Is Consciousness an Illusion?
In 2017, philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a review of Daniel Dennett's new book --- From Bacteria to Bach and Back :The Evolution of Minds. As the title suggests, he thinks that the 18th century musical genius, Johann Sebastian Bach, was a direct descendant of ancient single-cell bacteria. This book was his attempt to show, in great detail, how that improbable inheritance came about, via prolonged incremental evolution, instead of by instantaneous divine ensoulment. Even more astonishing is that he sets-out to prove that your personal feeling of enjoyment (or not) of the Brandenburg Concerto is also a construct of blind, mindless chemical reactions. That's a big project for any lab-less philosopher, but if anyone could do it, Dennett had the background and credentials for the task.
Shortly after its publication though, The New York Review of Books issued an article by well-known philosopher Thomas Nagel. Therein, he said "I shall explain eventually why I think the overall project cannot succeed, but first let me set out the argument, which contains much that is true and insightful". Many on this forum will readily agree with Dennett's materialistic worldview, but my personal view is closer to that of Nagel, as expressed in this article, and in his 2012 book Mind & Cosmos : Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
So, is Human Consciousness a form of Matter? If so, what is the missing link? Whence the Illusion?
Or, is Human Awareness perhaps a form of immaterial, but knowable, Information?
Questions? Comments?
Is Consciousness an Illusion? : https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/
My Review of Nagel's Review : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page65.html
Wiki : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bacteria_to_Bach_and_Back
Book : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HDSU2KY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Mind & Cosmos : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos
Nagel is Not Crazy : https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/thomas-nagel-mind-and-cosmos-review-leiter-nation
Shortly after its publication though, The New York Review of Books issued an article by well-known philosopher Thomas Nagel. Therein, he said "I shall explain eventually why I think the overall project cannot succeed, but first let me set out the argument, which contains much that is true and insightful". Many on this forum will readily agree with Dennett's materialistic worldview, but my personal view is closer to that of Nagel, as expressed in this article, and in his 2012 book Mind & Cosmos : Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
So, is Human Consciousness a form of Matter? If so, what is the missing link? Whence the Illusion?
Or, is Human Awareness perhaps a form of immaterial, but knowable, Information?
Questions? Comments?
Is Consciousness an Illusion? : https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/
My Review of Nagel's Review : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page65.html
Wiki : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bacteria_to_Bach_and_Back
Book : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HDSU2KY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Mind & Cosmos : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos
Nagel is Not Crazy : https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/thomas-nagel-mind-and-cosmos-review-leiter-nation
Comments (166)
Nagel's review was the subject of the following thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1189/thomas-nagel-reviews-daniel-dennetts-latest/p1
A comment I made at the time:
Quoting Wayfarer
Also, here's a copy of an essay that was a precursor to Mind and Cosmos - Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, originally published in The Last Word.
Oh, and also:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thomas-nagel-thoughts-are-real
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-heretic
What's the distinction between the illusion of consciousness and consciousness?
Physical pain is unpleasant, and explaining how matter can have unpleasant sensations is the hard part. The "illusion" of being in pain seems to also be unpleasant. So what exactly is calling it an illusion bringing to the table?
I don't think consciousness is immaterial, but I don't think dennett is right either. Explanatory power is the measure of any hypothesis.
Exactly. I don’t understand how supposedly cogent and smart philosophers can keep making the same logical error again and again. Dennett must not be very smart.
Yes of course, that's the answer!
...It's a marvel you were ever taught anything. When your physics tutor explained atomic theory to you did you say "well it doesn't seem that way to me, you must not be very smart"?
The word itself seems to presume consciousness. I can imagine specific conclusions about consciousness being incorrect or about 'human nature' or ontology coming out of our everyday experience and sense of what consciousness is. But that it is an illusion makes no sense to me just on a semantic level. An illusion is one type of experience. I'd also wonder how they are getting their information such that their words have meaning if not via having been conscious of things, arguments....etc. iow it seems problematic for an empiricist to make that blanket statement, not that a rationalist has it easy either
The same as the distinction between an illusion of consciousness that (like the Chinese Room) doesn't have a proper semantics, and one that does.
