Is consciousness, or the mind, merely an ‘illusion’?
You may have heard of the concept that consciousness, or the mind, is merely an ‘illusion’. The idea that consciousness is an illusion is primarily put forward to counter the dualistic stance that we, as humans, consist of a physical body and a separate ethereal consciousness or mind.
The concept of dualism was initially founded in ancient beliefs and philosophy which is thousands of years old and lacked the contextual benefit of contemporary physiology and science. Even so, I do not think that this is sufficient to explain why we developed dualism in the first place.
The belief in our ethereal selves also sprang from a desire to explain what we experienced in the past, and still experience today, as that undefinable seemingly undiscernible thing within ourselves that is perceived as a presence aware of our bodies, sentience and place in our environment.
So, what is this ‘thing’ that we seemingly observe in ourselves?
The concept that the mind or consciousness is an illusion does not mean that we are all mindless robots but rather our perception of this illusion is not what it seems. The interplay of subjective awareness can be explained by underlying biological processes within the human body. This body consists of a nervous system which contains multiple organs, one of which is the brain.
The body and the brain work together to produce sensory responses that form patterns of neuron-firing within the brain structure. I will call these patterns ‘activation matrices’ for want of a better term. Various activated matrices can affect cognitive areas of the brain prompting predisposed recognition and active response. This activity is supplemented by the release of neurotransmitter chemicals.
These matrices can also cause the formation of wave patterns across the brain structure which can activate different brain areas. These processes are further nuanced by time variance in that the quality of cognitive activation can vary dependant on the time delay between pattern propagation and brain area stimulation.
We are not conscious of these dynamic, complex and layered processes. We are only aware of their consequence. For example, when we pat a dog, we may experience seeing the dogs tail wag and feeling the texture of its coat.
We do not experience the light meeting our retina, travelling to our optic nerve as an electrical signal and into the brain structure and IT cortex where 16 million neurons activate in different patterns and register seeing a dog.
Nor do we experience the simultaneous chemical changes in the brain that may alter our mood and the firing of neurons in the somatosensory cortex that create a response that registers as ‘feeling dog hair’.
When we think about the dog, we do not experience the electrical activity of neurons in the visual and auditory cortexes, the prefrontal cortex or the activation of the motor cortex in preparation for saying ‘good dog’.
These consequences do not require an ethereal intermediary mind or consciousness entity to occur. They simply, or more accurately complexly, just happen. The combined inherent ability of the nervous system and brain to recognise and produce sensory responses simultaneously does all the work.
Our experience of our bodies, our sentience and its presence in our environment is a complex biological, electrical and chemical process. These processes are necessarily filtered and prioritised in order for us to efficiently react, intellectualise and behave in a way that makes sense in our environment.
I believe that nowadays, with the benefit of modern science and an understanding that the source ancient ‘thinking’ that led to dualism was relatively uninformed, we can dispense with the illusion of consciousness, or the mind, and shift our perspective away from these imagined ethereal forms.
The concept of dualism was initially founded in ancient beliefs and philosophy which is thousands of years old and lacked the contextual benefit of contemporary physiology and science. Even so, I do not think that this is sufficient to explain why we developed dualism in the first place.
The belief in our ethereal selves also sprang from a desire to explain what we experienced in the past, and still experience today, as that undefinable seemingly undiscernible thing within ourselves that is perceived as a presence aware of our bodies, sentience and place in our environment.
So, what is this ‘thing’ that we seemingly observe in ourselves?
The concept that the mind or consciousness is an illusion does not mean that we are all mindless robots but rather our perception of this illusion is not what it seems. The interplay of subjective awareness can be explained by underlying biological processes within the human body. This body consists of a nervous system which contains multiple organs, one of which is the brain.
The body and the brain work together to produce sensory responses that form patterns of neuron-firing within the brain structure. I will call these patterns ‘activation matrices’ for want of a better term. Various activated matrices can affect cognitive areas of the brain prompting predisposed recognition and active response. This activity is supplemented by the release of neurotransmitter chemicals.
These matrices can also cause the formation of wave patterns across the brain structure which can activate different brain areas. These processes are further nuanced by time variance in that the quality of cognitive activation can vary dependant on the time delay between pattern propagation and brain area stimulation.
We are not conscious of these dynamic, complex and layered processes. We are only aware of their consequence. For example, when we pat a dog, we may experience seeing the dogs tail wag and feeling the texture of its coat.
We do not experience the light meeting our retina, travelling to our optic nerve as an electrical signal and into the brain structure and IT cortex where 16 million neurons activate in different patterns and register seeing a dog.
Nor do we experience the simultaneous chemical changes in the brain that may alter our mood and the firing of neurons in the somatosensory cortex that create a response that registers as ‘feeling dog hair’.
When we think about the dog, we do not experience the electrical activity of neurons in the visual and auditory cortexes, the prefrontal cortex or the activation of the motor cortex in preparation for saying ‘good dog’.
These consequences do not require an ethereal intermediary mind or consciousness entity to occur. They simply, or more accurately complexly, just happen. The combined inherent ability of the nervous system and brain to recognise and produce sensory responses simultaneously does all the work.
Our experience of our bodies, our sentience and its presence in our environment is a complex biological, electrical and chemical process. These processes are necessarily filtered and prioritised in order for us to efficiently react, intellectualise and behave in a way that makes sense in our environment.
I believe that nowadays, with the benefit of modern science and an understanding that the source ancient ‘thinking’ that led to dualism was relatively uninformed, we can dispense with the illusion of consciousness, or the mind, and shift our perspective away from these imagined ethereal forms.
Comments (122)
With a passion for biology I can quite easily accept the idea that anything conscious may arise from the material world. I think people are too invested in themselves and in their lifes that they tend to not consider themselves anything "less than human" - for instance a walking living power plant. From a biological perspective that's essentially what we are. A constant chemical reaction that requires fuel to be added regularly to keep running.
Most cells in fact match the basic criteria for life: they sustain themselves (through proteins), they reproduce, they die. There's no real consensus in the scientific community where we should draw a line between "life" and "matter". Now if we do consider those smallest units of life as living themselves, there's suddenly not one of me but there's roughly 37 trillion of me.
Time for a quick detour to dualism and sex.
Quoting Brock Harding
I think the concept of dualism arose quite naturally through observation. Personally, I am a fan of it, of the essential message it transposes: One can not be without the other.
The first obvious instance of such a thing is biological sex. Long before we learned of self-reproducing organisms, people saw the male and the female coming together to create something new. Duality is basically used to draw up the contrasts of life - and it's the constrasts that are so noticeable; male-female, night-day, cold-warm, life-death. It's something our brain does all the time anyway. Comparing and categorizing. Dualism holds importance to this principle because often we will define things through what they are not: Cold is not warm. Warm is not cold. Dry is not wet. Wet is not dry. Etc.
