Why All Current Scientific Theories Of Consciousness Fail

[SteveKlinko]

If a particular Brain activity does not result in some kind of Conscious Experience, then it is irrelevant.

Consider yourself, consciously and deliberately, deciding to move your arm. Before the moment you make your conscious decision, your nonconscious mind has already initiated the action.

I think it's a mistake to consider our minds to be limited to the 'conscious mind' and/or consciousness. There's a lot more going on than that.

The Neural Activity implemented in the Brain can understandably be considered to be part of the Mind. That would be the Physical Mind. Very Mechanistic Processing. But more importantly is the next stage of Processing after the Neural Activity. This is the Conscious Experience Processing that happens in the Conscious Mind. Your Conscious Mind Experience is all you have ever known about any Neural Activity. Your Conscious Mind is all you really are. Your Conscious Mind uses your Physical Mind as a Tool to help with moving around in the Physical World. Your Conscious Mind is Primary to your being. The real targets of Philosophical debate and Scientific research should be to answer the basic question: What is the Experience of Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, the Smell of Bleach, the Touch of a Rough Surface, and etc. These are the things that you are, but you don't realize it. Yes, you literally are the Redness and all the Colors. You are Light. I'm referring of course to the Conscious Light inside your Mind not the external Electromagnetic Light.

[Consul]

But since it cannot Explain Conscious Experience I say it does not Explain Consciousness in general either. I don't even really think there is some sort of Generalized Consciousness thing. It is always and only some sort of Conscious Experience. The Primacy of Conscious Experience must be appreciated.

The word "consciousness" has more than one meaning; but, of course, having phenomenal consciousness or being phenomenally conscious entails having some sort of conscious experience or other. You can regard phenomenal consciousness as a determinable state with particular phenomenally conscious states (= subjective experiences) as its determinates—like red can be regarded as a determinable color with the various shades of red as its determinates: Nothing can be red without being some particular shade of red or other.

For the distinction between determinables and determinates, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dete ... rminables/

[Consul]

"Generic Consciousness: What conditions/states N of nervous systems are necessary and (or) sufficient for a mental state, M, to be conscious as opposed to not?
…
Specific Consciousness: What neural states or properties are necessary and/or sufficient for a conscious perceptual state to have content X rather than Y?"

The Neuroscience of Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... roscience/

Does the global (neuronal) workspace theory answer these questions? It gives a reductionistic answer to the question of generic consciousness, but I don't know if it also gives (detailed) reductionistic answers to questions concerning specific consciousness such as sensations of red.

See e.g.: Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis

Let me ask a question to your questions: What is General or Generic Consciousness as a separate thing from Conscious Experience?

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The first question of "generic consciousness" is about the general difference between conscious/experiential states and nonconscious/nonexperiential ones as such, whereas the second question of "specific consciousness" is about the specific difference between this (kind of) conscious/experiential state and that one or those ones. So, considering e.g. a visual sensation of red, the first question is In virtue of what is this occurrence a subjective experience?; and the second question is In virtue of what is this subjective experience a red-sensation rather than e.g. a blue-sensation?.

[Consul]

I just think Illusionism is Insane Denial of the purpose for Conscious Experience. The Conscious Visual Experience, for example, helps us to not walk into walls and not walk off cliffs during the day. If the Experience had no basis in any kind of reality we would be effectively blind. That beautiful High Resolution Wide Screen full Color Visual Experience that is embedded in the front of our faces is how we are able to safely move around in the world. The Conscious Visual Experience is the last stage of Processing in the Visual Processing chain.

I think illusionism as a form of eliminativism about phenomenal consciousness aka subjective experience is just silly.

By the way, there is a phenomenon called blindsight, which is a form of nonconscious visual perception.

QUOTE>
"By a “silly” theory I mean one which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily life. …It must not be supposed that the men who maintain these theories and believe that they believe them are “silly” people. Only very acute and learned men could have thought of anything so odd or defended anything so preposterous against the continual protests of common-sense."

