Personal Location
It seems to me that consciousness and perception is innately solipsistic.
There is no way to know what exists in reality without consciousness, perception and sensation.
All theories of reality are based on someones personal awareness. As Thomas Nagel says "Objectivity is a view from nowhere"
The puzzling thing for me is how we come to inhabit this conscious location of having experiences of a reality and how this subjective location arises. (People have framed this issue with the question "Why am I me?")
It is one thing to claim someone or something is conscious and another to be in that consciousness location experiencing those posited experiences.
I think a theory of consciousness's major problem is explaining the experiencer. And I don't see how we can know the true nature of reality without knowing how we consciously access and to what extent that perceptual access is accurate or illusory.
If consciousness is just "in the brain" how do you come to be the subject of that brains experiences?
There is no way to know what exists in reality without consciousness, perception and sensation.
All theories of reality are based on someones personal awareness. As Thomas Nagel says "Objectivity is a view from nowhere"
The puzzling thing for me is how we come to inhabit this conscious location of having experiences of a reality and how this subjective location arises. (People have framed this issue with the question "Why am I me?")
It is one thing to claim someone or something is conscious and another to be in that consciousness location experiencing those posited experiences.
I think a theory of consciousness's major problem is explaining the experiencer. And I don't see how we can know the true nature of reality without knowing how we consciously access and to what extent that perceptual access is accurate or illusory.
If consciousness is just "in the brain" how do you come to be the subject of that brains experiences?
Comments (78)
Why? It seems to me that we only become who we are by way of others.
I don't know what you mean. You will have to explain more. If you mean our personality can be shaped by others that maybe true but that is not consciousness.
If I am conscious of the moon that does not need the presence of anyone else to happen and that is my only access to the moon or anyone else (personal consciousness).
Our belief in other peoples existence is based on person experience and could be fabricated and indeed when people communicate with us we interpret it. We can draw false conclusions about what they believe about us.
What is solipsistic to me is reflected in the main theories of perception which is that our own brain is responsible for constructing a mental reality for us.
How can we access other people or reality without personal consciousness? The reason solipsism exists an idea is because of this realisation about the deeply subjective nature of experience (along with the potential for skepticism about experiences)
On the other aspect of the location issue... Imagine someone phoned you but you had no idea where they were phoning from and they were actually phoning from the other side of the world. This is an example of how you can communicate with someone and gather valuable information about them without being certain of their location.
Correlations of our mental life with brains states is based on verbal reports most often not on finding consciousness at a particular spot. Anyhow even if we explained how the brain produce experience that is a different issue to explaining the subject of experiences.
I don't understand the lack of study into subjectivity and location compared to qualia and neural correlates etc.
I don't think so. You were raised by some one and they told you who your are, sure you are conscious but only because there are others that you have mimicked that's all.
So instead, don't assume that there is an 'I' that got to be 'me', or got to be 'here', and the problem vanishes.
Quoting Andrew4HandelWell, an objective viewpoint is a view from nowhere and thus not really a viewpoint, but an objective description need not be precluded, and it often yields answers that elude a subjective description. You're going to need it for answers like this one.
I cannot render a 'view' (a drawing say) of a car without choosing a perspective, but I can describe one in full detail without the necessity of selection of a perspective.
Is this your actual theory of consciousness? I have not heard a theory of consciousness arising because of mimicry. I don't see how mimicry is a causal explanation for consciousness or the conscious experience.
I think there for I am am. As soon as I experience I am aware that I am and can reflect on my own existence along with the content of a a thought or perception.
There is no way to talk about something without knowing that you or someone else was conscious of it or imagined it.
There is no realistic way of taking the "I" out of any theory because that raises the question of who is talking and what they are talking about.
If we speculate that something exists that is based on prior conspicuous experience. So if speculate about something underlying my experience such as quantum entities I am doing so to try and understand my current experiences.
I think most reasonable theorist who are not trying to fudge the issue of consciousness because of metaphysical ideology, accept there is a subjective experiencing perspective.
When I am deeply unconscious I have no awareness or concern about reality existing. It does not somehow objectively reveal it self in a scenario where there is no consciousness in the universe.
With Some things like sounds, thought, pain,colours and concepts it is unclear how they could exist in the absence of minds.
I have never known a problem in philosophy to vanish.
More your wording: Quoting Andrew4Handel'Inhabit'. OK, I see the path you want. Never mind at all what I say then. Religion has better answers to this one than I do.
But concerning location, I've also never know a person to be conscious at a different location than where they were. Both questions seem absurd to me, because there is only me, not two things paired by an 'inhabit' relationship.
So no one raised you? You didn't learn how to be a person on your own, sure consciousness but you learnt how to be conscious by studying what others were doing, realizing that you are also an person.
You could not be anyone else now but you could have been someone else and been born in another body or era or gender.
I am one of 6 children I am conscious of being the fourth child but why not the first or sixth?
I have no idea how I became conscious and that is the mystery.
Are you saying we are unconscious until we interact with people?
My answer is that it would seem absurd for the 4th child to be conscious of being the second child. That's what monism says. I think a lot of people that claim to be monists actually don't understand it and cannot accept that simple answer. It sure took me a long time.
That's why my first post dove into that 'objective' rant. The whole thing is easier to grasp from the outside in. Don't propose reasons P why I experience such and such. Ask instead that if proposal P is true, what would be the experience of person X? Same question, but more in 3rd person, and it yields different answers given the different assumptions built into the different perspective.