Let's stay on the topic of sex though, because that's what's most relevant to this topic here. While we consist of over 37 trillion cells now, our very beginning consisted of only two cells; a sperm cell and an egg cell. Everything that we are grew from those two; the genetic replicators of our parents. A curious question is, supposing consciousness comes first, how exactly does it tie into this? Are the cells what is conscious and does that mean we originally consisted of two consciousness that became one? Or is the very process our consciousness, making us, so to say, our parents sexual desire?
Or perhaps consciousness is not quite there yet at the beginning? Perhaps it lingers around a bit and waits for that clump of flesh to develop before inhibiting it. Week 5 would be a good candidate because that's roughly when the fetus starts forming it's brain. Gives the consciousness something to do. Existence without a central nervous system might be quite dull afterall.
All in all I'm not really here to say that consciousness is or isn't an "illusion". Though I do think it's perfectly reasonable that consciousness may "just" be an expression of electrical currents darting through our brain. Personally I don't see why this wouldn't be consolidatable with many of the concepts about consciousness - the idea that consciousness is an expression of energy even spiritually seems satisfying to me.
It could be that all this patterned charges together are consciousness. If an electron encounters a proton, their charges cause them to move towards each other. They possess a kind of longing to be with each other and be united for ever. There are evil charges, longings, who want to break up this happy unity by means of a photon field. Some photon fields don't even have a charged longing from which they originated. The more complicated the charges inside a lump of matter, the more complicated the mental longings. Without the basic ingredient of charge, the material world can't develop.
By the same argument, digestion is an illusion. We may eat food and feel satisfied. But we do not experience the enzymes at work and the chemical transformations that occur in our bodies. These forums are also an illusion. We may think we are 'reading posts' but we do not experience the stream of 1's and 0's that constitutes the data. The 1's and 0's are also illusions: we may think we are dealing with binary numbers but we do not experience the electrical impulses of which the numbers are mere symbols fitted for our understanding. Further, illusion is an illusion. We may think we are seeing an illusion but we do not experience the nervous processes that we call 'seeing an illusion.' Since everything is in those terms an illusion we can jettison the concept of 'illusion'. It divides every term in every equation and so we can multiply it out without any loss of information.
On the other hand, some things are illusions: the rabbit from the hat, the winnings from your scam lottery ticket. Other things are not illusions: the hair of the dog you're patting when you pat the dog, for example. The hair of the dog when you think you're patting the dog but are just absent-mindedly patting the collar of your parka - that's an illusion.
I should have probably been clearer in my post, but I also introduced time-variant systems mechanics to the mix of things that our brain does which, in my opinion, fills the 'qualia' gap between the physical and non-physical subjective insubstantial-seeming mental world.
Yes. Consciousness is not a magic trick, but it is imaginary. Everything we are aware of is an image (or meaning) created by the Brain to represent the reality "out there". According to Daniel Dennett, those "unreal" pictures are projected onto the Cartesian Theater screen. And that mental mirror of the world is what I call "Ideality".
Donald Hoffman calls those subjective images "icons", referring to the little simplified symbols on a computer screen that represent the complex processing operations going on inside the CPU. Those subjective images may create an "illusion", but they are all we ever know about objective reality. "A map is not the territory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
Those "projections" in the mind are "illusory" in the same sense that a slice of reality recorded on film, when projected on a 2D screen, creates the illusion of dynamic 3D reality. Those mental images are also "ethereal" in the sense of "lacking material substance". They do have a real material substrate (neurons), but the pictures are ideal immaterial concepts. So, in my personal blog, I reconcile the ancient notion of real-vs-ideal or Qualia-vs-Quanta Dualism with the modern doctrine of all-encompassing Materialism, in a monistic philosophical perspective I call "BothAnd". :cool:
The Case Against Reality :
The interface theory of perception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
IDEALITY SYMBOLIZES REALITY
CARTESIAN THEATER
:up:
Iirc Dennett's description here is meant to be disparaging. Good post though, I enjoyed it a lot.
Don't pay attention to rumors! :grin:
Oh, come on, if consciousness, thinking, etc. were an illusion, then this discussion would be also an illusion!
Yes. He was trying to show a materialistic alternative to dualism. But he merely succeeded in kicking the immaterial can down the road. :smile:
Kick the can down the road :
put off confronting a difficult issue or making an important decision, typically on a continuing basis.
There is no answer. I can't explain you, and you can't explain me. We are entirely different, experiencing machines...but why? Why are there identities and peculiarities in a world devoid of chaos?
How things seem is on the surface. We have meteors crashing into planets, and then we have life, which avoids all obstacles. But why, if the essence of everything is a void of reason?
Are you saying that if we were all merely the fabled philosophical zombies, then this discussion would be an illusion?
Thinking is not an illusion, the concept that you need a non-physical entity to think is.
My cup has a shape. But it is not itself shape. It 'has' a shape. Shape is a property of my cup.
Similarly, consciousness is a property of my mind. It is not itself my mind. That's just confused. Minds 'have' consciousness, but they are not themselves the consciousness.
I am clearly conscious. That is, I am in a conscious state. To be aware of anything at all is to be in some kind of conscious state.
Anyone who argues that consciousness is an illusion is just plain confused. For really to be 'arguing' something is to be expressing some beliefs. And beliefs are conscious states, or dispositions to be in conscious states. And thus all genuine arguers are in conscious states.
As it is manifest to reason that conscious states cannot exist absent a mind to bear them, we can also conclude that minds exist.
There is no good case for the non-existence of either conscious states, or minds. For any argument that seeks to show that one or the other is illusory, will have a premise that is far less plausible than the reality of consciousness and the minds that bear it. Indeed, any argument - to be an argument - needs to be the argument of some mind or other. So it is entirely hopeless to try and argue for such views. At best all one can do is point to the metaphysical possibility that no minds or conscious states exist. But metaphysical possibilities are not evidence.
There are no zeroes propagating in the brain. Only bunches of sodium ions crossing the surface of dendrites through small channels. There are no charges pushed along a wire by an electric potential, as is the case in computers. The bunches of charges run in concert, parallel, and in large numbers, over paths determined by the strengths between neurons. The strengths between the neuron connections determines followed paths. Researchers in Kevan Martin's laboratory at the Institute of Neuro-informatics at the University of Zurich have shown for the first time that the size of synapses determines the strength of their information transmission, which seems logic. The connection strengths, the wide of the synapses, is important in memory. If you look at a scene over and over again the scene will be imprinted because the synapses in the neurons involved widen. If you look at a similar scene it will look familiar because the scene will, because of its similarity, follow the path of the strengthened connections. The falling in the engraved path is the recognition. Why can't this conscious recognition be contained in the physical process? Note that memories in this process are not stored as such. A memory is reconstructed by earlier strengthening of the connectivity of synapses. If you look at a circle shape there will run a corresponding shape of collective patches of ions on the neurons. This shape can be strangely attracted to the strengthened shape earlier engraved. So memory is a reconstruction process. Again, why can't a conscious thought not be the collective motion of charges. By which I mean, the content of the physical process. Not the process itself, but what's inside the process, literally the physical charge, of which no physicist has an understanding from the inside, only what it causes.