(Broad, C. D. The Mind and its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul, 1925. pp. 5-6)

"If 'consciousness' means conscious experience in the concrete, the proposition 'Consciousness does not exist' shows itself 'absurd and impossible' by the fundamental canons of science, philosophy, and common sense. Either the proposition, therefore, is false, or it entails the most searching scientific revolution ever envisioned, not merely in psychology but in all human concept-systems and all logical and scientific methodology. Such revision, although not impossible, is greater than any attempted by a Plato, a Darwin, or an Einstein. Its positive nature I cannot conjecture, and the behaviorists themselves have shown small interest or aptitude for it. Finally, even if it were accomplished, it must be so complex that no conceivable psychological advantage would warrant its substitution for the current scheme. No living man, I think, ever seriously thought through so recondite a possibility."

(Williams, Donald Cary. "The Existence of Consciousness." In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 23-40. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 30)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

That's a good quote, and it confirms that GWT does not Explain Conscious Experience.

Well, the defenders of GWT would reply that the quote confirms only that Chalmers thinks it doesn't.

[Consul]

If a particular Brain activity does not result in some kind of Conscious Experience, then it is irrelevant.

Consider yourself, consciously and deliberately, deciding to move your arm. Before the moment you make your conscious decision, your nonconscious mind has already initiated the action.

I think it's a mistake to consider our minds to be limited to the 'conscious mind' and/or consciousness. There's a lot more going on than that.

Yes, indeed. Conscious processing is the surface level of information processing in the CNS, being just the tip of the iceberg of neural activity.

QUOTE>
"Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our Mental Processes

As Bernard Baars has written, “Consciousness is the water in which we swim. Like fish in the ocean, we can’t jump out to see how it looks from the outside. As soon as we lose consciousness, we can no longer see anything.” We are well aware of our conscious selves. We can report on what is occurring right now as we experience an event or taste a food. Our knowledge of what is occurring moment by moment of our conscious life—the contents of our consciousness—forms the base of our awareness. Fluid, flexible, ever-changing contents of our consciousness seem to be a vast sea in which we swim.

Careful experimentation has time and time again proven this feeling to be false. In fact, the contents of our consciousness are quite limited. At any given time, only so much information, so many senses, feelings, and thoughts, can share the mind-space of our consciousness. More and more evidence is providing support for the notion that it is our unconscious processing that forms the overwhelming majority of brain functions. Our vast store of memories, language knowledge, automaticities, and procedural learning combine to form the largely unconscious but accessible if recalled storage of what we have learned and experienced throughout our life. …[T]his information is retrievable, in large part, and forms the bulk of the iceberg of our knowledge store. Conscious contents, at any given moment, form merely the tip of this massive iceberg.

Conscious and unconscious threads together form the thoughts and ideas and actions on any given day. We may be reading a book and thinking consciously about the topic of the book while keeping an eye on the time so we are not late for work. At the same time that these conscious processes enter and recede from the contents of our consciousness, largely unconscious processes are also at work outside our attention or our influence. If we are skilled readers, the process of reading the book—decoding the shapes of the print to form letters, decoding the strings of letters for form words, parsing the sequence of words to form sentences and so on—is not something we are usually conscious of. Similarly, we may be walking around the room while reading the book—the act of walking is an overlearned process and so the individual motor movements and balance required are largely automatic. Together the conscious, task-based activities of our lives combine with their unconscious and automatic elements to help us achieve our goals, large and small."
(p. 6)

"Waking cognition is woven of both conscious and unconscious threads, constantly weaving back and forth. For example, the process of reading these words is only partly conscious. You are a highly practiced reader, and you have learned over many hours of practice to automatically convert these tiny marks on paper into your own inner speech and then into unconscious processes like word recognition, grammar, and meaning."
(p. 255)