Before you are born is the period I am referring to. If I start to exist there is the question of how I start to exist as that person.
Bodily there is a continuum because I can trace my genetic lineage causally, but not for my mind. At some stage you emerge into consciousness of being you and I don't think it has anything to do with linguistics.
There are ways for a materialistic/physical dualism for example a disc can be put into different machines or maybe there will be brain transplants or implanted memories.
So if there was a physical dualistic separation of brain and mind then your mind could be uploaded to someone else body. Some theorist advocate mind uploads as a form of trans humanism reincarnation or longevity tool. So I don't think dualism is not hypothetically illogical or anti physicalist.
The point I making about location is that everything is filtered through your own perspective even if these perceptions are illusory or influenced by others. So for example you could be a depressed single African mother in 2090 thinking about The causes of WW2 or you could be someone in 1920 in France thinking about WW2. So the content of your thoughts can be similar while your identity is not.
I think there is distinction between consciousness and the contents of consciousness.
The main thing I am looking at here though is the subjective perspective and the location of that.
You could say the brain is the source of subjectivity but the brain it self is an objectively/collectively observable thing where as things like sensations and thought aren't (other than indirectly)
Perhaps the continual coherent processing of the subject's common sense data has no exact pin-pointable location beyond the human body, as its locus. The external body is one big sense organ for the most part. Most of what I have read suggest that perception is a two stage process, in which we are subconsciously aware of sense data, then we classify or identify that data by our facility of judgement all typically in less than 500 milliseconds. A continual process of our organism's sense organs informing our understanding and reason, by way way of judgement where our ability to judge includes our continual ability to conceptualize sense data.
When does combustion start to exist as a specific flame? Strange way to word it...
Isn't this a vicious circle? Don't you need to be conscious to be able to study what others are doing? So you seem to imply that one must already be conscious in order to become conscious.
Quoting Cavacava
I don't see how this is possible. You seem to be arguing that a plurality (we) is prior to the individual (I). Don't you believe in a first? How are two, three, and four possible without there first being one? I think that you have this backwards.
A plurality is made up of a group of individuals, so the individual is a necessary component of the plurality. However, the existence of an individual does not require the existence of a plurality, so a plurality is not necessary for the existence of an individual. Therefore it is impossible that the plurality is prior to the individual, yet possible that the individual is prior to the plurality. Furthermore, arguments can be made which indicate that it is probable that the individual is prior to plurality, as one is prior to two.
Meta levels...we become self aware, we are not born that way, and we are able to make ourselves an object of our own thought. We do it, you want to call it vicious, but I don't think so, it is handy, pragmatic and ongoing.
I believe in parents, caregivers, the people who teach you that the fire truck is red. The people teach you to speak and to help make you who you are....and you are not possible without them.
That's the trick though, consciousness isn't just "in the brain." The brain is at the end of a whole bunch of impinging causal chains, consciousness is all those causal chains, or rather, to be more precise, it's those causal chains plus the brain's internal processing (what it does with the impinging data).
The scam, the trick we all fall for, is thinking that we are a conscious thing trapped inside our body peeping out at the world from somewhere behind the eyes. It seems like this inexplicable nonesuch is the bearer of consciousness, the thing-that-is-conscious.
This is all illusory - as people who do meditation and other forms of practice that induce what's called a "non-dual" vision discover. There is no thing inside us that's conscious, there is no hidden subject (over and above, or "inside" the identifiable rational animal) that's the bearer or haver of consciousness; in reality, just plain existence is the same as consciousness; IOW the existence of a perceived tree, its actual existence, is the very "stuff" of consciousness, it's not that the tree has some sort of doubled representation inside a supposedly conscious ghost in the machine (think of the Magritte painting of the view outside the window).
The bit to get one's head around is that the way the tree exists for us is like a special gift it has just for us, the way it meshes with us causally in that moment, at that place, is a unique way it has of existing when causally interacting with our particular structure. Its manner of appearing with just that shade, that colour, that texture, is a manner of existing that it can only manifest at just that time and place, in interaction with us. Our presence affords it an opportunity to show a side of itself that never existed until that moment. (Rainbows are a good example to think about in this context.)
And when you extend the non-dual vision to its fullest, consciousness becomes really an impersonal, cosmic process that's merely anchored at one end in a limited, physical entity. One's thoughts are cosmic events quite on a par with a flight of geese across the sky, and all that jazz.
A quick and dirty way of thinking about it is to imagine a ball that extrudes eyestalks. The consciousness of the eyestalks is the ball's consciousness refracted in different locations. Every consciousness is God's consciousness, enjoying (and sometimes not enjoying, but still registering) a tiny portion of His infinite possibilities. (Or you can not use the God concept and cast it in a pantheistic, or Spinozistic, or panentheistic way - or even a purely materialistic way, as matter/energy - it doesn't actually matter, these are all just chew toys for the mind.)
So you've gone from a vicious circle to an infinite regress. Each person requires parents, ad infinitum. Do you believe that there was an infinite number of people before you?
A human infant cannot survive without a caregiver that's a fact and all children by definition have parents. People are not numbers, and logic alone cannot explain the fact of our existence.
But that doesn't mean that what makes a person a person is the caregiver. A human being cannot survive without food either, but this doesn't mean that food is what makes a person a person. A human being cannot survive without oxygen, either. There are many things which we need, to make us what we are, but not one of them can be cited as the cause of a person being a person.