Are you saying that consciousness is not an illusion, the concept that you need a non-physical entity to have consciousness is?
In short, all the problems of philosophy are dissolved by physicalist reductionism.
Question: are you familiar with the expression ‘the explanatory gap’?
If mind is an illusion, that the mind itself perceives, then it's not possible, since something can't be borne by its very own self. A woman can't bear herself as a baby, a god can't create itself as a god, etc. A creation of any sort has a necessary condition that its creator predates it.
So "the mind is an illusion" is a necessarily wrong concept.
Ways things birth themselves in biology:
- Fission
- Budding
- Fragmentation
- Parthenogenesis (Unfertilized egg birth)
- Hermaphroditism (Self-Fertilization)
Self-reproduction at some point was the standard. It still is in many aspects of our own physiology. Evolutionary, sexual reproduction has the benefit because it provides a larger genepool. More building blocks, more tools.
I think that you're right and there is a technicality that makes "the mind is an illusion" self-contradictory. But despite the technicality, I cannot resist to explore this further, just because the phrase makes an intuitive sense to me. So bare with me for asking ridiculous questions.
Is the statement "trees are made of wood" necessarily wrong? Something can't be borne by its very own self. Wood is created by trees, therefore trees cannot be made of wood, because they cannot give birth to themselves. Is there a flaw in this logic?
There is also no requirement for the creation to be the same or to resemble its creator. A man makes a chair. Or a man makes a pen. Or a woman makes a thermonuclear reactor.
Now, you can argue that an illusion is very different from a mind, and on that basis, the creation could be explained.
But the basic premise in the claim makes that impossible. "A mind is an illusion." There is no room left for argument. There are illusions; and one of them is the mind. A mind is a proper subset of the illusion. There is nothing about a mind that is not an illusion. That is what the basic premise states.
I am only doing logic here, not the research for the validity of the assumptions in the claim. If you wish to reword the claim, then you're free to do so; but you can't do that without altering its meaning.
The concept of tree and wood are different. Wood does not give birth to anything. Trees give birth to wood, in a sense, by the process of creating wood; but wood does not give birth to trees. The process of giving birth to trees is via a seed, and seeds carry no, or very little fibre. (Which wood basically is.) Seeds carry a lot of energy, protein, and the specific DNA to the species.
You can say then, how can a DNA give birth to a DNA. Well, they are different, separate DNAs. One is the successor to the other one. Much like a mother gives birth to a child, the child is almost the same as the mother, but the child is still created by the mother; the mother did not create herself. and the child did not create itself, despite the child and the mother may be indistinguishable from each other by some measurements.
To carry the simile farther: wood is to trees as, say, bones and muscles are to a child. Is a child created by its bones and muscles? No. Are the bones and muscles of a child created by the child? Well, arguably, yes. But the formation of the child starts way before the formation of muscles and bones.
No. In such a case this discussion would just have not taken place. Have you ever seen in movies any two zombies discussing? :grin:
The same can be said of all your other examples.
One more thing that may shed more light on the irrelevance of your examples: a parent can give birth to something, to the parent's child, which child is the same or very similar in structure to the parent. The child, however, is not the parent. Your examples, some of them, ignore this very subtle concept. Quoting Hermeticus
yes, but self-reproduction still creates a child by a parent. If a cell reproduces itself, there are two after that; not the same number as before the split.
You can argue that they are both children, or you can argue that one is the parent, and the other, the child. But you can't argue that they are both parents, because both did not exist before the split. And a parent's definition is to exist before its child gets born.
I didn't get that. Something missing?
So patting the dog - a physical process if ever there was one - is not, after all, an illusion (when I'm patting the dog). Else, why does your argument apply to events like patting the dog and not apply to events like electrical brain impulses? Seems a bit picky and choosy to me.
Yes. Even devout materialists use different words for Qualia (Mind, Consciousness, etc) and Quanta (Brain, Neural Nets). Their explanation for the implicit recognition of immaterial Qualia is that such ghostly invisible entities are merely epi-phenomena (functions) of underlying physical mechanisms. Hence, Qualia are caused by physical processes, but have no causal powers of their own. So, Matter is primary & fundamental, while Mind is secondary & useless (illusory).
However, some scientists have concluded that the qualitative Mind Stuff we call "Information" is actually the fundamental "substance" of the real world. Moreover, some physicists have equated Information with Energy, which implies that the same Mind Stuff can be both Physical and Causal. If so, then we could take a Monistic worldview, based on Information as the Essence or Single Substance (Spinoza) of the universe : Enformationism.
In that case, both Energy & Matter would be epi-phenomena. Yet, although I wouldn't call them "illusory", we are only conscious of Energy & Mass as ideas (information) in the Mind. That's because, as Kant noted, we never know the "thing itself", but only our mental model of a material thing. :nerd:
Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.
epiphenomenal qualia :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2960077
Is Information Fundamental? :
Could information be the fundamental "stuff" of the universe?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794
Quoting Wayfarer
Strawman. :roll:
Let our 'dialectic' continue :chin: ...
(excerpts from old posts, linked by my handle, in the contexts of other threads on consciousness)
"Consciousness" is phenomenal awareness of mind. Mind(ing) tracks and resolves 'discontinuities' between memories & expectations or expectations & predictions in order to adaptively coordinate behaviour with(in) social / natural environment(s). :point:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Au contraire, direct quote and paraphrase of the OP, wishful thinking on your part notwithstanding. Perhaps you could explain to our new friend the significance of the term 'explanatory gap', he says he doesn't know of it.
Thanks, I have looked into it and now understand the term.
I guess I was speaking to that term in the above quote.
Thank you for your replies! I must be repeating countless discussions about consciousness that already happened on this forum. I don't intend to keep this going for much longer. Maybe it'll be my post on this topic.
Could we reword the claim "consciousness is an illusion" as "consciousness is created by neural activity in the brain"? This should address the questions about how the consciousness is borne. Let's say we make this claim because we can see the correlation between neural activities and consciousness: no activity means no consciousness, and altered activities correlate with altered states of consciousness.
In saying the above, we're also saying that nothing other than neural activity in the brain gives birth to consciousness.
If we ask a conscious individual about how they perceive their consciousness, they are likely to say that consciousness just exists unconditionally (like god). We don't perceive consciousness as the firing of billions of neurons.
