Is consciousness really the mystery it seems?

[Pattern-chaser]

...could this be because the brain generates and maintains the mind, but that most of the mind is not involved in/with the 'conscious mind' or consciousness? Most of our minds are non-conscious; the conscious mind is just one part of a whole mind.

What is the difference between a nonconscious mental event in or state of the brain and a nonconscious nonmental one?

I think all nonconscious 'events' are mental, unless we split hairs and focus on the hind-brain, where much of its activity is most usefully described as electro-biochemical?

[Pattern-chaser]

After enough data has been gathered it should become increasingly possible to predict the brain states induced by novel stimuli, or at least determine probabilities.

Given our current knowledge of 'brain states', I think this still leaves a HUGE chasm between these close-to-the-metal brain states and mind/consciousness. It's like the difference between Microsoft Word as a document-processor, and as an executable collection of bytes, but probably quite a lot larger. It's too big a gap to span in one go. A lot more work will be necessary before empirical biological observations (at the 'bottom') meet our more abstract concepts like 'mind' (at the 'top').

[GE Morton]

"Why does anything exist?" is ground zero but, since everything has a precondition (as far as we know) then reality as we know it had a precondition, which ultimately leads to infinite regress. So, logically, there has always been something and our current reality is our particular something.

That was Nozick's argument and conclusion, and that of many others, I'm sure. (Nozick credits his argument to his 9 year-old daughter). But it doesn't answer the "why" question.

With the ultimate existential question now sorted out (haha), we can think of consciousness - subjectivity - as phenomena that either emerged from preconditions or has always been. Given the difficult most of us have in imagining subjectivity in a young universe full of radiation, plasma and dust, we figure it's emergent.

Yes, it is emergent, in the non-controversial sense that fire "emerges" when fuel, oxygen, and spark are brought together, or Cherenkov radiation emerges when a charged particle is accelerated to a speed faster than light in a dialectric medium (such as water). These effects are, of course, reducible to the underlying physics of the constituent elements of the process. But in the philosophically controversial sense of non-reducible emergence, saying the phenomenon is "emergent" is saying nothing more than, "It just happens." It is not an explanation.

If it emerged, then it emerged from something rather like it, but that "something" would lack the key distinguishing qualities of the phenomenon. My guess is reflexes, like the responses of microbes, eg. spasming or writhing when bitten. We spasm and writhe when bitten too - but not necessarily. New layers are added to this basic "subroutine" that might go like this:

IF Attacker = a, b or c (species) THEN Retreat
IF Bite Force > 𝑥 THEN Retreat
IF Bite Force ≤ 𝑥 THEN Fight Back

In mammals there would be many, many steps. The "Retreat" subroutine itself has many options for intelligent animals - up a tree, behind a tree, which tree - or bush?, and so on. Do you retreat slowly, facing the attacker as one would with a bear or wild dogs or would you bolt, as one might if facing an aggressive snake, crocodile or large monitor. How far do you retreat? What terrain and distance do you feel you can handle?

Well, emergence of that sort is reducible. So you are left either with physicalism or no explanation.

[GE Morton]

Actually, the mind according to cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience comprises both conscious processes and nonconscious ones. However, there is the basic question of the scope of the concept of a mind or mentality. Conscious (experiential) processes are surely mental ones (which is not to say that they are irreducibly nonphysical!), but what is still mental about nonconscious processes in the brain? What is and makes the difference between the nonconscious mental and the nonconscious nonmental? For example, so-called propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires are usually regarded as nonconscious mental states, but what exactly is distinctively mental about them when there is nothing experiential about them?

Good questions, which illustrate the ambiguities of those words ("mind" and "mental"). One thing to note is that those two terms are not necessarily co-extensive, i.e., "mental," as commonly used both colloquially and professionally, has a broader scope than "mind." Your quote from Baars contains an example: "Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our Mental Processes." But then, "More and more evidence is providing support for the notion that it is our unconscious processing that forms the overwhelming majority of brain functions."

Brain functions, not "minds."

With regard to memories and dispositional attitudes, though most would agree those are "mental" phenomena, they are not commonly assumed to be components of "mind" until one becomes conscious of them. Hence we have such phrases as, "That brings to mind an experience I had several years ago in Borneo . . .", "I didn't realize how prejudiced I was until . . ." I.e., things are "brought to mind" that weren't there before (though they existed before).

