Consciousness, what is and what it requires?

[Tamminen]

Consciousness does not depend on "physical conditions".

Yes it does.

Consciousness exists as an ontological necessity of reality(see Tamminem).

Right.

[BigBango]

At least I got it half right!

[RJG]

"I think, therefore I am" begs-the-question. In other words, it pre-assumes the conclusion and is therefore wholly irrational.

Do you notice the "I" in the premise? ...and the "I" in the conclusion? Descartes pre-assumes the conclusion in his premise, so as to then (irrationally) claim it in his conclusion.

I tend to dismiss those "I"s as a grammatical necessity. It could easily have been "you"s or even "tulips".

It doesn't matter what the subject is, it is still logically invalid and unsound. In other words, it is a nonsense statement.

"X does Y, therefore X exists" is logical nonsense; irrational. -- "Unicorns can fly, therefore Unicorns exist" does not prove that "Unicorns" exist. -- "I think, therefore I am" does not prove that "I" exists.

If Descartes wishes to logically prove "I" exists, then he needs to restate his flawed statement as such:

"Experiencing exists, therefore an Experiencer (named "I") exist".

Important Note: it is the "experiencing of thoughts" that is Absolutely certain, and NOT the "thinking of thoughts". (Descartes error).

So what you are saying is that I should not accept the argument; "I exist, therefore I exist".

Correct. It is nonsensical; proves nothing.

But I should accept the argument: "Everything that we experience is just an 'experience'".

You don't see a similarity between these two 'arguments'?

Firstly, this statement is NOT saying "We experience, therefore we exist", it says "We experience, therefore experiences exist".

Secondly, and of course, this presumes that "experiences" (and "we") exist in the first place, which so happens to be the starting seed premise statement to all true knowledge that Descartes was searching for but never found.

P1. Experiencing/experiences exist.
P2. Without an Experiencer there could be no Experiencing.
C1. Therefore, Hark, "I" (the Experiencer) exists!

[Consul]

Consciousness does not depend on "physical conditions". Consciousness exists as an ontological necessity of reality(see Tamminem). We do not have to figure out how "consciousness" came into being. It just is. What we need to do is chronicle the development of consciousness in our familiar physical world.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. It's not the case that my consciousness "just is". It comes into being every time I awake from a dreamless sleep and ceases to be every time I fall into a dreamless sleep.

[BigBango]

Consciousness does not depend on "physical conditions". Consciousness exists as an ontological necessity of reality(see Tamminem). We do not have to figure out how "consciousness" came into being. It just is. What we need to do is chronicle the development of consciousness in our familiar physical world.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. It's not the case that my consciousness "just is". It comes into being every time I awake from a dreamless sleep and ceases to be every time I fall into a dreamless sleep.

I think you are just being silly Consul! Well haha.

First of all I did not say "your" consciousness "just is". I said "consciousness "just is". Certainly the sensed world of objects also "

[BigBango]

Consciousness does not depend on "physical conditions". Consciousness exists as an ontological necessity of reality(see Tamminem). We do not have to figure out how "consciousness" came into being. It just is. What we need to do is chronicle the development of consciousness in our familiar physical world.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. It's not the case that my consciousness "just is". It comes into being every time I awake from a dreamless sleep and ceases to be every time I fall into a dreamless sleep.

I think you are just being silly Consul! Well haha.

First of all I did not say "your" consciousness "just is". I said "consciousness "just is". Certainly the sensed world of objects also "comes into being every time I awake from a dreamless sleep and ceases to be every time I fall into a dreamless sleep." However I am sure that you, as a materialist, believe in a world of objects and they still exist during your dream time. You need to apply your logic to your own assumptions about the nature of reality. If you did we would have no consciousness in the world and no objects.

I accept the tenants of "dual aspect philosophers" like Nagel, Searle even Leibniz. Consciousness never evolved from the material objects of science but has always existed in relation to the physical. Again see Tamminen. For Leibniz there are monads that are not divisible and are the source of individual conscious identities. These monads instantiate themselves in our world of physicality and that physical world is infinitely divisible. The "conscious monads" have always existed and they instantiate themselves in the physical world. They dominate that physical world and shape it into particular physical/conscious entities that are evolved versions of themselves.