In other words, the inner workings of consciousness don't seem to accurately represent the physical reality that gives birth to consciousness (neural activity in the brain). This crease a basis for us to suggest that "consciousness is an illusion" (i.e. a deceived appearance), meaning that the way we perceive consciousness does not accurately represent the physical reality of how the consciousness is being borne.
I hope you can follow my train of thoughts, even if you already see some flaws in it. With everything above considered, when you say that "consciousness is an illusion" is necessarily wrong, I perceive it is as a claim that consciousness is not the result of neural activity in the brain. This means that consciousness exists unconditionally. I can see some merit in that, but I'm also not fully satisfied by it. I can see it as a form of Curry's paradox: "If consciousness exists, it exists unconditionally", which means that "consciousness exists unconditionally".
I can agree that the statement "consciousness is an illusion" is somewhat paradoxical, but I don't think that denying the statement straight away is a fair way to end a discussion on this topic. I think a better way is to offer a more elaborate and less contradictory way to think about consciousness.
:rofl: Read it!
Quoting Brock Harding
As concise a statement of physicalist reductionism as you're likely to find anywhere.
Quoting Brock Harding
Good! As you're claiming that science has now dispensed with the 'ancient thinking' that posits an 'uninformed dualism', then perhaps you might say how that same science tackles the explanatory gap or the 'hard problem of consciousness' that was the subject of David Chalmer's well-known paper.
It's okay by me. I am not sure if it's true, but hey, why not. However, and unfortunately, chances are that this change will cause me to not post more, since I only had something to say while the previous definition was in effect.
I will see if I can put something coherent together on it. Would you like me to solve world peace whilst I am at it? :)
I guess we could but I think a deeper insight is needed. I think describing the brain as having a 'consciousness' is kind of like saying your car has 'driverness'. It is all about perspective.
Quoting Brock Harding
Which only a mind can bring.
Without a driver in it? Consciousness implies something like conscious. "Mindfulness": something like mindful. Or possession thereof. Greatness: being great. Consciousness: being conscious. Driverness: being driver?
Why can't the conscious actually exist inside of matter? Litterally. In this light, calling it an illusion is an illusion. A persistent one, but an illusion, no matter what so-called experts say, who try to explain it materialistically, as an interactive process, or processes containing strange self-referential loops. Self-reference seems a recurring theme in the field consciousness. It is by some even considered the defining feature: Consciousness as self reference. Notice the "as". What has self reference to do with consciousness? You have to be conscious first to be conscious of yourself.
According to dualism without a driver would mean that the car is controlled by the 'Subdriverness' and with a driver it is controlled by the 'Driverness' - the driver being the brain of the car.
So thinking is not an illusion - but (according to OP / topic title) consciousness is an illusion, or at least an 'illusion' - which may be something different? Yet we need to be conscious in order to think.
When I think about neurons - that's not an illusion, even though I can't experience the firing of neurons involved in the thinking, which is in itself after all only the firing of neurons. When I pat the dog - that's an illusion, because I cannot experience the firing of neurons involved in the perception and what I call 'patting the dog' is merely the firing of neurons. Seems quite arbitrary.
I expect you're right that you don't need a non-physical entity in order to think. But it does not seem to follow that consciousness or mind or our everyday dog-patting-style perceptions are illusions or that patting dogs is any more illusory that discussing neurons.
Sounds better. What this seems to say is that if you take away our brains and nervous systems we will no longer be able to know whether or not we are patting the dog. Now that is something I can sign up to. It's a minor triumph but a lot better than 'consciousness is an illusion'.
Sure we do. Our experiences are what it is like to feel light entering the eye and the chemical changes in the brain. An experience is not the thing experienced but is about the thing experienced. Every thing is a consequence of prior causes. Things are not their causes.
Where is the illusion? Is there not really a dog wagging its tail when i experience a dog wagging its tail?
Just replace "dog" and "tail wagging" with "brain" and "neurons firing" and you have the same problem. By asserting that your mind is an illusion you undermine all of your experiences and knowledge, including those of brains and their neurons. The experience of seeing an MRI image of your brain would just be another of these consequences.
And none of this explains how brains can create illusions or how the substance of the illusion is created by the substance of the brain.
Sometimes it's not really a dog, but a bush shaking in the wind that you momentarily mistaken for a dog. Your experience was real, and it matched the experience that you would have if there was a dog, but there wasn't a dog.
Is your experience joyful when you're seeing a dog wagging its tail? Perhaps a person next to you experiences fear because they're afraid of dogs. Don't we call it an illusion when things appear differently in our experience from what they actually are? Do we ever perceive things exactly the way they are? Can an experience exist without containing at least some illusion in it?
I think there is always an element of illusion in everything we perceive. E.g. does the dog have a color in your experience? We know that the color perception in humans is somewhat arbitrary. It only ties to a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The things in the universe are not inherently colorful, but it's the human brain that perceives them as such. Is it not reasonable to say that color is kind of an illusion? Would this necessarily undermine our experience and knowledge about colors?
Does a verb exist in the same sense as a noun? Can I say walking exists? If I can, does it exist in the same sense as legs do? To the extent nouns and verbs have been mixed up, consciousness is an illusion.
The mind exists objectively in the brain. The mind, the noun, is in motion, verbally. Therefore it's a verbal noun. The mind can be seen as that what's litterally in the brain. It certainly is not present in the brain the doctor on TV shows us to explain what structures are changing in a developing child or in the brain the professor on TV cuts in half to share his sense of wonder with us by pointing at the beautiful structures that become visible inside, after the cut of the bridge connecting left and right.
The working brain can't be cut out of the body. Nobody ever has seen a working brain on the outside. But we all know what it feels like on the inside. All matter is charged. A physical truth. It's a kind of panpsychism, but on scientific solid grounds. A dualism. Charge and matter, interacting in space. That's "all" there is to it.
I was not familiar with the term "phenomenal consciousness", so I Googled it. After a brief review, I can see that the theory is more complex & technical than a cursory overlook could suffice for understanding. But the key concept seems to be based on Holistic Emergence. So, on the face of it, their hypothesis sounds compatible with my own notion of Consciousness as an Emergent phenomenon of Information processing in the Brain.