But as I said to Pattern-chaser, its only a terminological question.

[GE Morton]

P.S.

Consul . . .

Another thing to keep in mind is that memories, and probably dispositional attitudes as as well, are reducible to brain processes, at least in principle, while qualia are not. The former mental phenomena don't present the "Hard Problem."

[PoeticUniverse]

But in the philosophically controversial sense of non-reducible emergence, saying the phenomenon is "emergent" is saying nothing more than, "It just happens." It is not an explanation.

"Non-reducible" is suggesting strong emergence, as if new properties come to be at certain levels of organization, but I think it's more like that they become available since the potential for them had to already be inherent. It could be as simple as "more is better" for then more connections can be, such as the case with neurons.

So you are left either with physicalism or no explanation.

I would ever go with physicalism because that surrounds the occurrence of what is novel in that it wasn't there at all long ago and now it is. It's hard to explain what one cannot easily get at.

My guess for qualia is that either they are the maps made by the brain that become the territory of our inner reality or that the brain invented its own internal language of symbols that culminated in its ultimate symbol of qualia. But how does it become, really? Chalmers thinks that it is a fundamental property that information can be represented in two ways: qualia and neurological.

[Sy Borg]

After enough data has been gathered it should become increasingly possible to predict the brain states induced by novel stimuli, or at least determine probabilities.

Given our current knowledge of 'brain states', I think this still leaves a HUGE chasm between these close-to-the-metal brain states and mind/consciousness. It's like the difference between Microsoft Word as a document-processor, and as an executable collection of bytes, but probably quite a lot larger. It's too big a gap to span in one go. A lot more work will be necessary before empirical biological observations (at the 'bottom') meet our more abstract concepts like 'mind' (at the 'top').

As noted more than once, neuroscience is a relatively new field. That is why I think the conclusions of many today, being based on today's neuroscience's relatively meagre findings, are premature.

People think it's just a matter of telling people to imagine a red square or a green triangle and then taking the measures, but that's akin to expecting to build a skyscraper with a bricks and two rubber bands. It will probably require thousands or even millions of tests to be processed in supercomputers.

[Sy Borg]

"Why does anything exist?" is ground zero but, since everything has a precondition (as far as we know) then reality as we know it had a precondition, which ultimately leads to infinite regress. So, logically, there has always been something and our current reality is our particular something.

That was Nozick's argument and conclusion, and that of many others, I'm sure. (Nozick credits his argument to his 9 year-old daughter). :-) But it doesn't answer the "why" question.

Since nothingness, by definition, cannot exist we are left with an eternal, ever-changing something.

Why is there an eternal, ever-changing something, one may ask. Because there is no possible alternative, in an anthropic sense.

With the ultimate existential question now sorted out (haha), we can think of consciousness - subjectivity - as phenomena that either emerged from preconditions or has always been. Given the difficult most of us have in imagining subjectivity in a young universe full of radiation, plasma and dust, we figure it's emergent.

Yes, it is emergent, in the non-controversial sense that fire "emerges" when fuel, oxygen, and spark are brought together, or Cherenkov radiation emerges when a charged particle is accelerated to a speed faster than light in a dialectric medium (such as water). These effects are, of course, reducible to the underlying physics of the constituent elements of the process. But in the philosophically controversial sense of non-reducible emergence, saying the phenomenon is "emergent" is saying nothing more than, "It just happens." It is not an explanation.

Like everything else, mentality is logically an extrapolation of what came before. So numerous reactions combined to become reflexes, and numerous reflexes combined to become consciousness.

If it emerged, then it emerged from something rather like it, but that "something" would lack the key distinguishing qualities of the phenomenon. My guess is reflexes, like the responses of microbes, eg. spasming or writhing when bitten. We spasm and writhe when bitten too - but not necessarily. New layers are added to this basic "subroutine" that might go like this:

IF Attacker = a, b or c (species) THEN Retreat
IF Bite Force > 𝑥 THEN Retreat
IF Bite Force ≤ 𝑥 THEN Fight Back

In mammals there would be many, many steps. The "Retreat" subroutine itself has many options for intelligent animals - up a tree, behind a tree, which tree - or bush?, and so on. Do you retreat slowly, facing the attacker as one would with a bear or wild dogs or would you bolt, as one might if facing an aggressive snake, crocodile or large monitor. How far do you retreat? What terrain and distance do you feel you can handle?