Yeah, it's the difference between consciousness as a subject of investigation and consciousness as an adjunct to investigation.
So an illusion is something which appears to be one thing, but is, in fact, another. So immediately it's about the properties of the causes of the perception.
We could say "whatever is actually happening in our mental process, we'll call that 'consciousness' and work out what properties it has - I think that's the route you're drawn from the sound of it.
Or we could say "well 'consciousness' is already a word with a lot of meaning attached (it's already used in ways which assume certain properties of it) and so we'll continue with that use and if the mental processes we're investigating turn out not to have those properties then calling them 'consciousness' in that sense is incorrect, they seem that way, but aren't". That's the route Dennett takes.
I think his choice of route has more to do with selling books than philosophical merit, but that's not relevant to his conclusions so long as we understand his choice.
It's been a long time since I read Dennett on this. I just took a quick glance at an outline of his argument and I remember more of the issues I have with his position (one right off is his metaphors are extremely poor I think). But that's another thread, or perhaps this one as it develops.
Or we could say "whatever is actually happening in our conscious process, we'll call that 'mind' and work out what properties it has" etc.
Oh, hang on.
Then it appears that there is no difference in an illusion of consciousness that doesn't have proper semantics, and one that does. Semantics is derived from the syntax - from the relationship between the rules and what the rules cause one to do or not do.
Meaning is the relationship between cause and effect. Meaning exists wherever causes leave effects. It's not some special thing or process that only exists as a feature of minds.
If physicalism is true then, philosophical zombies are supposedly impossible and here Dennett's asserting that we're all philosophical zombies which would mean that physicalism is false. Has Dennett shot himself in the foot? Not really. After all, the difference between philosophical zombies and normal people requires consciousness to be real i.e. it can't be that "consciousness is an illusion". If "consciousness is an illusion" then the discussion ends there - there's no such thing as consciousness to begin with, ergo, what's the point in entertaining thoughts about situations where its present or absent. Since philosophical zombies no longer make sense the p-zombie argument for non-physicalism is shot to pieces. In fact, non-physicalism, itself predicated on consciousness being real, becomes meaningless. The odd bit is even physicalism (at least as it relates to mind) becomes nonsensical because as per Dennett, "consciousness is an illusion" and if that's the case, the whole business of proving consciousness is physical is an absurdity. Perhaps Dennett is under the impression that physicalism is the default position and, to my reckoning, he's not wrong; after all, the only reason why non-physicalism is still around, alive and kicking as it were, is consciousness, the belief that it's real and our near-complete ignorance regarding its nature.
Dennett's tactic reminds of the time when I saw, as a child myself, two other children fighting over a toy - both wanted it - and they had come to blows over it. An adult intervened and the clever solution was...to promptly remove the toy from the scene. The toy having disappeared, the two children stopped fighting.
However, what does Dennett mean by "consciousness is an illusion"?
Here's what I think Dennett means...
The definition of consciousness, I'm going to use here is awareness of the external world and also of oneself. It's quite obvious that this is what is meant by consciousness by most folks as when these don't occur e.g. when one is asleep or in a coma, we're said to be unconscious.
Imagine now a camera set up in such a way that it captures images of the external world and also of itself with the help of a mirror placed strategically. It's turned on and images of itself and the world are formed inside it. This camera is, in every sense of the word, aware of both the external world and also itself which take the form of images that form inside it, behind the lens.
Compare this camera to what we call consciousness. At the end of the day, consciousness is ultimately, at its core, an image of the world outside and of the self, what we call awareness is just that.
In essence, what we call consciousness is analogous to the images that form in this camera - both being, all things considered, states of awareness of the external world and of the self. However, most of us who don't know any better would, I presume, never say that this camera is conscious but would not hesitate at all in thinking of ourselves as conscious. That means the following must be true:
1. The world and the camera itself take the form of This camera's images. Not consciousness!
2. The world and the person faerself take the form of Mental images. Consciousness!
But 1 and 2 are identical in that both are awareness of the external world and of oneself. Ergo, to think that there's something extra - consciousness - when it comes to what are basically mental images just like the images in this camera is a mistake. Since this camera and us are identical in the sense that both operate in terms of images of the world and of the self there can be no difference on which to make the distinction consciousness and not consciousness. So, to claim that we possess consciousness and this camera not can only mean that consciousness isn't real or, in Dennett's words, consciousness is an illusion.