The authors of the article linked below, even quote one of my favorite physicists, Paul Davies, about the "emergentist hypothesis". I don't know if they also refer to one of Davies' cutting-edge concepts in Physics : that "shape-shifting" Information (or EnFormAction as I call it) is the essence of both Energy & Matter, as they interact to form emergent Whole Systems, with novel properties & functions, from a selection of otherwise independent Parts. From that perspective, the Conscious Mind emerges not just from a Material Brain, but ultimately from the Immaterial Information that is knitted-together into novel patterns of inter-relationships, which humans interpret as Meaning. :smile:
Phenomenal Consciousness and Emergence :
In this paper, we discuss the critical role emergence plays in creating phenomenal consciousness and how this role helps explain what appears to be a scientific explanatory gap between the subjective experience and the brain, but which is actually not a scientific gap at all.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01041/full
Note -- Consciousness is a philosophical gap in primacy & category : Which comes first "physical form" or "metaphysical design"? Which is more important "awareness" or "physical substance"? Which is more crucial "knowing" or "sensing"?
Davies, P. (2006). “Preface,” in The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion, eds P. Clayton and P. Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ix–xiv.
Life, the Universe, and Everything :
"I think we begin to see that if information can have causal leverage over matter, . . ."
https://physicsworld.com/a/life-the-universe-and-everything-an-interview-with-paul-davies/
Holistic Emergence of Mind :
For example, at levels of low complexity, exchanges of information are merely what physicists call “energy”, which is “doing” without “knowing”. Only at higher levels of intricacy and entanglement do the conscious properties of Mind emerge from Material stuff.
BothAnd Blog ; Post 6 -- Alternative Theory of Reality
Quoting 180 Proof
I can agree with this assertion. But not necessarily with its implication that Consciousness is a second-class phenomenon in the material world. Astronomers are eagerly searching for signs of Life ex-terra, but ultimately what they seek is creatures like humans, that are aware of what's going on. To discover a Mindless world may be even more disappointing than a Lifeless planet.
My own assessment is that the human notion of FreeWill is "more veto than volo". But what little agency (e.g. executive veto) we do have, is more precious than gold & diamonds, or life itself, to those who can choose the next fork in their path of Life, and to express the thought uppermost in their own Mind. :cool:
PS___I also concur with the "Phenomenal" article, that the "explanatory gap" in understanding Consciousness, is a philosophical quest instead of a scientific gap. Empirical scientists are usually content with dissecting a "problem" into its constituent parts. But theoretical philosophers, such as David Chalmers, cannot rest until they put all those puzzle pieces back together again to form a Whole picture of a living & thinking phenomenon. :joke:
Right. So preliminary perceptions can lead to a misinterpretation of those perceptions. Only after you do a double-take and look more closely do you see that it's a shaking bush, and not a tail-wagging dog and the illusion is dispelled, yet you still experience something. So it seems to me that consciousness and its contents (qualia) are not illusions. As you said, the experience is real. It is the misinterpretation of the experience that is the illusion.
Take mirages and a "bent" straw in a glass of water. There isn't really water on the ground and the straw isn't bent. It is the light that is being bent and that is what you are experiencing. Once you interpret the sensory data correctly the illusion disappears. Even though I still experience the appearance of water on the ground and straws being bent, the interpretation is what either makes it an illusion or not. Once I interpret the data correctly, I am seeing it as it truly is. Pools of water on the ground and bent straws are what bent light looks like. Even though what things look like isn't the way those things truly are (that would be confusing the map with the territory), I can still get at how it truly is. How can I still get at things as they truly are indirectly? Because causes leave effects and effects are about their causes. So by seeing the effect (qualia) as it truly is I can get at what the qualia is about by correctly interpreting the causes.
Quoting pfirefry
That's if you are incorrectly projecting joy and fear onto the dog. In this case it would be an illusion if you interpreted your joy or fear as being part of the dog and not part of your self, just as we create an illusion by interpreting the bentness as part of the straw in the water and not to the light that reflects off it and into our eyes.
Information is a material notion. It describes the spatial relationships between particles. I agree that if there is information in motion, like there is between heat and cold, and if this information structures can form correspondences, resonances, with informed structures around them and interact with them, one can speak of conscious life. At the same time you take out an essential ingredient. Consciousness itself. It is like taking out the charges of elementary particles. Without them they would stray in the void, diverging into the whole vastness of space. It's because of these charges they can form structures in the first place.
:100:
This is literally an explicitly false statement. The word "mind" is a noun unless it is referring to caring (a shepherd minds their flock, or "I don't mind if you smoke"). "Think" is absolutely a verb (thought is also a noun). "Think" and "mind" are not synonyms.
If one's approach leads to a need to reinvent the English language in fundamental ways in order to make sense of one's conclusions, I'd suggest that approach is flawed.
Yes, but Information is also an immaterial function. In my thesis, Information is the fundamental "substance" (Aristotle : essence) of the world. So, Matter, Energy, & Mind are various forms of shape-shifting Information. That's why I noted that "Mind emerges not just from a Material Brain, but ultimately from the Immaterial Information". :smile:
Information : Shannon vs Deacon :
Originally, the word “information” referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacon’s book (Incomplete Nature : How Mind Emerged From Matter) about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, “The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe.” Claude Shannon’s Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
BothAnd Blog 4, post 80.
Information -- What is It? :
But perhaps the most fundamental enigma is the ultimate “nature” of Information itself. The original usage of the term was primarily Functional, as the content of memory & meaning. Then Shannon turned his attention to the Physical aspects of data transmission. Now, Deacon has returned to the most puzzling aspect of mental function : Intentions & Actions. For example : a> how one person’s mind can convey meaning & intentions to another mind; b> how a subjective intention (Will) can result in physical changes to the objective world. How can invisible intangible immaterial (absent) ideas cause physical things to move & transform. Occultists have imagined Mind as a kind of mystical energy or life-force (Chi; psychokinesis) that can be directed outward into the world, like a laser beam, to affect people and objects. But Deacon is not interested in such fictional fantasies. Instead, he tries to walk a fine line between pragmatics & magic, or physics & metaphysics.
BothAnd Blog 4, post 80.
There's nothing in walking that we could consider ontologically equivalent to kidney or a heart. A mind is not an 0bject like the brain, it's simply an activity that something (the brain?) conducts.
You are conflating "noun" with "material". A name, and equation, traffic, an answer... none of these consist of matter, even though, like the mind, all of them can be related to matter, yet they are all nouns. They are all things. That doesn't imply Quoting Agent Smith
In normal English the mind is a thing, not an activity. That's not a subject for debate, it's a fact of the language. Confusing the point that it is immaterial or if it is recognized and defined in terms of activities, with whether it is a noun or a verb, is simply misspeaking and asking to confuse yourself and others.
There's no such thing as a mind which thinks. Thinking is the mind! Mind is an activity (thinking), not an actor (thinker).
That is a false statement in common English. Again, not up for debate, it's a fact of the language. I will reiterate that if your method leads you to having to reinvent the English language in order to justify your views, then I think your method is flawed, and suggest you rethink it.
You're also free to just keep insisting that your new and novel use of language is the better one and hope we all adopt it, but I'm not optimistic for you if you can make no better case than just insisting it is so by fiat.