The point about scientific objectivity is that it averages and quantifies experiences across subjects, and so reaches 'inter-subjective certainty' with respect to those things which can be measured. We all agree on common units of measurement, and what constitutes a valid observation - and away we go.
We have many common units of measurement and agreed definitions with which to proceed. These aren't solipsistic in the least; you don't have your own version of numbers or words, or your own language. We have shared experiences and conventions, clearly.
And as we're all members of the same species and have many common cultural traits, arriving at a consensus understanding of phenomenon is eminently possible by this means.
Nagel's 'View from Nowhere' is about reconciling that objective, impersonal view with the reality of subjective experience. I think the point of his critique, is to remember what it is that eludes quantitative analysis and scientific objectivity. And that is something very important, and habitually overlooked in our 'scientistic' culture. But that doesn't mitigate against the effectiveness of science in its domain of application.
The infant child does not identify itself apart from its parents until it becomes self aware of itself as an independent agent, this is what Freud is all on about. The child has no structured psyche until it has experience, and these experiences are shaped by its caregivers....the child's desires are the desires of the mother, and in a similar manner our desires are the desires of others.
The 'I' is derivative of the 'We'.
I don't know Freud very well but I know that a lot of his principles are debatable, if not completely discredited.
Quoting Cavacava
This is surely wrong. A baby has the desire to eat, and though the mother may shape this desire through timing and substance in an effort to create habit, the desire is not the mother's desire. Nor is the desire derived from the mother. The desire is that of the baby, as an independent agent. Even within the womb, the need for nutrition is a need of the foetus, not a need of the mother.
Quoting Cavacava
You didn't reply to my description of the logical relationship between "one" and "plurality". So I take this as a hollow assertion which is contrary to logic and ought to be rejected.
I tried to indicate that such logical assertions can't begin to explain people. Your description also didn't sound very logical for that matter.
Lacan's conception explained as follows:
Is science describing world with or without consciousness in it.
I feel like facts are undermined until we can locate consciousness and know how we are accessing reality and how veridical our perceptions.
I am not saying facts don't exist just that lack of explanation for consciousness leads to scepticism like solipsism or elaborate consciousness derived paradigms like panpsychism or idealism. Indeed some physicist have been and are supporters of idealism.
When I am around young children and babies I see no evidence that they are relying on me for a sense of identity or perception or volition.
I don't see how one can prove claims about babies mental states because they cannot speak and so it is all an interpretation which has been challenged. All sorts of attitudes have been attributed to babies including extreme egotism which I find disturbing.
I think we usual can trace our own consciousness back to our most early memories before that we have amnesia. I cannot trace my consciousness back to any one emergent moment.
Nevertheless at whatever stage personal consciousness emerges it is private and subjective and everything you experience is channelled through yourself. You do learn things from other (bad things) and that can damage your identity or shape parts of it. But that is not the same as creating ones subjectivity.
I think some peoples lack of strong personal identity is due to over conformity and a lack of personal reflection. I am well aware of this having grown up in a religious cult.
Consciousness is not property described by other fields such as the study of electricity and magnetism or the study of cells or neurotransmitters/biochemistry.
So either we need a new theory in these fields or a new property or paradigm postulated. If neurons can create consciousness and subjectivity we need a convincing causal/emergent theory of that. (A theory that makes predictions I imagine)
But whatever theory of emergence is posited will that amount to an explanation for subjectivity which is more than merely a third person correlation?
I was talking about the logical relation between one and many, which I explained. You still haven't gone back to address how it is possible that we, implying many, is prior to I, implying one.
Lacan's explanation makes no sense to me. The child takes itself to be its mother seems like nonsense.
This actually contradicts "the child takes itself to be its mother. It talks about a relation between child and mother, and a relation between the desires of the mother and desires of the child. And, it clearly refers to a recognition of the other. If the child takes itself to be its mother, then obviously there is no recognition of the other. What you have presented is nothing more than contradictory nonsense.
The issue I suppose, is whether prior to recognizing the mother as other, does the child recognize the mother as itself. Why would you think that this is the case? If the child recognizes the mother at all, wouldn't the child recognize the mother as something other than itself? Why would you think that when the child first recognizes the mother, it recognizes the mother as itself? That doesn't make sense.
Here is what you said:
An individual suggests a differentiation, and how could that differentiation be possible if not from other individuals..duh.
The differentiation need not be a differentiation from other individuals. It might only be a differentiation between oneself and what is other. So if I differentiate myself from that which is other than me, I need not recognize the "other" as individuals. It is simply other.
So you are not denying that the individual distinguishes itself from the many because of the existence of other persons.
My contention is that in the real world the only actual way for a person to realize that it is an individual person is because it is able to distinguish itself from other persons and this can only be possible due to the pre-existence of other persons. If other people did not exist then I too would not exist.
I don't see this as logical. The person distinguishes itself from all that is other than itself. Why does the person need to consider the pre-existence of other persons to do this?
Because they say "eat your beans, little meta"
How does a person talking to you in such a way, produce a need to recognize the pre-existence of that person? I would think that the desire to recognize another comes from within, not from the other, a personal reason.
It does not work that way. It is though interactions with others that we come to realize that we are separate individuals with similar likes, dislikes, fears and so on. If you had no such interaction you would not, could not become a person.