I don't think this is right Bongo. The discussion here is about er conscious humans that are supposed to have illusions about their own consciousness. In the case of the Chinese Room (some) conscious humans are under the misconception that a computer is conscious.
But surely reflective awareness must come into the picture. You speak of 'images of the world and the self', but I am not sure that we can divide self and world so easily. Surely this distinction of it is made is itself dependent on consciousness.
This is absolutely hopeless stuff Fool my friend. The camera is not aware of anything in the way you are. It doesn't see anything. How can you have got yourself into a position where you think a camera can see things? And Harry Hindu is just as bad, he thinks the beach remembers where you walked, until the waves wash the footprints away.
Neither is correct. These ideas are based on Cartesian Dualism, whereby the world is divided into exactly two realms, the physical and the mental, the material and the immaterial. But that's a mistake. We live in one world.
Those two are the same thing, there’s no distinction to make here. Until you understand that the problem involves reflexivity, you won’t be able to make any sense.
The problem is that you are still aware when asleep. You wake up suddenly to loud noises. How could you do that unless you were at least partially aware? Are you conscious while dreaming?
Is consciousness just an experience, or does the experience have to have some causal connection with the world outside of the mind, i.e, the experience is in some sense about the world?
Consciousness is the awareness not the images. It is what continues between the state of unconscious and conscious, as those who become conscious are aware of who they once were.
As for Dennet, why is he and others trying so hard to be a famous nothing. Doesn't he realize that he's nothing but an continuous accident? And why does he even bother writing of he can see past the veil of illusion? Doesn't he see the meaningless of his life? A life of continuous denial. Must be quite empty.
Yeah...presuming we have any more confidence that we know what 'our conscious process' distinguishes than we do what 'our mental processes' does.
So, everywhere. I disagree.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But it's a special fiction indulged by animals capable of playing along.
And vice versa was obviously my point.
Agreed.
The Chinese room is about whether we can infer intentionality, let alone subjective states, in another entity based on its behaviour.
This is a very different thing from the idea that some entity can itself be under the illusion of having subjective states.
As I alluded, there's no distinction between being in pain and the illusion of pain if both hurt.
Let's look at it from another point of view. At any single moment in time when you think of yourself as conscious what exactly are the contents of your mind? You may be out on a walk by the seaside - you see the waves, you hear the gulls, you feel the light breeze, you smell the salty air, you take a sip of the drink in your hand and taste whatever it is that you're drinking and you think how lucky you are to have the time to relax like this. I've covered all the bases in this description of you having a good time insofar as awareness is concerned - there's nothing else you can add to it. These different kinds of awareness (of the external and the internal) come together to produce what is, at the end of the day, an image of the world and yourself in it.
How different is this image from that captured by your phone's camera of the world and itself through a mirror? Can you tell the difference between the sights and sounds in the video recorded on your phone and your experience of them? Apart from your experience being in your head and the recorded video being on your phone's memory, there's no way to distinguish between the two - the surf, the gulls, the sunset if you were lucky enough, everything would be exactly the same between you and your phone's camera. I've left out the other senses because current technology doesn't allow me to paint a realistic picture of all the senses in action. However, if technology can record sights and sounds, there's nothing holding us back from replicating the other senses too. That out of the way, just take note of the fact, in a basic, but adequate to make the point, sense, your phone's camera can record both the world's and its own sights and sounds and that's exactly what's in your or any other person's mind when you/they are conscious. In essence what you call consciousness - seeing and hearing (limiting you to your phone's existing capabilities) the world and yourself - is something your phone's camera can do and does do. If you have difficulty in accepting this, I want to ask you a simple question, "what if your so-called consciousness were transferred to your phone's camera?" What would be different but limit your answer to vision and hearing as even the most advanced phone's aren't exactly bodies with full sensory and motor functions? What you'll see and hear will be exactly what the camera records through its lens and microphone but now you'd be referring to what hasn't changed in any way - the images and sounds in the camera - as consciousness and that's what in my, and probably Daniel Dennett's, book is seeing something that isn't really there and that's what an illusion is. Consciousness is an illusion.