I can't simplify it further. I've avoided linguistic references and focused on what is true.
Thinking = Mind.
Thinker [math]\neq[/math] Mind.
It's as easy as ABC. I don't see why we don't see eye to eye on this matter.
All I can say is you're hung up on language. I made it clear to you that language isn't the only way to understand my point.
Dunno. This directs attention away from the matter itself. And, so I think, that's exactly the stuff conscious resides in. You can consider the conscious as an outside function of matter, like force fields, but these are a necessary element to express the conscious, to form forlmations, so to speak. The force fields emanate from charged particles (though they were, and still can be, given a quite independent existence, like real photons are created when charges interact, thereby influencing other electrically bound charges or free charges, say an atom they excite or an electron they scatter from). The potential energy fields, which can be charged even themselves, like is the case for the colored interaction fields, have a function, but conscience resides inside matter, like charge in a particle, and it is in fact informed charge. That renders it material in a sense, but the inside of matter, its charged content, is not really material.
Seeing as though language is virtually the only tool we have to communicate in this forum, I can't possibly imagine how you could communicate otherwise (pictures or graphs, I suppose).
Quoting Agent Smith
Can you point me to where you did that? I missed it, and it isn't at all clear to me.
Hi. Picking on qualia is a hobbyhorse for me lately, so please pardon a question. How would one establish that qualia are caused by something? Would we not instead be limited to saying that reports (like 'I heard music') are caused by physical interference (like running a current through some part of the brain) ?
How would a case be made for the existence of qualia in the first place? Like the red square I'm using as my thumbnail. All we have to offer as evidence are public entities like reports or a rat trained to stop at a surface reflecting a certain frequency of light, etc.
Let's start over.
For me what we call mind is an activity like walking & talking , and not an object, like legs & mouth. To think the mind is an object and not an activity is an error that's committed by many. That's about the gist of what I want to share.
That's precisely the problem. Mind is an activity à la breathing, walking, talking. It is not an object like lungs, legs, mouth.
Look, adding "For me" doesn't fix the problem you have here. I could say "For me, radishes are berries", but all that displays is that I either don't know much about radishes, berries, or both. Minds are things, not activities, no matter how often you want to say otherwise, and the only way to change that is to change the English language... which brings me back to what I originally said: If your way of approaching the question requires you to change the English language in order for it to make sense, then I think it is a good idea to change the way you approach the question. So I acknowledge what you're saying, and I'm pretty sure I understand it, and I think it's a bad way to approach the subject for the reasons I explicated.
Thanks! That’s a good answer, well articulated too. You’re saying that once we understand the nature of an illusion, the illusion no longer affects us.
The way I saw it was that our perception is inaccurate, and we cannot change or perception, therefore we need to come to terms with the idea that everything we perceive is an illusion. But you made a case that an illusion is when we incorrectly interpret what we perceive. Although we cannot change our perception, we can change our interpretation, therefore we can overcome the illusion.
Now I can see what people mean when they say something is not an illusion. But paradoxically, we can only overcome an illusion when we accept that it exists and affects us. By saying that something is an illusion we’re making the illusion disappear, according to your post. I’m fine with that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That's what you think. Not all words in English language refer to things though. That's your limited interpretation. How would changing language change your mind?
Mind is not a thing. In plain English.
I deeply regret ever having brought language into the discussion.
Anyway...
Look at the following nouns:
1. Horse
2. Brain (not mind)
Look now at the following verbs
3. Run
4. Think (mind)
Do you see my point?
Why isn't it ("mind" being a noun) open for debate. Even the great Aristotle made mistakes.
I merely made explicit something that's true for everyone, including yourself unless there's someone who's omniscient. Are you omniscient? I hardly think so.
I replied to you.
If you want to say that minds are manifested through actions, then that's a sensible thing to say that is consistent with the English language. If you want to say that minds are activities or actions, then you are speaking nonsense. It matters that you express yourself in sensible ways, and just because what you're saying makes sense to you in your own head doesn't really mean anything.
When you speak carelessly, then you are likely to incorporate the careless propositions into your reasoning, which leads to careless reasoning and false and fallacious conclusions. I'm sure you don't want that result, so I am trying to suggest things you can do to avoid it.
But what you are claiming to be true, in the way you are claiming it, is demonstrably false. "Mind" is in no way a verb. You need to find a way to express what you're trying to say accurately and sensibly, or you will just keep saying things that are false.
Just like it is utterly blatant, and seriously grave nonsense if you say mind is a thing. It's not an activity either. A volcano is a thing. It erupting is an activity, if it's an active volcano. Neither posses mind.
Because what is or isn't a noun is a function of how billions of English speakers have historically and continue to currently speak, not a function of what makes sense to you. that's how language works.
I'm assuming that you are functionally literate person and actually know that mind is a noun, but have just committed yourself to something that if you stepped back from for a second, you'd see that as spoken what you've said is incorrect. Am I correct to assume you are fluent and at least minimally literate in English?
I regret to inform you that I don't see you as an authority on sense and nonsense. Do pardon me.
What's the difficulty in accepting mind as an activity/action? You say this is nonsense, but I don't think you understand what nonsense is. If you did, you would never have said what you said. Perhaps, you mean to clarify in subsequent posts. Do go on...explain.
Or we can do it the other way. "I heard the song in my mind" is a sensible sentence, but "I heard the song in my think" is not.
Do you dispute these? These are simple demonstrations that "Mind" is a noun and not a verb in English.
You're hung up on language is all I can say. Good day. I learned a lot from our little chat. Thanks.
Only because it's the only thing we can use to discuss these ideas. Maybe it's more important than you think.
It seemed like you were identifying nouns with 'things'. And, as quoted, as things they cannot be activities. Perhaps I missed something.
A blizzard is a noun. It's also a process. One can certainly argue it is a 'thing' of some kind. But what are you ruling out when you say minds are things.
Evolution is a noun.
Natural selection is a compound noun.
Civilization is a noun.
Why does mind being a noun mean it is not some complicated activity? or set of activities?
What are particles? Isn't any particle really just an interaction of smaller "particles", which are in turn composed of the interaction of even smaller "particles", ad infinitum? So you never get at any particles, only interactions between smaller interactions, or information/processes all the way down. Particles would be the process of mental modeling of other information, or processes, relative to your own.
Quoting Raymond Have any examples?
If some word doesnt refer to something, then what would you be talking about?
The process stops at a fundamental level. The fundamentals are massless. They interact and form the massive structures of quarks and leptons. They interact because they contain a charge, which is not a material like we see around us. Not a thing. So the word "charge", in relation to elementary particles, is an example of a word not referring to a thing. It's a non-thing in a thing.