Your desires are not your desires, they are the desires of others.
Surely I can only be whatever the experience happens to be. Everywhere I go there I am.
Awareness ( a perceptive, sensitive, and cognisant condition) and self identification (the recognition of one's self as distinct from the environment and others) combine to produce subjective experience (the effects of an object upon an organism).
For self identification, see Rochat, Philippe (2003). "Five Levels of Self-Awareness as They Unfold in Early Life". Consciousness and Cognition 12 (2003): 717–731.
I agree.
You know I disagree. You've described two distinct things here, and conflated them as one. Realizing that we are separate is one thing, and realizing that we have likes, dislikes, etc., which are similar to others is another thing. The former, recognizing that we are separate, does not require a recognition of other persons, as I explained, the latter does. The two are clearly not the same sort of thing, and ought not be classed together, as you do.
Quoting Cavacava
Consider this. Do you agree that in order to believe that others have desires, likes and dislikes, which are similar to your own, you must first recognize such things within yourself? You cannot recognize a desire within another, as similar to your own, without having first recognized your own desire in order to make the comparison.
The question I have for you, is how can your own desires come from others, if you cannot even recognize a desire in another without first recognizing that desire within yourself?
Then how did the others become aware of who they are? Am I not an "other" to others? Does not that make me the creator of others? Others are only one type of object in the world. Why would I need other people to become what I am, and not the simple recognition that I am not a tree, dog, or a rock based on my own observations of myself and other things? How would I interpret my own reflection without others around? Maybe you mean that we need language to become who we are - with a narrative?
Even if I were defined by others, I can interpret how others define me incorrectly, which means that I can't be completely defined by others. I have the "power" of misinterpretation that distinguishes me from others and their interpretations of me, which can also be wrong. Your explanation doesn't seem to account how others improperly define you, especially when they don't know YOU.
The same way that any unique array of information is about some unique states-of-affairs. A subject emerges from the kind of, and how the, information is presented. Your information entails your location in space-time and your history - which is unique and relative to every one else's. Your unique array of information is what it is like to be you.
An infant is like a sponge it soaks up everything it experiences, it does not differentiate it self from what it experiences until it starts to develop language and its self realization (the mirror stage) which is not fully developed until around age 5.
It is the individual's desire for recognition that causes it to mimic what others desire, the desire for what we believe others desire actually structures the individual's desire. Again the infant is not born self aware, this develops as the child develops, so your attempt to rationalize this process is in principal otiose.
It is hard to imagine describing something with no observer describing from their perspective.What features would exist when you strip away perspective and qualia? Would objects exist or just strange quantum fluctuations of matter?
This why I have strong sense of self and solipsistic senses because I realise everything I believe or perceive is being channeled through me.
I am an antinatalist and I think one reason fro reaching that conclusion is realising the vividness and centrality of another persons experiences so they are not just a statistic or object to be manipulated.
So if people say why am I me I think they are referring not a just a technical or vague concept of body but to this all encompassing vivid personal location of perceiving reality through your own eyes (consciousness).
The issue for me is how to inhabit that very specific personal subjective portal to reality being subject to experiences.
Information is a problematic notion. You are invoking the notion of mental representation it seems. This kind of information requires a preexisting subject.
For example if you cannot read Chinese the symbols mean nothing to you and don't convey any information. I don't think reproducing is the same as information so that if a gene preserves the pattern of biochemical activity that produces body parts it is just a mechanical procedure. But our kind of knowledge is mental representation.
When you say "information presented" who is the information presented to? Also I don't think we know where we are in space apart from relative to what is around us and things are relative to where we are conscious of being.
So for example we are assuming we are all humans on earth but we are not imagining being another organism light years away with different senses and cognitive abilities.
So even the general human perspective is not objective in the sense we are based in from just one location in the universe with a particular array of cognitive and perceptual apparatus molding our intuitions.
Others are always there, that's an empirical fact, not some sort of logical regress argument. It is only by means of interactions with those closest to you that you can become you, that your desire for recognition can be realized. And, yes we begin to become self aware around the time of language acquisition, the mirror stage of development starts at around 24 months (the terrible 2s) goes on until around age 5.
The 'I' is derivative of the 'We'.
I am not sure what you are referring to by the "I"
I am using to describe the subjective of experience. The person having experiences and not their self concept. There are numerous aspects to a persons identity and cognition etc but I am only referring to the need for a consciousness to have a subject to be the person having experiences.
I think when people discuss the self they are often discussing different things and the same happens with consciousness. I am using it in a technical sense of what constitutes an experience and a subject is required for an experience.
There is substantial evidence that consciousness is internal and subjective. Illusions are one example. How can you mispercieve the external world if you are are just having a brute direct experience of it.
The stick is not bent in the water the Muller-Lyer lines are not unequal length but they appear that way to someone.
Then there is the privacy or memory and pain. I have a lot of information only immediately accessible to me that I can choose to share via language and pain is not something we can share, it is our own and only our pain reactions are publicly observable.
Musical tastes differ as people have different reactions to and experiences of the same piece of music.
I am using the "I" to refer to the self conscious self, the self that recognizes itself as such in a mirror, which I maintain is not possible without the interactions of others, is in fact derivative of these interactions and which first occurs around the same time as language acquisition begins.
This POV is not possible without self consciousness, reflexive awareness of oneself as a separate person...you asked for the location of the concept of being a person, and I suggest that location is derived from others.
