depends on explicit and deliberate self-reflection in the form of linguistic thought about it, in the sense that you cannot have an experience without thinking you're having it; but some degree or level of inner awareness (cognition, perception) of it through attention is necessary for its occurrence.

Re #1: "externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself."

There was an episode of Black Mirror, where a medical company had developed a device that allowed doctors to feel what their patients felt as a diagnostic tool. Of course everything goes pear-shaped, but utilising our other senses - feeding data to them - will broaden our range of inquiry. Consider how LIGO has expanded cosmologists' ability to better understand what happens in space by utilising gravity waves. There's also been sonic analysis of wavelengths emitted by cosmic objects, which can sometimes give a clearer, more visceral, sense of what is going on. Immersive VR technology may be helpful. At this stage we know very much less than is generally claimed on philosophy forums.

Re #2: When it comes to the first ever sensation felt by biology, the idea of wakefulness and sleep is moot. It would perhaps be a very, very weak sensation, or perhaps completely overpowering, being unregulated.

Re #3: Consciousness happens in time because everything happens in time. It may have initially come in short flashes.

Re #4: Once you have a mind that is aware of itself, you are surely a very long way from the first ever moment of consciousness. That is an example of the trouble that humans have in accepting that consciousness can be anything other than a variant on humanlike consciousness.

It remains to be seen if the global workspace theory gets to the bottom of consciousness, or just the bottom of p-consciousness at a level that humans consider worthwhile.

[Atla]

Fact is, you aren't scientifically literate enough to understand how there is no conflict between P-consciousness and science.

Consciousness as people with your bizarre, utterly fringe view want to understand it, is by definition impossible to explain or characterize by science. Aren't you the one who in this or another thread made the hilariously ignorant but triumphant claim that science knows nothing about it?

Again, I believe fully that people have conscious experiences. They just happen to be mundane biochemical information processing in the end and bad philosophers and New Age crackpots want them to be something more.

Scientific literacy, and understanding that it's bad to believe in X and not-X at the same time, can be useful.

You couldn't document so much as one instance of me saying x and not-x at the same time. But of course, you have a history of desperately turning to reprehensible dishonesty in characterizing people you disagree with. Quite sad, and pathetic.

And again in this comment you both accepted and rejected P-consciousness. You have no idea what you're talking about and you have no idea what I was and wasn't talking about. Which again leeds to totally dishonest accusations from you, but you say nothing of substance, why are you even here?

[Atla]

The situation is so bad on philosophy forums that people don't even realize that I keep stating a fact when I say that nondualism is correct. It's fact unless you can prove otherwise. That's not a theory or belief or an opinion. You people have years of catching up to do, it's philosophy 101.

Nondualism is as much a theory or belief as the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a theory or belief.

[Consul]

But there is at least a conceptual dualism between mind and body, isn't there?

One way to put is that the human mind is a part of the human body, in other words the human body is the human mind plus outer parts. And mind as in P-consciousness/fundamental subjectivity, is universal.

QUOTE>
"[T]he following conclusions can be drawn about the basic Buddhist view of the relations between the mental and the physical. First, the mental and the physical are categories of event which are phenomenologically irreducibly different. Second, these events are not attributes or properties of any substance; to give an account of their causal functions and interrelations is to give an exhaustive account of what there is in the world. Third, certain kinds of causal interaction between the mental and the physical are envisaged, but no event of one class may ever come into existence solely as the result of the occurrence of an event of another class. In sum, we have a non-substantivist event-based interactionist psycho-physical dualism."

(Griffiths, Paul J. On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1986. p. 112)
<QUOTE

By the way, the Buddhist concept of an event or process lacking a substantial substrate is unintelligible to me. There can be no flowing without something that flows. A river isn't a "pure flowing", a flowing of nothing but a flowing of something, viz. water, which—as a kind of stuff—is the substantial substrate of the flowing by being that which is flowing.

[Consul]

The situation is so bad on philosophy forums that people don't even realize that I keep stating a fact when I say that nondualism is correct. It's fact unless you can prove otherwise. That's not a theory or belief or an opinion. You people have years of catching up to do, it's philosophy 101.

Nondualism is as much a theory or belief as the non-existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a theory or belief.

I wish I knew what nondualism about mind/body (mind/brain) is!