How do you know that there is a "fundamental level" of the universe? Any "level" is just a view from somewhere in the universe, so levels of the universe, including the "fundamental" one would just be different imaginary views of the universe from imaginary vantage points in the universe.
A charge is often described as an attribute, or defining quality, of some thing, which is just another way of saying that it is information.
How do you know there is no fundamental level? There is one more level below quarks and leptons. Two basic particles is the absolute minimum. Elementary particles can't be divided. Charge is not information. That's a property of particles in cooperation.
Because everytime himans declare theyve discovered the fundamental level of reality we find there are even smaller things, like atoms to protons to quarks.
Besides, how do you reconcile the concept of particles with the concept of the mind (the hard problem)? We can refer to the mind with words. Is the mind a thing or particle?
Quoting Raymond
I can use whatever term you like. Property is a type of information. When you use the terms property, interaction, relationship or process, you are referring to a type if information.
That is no guarantee a fundamental won't be found.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The mind is for the brain as charge for particles.Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, that's why charge and mind are not information.
Yes. That was the point of my post. Mind & Consciousness are not material things, but immaterial mathematical functions. A "function" is a relationship (ratio ; pattern), not a physical object. We typically refer to those Menta-Physical concepts (ideas ; symbols) with nouns, as-if they are tangible things. But the Mind is an Information Processor (not the machine, but the logical procedure) which receives raw sensory information Input and changes it into symbolic Meaning (significance to Self) as the Output.
Since Shannon reified Information (abstract ideas) as-if they are chunks (bits & bytes) of matter, many people imagine "Information" as some kind of ectoplasmic "stuff", that is stored in the brain. But it's "stuff" only in a metaphorical sense. Yet, those mental images are actually abstractions of mathematical logic, in the form of relationships between sensory inputs and mental outputs. Information is stored in the Brain in the form of abstract patterns of relationships. Mind pictures are like the illusory images we see on a movie screen. Metaphors are Meta-Physical. Much of our philosophical disputes are not about the facts, but the significance of metaphors. :nerd:
What is a Function? :
A function relates an input to an output. ... It is like a machine that has an input and an output. And the output is related somehow to the input.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/sets/function.html
Note -- a function is an abstract relationship, like a mathematical ratio
Process :
a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
Note -- actions are not physical objects, but changes in the objects
Symbolic :
a representation of a thing, not the thing-in-itself
Reify :
make (something abstract) seem more concrete or real.
Note -- imagining a bit or byte of Information as-if it is a material object makes it seem more realistic.
Abstraction :
The act of obtaining or removing something from a source : the act of abstracting something, a general idea or quality, rather than an actual person, object, or ...
Note -- The mental processing of incoming sensations filters-out the material "stuff", leaving only the "general idea" of the specific thing represented. The result is a Qualia, not a Quanta. The Idea of a thing is its abstract logical structure, along with attributed Properties or Qualities.
PS___The Beatles' Days in the life says : "he blew his mind out in a car". In this poetic sense, "mind" is a metaphor for "brain". Yet, it wasn't actually "mind" splattered on the roof of the car. People often to equate the function with the material. But they are as different as "heat" and "heater". Heat is a physical process, but it has no material substance. In that comparison, Mind is like Energy : invisible & intangible but sensible & knowable. We "sense" the Mind with our sixth sense of Rational Inference.
If only... but the ancient thinking is our thinking. It says pictures in the head, echoing like words. And sentences in the head, representing like pictures.
First, I need to clarify that the quoted phrase is my interpretation of an interpretation that I don't agree with : that Qualia have no causal powers. As ideas (beliefs) in the mind, Qualia do have a causal role in human behavior.
Regarding the "how" of "establishing that qualia are caused by something", you can refer to neuroscience articles such as those linked below. :smile:
Qualia are the subjective or qualitative properties of experiences. ... in terms of the causal role it plays in our mental life:
https://iep.utm.edu/qualia/
Information and the Origin of Qualia :
The cause of sensory qualia is just the same as all the other experiences, it just happens to be focussed on sensory perception.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2017.00022/full
I just browsed the second link. It seems to completely miss the logical-semantic issue (as perhaps you do), and it's hard to gauge a priori whether it's published by cranks.
If you've actually read it, perhaps you'll be willing to summarize the argument for conclusion #3 below, namely the qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages.
[quote=second link]
So some basic conclusions can be drawn from the discussion of information processing so far.
• Information can be in the form of structures or messages.
• The brains physical activity deals with information structures.
• The qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages.
• Structures represent messages.
• Messages can be identified from structures.
• Structures, but not messages, can be transmitted from a sender to a receiver.
[/quote]
These statements are cranky:
The brains physical activity deals with information structures.
• The qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages.
• Structures represent messages.
The brain doesn't deal with structures. Qualia are not information messages, whatever you mean with that. Structures don't represent messages. They can be messages though.
What about qualia associated with hallucinations? In the case of phantom limb pain, what information message is there? Is it a mistaken information message? What about the beauty of a sunset?
I was quoting a paper I find suspicious. I'm wondering whatever they can mean by that sort of talk.
Mentioned above that I never made such claim, but I'll also add that the loose use of 'information' is not much better than the use of 'qualia.'
Huffing their own exhaust in a brown paper bag, it seems to me.
I don't know anything about the Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience organization. But, FWIW, the author of the article, Roger Orpwood, is a researcher at the Centre for Pain Research, Department for Health, University of Bath, Bath, UK. The "frontiers" label might indicate a focus on pushing the envelope of Neuroscience knowledge. Whether that qualifies as "crank", I don't have enough information to say.
The Information & Qualia article, in general, agrees with my own understanding of how information processing works in the brain/mind. Apparently, you have a problem with their assertion that : "The qualia of our inner conscious world are information messages". But it makes sense to me, in the light of cutting-edge Neuroscience and Information Theory. So, as requested, here's my summary of the argument :
1. Qualia are abstract concepts in the mind, that result from sensory stimulation. The typical example is to point out that there is no Redness in red light. Instead, it's an interpretation in the mind.
2. Information is an abstract pattern that carries Potential Meaning. For example, Morse Code is merely a series of dots & dashes (symbols) that can be interpreted by prepared minds as meaningful Information.
3. Messages are the semantic meanings associated with abstract symbolic patterns, or conventional squiggles such as "2" or "X".
4. Logic is a mathematical relationship (structural pattern) between items in a series or array. If the logic "adds up", the result is value or meaning.
5. Structure is an abstract logical pattern that the mind perceives as the essence of an object or arrangement of objects.