And the source of the misconception appears to be mistaking mere syntactical proficiency for a proper semantical understanding.
I'll stop you there. We don't know.
We don't know to what extent images are formed in the brain; we know that sensory data from the eyes is broken down in several ways in the eye and the brain and there is a lot of ongoing research into whether, and to what extent, these elements are brought together.
The sensation of sight certainly *feels* like just seeing one discrete image, but there are reasons to doubt this.
For one thing, if the brain internally makes an image, what views that image? And does it also need to make an internal image, and so on?
For another, there are various optical illusions that cast doubt on this simple idea. The first that comes to mind are the "impossible colors", where it is possible to see a blue that's darker than black or an orange that's lighter than white. Good luck rendering those images.
There's a clear enough (ethical, even) distinction between a self-driving car able through mere syntax to complain of bodily trauma and an as yet fictional self-driving car able to play the social game of pointing appropriate words at the same trauma.
I agree. I don't think consciousness is immaterial either, and saying that consciousness is an illusion is unhelpful, and it comes across as an abuse of language.
Quoting Mijin
The temptation to believe in unicorn-illusions that are no less fanciful than unicorns.
When you think of it a bit more, you realize that what the camera and microphone record are just bits. 0/1. Those bits are recorded so that the images and sounds can be recreated for someone to experience them.
0’s and 1’s are very different from what I see.
Your disagreement isn't an valid argument against anything I've said.
Quoting bongo fury
Then semantics/meaning is a fiction?
Wouldn't that mean that syntax is non-fiction?
How do images "literally" exist inside brains?
I don't know. The exist in our minds, though, and arguably nowhere else.
Well, that was my question: how do minds exist "inside" brains?
But then I think you need to also explain how images are "in" minds, too.
It's a hard problem. But maybe we'll know in another century.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Produced by minds, part of the makeup of minds, however you wish to phrase it. Mind being a word for consciousness, thinking, intentionality, desire and anything that's difficult to reduce to neurons firing and chemicals flowing.
Displayed to minds, I would say. There’s a mechanical, predictable aspect to perception. I cannot really chose what to see.
Then how do you know that minds or images don't literally exist in computers?
Quoting Marchesk
Its only a hard problem if you're a dualist. You have to explain how certain hardware contains minds and other hardware doesn't. The problem is thinking in "physical" and "mental" terms - that there are physical boxes that contain these non-physical things we call images and minds.
Quoting Marchesk
Thats just rephrasing your statement that images are in minds. What does it mean for a mind to produce images? Doest your computer produce images on the screen? Where is the image of this web page- in your brain, in your mind, or on the computer monitor?
I don't know what consciousness is, but thinking, intentionality and desire can all be reduced to behavior.
Galen Strawson, March 13, 2018
One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion.
What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.
The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short. […]
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
Similar question to panpsychism. I don't have certainty, but I doubt they do, since we can explain computer functionality just fine without consciousness. But we can't do that for ourselves. Or at least I'm not a p-zombie.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Sure, but doesn't change the fact that consciousness is difficult to account for if one also accepts physical reality. Are you some sort of information idealist?
It really depends on where one is convinced to bite a philosophical bullet. But we all do.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If i knew, I'd be famous. Assuming I could explain it to the rest of you bullet-biting p-zombies.
Here I'm going to say a hard no we can't. That's why behaviorism fell out of favor. Cognitive science has made more inroads on those, but I don't believe intentiionality has been solved. I do know Chalmers thinks it can be, unlike consciousness.
Ok. Everyone hang their gloves up, fight's over. Someone thinks it's silly, so that's settled the matter to everyone's satisfaction...
...but hang on, some other writer doesn't think it's silly...oh no, now what will we do?
It's almost as if it's a difficult issue on which many intelligent people have differing opinions...