Well, emergence of that sort is reducible. So you are left either with physicalism or no explanation.

What are the credible alternatives?

[GE Morton]

"Non-reducible" is suggesting strong emergence, as if new properties come to be at certain levels of organization, but I think it's more like that they become available since the potential for them had to already be inherent.

But that is not saying anything. Saying that firewood has "the potential" to produce fire is not an explanation of how the fire is produced. Nearly everything has the potential to do something, become something else, or produce something. That tells us nothing about why anything actually happens.

I would ever go with physicalism because that surrounds the occurrence of what is novel in that it wasn't there at all long ago and now it is. It's hard to explain what one cannot easily get at.

Yes, that is the problem --- qualia are not accessible to scientific analysis. That makes explaining them impossible.

[GE Morton]

I should have qualified that, said, "It makes it impossible to explain them scientifically."

[John_Jacquard]

"Non-reducible" is suggesting strong emergence, as if new properties come to be at certain levels of organization, but I think it's more like that they become available since the potential for them had to already be inherent.

But that is not saying anything. Saying that firewood has "the potential" to produce fire is not an explanation of how the fire is produced. Nearly everything has the potential to do something, become something else, or produce something. That tells us nothing about why anything actually happens.

I would ever go with physicalism because that surrounds the occurrence of what is novel in that it wasn't there at all long ago and now it is. It's hard to explain what one cannot easily get at.

Yes, that is the problem --- qualia are not accessible to scientific analysis. That makes explaining them impossible.

To " explain " something means to use symbols to describe a pattern of information.

( what is the reason reality has this attribute, since a symbol is arbitrary with no literal connection to the information component?

Two things with absolutely no connection
( symbol representing information)

What about reality makes this coherent?

[Sculptor1]

The journey can never explain the vehicle.
We are only conscious of a mystery. If we were not conscious there would be no mystery.

[GE Morton]

To " explain " something means to use symbols to describe a pattern of information.

Well, no. The use of "symbols to describe a pattern of information" would apply to all written descriptions of things or states of affairs: "The sun rose at 6:25 AM today" is not an explanation of why the sun rises.

An explanation is verbal description of the causal chain leading from event A to event B, listing the necessary and sufficient conditions for producing B given A.

( what is the reason reality has this attribute, since a symbol is arbitrary with no literal connection to the information component?

I'm not sure what "attribute" you have in mind. Our descriptions or explanations of things are not attributes of those things.

[GE Morton]

Like everything else, mentality is logically an extrapolation of what came before. So numerous reactions combined to become reflexes, and numerous reflexes combined to become consciousness.

Your first sentence there is essentially true with respect to consciousness (as defined behaviorally), but it is not true with respect to qualia. There is no logical path from observable neural phenomena to qualia (that is the subject of the extensive "philosophical zombie" literature).

I haven't seen any work on this subject proposing that consciousness results from combinations of reflexes (which doesn't mean there isn't any). Most approaches view it as resulting from evolution of higher levels of abstraction and integration.

[Well, emergence of that sort is reducible. So you are left either with physicalism or no explanation.

What are the credible alternatives?

I go for the "no explanation" alternative.

[Consul]

Actually, the mind according to cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience comprises both conscious processes and nonconscious ones. However, there is the basic question of the scope of the concept of a mind or mentality. Conscious (experiential) processes are surely mental ones (which is not to say that they are irreducibly nonphysical!), but what is still mental about nonconscious processes in the brain? What is and makes the difference between the nonconscious mental and the nonconscious nonmental? For example, so-called propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires are usually regarded as nonconscious mental states, but what exactly is distinctively mental about them when there is nothing experiential about them?

Good questions, which illustrate the ambiguities of those words ("mind" and "mental"). One thing to note is that those two terms are not necessarily co-extensive, i.e., "mental," as commonly used both colloquially and professionally, has a broader scope than "mind." Your quote from Baars contains an example: "Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our Mental Processes." But then, "More and more evidence is providing support for the notion that it is our unconscious processing that forms the overwhelming majority of brain functions."

Brain functions, not "minds."