Essentially I am not really aware of others. The only proof of I that I have is whatever the experience happens to be. Now I am not being deliberately tricky or just trying to seem intelligent. I am talking about what seems to me to be absolute indisputable fact, although you may dispute it if you want of course.
If you do dispute this then this still does not prove there is other than I. All that would have occurred is the experience, I, of some apparent dispute.
So "others" do not locate or define me. "Others" are the experience that is me. I cannot see how it can be otherwise.
Not sure I understand what you are stating....are you an idealist taking the position that the real structure of the world is in some sense identical and therefore ontologically dependent on the structure of thought, as suggest by a thinker like Berkeley?
Am I an idealist? Too much pain for that. If I was young and pain free while having the understanding I understand that perhaps I may have then maybe I would be an idealist.
No. I regard myself as a realist. I feel completely real about what I have said is me.
I define information as the relationship between cause and effect. Even if you didn't know what the symbols mean (their abstract meaning, or the author's intent), the fact that there are written symbols (the effect) is indicative of the cause, (someone wrote them). In seeing written symbols, I can conclude the cause of the symbols based on my experiences - people write symbols. So the Chinese symbols carry more than just their abstract meaning, or information. They also convey concrete information.
Information is everywhere causes leave effects. Just because you aren't aware of it, doesn't mean that information isn't there. We also filter information based on the present goal in mind.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
In a computer, information is processed and triggers certain behaviors not based on the physical interactions of the computer, but based on the logical interactions of the program. Different programs make the computer, which has the same hardware throughout each program that is run on it, behave differently. Just as you can behave differently based on the information you have in your head (working memory) at any given moment. You "physically" haven't changed, but the information inside you has, and accounts for your behavior. You can even behave differently than others given the same information because you have a unique history of experiences that allow you to interpret the information differently. In this sense, the information isn't really presented, but is the cause of our behavior as it is used by our body in order to achieve some goal.
It seems that logic is in the human mind and they create structures in computers that behave based on the operation a human wants to achieve. The program has designed constraints to guide its capacities and to act in precise or algorithmic ways
I wouldn't make an analogy between humans and computers because the immense amount of design that goes into computers. If there is no design in making humans then we can't safely take for granted any of the aspects of human inventions that utilise this
There may be causal reason for behaviours and belief formation et al but I don't see how that explains the subjective perspective. For example it is possible that You and I are having a near identical experience of a tree. I don't think we are differentiated simply by possibly having a different combination of input.
Nevertheless I am not very knowledgeable about the concept of information in physics but if everything carries information in a sense of causal interaction and properties then it seems arbitrary that some information should become conscious.
So for examples all organisms receive input from and interact with their environments.
What comes first the definition, or the thing being defined? It seems to me that what is being defined is what a definition represents. Definitions are simply representations used for categorizing and communicating states-of-affairs that exist(ed) a priori.
To say that "others" define me without recognizing that I am also an "other", isn't very well thought out.
What does it mean to "not live up to others expectations" if I am completely defined by others? Shouldn't I always live up to others expectations if others define me? If others define me, then it seems that there would end up being conflicting, even contradictory, definitions of me.
Sure. Computers don't have goals of self-preservation and procreation, like we do. If they acted for themselves, and were designed and programmed to use the information that they contained, or had access to via sensory devices, for their own benefit, then we could start talking about a more concrete analogy.
Humans were "designed" and "programmed" as well, via natural selection. Evolutionary biology explains how our bodies were designed over an enormous period of time with an immense amount of design. Evolutionary Psychology explains how we have been programmed over a long period of time. We also have the ability to (re)program ourselves with our ability to learn (our non-instinctive behaviors) so that we can adapt quickly to rapidly changing environmental conditions.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
So it comes down to, "What is consciousness?"
We are differentiated in space and therefore can't have the exact same experience of the same tree. This slight differentiation is what gives us our uniqueness. This unique information about location is what gives each of us our individuality. I am not you because we both have different brains and support systems for those brains. I cannot will your body to move, and you cannot will mine. These are all things that we learn as an infant. We learn to control our own bodies, not others. We learn to manipulate others through indirect means, like using language, or using our own bodies.
Consciousness is probably nothing special. It is made of the same substance as everything else, or else how could it interact and cause changes in other things? I don't think that there is some impenetrable boundary between mind and body/world. It is our assumption that there is that is keeping us from really getting at what consciousness is.
I am stating that without Others the I is impossible...there are no "wolf children"
No, others enable you to understand that you are a separate individual and at the same time Others effectively structure who you are, which you willingly accept because it reinforces their recognition of you as an individual.
Our desire is a desire for recognition, which is also the desire for what we believe the other desires, which is why we are always asking what others desire or lack. Our beliefs can be mistaken, but the structuring process remains the same.
Quoting Cavacava
It looks to me that you can't talk about the we without using terms like, "I" and "you", and "others". Define others without making reference to something other than yourself - yourself being you - the thing that exists prior to being labeled by others for their own ends, which you possess your own ends and that is why conflicts and moral dilemmas arise, because our individual goals come into conflict.
I'm not always asking what others desire. That is the sign of someone who has no self-worth. You describe the symptoms of someone who has no self-esteem - who looks to others to define them. Transgenderism arises as the result of allowing others to define you as something that you are not. Transgenders are typically from homes where the parents raised them and treated them as the opposite sex, so that later in life they are confused about what they really are.