Since this is off-topic in this thread, see: viewtopic.php?p=389599#p389599

[Faustus5]

And again in this comment you both accepted and rejected P-consciousness. You have no idea what you're talking about and you have no idea what I was and wasn't talking about.

Nope. You're hallucinating again, which is really all you're good at. Why are you even here?

[Consul]

Unless experiences are neural processes, they are externally imperceptible; and even if they are externally perceptible (with the help of neuroimaging technology), they are not externally perceptible as experiences. For externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself.

#2. Wakefulness as a state of a subject is one thing, and the intensity of an experience is another. An experience E1 can be weaker than an experience E2 in the sense being less intense, but this meaning is different from my 2*! You can be fully awake and have very feeble experiences.

#3. As for the temporal form of consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... -temporal/

#4. If by "mentality" you mean the cognitive, intellectual, or "noetic" department of the mind, I doubt that experientiality is independent of mentality. I think there is no entirely "anoetic" experiencing of experiences; that is, totally cognitively non-accessed or non-apprehended experience is non-experience.
I think the global-workspace theory of consciousness is basically correct: There is nothing experiential/phenomenal about an inner process which doesn't enter working memory and becomes a target of attention. This is true even of the most primitive subjective sensations, so phenomenal consciousness (affective consciousness) isn't independent of "access consciousness" (cognitive consciousness). There is no first-order experiential consciousness without any intellectual consciousness of it.
This is not to say that experience depends on explicit and deliberate self-reflection in the form of linguistic thought about it, in the sense that you cannot have an experience without thinking you're having it; but some degree or level of inner awareness (cognition, perception) of it through attention is necessary for its occurrence.

Re #1: "externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself."

There was an episode of Black Mirror, where a medical company had developed a device that allowed doctors to feel what their patients felt as a diagnostic tool. Of course everything goes pear-shaped, but utilising our other senses - feeding data to them - will broaden our range of inquiry. Consider how LIGO has expanded cosmologists' ability to better understand what happens in space by utilising gravity waves. There's also been sonic analysis of wavelengths emitted by cosmic objects, which can sometimes give a clearer, more visceral, sense of what is going on. Immersive VR technology may be helpful. At this stage we know very much less than is generally claimed on philosophy forums.

It's one thing to feel an experience in myself which is qualitatively identical to (but numerically different from) an experience someone else feels, and it's another thing to externally observe that experience within the other subject's brain.

By the way, Herbert Feigl devised the idea of an "autocerebroscope":

QUOTE>
"…with the help of an autocerebroscope. We may fancy a 'compleat autocerebroscopist' who while introspectively attending to, e.g., his increasing feelings of anger (or love, hatred, embarrassment, exultation, or to the experience of a tune-as-heard, etc.) would simultaneously be observing a vastly magnified visual 'picture' of his own cerebral nerve currents on a projection screen. (This piece of science fiction is conceived in analogy to the fluoroscope with the help of which a person may watch, e.g., his own heart action.) Along the lines of the proposed realistic interpretation he would take the shifting patterns visible on the screen as evidence for his own brain processes. Assuming the empirical core of parallelism or isomorphism, he would find that a 'crescendo' in his anger—or in the melody he heard—would correspond to a 'crescendo' in the "correlated" cortical processes. (Similarly for 'accelerandos', 'ri-tardandos', etc. Adrian's and McCulloch's experiments seem to have demonstrated a surprisingly simple isomorphism of the shapes of geometrical figures in the visual field with the patterns of raised electric potentials in the occipital lobe of the cortex.) According to the identity thesis the directly experienced qualia and configurations are the realities-in-themselves that are denoted by the neurophysiological descriptions. This identification of the denotata is therefore empirical, and the most direct evidence conceivably attainable would be that of the autocerebroscopically observable regularities."

(Feigl, Herbert. The 'Mental' and the 'Physical': The Essay and a Postscript. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1967. pp. 89-90)
<QUOTE

Re #2: When it comes to the first ever sensation felt by biology, the idea of wakefulness and sleep is moot. It would perhaps be a very, very weak sensation, or perhaps completely overpowering, being unregulated.