With regard to memories and dispositional attitudes, though most would agree those are "mental" phenomena, they are not commonly assumed to be components of "mind" until one becomes conscious of them. Hence we have such phrases as, "That brings to mind an experience I had several years ago in Borneo . . .", "I didn't realize how prejudiced I was until . . ." I.e., things are "brought to mind" that weren't there before (though they existed before).

But as I said to Pattern-chaser, its only a terminological question.

Terminological or conceptual questions do matter. If psychology is the science of the mind or the mental, I'd like to know what a mind or a mental entity is; since otherwise I don't know what the subject matter of psychology is.

First of all, the word "mind" can be used to refer to mental substances (substantial souls/spirits) or to nonsubstantial complexes of mental occurrences. (I'm using "occurrence" or "occurrent" as an umbrella term covering events, processes, states, and facts.)

In the broadest (nonsubstantialistic) sense, a mind comprises both conscious, experiential occurrences and nonconscious, nonexperiential occurrences; so the mind has a conscious part and a nonconscious part, with the nonconscious part comprising both static occurrences (dispositional mental states, "standing" propositional attitudes, mental abilities/capacities/faculties) and dynamic occurrences (subconscious mental, cognitive information processing). – In a narrower sense, the only nonconscious mental phenomena are mental dispositions (propositional attitudes). – And in the narrowest sense, the only mental phenomena are conscious experiences, such that mind = (phenomenal) consciousness.
However…

QUOTE>
"[W]e may not always be able to say whether or not it is best or appropriate (let alone correct) to call certain abilities, properties, states, or phenomena mental. This is not because of any failure of insight or lack of information on our part, but simply because there is no single right answer. Such is the nature of the term 'mental'.

Some theorists see mental phenomena as forming a great continuum. The continuum stretches from the most complex human experiential episodes down to the nervous-system activity that goes on in seaslugs, or enables Cataglyphus, a desert ant, to go straight back to its nest in the dark without any environmental cues after pursuing a zigzag outward path. (It is as if it has done some complicated trigonometry.) These theorists see no line to be drawn on this great natural continuum of behavioral-control-system activity. They see no interesting line that sharply divides truly and distinctively mental activity from nonmental activity on this continuum. And they add, forcefully, that we don't really need to use the word 'mental' at all, or to determine its extension precisely. We can say all we want to say without using it.

Others, at the other extreme, propose to restrict the domain of truly mental phenomena to experiential phenomena—to the surface phenomena of the mind, as it were. Those who take this second view hold that none of the extremely complex subexperiential brain processes that subserve the stream of experience are to be counted as mental phenomena, sensu stricto. Only experiential phenomena (including brain processes that can be literally identified with experiential phenomena) should be counted as mental phenomena. Everything else is mere mechanism, ultimately nonmental process. These theorists may offer an analogy: plays are not possible without a great deal of activity behind the scenes, but none of this activity is, strictly speaking, part of the play.

These two opposing sides will obviously differ on the question of whether there was mental life in the universe before there was experience. The first group will say that there was, the second will say that there was not. The first group may well grant that something very important happened when experience began, something quite new. But they will not agree that it was the beginning of mental life, the beginning of mind, a sudden switching on of the mental light. Mind, they will say, was already there.

They may add that the theory of evolution shows that the line between the mental and the nonmental cannot be sharp. For behavioral-control systems originally arise simply because certain randomly arising movement-tendencies turn out to have survival value, and hence tend to be preserved in succeeding generations. Thereafter, of course, things increase enormously in complexity, and at some point in this process of increasing complexity, some of the internal causes of the movement-tendencies come to be such that we find it natural to dignify them with the title of ‘mental processes’. But it is indeed only a question of what we find natural, and our intuitions are not grounded on any precise criterion that makes a clear cut between the mental and the nonmental. The basic facts of natural history and evolution show that it is foolish to think that there could ever be a sharp answer to the question of when the title ‘mental process’ becomes appropriate.

A third group are happy to proceed with the philosophy of mind, and the science of psychology, without any attempt at a tight definition of the term ‘mental’, making do with our ordinary, more or less philosophically informed, more or less science-assisted, general consensus on the question of the proper subject matter of psychology and the philosophy of mind. This third group may be right that it doesn’t matter much how we put things, so long as there is some terminology or other in which we can agree on what we are talking about."

(Strawson, Galen. Mental Reality. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. pp. 151-53)
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