Like I said, your existence is a priori to the labels people put on you. Definitions and labels are for categorizing and communicating, not for creating something from nothing.
They appear that way to everyone, and everyone also knows that the stick isn't bent and that the Muller-Lyer lines are not of unequal length. So how can illusions demonstrate that consciousness is subjective?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Privacy is only a relative matter. We're not far off being able to read thoughts by observing the brain (in fact I vaguely recall that it was recently done by a research team at a very crude level, as part of research into brain/computer interfacing); though it may not be possible practically (the processes involved may be too mathematically chaotic), that line of progress could in principle lead to being able to record and play back others' thoughts and experiences. But even without that, the experience of being able to "read" someone emotionally just by subtle but overt signs (e.g. flushing, slight twitches) is quite common. There's a continuum - the nervous system, the musculo-skeletal system - between the stuff chungling around in the darkness of the skull-case and the observable activity of the body.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Musical tastes cluster, and there is quite a lot of statistically-observable agreement on what's good and bad musically, both synchronically and diachronically. Taste has an element of subjectivity, certainly, but it is not completely subjective across the board. But anyway, that's really a different sense of "subjectivity" from the one we're concerned with here, I think.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Because while experience is direct, perception involves categorization (partly automatic, worked out below the level of consciousness, partly conscious and deliberate), which can go wrong.
IOW "appearing bent even though not bent" is the direct experience, that's just how sticks in water directly turn up in experience. Consistently and for everybody.
None of any of this kind of thing means that we should believe that what we truly are is a mysterious somewhat looking out at the world from behind the eyes, trapped inside the body, that is the true bearer of consciousness. It's all perfectly consistent with the bearer of consciousness being simply the publicly-observable human animal.
There's a slight onomatopoeic irony here though: the illusion of the "inner self" may itself be an illusion of the standard kind (i.e. an illusion the publicly-observable human animal standardly has)! :)
The point is that the bent stick is not in the external "objective world" Just because people can agree on some subjective states does not make them less subjective.
I agree that it could be that everyone's visual system and or the nature of light causes the same experience. But It is due to language that we can talk about our mental states not due to them being publicly observable.
I think people take for granted how much information they receive from language. Guessing what someone is experiencing by brain scans is not the same as having direct access to their being.
I have a brother who has had aggressive MS for twenty years, he is paralysed, communicates by blinking, has had pneumonia at least 6 times and so on and I have no idea what it is like to be him. I don't speculate either because when you are caring for someone in that situation you have to ask them what they want and not impose your preconceptions on them.
I can publicly observe aspects of his illness but you could not really believe that is at equivalent to having the illness for twenty years.
The bent stick is a fairly trivial example of a basic illusion that illustrates a lack of direct access to the external world. It is easy for everyone to give a basic report on this illusion. It doesn't mean they have identical experiences of the phenomenology of the experience... but that the stick simply looks bent.
But having the same basic illusion does not amount to having public access to what it is like for someone quite different over a 20 year period.
I know that there is music other people like that I absolutely dislike and no amount of majority preference could convince me it was good or make me like it. Obviously majority held intuitions do not equal facts.
The only way we can have these differing experiences is due to subjectivity. The music is being experienced differently.
I am not saying different subjective experiences cannot be accounted for by differing brain patterns but that there is an experiencer being subject to experiences that he/she is reporting.
I don't see how something cannot be an experience. If we describe something it is because either we or somebone else experienced or perceived or imagined it.Things like colour, sound and pain have purely experiential qualities that aren't described in objective statements about brain processes.
And it is unclear how pain could exist without consciousness.
Who ever thought it was? "Bent" is just the way a stick in water appears. And we all know it, it's not in the least mysterious or "subjective."
Same for other visual illusions, they're just cute anomalies - the only importance they have is that they show that there might have been occasions (especially in our tiger-avoiding past) when glitches like that mattered, and there might be occasions like that now. But any contemporary illusion that we're subject to would still have to be capable of being demonstrated via perception itself.
You can't extrapolate from illusions to the idea that all perception is subjective, because if you accept that there are such things as illusions, then you must accept that some perceptions are objective (specifically, the ones that tell you the previous perception was an illusion).
Quoting Andrew4Handel
But the fact that they are illusions doesn't mean they aren't objective states.
The distinction between appearance and reality is not a distinction between subjective and objective, both appearance and reality are phases of a process of perception, part of the continuum of objective experience. Subjectivity is just a practical matter of lack of access, not the result of an in-principle barrier.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, and the experiencer is the reporting human animal, not a mysterious ghost trapped inside, and animating, an inert fleshy hulk, or associated with it in some mysterious way.
Really, all the vaunted distinction means, is that I am physically not you, and you are physically not me - the perturbations my being undergoes when looking at a tree are not the same as the perturbations your being undergoes when looking at a tree. Big whoop. That doesn't stop us from both perceiving the same tree.
I think you are failing to grasp the definition of objective and subjective in the sense used with knowledge. This definition from Wikipedia is helpful.
"Objectivity is a central philosophical concept, objective means being independent of the perceptions[thus objectivity means the property of being independent from the perceptions, which has been variously defined by sources. "
I don't think anything can be proven to be independent of the perception and the senses, because we are only aware of things through perception and the senses. Notice that science talks about a lot of concepts pr entities unavailable to immediate perception that are supposed to underlie our perception. Science does not usually validate immediate perception
The point about illusions is they cannot be in the external world and in that sense are subject based and internal. Another examples is if I mistake bush for a cow in the darkness. The seeming like a cow must be happening in my mind.