The wake/sleep cycle isn't an exclusively human phenomenon:

Sleep in non-human animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_in_ ... an_animals
Circadian rhythm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm

QUOTE>
"Circadian rhythms are found in nearly every living thing on earth. They help organisms time their daily and seasonal activities so that they are synchronized to the external world and the predictable changes in the environment. These biological clocks provide a cross-cutting theme in biology and they are incredibly important. They influence everything, from the way growing sunflowers track the sun from east to west, to the migration timing of monarch butterflies, to the morning peaks in cardiac arrest in humans.
Despite the diversity of life on our planet, there are many similarities in the way in which circadian rhythms are generated and synchronized to the solar cycle. There is a molecular feedback loop—the transcription–translation feedback loop (TTFL)—that underpins all these processes, and our understanding of this molecular clockwork provide the best example to date of how genes and their protein products interact to generate complex behaviour.
Circadian rhythms are found in bacteria, algae, fungi, plants, and animals, but we have had to concentrate our discussion on mammals. Although rats and mice are familiar, the terminology used to describe the circadian rhythms in these species may be alien to readers, and it is this terminology that makes some of the diagrams seem daunting, but the concepts are, we hope, much easier to follow."

"The regular cycle of sleep and wakefulness is perhaps the most obvious 24-hour pattern of behaviour.
…
Almost all life shows a 24-hour pattern of activity and rest, as we live on a planet that revolves once every 24 hours causing profound changes in light, temperature, and food availability."

(Foster, Russell G., and Leon Kreitzman. Circadian Rhythms: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.)
<QUOTE

Re #4: Once you have a mind that is aware of itself, you are surely a very long way from the first ever moment of consciousness. That is an example of the trouble that humans have in accepting that consciousness can be anything other than a variant on humanlike consciousness.

It remains to be seen if the global workspace theory gets to the bottom of consciousness, or just the bottom of p-consciousness at a level that humans consider worthwhile.

The point is that there are good scientific reasons to doubt that the (phenomenally) conscious mind is independent of the cognitive mind. The idea of "pure", "virginal" experience which doesn't depend for its occurrence on being accessed, apprehended, detected, or discerned by any cognitive function seems to be a metaphysical myth. Even the most primitive experience seems to require a pretty complex cognitive architecture.

"Cognitive function is a broad term that refers to mental processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information, and reasoning. Cognitive functions include the domains of perception, memory, learning, attention, decision making, and language abilities."

Source: https://link.springer.com/referencework ... 0753-5_426

QUOTE>
"My opinion is that Chalmers swapped the labels: it is the 'easy' problem that is hard, while the hard problem just seems hard because it engages ill-defined intuitions. Once our intuition is educated by cognitive neuroscience and computer simulations, Chalmers’s hard problem will evaporate. The hypothetical concept of qualia, pure mental experience detached from any information-processing role, will be viewed as a peculiar idea of the prescientific era, much like vitalism—the misguided nineteenth-century thought that, however much detail we gather about the chemical mechanisms of living organisms, we will never account for the unique qualities of life. Modern molecular biology shattered this belief, by showing how the molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton. Likewise, the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes."

(Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking/Penguin, 2014. p. 262)
<QUOTE

However, I disagree with Dehaene when he says that "consciousness reduces to what the workspace does: it makes relevant information globally accessible and flexibly broadcasts it to a variety of brain systems." (p. 168)

For if access consciousness or cognitive access is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, it alone may not be sufficient for it; and if it isn't, there is an extra explanandum: What makes the neural information in the global workspace = working memory experiential/phenomenal information? – Answering this question merely by referring to the functional aspect of global accessibility/availability is unsatisfying, because it seems conceivable that the information content of working memory has this functional feature and yet lacks the experiential feature, without which there is no phenomenal consciousness.

So even if the experiential content of phenomenal consciousness is identical with the globally accessible/available information content of working memory, and its accessibility/availability to various neurocognitive modules in the brain is a necessary condition of phenomenal consciousness, it doesn't seem sufficient. Phenomenal consciousness may depend on access consciousness, but it isn't reducible to it, because there is an important distinction between objective neural information and subjective neural information in the form of experience.

A mental/neural state is access-conscious iff its information content is accessible or available to (most or many) cognitive modules or processors in the brain (such as the one responsible for the human capacity for introspective reports).