(Gage, Nicole M., and Bernard J. Baars. Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2nd ed. London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2018.)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Conscious and Unconscious Processes Together Form the Bases of Our Mental Processes
…
<QUOTE

That said, there is still a basic theoretical question concerning the concept of mentality or a mind, and its relationship to the concept of consciousness. To say that there is a nonconscious mind in addition to the conscious mind (consciousness) is to presuppose that mentality is independent of (subjective) experientiality. But what is still genuinely and distinctively mental about an event or state which doesn't have any subjective experiential content? What is the difference between a nonconscious mental occurrence and a nonconscious nonmental one? If there is no difference, then there are many nonconscious neural processes, but no nonconscious mental ones; and then there is a nonconscious brain but no nonconscious mind.

[Sy Borg]

More than could be. There is not much else that is capable of comprising consciousness. Try to think of just one other.

I can think of a totally different perspective where Conscious Experience is Experienced in a Conscious Mind that exists in some sort of Conscious Space. Very speculative but as good as anything I have seen so far.

That idea would come under panpsychism, or even religion.

I have a similar "wild idea", that this is not the first ever universe, but perhaps there have been many before us, maybe even trillions or more. What if a species in one of those previous universes kept evolving and advancing without dying out - right through the trillion-year star forming era and beyond, ultilising the remaining black holes to advance further? They would transcend biology and become so advanced that they can solve every existential threat that the universe threw at them/it. So, when the next big bang arrives, they/it would continue on, seemingly immaterial to us, still in the background of our own universe.

Yes, I have also thought of that one. But I think we will need to exist as Conscious Minds only. I don't see continuation of any Physical manifestations of ourselves surviving through a Big Bang cycle.

I'm glad someone else has covered that territory :)

Certainly nothing physical, in our conceptions, could survive a big bang. Still, given how hard it is to predict the next decade, trying to imagine how possible entities millions, billions, trillions and quadrillions of years into the future may operate is a tad out of our range. It would be like a microbe trying to understand the structure and functions of the International Space Station.

[Pattern-chaser]

If a particular Brain activity does not result in some kind of Conscious Experience, then it is irrelevant.

I think it's a mistake to consider our minds to be limited to the 'conscious mind' and/or consciousness. There's a lot more going on than that.

The Neural Activity implemented in the Brain can understandably be considered to be part of the Mind. That would be the Physical Mind. Very Mechanistic Processing. But more importantly is the next stage of Processing after the Neural Activity. This is the Conscious Experience Processing that happens in the Conscious Mind. Your Conscious Mind Experience is all you have ever known about any Neural Activity. Your Conscious Mind is all you really are. Your Conscious Mind uses your Physical Mind as a Tool to help with moving around in the Physical World. Your Conscious Mind is Primary to your being. The real targets of Philosophical debate and Scientific research should be to answer the basic question: What is the Experience of Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, the Smell of Bleach, the Touch of a Rough Surface, and etc. These are the things that you are, but you don't realize it. Yes, you literally are the Redness and all the Colors. You are Light. I'm referring of course to the Conscious Light inside your Mind not the external Electromagnetic Light.

Although we all know what consciousness is, that understanding is a vague and undefined one. Theories abound, but that's about as far as we've got, so far. You introduced this topic by proclaiming a hierarchy: that the brain supports the Conscious Mind and consciousness flows directly from that conscious mind. But I think it's a mistake to ignore most of the mind, and to consider only that one small part of the mind that we call the 'conscious mind'.

To put it the other way around, we would all be very surprised to find that consciousness is not intimately associated with the mind. That being the case, I think it's wrong to ignore any part of the mind, and its part in creating or maintaining consciousness. Perhaps, when and if we know more, we will be able to clarify that observation?

[SteveKlinko]

But since it cannot Explain Conscious Experience I say it does not Explain Consciousness in general either. I don't even really think there is some sort of Generalized Consciousness thing. It is always and only some sort of Conscious Experience. The Primacy of Conscious Experience must be appreciated.