I am not making a commitment to what the mind is or the experiencer but just that they do exist and are subjective. However there is a dualism to experience in that we can be aware that we are aware. That might be called a meta cognition. "I think therefore I am" I become aware of myself whilst perceiving.Here I am looking to find out how we become that experiencing thing. Even if it is just the brain it is an empirical phenomenal reality that we are a subject or experience.
Nothing in reality is trivial. The phenomena we discover is all special and not banal and with weird properties. But I don't see consciousness being explained using the same framework we use from the natural sciences.
I think subjectivity is one the most defining, special aspects of mind. It is easy to imagine that we all experience a tree in a similar way but we have immediate access to our private mental states and bodily sensations in a way unlike the public access to trees and their cells and biochemistry etc.
I think expanding physics or exploring the role of the observer in physics and observer relativity is probably more useful than trying to exorcise consciousness or subjectivity from science.
Like Descartes I believe we can be more certain of our conscious existence then anything. So that when I have been deeply unconscious everything ceases to exist for me and becomes somewhat irrelevant. So consciousness is not like a weak irrelevant epiphenomenon and something to tap onto to the end of an exhaustive physicalist framework imo.
It's not that I don't understand that idea, it's that I think it's incoherent, and that I understand objectivity to be simply scientific objectivity (sticking to the facts, freedom from biases, value-free). IOW, I think objectivity in that "independent of perception" sense was a way of trying to encapsulate a metaphysical distinction that was at one time thought to be the cause of the necessity for the practice of objectivity - but it isn't.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And we can be objective or not about that - whereas if you're talking about something that can't be proven to be "independent of perception and the senses" then what are you talking about?
The objective is "independent of perception" in an unproblematic way - its existence is independent of the act (any given act) of perception. But that doesn't mean it can't be perceived, or is metaphysically independent of perception as a process.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, that's just how the bush looks under those conditions. The phenomenon that's objectively happening is that there's a causal chain from the bush to your brain, that includes both the bush and your brain, that results in the bush "looking like a cow" under those conditions. That doesn't need to happen "in" something, or "in" some kind of mysterious subjective realm.
To put it another way, the bush presents as a cow under those conditions. Your unique physiology and brain state at that moment (your "subjectivity" in that sense) certainly have something to do with it, but so does the bush itself, the ambient light, etc. The total phenomenon under consideration is not something that's just occurring in your brain, or in a subjective "mind," it's a total phenomenon that's spread out in space and time, part of which is external to your body. (What I'm touting is a kind of Externalism, btw.)
It can only "look" like something if you have a mind.
Different animals have different visual capacities and things look very different under a microscope or at the atomic level. There is no independent way of something being in the world.
It seems to me that you are claiming that any perspective on anything is dependent on external input but that seems trivial if true. It might be but it might not be. But what different perspectives require is a mind. A coin can appear different from different angles but these are not part of the nature of the coin.
An unconscious object has no perspective.
I don't see how belief in an external world rules out belief in an internal world. A dream is a clear example of something internal or mental. I have vivid dreams which are photographic sometimes with sounds. If the dreams are based on the external world then they must be based on stored memories of it not immediate access.
To have rich veridical-truthful access to an external world like we seem to have would require immense sensory apparatus and conscious access to the product of this sensory scheme. That is to say the more accurate we believe our experiences to be the more sophisticated our means of capturing details of the external world must be.
I think Descartes thought God gave us honest perceptions because God is not a liar. Now evolutionary theorists claim that we must have accurate perceptions because they favour our survival so would have been selected for.
However I think as I said earlier that only an explanation of consciousness can resolve the issue of the validity of our perceptions.
Quoting Andrew4HandelDo we really have different access to a tree than we do with each others minds? Your mental states and bodily sensations are indirectly accessed by observing your behaviors. When we look at a tree, we only see the outer layer and it's behavior. What we are able to see is only what light can reflect off of, which is why we can't see atoms. Light doesn't reflect off of conscious experiences. Conscious experiences are a partially produced from the information we receive via light entering our eyes.
Subjectivity isn't special. You thinking it is isn't productive to getting at what it is. You are making a value judgement, not an explanation that would be useful to everyone who has subjective experiences. Subjectivity is simply a unique array of sensory information. We each have our own unique array of sensory information and memories that are used to interpret it. It really isn't that difficult to explain when you step out of your subjective value judgements and look at things more objectively. Your view is reflective of how humans have looked at consciousness since we've started trying to explain it. It is time for a paradigm shift.
Quoting Andrew4HandelYou mean like QM?
Quoting Andrew4HandelI never said it was irrelevant. I said it wasn't special. There is a difference. Consciousness needs to be explained. It just needs to be explained objectively - without making any value judgements (which are only useful for yourself). It needs an explanation that gets at what consciousness is and how it related to the world, why it is useful to have it, and how each person has their own version (subjectivity).
This is our fundamental disagreement. They are very much part of the nature of the coin, in the sense that they are ways the coin exists under those conditions. IOW, the interposition of our body and brain at just that point in space and time affords the object an opportunity to exist in a way that it otherwise couldn't have.