6. Information is processed, organized and structured data.
7. Data is things known or assumed as facts, values, or meanings, as the basis of reasoning or calculation.
So, the article seems to be saying that "the Qualia we are aware of in the Mind are interpreted from abstract logical patterns of incoming data as meaningful information". The brain is just a machine for processing raw data into meaningful messages to the conscious Self. For example, light in the range of 620 to 750nm, has no inherent color. So, it must first be converted into a chemical form, which is then transformed into electro-magnetic forms, and ultimately processed into the Meaning (qualia) we call "Red". The Mind, both conscious and sub-conscious, is the interpreter of meaning; of significance to Self. Does that sound cranky to you? :smile:
Qualia Are Fundamental Particles Of Information
A seemingly secondary but eventually essential theme of Rhet Fardter’s critique of cultural objectivism is the paradigmatic hypermeaninglessness of any predialectical 'society.' If his rehabilitated and purified (counter-)semiotics holds, we have to 'chews' finally either a metaphysically conceptualist desituationism or an ignominiously infinite Conversation. In other 'worse,' either the aforementioned 'we-appropriation' of his 'slurrealism' or conclude after all that art is used to marginalize the proletariat.
paraphrased source
Whoa! Hold on there partner. Can you break-down some of those polysyllabic words, so a non-specialist can follow the logic? I have no idea what all that "hypermeaninglessness" means. :joke:
PS__It sounds like a political rant or screed, not a philosophical analysis of Consciousness. :cool:
Except that qualia are the conscious understanding of the nòn-material content of the two gauge-coupled massless Dirac fields constituting reality.
Quoting RogueAI
These experiences lack the physical part. The leg that stimulated the structured charge currents, is not there anymore, but all the processes following are still there. Even without the leg you can still feel pain in your toe. If you lay in the dark, then hold you arm near a lamp, switch the light on and off, your arm is shortly lit by light. If you withdraw your arm, it looks as if is still near the lamp. As if you pull your arm out of your own arm. Same for your leg that's not there. There will remain a kind of after image. An afterpain in the toe, proving that space is a conscious experience.
A yes! I thought you wrote it. My fault! :smile:
I hope an initially ingenuous investigation of the following is incipiently instructive. Awareness merely regulates a symbolic representation of Chaos, while an otherwise 'formless' Void illuminates our therefore essentially infinite Experience. If culture always exists only as a symphony of boundaries within which imagination shapes self-righteous belonging, the true Self nevertheless maintains its existential silence as a primordial summoning of Qualia.
a helpful co-creative source
Too much tuna ! But would not that imply that the subject is performatively recontextualised within a theory that foregrounds a vanishing narrator? If 'truth' is indeed to be capable of significance, reality itself must be created by a lusty proletariate (but only if reality is equiprimoridal with culture; if that is not the case, knowledge is intrinsically impossible within a dismal regime of dialectical nihilism.) In other words, the subject is merely a self-referential pseudo-totality fluffed by a consensus which includes language as a hole.
influences
:lol:
More or less! Let's not forget though that to actually and objectively experience the non-narrative aspect of the conceptual imperative as imposed by the political powers in contemporary science dominated cultural exchange, eliminating the subjective... shit, I can't write... I laugh to hard!
:lol:
Capitalist postsemanticist theory holds that the purpose of the writer is social comment, given that language is interchangeable with truth. That 'rationalism is a mythopoetical totality' is anything but Irrelevant or Obscure. In short, “consciousness is fundamentally unattainable"(Fardter 1976). "Qualia are rather the collapse, and eventually the absurdity, of consciousness". Or, in another register, the main thesis of any legitimately dialectical theory must be the absurdity, and some would say the futility, of any necessarily merely purportedly postdialectical 'language.'
inspirations
'Random' arrangements of words can signify, and this supports a detachment of words like 'qualia' from any ground in secret 'Experience.' ('Thesis a chew sorry.') Buy the whey, a friend once too no:
Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clothing are there and that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there at the same time, and that one may be separated from the other, that both may then be contemplated simultaneously & that each may be considered in turn apart from the other successively?
That's a good one!
2. What biological advantage does qualia provide? Presumably, information about bodily injury could be sent without any qualia at all, so what purpose does the feeling of pain serve? Also, do robots that have sensory apparatuses that send information to a CPU have qualia?
Source of income for philosophers.
Science can only point to a series of biological processes such as breathing, cognitive awareness, etc., when declaring a person to be conscious or not (as often happens in a hospital emergency). And the line blurs even further when comparing animals and humans, and further, animals and plants.
Personally, I would ask what benefit is there in claiming something so essential to human reality an illusion? Are we going down the path of solipsism? In other words, if consciousness is an illusion then what is actually real? We know everything by way of our consciousness...
Maybe I am going a bit too far here, let's take a step back for a sec. Let us assume that consciousness really is actually an illusion.
Okay, so we get rid of the "name" of calling it consciousness, but the processes which describe consciousness still remain? The entire point of dualism is not just an "ancient" contention. There is a very current, modern and real problem (called the problem of consciousness) in that there is absolutely no way to prove an objective, physical consciousness exists (we simply cannot find it anywhere in the brain).
We cannot point to any one biological process and say, "there, that's consciousness". Instead, it's a combination of different biological processes from different areas all combining together to create what we call consciousness. It's an approximation of measure because there is no way of truly quantifying "consciousness".
So, dualism really points to something that is a current enigma, a mystery in our current sciences, not just the long-ago ancient times. There is simply no way to explain how consciousness arises from physical processes. It cannot be located, we do not know what it looks like, smells like, its shape or form. For all intents and purposes it is an illusion, but it's a very real illusion that permeates our very understanding of objective reality.
There are various processes that when combined together create what we refer to as "consciousness", if you get rid of the name it just makes it more difficult to talk about it.
But I sense in my poorly-worded musings, that you are referring to something deeper than merely getting rid of its title (as I had alluded to in the beginning). You are saying consciousness does not actually exist -in the abstract. You are saying that the biological processes do not culminate in a greater, non-physical and mysterious instantiation of reality.
If this is the case, then join the other scientists out there in finding where this material, physical consciousness exists and get your nobel prize!
The dualism referring to the "mind-body" problem is one of the greatest scientific mysteries to date. If you want to be a materialist then science is your best bet, but as I stated, a quantifiable consciousness will need to be discovered, somewhere, wherever it is (probably in the brain).
And if such a thing as a physical consciousness is discovered then it will create all kinds of marvelous new science for us to sink our teeth into.
All you have written about awareness is pretty interesting. I never seen consciousness as merely scientific thing. I think is one of the best proofs which shows the human's existence: I think, therefore I exist.
Descartes was clever figuring out this theory. Probably what is all around me is fake, but what I do not have any doubt is about my own existence thanks to consciousness. Sometimes it feels like the world around us is made about our interpretation but it is difficult to point what is real or fake.
It would be so interesting if one day science can discover the quantification of consciousness. But, first of all, we should ask the next question then:
Is consciousness quantifiable?