However, the term "access consciousness" (which was coined by Ned Block) may be regarded as a misnomer, because an access-conscious state as such is nothing more than a state with an externally accessible informational content; and if such an access-conscious state isn't also a phenomenally conscious state with an experiential content, what's still conscious about it? Mere access consciousness can be built into AI robots which are phenomenally nonconscious zombie agents.

QUOTE>
"[T]his redefinition of information access as “access consciousness” risks inflating a brain function to a conscious status that it does not possess. Information access and information availability have been widely recognised aspects of human information processing since the advent of cognitive psychology in the 1960’s, and it is true that information which enters phenomenal consciousness can be accessed, rehearsed, entered into long-term memory, used for the guidance of action and so on. However, the processes that actually enable information access, rehearsal, transfer to long-term memory and guidance of action are not themselves conscious (if they were there would be no need to subject such processes to detailed investigation within cognitive psychological research—see Velmans, 1991a). In short, “access consciousness” is not actually a form of consciousness. The conscious part of “access consciousness” is just phenomenal consciousness, and the processes that enable access to items in phenomenal consciousness are not conscious at all."

(Velmans, Max. "How to Define Consciousness – And How Not to Define Consciousness." 2009. Reprinted in Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness: Selected Works of Max Velmans, 23-36. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. p. 28)
———
"Functionalists in particular try to reduce consciousness to some input-output function or causal role in the control of behaviour. Along the functionalist lines of thought, consciousness has been defined as 'access consciousness'. Access refers to the output function of conscious information: Consciousness is the type of information that accesses many other cognitive systems – motor systems – and thereby also is able to guide or control external behaviour, especially verbal reports about the contents of (reflective) consciousness. According to the functionalist definition, then, conscious information is only the information in the brain that fulfils the access function. 'Access' refers to global informational access, especially the access to output systems within the human cognitive system.

If consciousness is identified with the global access function of information, the ability to report the contents of consciousness verbally or to respond externally to stimuli is at least implied as necessary for consciousness, because 'access' generally means access to output systems. Furthermore, the access definition of consciousness reduces consciousness to a certain type of information processing (or input-output function) and hence suffers from all the same problems as functionalism does as a theory of consciousness. It leaves out qualia, and it rejects the possibility that there could be pure phenomenal consciousness that is independent of selective attention, reflective consciousness, verbal report or control of output mechanisms."

(Revonsuo, Antti. Consciousness: The Science of Subjectivity. New York: Psychology Press, 2010. p. 95)
<QUOTE

[Sy Borg]

Unless experiences are neural processes, they are externally imperceptible; and even if they are externally perceptible (with the help of neuroimaging technology), they are not externally perceptible as experiences. For externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself.

#2. Wakefulness as a state of a subject is one thing, and the intensity of an experience is another. An experience E1 can be weaker than an experience E2 in the sense being less intense, but this meaning is different from my 2*! You can be fully awake and have very feeble experiences.

#3. As for the temporal form of consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... -temporal/

#4. If by "mentality" you mean the cognitive, intellectual, or "noetic" department of the mind, I doubt that experientiality is independent of mentality. I think there is no entirely "anoetic" experiencing of experiences; that is, totally cognitively non-accessed or non-apprehended experience is non-experience.
I think the global-workspace theory of consciousness is basically correct: There is nothing experiential/phenomenal about an inner process which doesn't enter working memory and becomes a target of attention. This is true even of the most primitive subjective sensations, so phenomenal consciousness (affective consciousness) isn't independent of "access consciousness" (cognitive consciousness). There is no first-order experiential consciousness without any intellectual consciousness of it.
This is not to say that experience depends on explicit and deliberate self-reflection in the form of linguistic thought about it, in the sense that you cannot have an experience without thinking you're having it; but some degree or level of inner awareness (cognition, perception) of it through attention is necessary for its occurrence.

Re #1: "externally perceiving an experience had by somebody else is unlike experiencing it oneself."

There was an episode of Black Mirror, where a medical company had developed a device that allowed doctors to feel what their patients felt as a diagnostic tool. Of course everything goes pear-shaped, but utilising our other senses - feeding data to them - will broaden our range of inquiry. Consider how LIGO has expanded cosmologists' ability to better understand what happens in space by utilising gravity waves. There's also been sonic analysis of wavelengths emitted by cosmic objects, which can sometimes give a clearer, more visceral, sense of what is going on. Immersive VR technology may be helpful. At this stage we know very much less than is generally claimed on philosophy forums.