It's all about existence, there's nothing at our end that "has" a "representation," objects are not causes of a doubled-up "inner" world; there's just solid, standing existence of a particular type, that couldn't exist without both us (the physical us) and the object, in just those positions.
It's the same with dreams, images, etc. - they're just jumbled, time-delayed perceptions. Or from a physical point of view, one might say they're re-circulating reverberations or echos of the perturbations in one's substance that the real objects produced; the re-stimulated our-half of a split boiled egg, with the fractal break having the precise "negative" contours of the of the other half of the egg.
I very much like your phrase "an unconscious object has no perspective," but to me that's a neat encapsulation of a false view :) The "unconscious object" has all sorts of perspectives with all the things it's interacting with other than us, when we're not interacting with it; and the sum total of those, plus those forms of existence it has when it is interacting with us, is the sum total of its existence.
This, therefore, does not give any validity to there being any such thing as us being aware.
It appears we really don't have awareness. It appears to be impossible to be objective about experience.
We aren't actually aware. Just some stuff arises. What is the stuff? I don't know.
If someone is in pain it seems that being theoretically skeptical about it does not make sense.
You can be skeptical about perceptions because your eyes might be deceiving you but all it takes to class something as pain is to be an unpleasant sensation. Even if the a pain is psychosomatic.
It seems sinister, if someone is claiming to be in severe pain, to then demand rigorous objective evidence as if you are immune to empathising with other people.
I think being skeptical about other mental states can be equally distasteful, undermining or unhelpful.
Unfortunately people with chronic pain and no bodily injury do face skepticism and mental health issues cause skepticism because of peoples skepticism about hidden mental states.
If someone has a big wound most people will assume, or accept, that they are in pain or if someone is writhing around as if in agony.
So why do people think people can accurately report some mental states and not others and what grounds have they for differentiating?
I can reject a theorists model of consciousness or self just by comparing it with my own experience. I think people should do phenomenology and reflect as honestly and (non theoretically) as possible on their mental states and not try and base theories around other ideologies.
It is ironic that some thinkers who seek to diminish qualities of human conscious at the same time seek to elevate the qualities of other organism mental states (kind of like a misanthropic-anthropomorphism)
It seems to me that somethings appearance is a property of the visual system and not the object.
For example people perceive colours differently and it seems to be implausible to claim the object is both colours at once. It is easier to say that the object is individually represent as such. Also when something big seems small because it is far away raises similar issues.
I just can't imagine anything you could say about an unperceived object. (I don't see that physics supports naive realism)
At the very least we need an observer who is separate from an object to discuss it and I am trying to explore that location of the person having these perceptions of some kind of reality.
I am not sure this follows.
For example if your father tells you on his death bed that you are adopted. You have discovered he is not your father but you don't know who your real father is.
I think an illusion just shows the possibility of experience being deceptive. Because it casts doubt on the validity of a former experience.
That is why I think only a full account of consciousness can stop skepticism. I think if know full how we are able to be conscious of a stick in water bent or otherwise then we will know how valid our perception is.
Why can't it be a bit of both? That an object looks yellow to the jaundiced eye is as much a property of the object as of the jaundiced person. Again: bent-looking is just how sticks show up in water, in the same way that straight-looking is how sticks show up outside water. The "seeming as" is just as dependent on the object and on surrounding conditions as it is on the observer. Presenting-as-small while in the distance is a property of the object in interaction with the observer.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
But it doesn't cast doubt on the validity of the experience that reveals that the former experience was an illusion, does it? If you accept that the former experience was an illusion, then you've implicitly accepted the validity of the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.
If you accept that there's such a thing as illusion at all, then you must accept that there's some valid perception somewhere, namely, at the very least, the perception that tells you the former experience was an illusion.
But then it makes no sense whatsoever to wonder whether all experience "could be illusory." You've already denied that possibility by accepting that you've had an illusion.
All the possibility of illusion shows is that any given experience could be illusory, not that the whole series of experiences could be illusory. To put that another way, all it shows is that testing for illusion is possible with any given experience. But how do we test for illusion?
We test for illusion on the basis of testing experiences we accept as validly revealing illusion.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
The observer is the human animal who's observing and physically distinct from the observed object, as I said. What the observer is not, is a mysterious inner entity having experience as something metaphysically distinct from reality.
I think this is wrong. Objectivity is a view from everywhere, not nowhere. Obviously I can't have a view from everywhere, so others are needed for that, and objectivity is thus really intersubjectivity. Solipsism is nonsensical.
I somehow got to thinking that if no conscious beings existed (observers) it would weaken God.
Because in that scenario God could do all manner of miracles, making planets appear and so on but no one would there to acknowledge it. I also imagined God being lonely.
So I thought a god would want to create conscious beings to have his existence acknowledged and have company, but then once they became conscious they could reject him. That seemed to give the individual a certain power because a god creates them to be validated and then he can't just make them robots because that would make there relationship with him pointless.
So I was thinking about this dynamic, that a supposed omnipotent god could be disempowered by his reliance on someone else's consciousness. That made me realise consciousness was a powerful thing in this role of illuminating things existence and adding value.But also the relationship seemed solipsistic where the observer imposes value on something.
Before I thought about all that I had thought about how even the most famous celebrity in the world was probably unknown to a Mongolian herder (and to all the people who died before they became famous). so it is like you can't transcend a lack of personal awareness.....since then I have felt trapped in my own consciousness more then ever.