The word "consciousness" has more than one meaning; but, of course, having phenomenal consciousness or being phenomenally conscious entails having some sort of conscious experience or other. You can regard phenomenal consciousness as a determinable state with particular phenomenally conscious states (= subjective experiences) as its determinates—like red can be regarded as a determinable color with the various shades of red as its determinates: Nothing can be red without being some particular shade of red or other.

For the distinction between determinables and determinates, see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dete ... rminables/

That's all well and good but how can the Conscious Redness of Red be Explained? Redness is a thing in itself. What is Redness?

[SteveKlinko]

"Generic Consciousness: What conditions/states N of nervous systems are necessary and (or) sufficient for a mental state, M, to be conscious as opposed to not?
…
Specific Consciousness: What neural states or properties are necessary and/or sufficient for a conscious perceptual state to have content X rather than Y?"

The Neuroscience of Consciousness: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons ... roscience/

Does the global (neuronal) workspace theory answer these questions? It gives a reductionistic answer to the question of generic consciousness, but I don't know if it also gives (detailed) reductionistic answers to questions concerning specific consciousness such as sensations of red.

See e.g.: Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis

Let me ask a question to your questions: What is General or Generic Consciousness as a separate thing from Conscious Experience?

There seems to be a misunderstanding. The first question of "generic consciousness" is about the general difference between conscious/experiential states and nonconscious/nonexperiential ones as such, whereas the second question of "specific consciousness" is about the specific difference between this (kind of) conscious/experiential state and that one or those ones. So, considering e.g. a visual sensation of red, the first question is In virtue of what is this occurrence a subjective experience?; and the second question is In virtue of what is this subjective experience a red-sensation rather than e.g. a blue-sensation?.

We need to know what Blueness is and what Redness is before we can make any sense out of their differences. First things first.

[SteveKlinko]

I just think Illusionism is Insane Denial of the purpose for Conscious Experience. The Conscious Visual Experience, for example, helps us to not walk into walls and not walk off cliffs during the day. If the Experience had no basis in any kind of reality we would be effectively blind. That beautiful High Resolution Wide Screen full Color Visual Experience that is embedded in the front of our faces is how we are able to safely move around in the world. The Conscious Visual Experience is the last stage of Processing in the Visual Processing chain.

I think illusionism as a form of eliminativism about phenomenal consciousness aka subjective experience is just silly.

By the way, there is a phenomenon called blindsight, which is a form of nonconscious visual perception.

QUOTE>
"By a “silly” theory I mean one which may be held at the time when one is talking or writing professionally, but which only an inmate of a lunatic asylum would think of carrying into daily life. …It must not be supposed that the men who maintain these theories and believe that they believe them are “silly” people. Only very acute and learned men could have thought of anything so odd or defended anything so preposterous against the continual protests of common-sense."

(Broad, C. D. The Mind and its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul, 1925. pp. 5-6)

"If 'consciousness' means conscious experience in the concrete, the proposition 'Consciousness does not exist' shows itself 'absurd and impossible' by the fundamental canons of science, philosophy, and common sense. Either the proposition, therefore, is false, or it entails the most searching scientific revolution ever envisioned, not merely in psychology but in all human concept-systems and all logical and scientific methodology. Such revision, although not impossible, is greater than any attempted by a Plato, a Darwin, or an Einstein. Its positive nature I cannot conjecture, and the behaviorists themselves have shown small interest or aptitude for it. Finally, even if it were accomplished, it must be so complex that no conceivable psychological advantage would warrant its substitution for the current scheme. No living man, I think, ever seriously thought through so recondite a possibility."

(Williams, Donald Cary. "The Existence of Consciousness." In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 23-40. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 30)
<QUOTE

Blindsight is not sufficient to move safely around in the world. People can recognize certain items put in front of them but they are profoundly Visually handicapped with this kind of Sight.