It's one thing to feel an experience in myself which is qualitatively identical to (but numerically different from) an experience someone else feels, and it's another thing to externally observe that experience within the other subject's brain.

By the way, Herbert Feigl devised the idea of an "autocerebroscope":

QUOTE
"…with the help of an autocerebroscope. We may fancy a 'compleat autocerebroscopist' who while introspectively attending to, e.g., his increasing feelings of anger (or love, hatred, embarrassment, exultation, or to the experience of a tune-as-heard, etc.) would simultaneously be observing a vastly magnified visual 'picture' of his own cerebral nerve currents on a projection screen. (This piece of science fiction is conceived in analogy to the fluoroscope with the help of which a person may watch, e.g., his own heart action.) Along the lines of the proposed realistic interpretation he would take the shifting patterns visible on the screen as evidence for his own brain processes. Assuming the empirical core of parallelism or isomorphism, he would find that a 'crescendo' in his anger—or in the melody he heard—would correspond to a 'crescendo' in the "correlated" cortical processes. (Similarly for 'accelerandos', 'ri-tardandos', etc. Adrian's and McCulloch's experiments seem to have demonstrated a surprisingly simple isomorphism of the shapes of geometrical figures in the visual field with the patterns of raised electric potentials in the occipital lobe of the cortex.) According to the identity thesis the directly experienced qualia and configurations are the realities-in-themselves that are denoted by the neurophysiological descriptions. This identification of the denotata is therefore empirical, and the most direct evidence conceivably attainable would be that of the autocerebroscopically observable regularities."

(Feigl, Herbert. The 'Mental' and the 'Physical': The Essay and a Postscript. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1967. pp. 89-90)
QUOTE

Ideally researchers would not limit themselves to just visual cues. Vision is more important for humans than for most other species. So we have a skewed starting position when we considering what it's like to be a different kind of organism. It's easy to empathise to at least some small extent with very intelligent organisms and we can assume that their kind of consciousness will share many attributes with ours. They are more relatable.

Even today, numerous experts claim that insects would not experience their lives at all, they are "biological robots". The fact is, if other organisms are considered to be "biological robots" then so are we, in which case subjective experience can be treated as unimportant, a view that treats ethics as a game rather than a serious field.

Re #2: When it comes to the first ever sensation felt by biology, the idea of wakefulness and sleep is moot. It would perhaps be a very, very weak sensation, or perhaps completely overpowering, being unregulated.

The wake/sleep cycle isn't an exclusively human phenomenon:

Sleep in non-human animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_in_ ... an_animals
Circadian rhythm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm

When considering the first ever sensation felt in the biosphere, we must discard evolved traits. At some point in evolution, an organism felt its environment for the first time. At this stage - the first moment of sensation, cycles had no time to evolve.

Re #4: Once you have a mind that is aware of itself, you are surely a very long way from the first ever moment of consciousness. That is an example of the trouble that humans have in accepting that consciousness can be anything other than a variant on humanlike consciousness.

It remains to be seen if the global workspace theory gets to the bottom of consciousness, or just the bottom of p-consciousness at a level that humans consider worthwhile.

The point is that there are good scientific reasons to doubt that the (phenomenally) conscious mind is independent of the cognitive mind. The idea of "pure", "virginal" experience which doesn't depend for its occurrence on being accessed, apprehended, detected, or discerned by any cognitive function seems to be a metaphysical myth. Even the most primitive experience seems to require a pretty complex cognitive architecture.

These are suppositions. Maybe they are right, maybe not.

Sensation without cognition seems impossible to humans because cognition is central to our sense of self and sense of being. So we assume that our consciousness is an example on which we can assess other minds. Assume. To humans, it seems that much simpler organisms experience nothing at all, and then use that most misleading of analogies, "biological machines". Machines imitate biology, not the other way around, so such a metaphor is tainted by a basic category error. As stated, if other organisms do all of their intelligent things as "machines", then so do we.

"Cognitive function is a broad term that refers to mental processes involved in the acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information, and reasoning. Cognitive functions include the domains of perception, memory, learning, attention, decision making, and language abilities."