When you solve the hard problem of consciousness, without having to evolve it from the inanimate objects of your particular form of materialism and also exactly explain the "beginning" of life, then you might get me to see things differently.

[Atla]

"Lying"? It certainly doesn't follow from materialism/physicalism that it's physically possible for all physical systems and even their simple elements (elementary particles) to be subjects of experience.

The default hypothesis is that experince and the physical world are the same thing, we just sort of see double in our thinking.

Unless you can prove your extraordinary additional assumptions: that the experience and the physical are indeed two different things, and the experience somehow emerges from the physical. But it only emerges when the 'right' kind and 'right' amount of matter is arranged the 'right' ways, and has to be sufficiently complex (complex to whom?).
A ton of irrational and unnecessary assumptions without evidence.

What's the best, most plausible explanation of the psychophysical correlations in the light of our scientific knowledge?
Answer: Experiences are realized by (and both causally and existentially dependent on) electrochemical processes in central nervous systems; and they first appeared during the course of the evolution of animal brains when their electrochemical dynamics reached a certain level of functional-informational complexity and connectivity, which isn't found in any other types of physical systems, let alone in nonbiological ones.

"The human brain is the most complex entity we know of. It contains at least 90 billion neurons (nerve cells). Each of these is a complex information-processing device in its own right and interacts with about 1,000 other neurons. Understanding this degree of complexity is a daunting task."

Of course the best, most plausible hypothesis is what I said: that experince and the physical world are the same thing, we just sort of see double in our thinking.
It's just that rocks can't talk about their experience, now can they. It baffles me why most people don't get this, and automatically assume that rocks therefore must be void of experience.

Where are the rational thinkers?

[RJG]

It's just that rocks can't talk about their experience, now can they. It baffles me why most people don't get this, and automatically assume that rocks therefore must be void of experience.

Rocks can certainly experience. They can experience vibrations, impacts, temperature changes, etc. They just have no way of "knowing" it (or talking about it).

Experiences (aka "bodily reactions") are one thing. And Conscious Experiences (aka "Consciousness") are another. Those that possess 'memory', have the capability to experience 'recognition'. Those that experience 'recognition' experience the "knowing" of their bodily reactions.

Consciousness is the experience of recognition (of bodily reactions), made possible by memory.

[Atla]

It's just that rocks can't talk about their experience, now can they. It baffles me why most people don't get this, and automatically assume that rocks therefore must be void of experience.

Rocks can certainly experience. They can experience vibrations, impacts, temperature changes, etc. They just have no way of "knowing" it (or talking about it).

Experiences (aka "bodily reactions") are one thing. And Conscious Experiences (aka "Consciousness") are another. Those that possess 'memory', have the capability to experience 'recognition'. Those that experience 'recognition' experience the "knowing" of their bodily reactions.

Consciousness is the experience of recognition (of bodily reactions), made possible by memory.

Yeah sort of, if we use the word "Consciousness that way".
(But if nothing is happening to a rock, the rock still isn't void "experience" or "Phenomenal consciousness". Its experience is just more or less static.)

[Consul]

Rocks can certainly experience. They can experience vibrations, impacts, temperature changes, etc. They just have no way of "knowing" it (or talking about it).

It should be clear that the verb or noun "experience" is used in this context in the psychological sense. We're talking about mental experience (in the form of subjective sensations, emotions, or imaginations), and not about objective physical "experiences" in your sense.

[Consul]

First of all I did not say "your" consciousness "just is". I said "consciousness "just is". Certainly the sensed world of objects also "comes into being every time I awake from a dreamless sleep and ceases to be every time I fall into a dreamless sleep." However I am sure that you, as a materialist, believe in a world of objects and they still exist during your dream time. You need to apply your logic to your own assumptions about the nature of reality. If you did we would have no consciousness in the world and no objects.

I accept the tenants of "dual aspect philosophers" like Nagel, Searle even Leibniz. Consciousness never evolved from the material objects of science but has always existed in relation to the physical.

Searle is not a fundamentalist but an emergentist about consciousness!