But by all means just find whichever one agrees with you and cite them as if they were gospel.
Given that our knowledge and understanding of brains is in the form of conscious visual models, if our minds are illusions, then so is our understanding of brains. All the deniers do is undermine their own theories of how brains work.
We agree on that. I don't understand what your position is, though. You think it's information all the way down. What sort of metaphysics is that?
Also, would be curious to get your feedback on the thread I created about information being a strongly emergent physics, as proposed by one physicist and researcher into life's origins.
I'm not one of those asserting that the mind is an illusion, or doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that our view of the world as "physical" boxes containing "non-physical" images and minds is wrong. The boxes are quantified information. There are no "physical" boxes with "non-physical" items in them. It is all information.
Quoting SophistiCat
It’s about the logical contradictions of materialism. Logic is important for some.
Exactly.
Good question! If the illusion of consciousness is what you experience as awareness, then for you it's your window to reality. But apparently, Dennett is simply saying that Consciousness is not a material substance, hence not a real thing, therefore not important. The reality for him is objective neurons twinkling, and the subjective experience is a deception. Perhaps, when Dennett sees a beautiful woman, he ignores that illusion, and focuses on those lovely abstract neuronal patterns.
For me though, Consciousness is the function (the purpose) of the brain. Hence, it's the gateway to my personal reality. I'm not aware of my own neurons --- only of the imaginary patterns they form in my Cartesian Theater. When you go to a movie, do you look at the "real" projector (hardware) or at the illusory fleeting images on the screen (function; purpose)?
It seems that, in his attempts to deny the experiencing Cartesian Soul, Dennett says that only the sensing physical Body is real, and worth talking about. But what good is objective Reality, if you are not subjectively aware of it? Would you call his materialistic worldview a case of "misplaced emphasis"? :smile:
Function : 1. an activity or purpose natural to or intended for a person or thing.
Consciousness : Consciousness refers to your individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you. This awareness is subjective and unique to you.
Cartesian Theater : Cartesian theater" is a derisive term coined by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett to refer pointedly to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialist theories of the mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
PS__I think Hoffman has a more useful interpretation of Dennett's "illusion" :
http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html
Apparently, Dennett doesn't value that mushy sentimental illusion we call "the Self", simply because it doesn't "matter", literally. :smile:
Matter :
[i]1. physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; .
2. be of importance; have significance[/i].
Significance :
1. the quality of being worthy of attention; importance.
Ah, how wonderful it is to be a self-assured fool. Everything is crystal-clear, and no question requires more than two seconds of contemplation.
I'm sorry but to me, philosophy cannot ignore logic. I wish I could say whatever comes to mind, like many here do in automatic writing style, without caring for the logical consistency of what they say, but I can't.
Obviously not.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Haha yes, potentially. When implemented as automation. Then the reference of each symbol token becomes a matter of mechanical fact. As when a machine translates a phonetic symbol into a sound. When considered apart from such automation, the syntactic connections may well be made semantically, so that we acknowledge a pretended connection between, say, a written letter and a phoneme, or between one written token of the letter and another.
Most semantics, though, even where plausibly construed as literal and factual, is far too complex and disputable to reduce to syntax. As the Chinese Room reminded us. So, whether or not it is fictional in the important sense that crucial grammatical subjects fail to straight-forwardly refer, any semantics is indeed all fictional in the sense that the alleged referential connections are all pretended.
It's been said that a machine translation is like a jar of cookies, only 5 percent of which are poisoned.
Fine, this gels with what I just said. Even if your semantics reduces plausibly to syntax and is thus made automatable, you will doubtless impose a wealth of extraneous meaning. Including, as you say, correlating voltage events with written numerals.
:grin:
"Inside" isn't really the right word. The mind is constituted by the state of the brain.
1 - Man is the only animal species that knows all the others. They only know the ones immediately accessible.
2 - Man can even know the perception of other animals. A chimpanzee or a rooster cannot have a clue how a human eye works.
3 - Man is therefore the only one for whom "nature" exists. For other animals there is only their immediate environment.