Good Quotes.

[SteveKlinko]

I can think of a totally different perspective where Conscious Experience is Experienced in a Conscious Mind that exists in some sort of Conscious Space. Very speculative but as good as anything I have seen so far.

That idea would come under panpsychism, or even religion.

I have a similar "wild idea", that this is not the first ever universe, but perhaps there have been many before us, maybe even trillions or more. What if a species in one of those previous universes kept evolving and advancing without dying out - right through the trillion-year star forming era and beyond, ultilising the remaining black holes to advance further? They would transcend biology and become so advanced that they can solve every existential threat that the universe threw at them/it. So, when the next big bang arrives, they/it would continue on, seemingly immaterial to us, still in the background of our own universe.

Yes, I have also thought of that one. But I think we will need to exist as Conscious Minds only. I don't see continuation of any Physical manifestations of ourselves surviving through a Big Bang cycle.

I'm glad someone else has covered that territory

Certainly nothing physical, in our conceptions, could survive a big bang. Still, given how hard it is to predict the next decade, trying to imagine how possible entities millions, billions, trillions and quadrillions of years into the future may operate is a tad out of our range. It would be like a microbe trying to understand the structure and functions of the International Space Station.

Exactly.

[Sculptor1]

All scientific theories fall into two exclusive categories.

1) Those theories that have failed.
2) Thiose theories that are yet to fail.

This fact is where the usefullness and beauty of science resides. It is its strength and gives it meaning.

[SteveKlinko]

If a particular Brain activity does not result in some kind of Conscious Experience, then it is irrelevant.

I think it's a mistake to consider our minds to be limited to the 'conscious mind' and/or consciousness. There's a lot more going on than that.

The Neural Activity implemented in the Brain can understandably be considered to be part of the Mind. That would be the Physical Mind. Very Mechanistic Processing. But more importantly is the next stage of Processing after the Neural Activity. This is the Conscious Experience Processing that happens in the Conscious Mind. Your Conscious Mind Experience is all you have ever known about any Neural Activity. Your Conscious Mind is all you really are. Your Conscious Mind uses your Physical Mind as a Tool to help with moving around in the Physical World. Your Conscious Mind is Primary to your being. The real targets of Philosophical debate and Scientific research should be to answer the basic question: What is the Experience of Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, the Smell of Bleach, the Touch of a Rough Surface, and etc. These are the things that you are, but you don't realize it. Yes, you literally are the Redness and all the Colors. You are Light. I'm referring of course to the Conscious Light inside your Mind not the external Electromagnetic Light.

Although we all know what consciousness is, that understanding is a vague and undefined one. Theories abound, but that's about as far as we've got, so far. You introduced this topic by proclaiming a hierarchy: that the brain supports the Conscious Mind and consciousness flows directly from that conscious mind. But I think it's a mistake to ignore most of the mind, and to consider only that one small part of the mind that we call the 'conscious mind'.

To put it the other way around, we would all be very surprised to find that consciousness is not intimately associated with the mind. That being the case, I think it's wrong to ignore any part of the mind, and its part in creating or maintaining consciousness. Perhaps, when and if we know more, we will be able to clarify that observation?

I have not ignored the Non Conscious parts of the Mind during my Journey to understand Mind. I studied the Brian and its Neural functioning for years. But eventually I realized that the Brain is where our Sub Conscious processes happen and it is not even really Conscious at all. How could it be. It is an Electro Chemical Machine. It is a Tool that our Conscious Minds use. I have come to understand that the more important part of our Minds is in the Conscious Experience aspect. Conscious Experience is also the Hardest Problem to solve. Most Scientists ignore Conscious Experience or try to Incoherently explain it away. I am devoting the rest of my life to Understanding and Explaining the thing that some Scientists say does not even exist. If it is an Illusion, I just don't know what to do with that beautiful Wide Screen Visual Experience that is always there embedded in the front of my face.