Again see Tamminen. For Leibniz there are monads that are not divisible and are the source of individual conscious identities. These monads instantiate themselves in our world of physicality and that physical world is infinitely divisible. The "conscious monads" have always existed and they instantiate themselves in the physical world. They dominate that physical world and shape it into particular physical/conscious entities that are evolved versions of themselves.
When you solve the hard problem of consciousness, without having to evolve it from the inanimate objects of your particular form of materialism and also exactly explain the "beginning" of life, then you might get me to see things differently.

Under one interpretation, Leibniz's worldview is no different from Berkeley's: The world ultimately consists of nothing but immaterial minds/souls/spirits and their immaterial "ideas", i.e. their mental/experiential properties or states (what Leibniz calls "perceptions"), with apparent bodies or physical objects really being nothing but complexes of mental ideas or impressions.

But the hard problem of consciousness doesn't disappear when nonphysical souls are substituted for physical bodies (or brains) as substrates of consciousness, since then the question is how ideas or items of mentality/experientiality are realized (caused/created/generated/produced) by souls as immaterial substrates or subjects of mentality/experientiality. This is especially mysterious as those souls or spiritual monads are nothing more than "metaphysical points" (Leibniz), i.e. zero-dimensional objects. How could such a thing possibly be a subject of a mind, let alone a complex one housing different kinds of mental items?! This is much more mysterious than the claim that a single physical point-particle can be a mental subject.

Anyway, the very concept of a simple immaterial substance or spiritual monad is incoherent, because in order for it to be a substrate or subject of "ideas" or mental items it must have nonmental properties in addition to its mental ones; for otherwise it would be nothing but a nonsubstantial, substrateless complex of ideas or mental items. But if a soul has both mental properties and nonmental ones, then it's no longer a (purely) mental substance but a material one with mental properties. So Berkeley's&Leibniz's substance immaterialism/spiritualism collapses either into a pure "bundle" idealism without any substantial substrates or into materialism.

The next problem is that "bundle" idealism—according to which substrates or subjects of mentality are reducible to and thus nothing more than complexes of items of mentality ("system[s] of floating ideas, without any substance to support them" – Berkeley)—is itself incoherent, because mental items are ontologically dependent on mental substrates/subjects. So the only coherent option left is to regard mental subjects as material substances!

[RJG]

Rocks can certainly experience. They can experience vibrations, impacts, temperature changes, etc. They just have no way of "knowing" it (or talking about it).

Experiences (bodily reactions) are one thing. And Conscious Experiences (aka "Consciousness") are another

It should be clear that the verb or noun "experience" is used in this context in the psychological sense. We're talking about mental experience (in the form of subjective sensations, emotions, or imaginations), and not about objective physical "experiences" in your sense.

A "subjective sensation" is a "conscious experience". Without a physical experience (non-conscious brain/body reaction), there can be no "sensation" for one to then be "conscious" of, nor can there be a "conscious experience", nor a "subjective sensation".

It all starts with the bodily experience (a non-conscious physical reaction), then 'recognition' (made possible by those with memory) occurs, then hark, we now have a "conscious experience", a "subjective experience"; we now have "consciousness"!

It is 'recognition' that converts a non-conscious bodily experience/reaction into a "conscious" experience.

[Consul]

It should be clear that the verb or noun "experience" is used in this context in the psychological sense. We're talking about mental experience (in the form of subjective sensations, emotions, or imaginations), and not about objective physical "experiences" in your sense.

A "subjective sensation" is a "conscious experience". Without a physical experience (non-conscious brain/body reaction), there can be no "sensation" for one to then be "conscious" of, nor can there be a "conscious experience", nor a "subjective sensation".

Your "experiences" are simply physical/physiological occurrences (states/events/processes) in bodies or organisms, only some of which are or cause experiences properly so called, i.e. psychological ones. It's nonsensical and confusing to call everything happening to or in a body or organism an experience.

[RJG]

Consul, you are falsely equating "experience" as "conscious experience". These are two different things.

[BigBango]

Consul, you are falsely equating "experience" as "conscious experience". These are two different things.

I think RJG that Consul properly differentiated types of "experience" as, for one, brought up by Atla's experiencing rocks as physiological occurrences in contrast to "conscious experience" that is psychological in character as in:

Your "experiences" are simply physical/physiological occurrences (states/events/processes) in bodies or organisms, only some of which are or cause experiences properly so called, i.e. psychological ones. It's nonsensical and confusing to call everything happening to or in a body or organism an experience.