4 - Man can watch over other animals and they cannot watch over him, in fact, not even for each other. Animals do not practice veterinary medicine.
5 - Man can discuss this issue, other animals cannot.
6 - If there is still any doubt, do not try to ask for clarification from a goose or an ant.
All that is true and interesting, but the human capacities you mention are not criteria for consciousness. Other creatures are conscious, like my dog, he hears things, sees things, smells things. A human baby doesn't know how a human eye works, but it is conscious, it can hear, see, smell.
And you think those taking an alternative position to you don't think they're being entirely logically consistent? So you think their position has logical contradictions...they obviously don't. What now? You point out the logical contradictions, they say "no, they're not logical contradictions because...".
This is exactly the discussion that's been happening in the field for hundreds of years. The discussion that Dennett and Chalmers et al are still having, that their respective works are part of. It's not only naive, but unbelievable arrogant to think you're the first one to suggest we use logical contradiction to analyse the positions. It's not as if either side have just written a three line syllogism that can be just put into a truth table or something. Even just parsing the two arguments into formal logic would be fiendishly difficult and prone to error, let alone the task of then comparing the two for logical errors
But then by 'logic' you don't really mean Logic do you? As with most people like you here, when you use 'logic' you just mean 'what seems to me to be the case'.
Suits me. Truth be told, insofar as all that we have in, what we call, our minds - a mental image - is concerned, there's no difference between the self and the not-self; both are, all things considered, mental images. The contents of the mental images are not the same but both are mental images.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well, it may make sense to describe sleep as a state of partial awareness but the fact remains that there's a difference between sleep and awake states. When awake, we're aware of the outer world and of the inner world of, what people call, the self at a level (sleep is partial awareness) not seen in sleep. All I can say at the moment is that this difference in level of awareness between being asleep and being awake can't be ignored or should be given the attention/importance due to it.
You inquired whether "...the experience (of consciousness) is in some sense about the world"? and, as Dr. Lanning in the movie I, Robot (2004) says, "That, my friend, is the right question".
Consciousness is, at the end of the day, awareness - this awareness has myriad forms, from awareness of awareness to simply awareness of a fly buzzing around in the room. The bottomline is that consciousness is awareness whatever form that awareness may take. The catch is that to be aware, there has to be something we can be aware to, right. This is where the world and, let's not forget, the self, comes in - the world and the self are, as we all know from experience, legitimate objects of awareness. Ergo, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that "...the experience (of consciousness) is [s]in some sense[/s] in part about the world"
Returning now to sleep as it seems relevant to your question, it's quite clear that when we fall asleep the sensitivity of our senses are reduced - as you mentioned only loud noises arouse us - and that amounts to basically blocking all sensations from the world and no sensations translates into nothing to be aware of.
Hand in hand with this sensationless state comes the shutting down of all thought processes (dreamless sleep phase) and what this means is nothing about the self to be aware of. Thus, the sensationless and thoughtless states in sleep, together, become the occasion in which, even if there exists something that's, capable of awareness, there's, quite literally, nothing to be aware of and there's no consciousness, or if that seems difficult to swallow, at least no consciousness comparable to that of the waking state.
Quoting Olivier5
The difference you're alluding to here is contingent and not necessary. There's no necessity that the mental image of the world and ourselves not be in binary code (1's & 0's). If you don't believe me, look at an object with your eyes and then look at a digitial picture of that object. Can you tell the difference between the object's image in your eyes and the digitial picture? Our eyes are essentially cameras but, of course, you knew that. By mental image I mean the finished product as it were - the final output of all the processing if there's any processing involved to begin with because that's what we're aware of and consciousness is all about awareness.
Quoting SophistiCat
I'll take this as one of the best pieces of advice I've heard in a long time. It strikes a chord in me because mea culpa! Thanks! :up:
To all of the above-mentioned folks:
After turning things over in my head, I've come to the conclusion that there are three important aspects to consciousness (awareness of the world & the self):
1. X, the thing that can be aware [Us]
2. Y, the thing we can be aware of [The world or even X]
3. X and Y meet, Image in the eye. X's awareness of Y
Consider now a camera,
4. C, the camera that can capture an image
5. P, the object which can be photographed [The world or even C using a mirror or a fancy flexible lens]
6. C and P meet, Image on the image sensor. C's awareness of P
I'd like to request that the reader kindly remain within the confines of visual experience for the sake of simplicity and too, experiencing the world and the self with all senses can be extrapolated to.