Source: https://link.springer.com/referencework ... 0753-5_426

And it is light years from the first sensation felt in the biosphere.

"My opinion is that Chalmers swapped the labels: it is the 'easy' problem that is hard, while the hard problem just seems hard because it engages ill-defined intuitions. Once our intuition is educated by cognitive neuroscience and computer simulations, Chalmers’s hard problem will evaporate. The hypothetical concept of qualia, pure mental experience detached from any information-processing role, will be viewed as a peculiar idea of the prescientific era, much like vitalism—the misguided nineteenth-century thought that, however much detail we gather about the chemical mechanisms of living organisms, we will never account for the unique qualities of life. Modern molecular biology shattered this belief, by showing how the molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton. Likewise, the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes."

(Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking/Penguin, 2014. p. 262)
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However, I disagree with Dehaene when he says that "consciousness reduces to what the workspace does: it makes relevant information globally accessible and flexibly broadcasts it to a variety of brain systems." (p. 168)

For if access consciousness or cognitive access is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, it alone may not be sufficient for it; and if it isn't, there is an extra explanandum: What makes the neural information in the global workspace = working memory experiential/phenomenal information? – Answering this question merely by referring to the functional aspect of global accessibility/availability is unsatisfying, because it seems conceivable that the information content of working memory has this functional feature and yet lacks the experiential feature, without which there is no phenomenal consciousness.

So even if the experiential content of phenomenal consciousness is identical with the globally accessible/available information content of working memory, and its accessibility/availability to various neurocognitive modules in the brain is a necessary condition of phenomenal consciousness, it doesn't seem sufficient. Phenomenal consciousness may depend on access consciousness, but it isn't reducible to it, because there is an important distinction between objective neural information and subjective neural information in the form of experience.

A mental/neural state is access-conscious iff its information content is accessible or available to (most or many) cognitive modules or processors in the brain (such as the one responsible for the human capacity for introspective reports).

Microbes digest food without a stomach or intestines, and they sense their environments without neurons. Given that nature tends to find multiple ways of solving survival problems, it seems rather "unnatural" that the brain would be the only way that organisms can experience their environments. There are multiple ways to digest food, multiple ways to clean out waste, multiple means of locomotion, multiple means of sensing. The brain is clearly the peak object used by organisms for cognition, but I question the usual assumption that it's the only possible means of experiencing.

[NickGaspar]

I'm not one of them! I don't believe in ontological emergence.

Me, either. The idea that consciousness has any non-physical properties is about as dumb and evidence-free an idea as anyone has ever had in philosophy.

My basic ontological argument against ontological emergence (which was originally devised by John Heil):

Imagine a simple (noncomposite) property Z and two distinct simple (noncomposite) material objects x and y. If Z is emergent, then it isn't had by x alone or by y alone, but by x+y collectively: Z(x+y).
Where is Z? It is neither wholly in x nor wholly in y, since it would then be a non-emergent property of x alone or y alone; and it is neither partly in x nor partly in y, since it doesn't have any spatially separable parts that can be at different places (where x is and where y is). If Z is neither wholly nor partly in x, and neither wholly nor partly in y, then it is neither wholly nor partly in x+y either, which means it isn't in x+y at all, in which case Z isn't an emergent property of x+y. There is no place for Z to be as an emergent property; and if there isn't, there can be no such emergent property as Z. This example can be generalized to any number >2 of objects said to collectively have some simple emergent property, so it's a general argument against the possibility of ontologically emergent properties.

Footnote: My argument presupposes Aristotelian immanentism about properties—as opposed to Platonic transcendentalism, according to which properties instantiated by objects in space aren't themselves anywhere in space.

Your basic ontological argument against ontological emergence collapse by a simple direct observation.
Take atoms H and O two highly combustible gas-elements,let them bind in a common molecule (H2O) and a. see what happened to their previous properties b. identify their new properties
Then try learning about ALL the amazing properties of water that can't be explained by looking at its constituent parts.(liquidity, fire extinguishing properties, reversed expanding properties , surface tension etc etc etc .)
This is what matter is does....this is what is capable of. Emergence is an essential quality of matter.

All the above " x y z " and 2000 years old philosophical failed views etc is a pseudo philosophical attempt to avoid looking directly to the facts of reality. of course ...this is only my opinion, which is supported by objective observations...