Suppose X looks at a flower (F) and C take a picture of it. The image that forms in X's eye [X meets F] is identical to the image that forms in C's image sensor [C meets F]. Yet, we say that X meets Y [X's awareness of F] is consciousness and C meets F [C's awareness of F] isn't consciousness. There's no difference at all between X meets F and C meets F - both are identical images - and so, if one believes X meets F is consciousness and C meets F is not, consciousness isn't real. A difference between identical objects, here consciousness, must be an illusion for to be identical means there are no differences. Hence, consciousness is an illusion.
I don't know what consciousness is either, but calling it an illusion doesn't do much for me.
No, they would rather avoid having to face the fundamental contradiction in their thinking, because they are afraid to look like fools. You for instance, you keep avoiding the issue.
Quoting Isaac
I never said I was the first one. The point that eliminative materialism is self-contradictory has been made by countless people before me, starting with Descartes himself. He said: I think therefore I am, not I think and therefore I am an illusion... But materialists are like communists of old, you cannot talk them out of their ideology. It is a very strong belief, a form of religion, which provides believers with much comfort. Hence there will always be eliminative materialists, they will always be wrong, and most of them will never be able to realize it.
Quoting Bitter Crank
If I may offer my views...
The brain is being fooled into thinking that there's something more to the mental image, image in the broadest sense of that word, in our minds, an additional factor as ir were, over and above the image. If this weren't true then why would the brain think a camera's awareness of the world and itself in the form of an image is not conscious? However, there are no two ways about images being nothing more than images. In other words, images, mental or camera-based, are identical. The notion of consciousness is, at its heart, claiming there's a difference between mental images and camera-images but we know there's none. Ergo, consciousness - the purported difference in identicals - can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion.
Even if we say this is the case for vision, it doesn't work for pain and other conscious sensations. The massive focus on vision in these discussions can be misleading. Consciousness is more than seeing a red apple.
I doubt it. I couldn’t decipher the source code of a jpg file if my life depended on it. A cellphone couldn’t see anything or hear anything around it; it just records bits in a way that can help reconstruct images and sound.
— James Baldwin
Baldwin said this in a different context but it resonates here. Imagine a teacher who doesn’t believe in independent minds, and then imagine the damage that this teacher can do to his students. You cannot educate independent minds unless you believe in independent minds.
You'll hopefully forgive me for using what are loaded terms but unfortunately it can't be avoided. It appears the first people to have made contact with the mind came to certain conclusions that somehow found their way into the words they used to describe the mind and what goes on with it.
Two things I want to say
1. I'm talking about the finished product - the final output - of whatever processing that goes on wherever it does go on. The image of the world in our eyes is identical to the image of the world in a camera's. If that were false, a camera wouldn't be a camera. A camera records events and that's another way of saying the image in the camera should be a faithful reproduction of actual events/places.
2. The fact that you can't decipher the 1's and 0's in a digital image is irrelevant. The camera can't do the same in re your eyes too. Does that mean the images are different? No! That's all.
What's different about pain? Pain is essentially temperatures, pressures, and chemical concentrations that go beyond the threshold of tolerance. This means that they too are, all said and done, "images" of the world taken using other sensory modalities. The point is it's not the character of the awareness that's important, it's awareness, by itself, alone, that's the key to consciousness.
The camera has been designed on purpose to capture an image close to what your eyes would capture. The colors, the focale, etc. are designed to render faithfully human vision. But the cellphone doesn’t actually perceive anything by itself. Otherwise it would comment on what it sees, like you can do.
I fear you're missing the point of what consciousness is. Consciousness is all about awareness - a certain entity is conscious if and only if it's aware of its environment and itself and what we call awareness is simply the formation of mental images in our minds, and that's precisely what happens inside a camera. To then say we're conscious and the camera not can mean only one thing - consciousness isn't real or, as Dennett puts it, consciousness is an illusion for the simple reason that to say so is to see a difference in what are identical things - such differences can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion.
As for passing comments, a standard issue desktop can be installed with a program that can do that. Does that mean the desktop is now conscious? We have three choices here:
1. The desktop and we aren't conscious
2. Both the desktop and we are conscious
3. The desktop is not conscious but we are conscious
Since both the desktop and I can make comments, the correct choices are 1 or 2 - either both or neither are conscious. It can't be that we are but the desktop not - to think this would be to see a difference that isn't there. The received opinion is that this difference is consciousness but, as I said, this difference isn't there, isn't real - consciousness is an illusion.
So #3 it is.
Awareness of colored objects which make sounds and have smells/tastes. But also can be painful when you mishandle them. Those objects don't have those properties. That's just how our biology interacts with the world in order to survive.
Sure, a human being or several could encode in the computer a capacity to emulate human speech, like Siri. But Siri can’t pass for a human being. It cannot pass the Turing test.
That would be the following:
2. Both you and the desktop are conscious
OR
3. You're conscious and the desktop is not conscious
Quoting Marchesk
As I said, what it is that we're aware of is of zero importance. All that matters for consciousness is awareness.
You underestimate Siri.
What human has been tricked by Siri into thinking it was a person? I find Siri to be a useful assistant for certain things, but a lousy conversationalist in general.
The point isn't whether anyone has been tricked or not but that all that's necessary is to be tricked.
The reference to each "symbol" becomes a matter of causal fact. Effects "symbolize" their causes. The tree rings in a tree stump don't pretend to be about the age of the tree. The tree rings are about the age of the tree because of how the tree grows through out the year - cause and effect.
Words and letters are slightly different in that their use is arbitrary. We could use any scribble or sound that we make to refer to any other sensory impression, which may include other scribbles or sounds. In this sense, it is the syntax/semantics that is pretend, or arbitrary.
The same causes lead to the same effects, and that is the syntax (the rule). The semantics is the relationship between cause and effect.
Yes. For discussions of "Consciousness", I prefer Spinoza's Substance Monism, in which the "universal substance" is Generic (all-inclusive) Information, as defined below. :smile:
What is Information? : http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
Substance Monism : The most distinctive aspect of Spinoza's system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substance—God or Nature—is the only substance that exists.
https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
Attributes of Substance : Early in The Ethics Spinoza argues that there is only one Substance, which is absolutely infinite, self-caused, and eternal. Substance causes an infinite number of attributes (the intellect perceiving an abstract concept or essence) and modes (things following from attributes and modes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism
Substance : "In European thought the notion of substance received different interpretations : ... concrete individual ... single foundation ... ontological reality ... logical subject ... spiritual principle ... material substratum ... self-identical essence ... law of change ... "
https://simplyphilosophy.org/study/substance-definition/
Note : Generic Information is all of the above.
Yes. Dennett's term of derision (illusion) seems to be an indirect dismissal of Consciousness, because of its association with the religious term "Soul". Illusions are the stuff of Magic and Delusion. So, I prefer to use a more modern term to describe the immaterial-but-effective functions of the human brain : "Information". The brain is an Information Processor, and one of its outputs is Awareness of both the internal milieu and the external environment. :smile:
Is Consciousness an Illusion? : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page66.html
My dog's brain and body all work like mine, that's the machinery that provides my consciousness and his.
Nobody knows when consciousness first appeared on earth, when the first organism could feel something. Maybe it was a worm, or an insect.
Please clarify, if possible. If not possible, no worries.
There is one significant difference between forming images on a light-sensitive Surface, and forming images in a meaning-sensitive Mind. The mental Image, or Illusion, has personal Meaning & Significance & Aboutness & Awareness. Imaging is not awareness; but Imagination is. :smile:
Note 1 -- The light-focusing optics of a camera are called "objectives". Perhaps, that's because the camera has no "subjective" perspective.
Note 2 -- The camera metaphor is an abstraction from human vision, but it abstracts-out the Knowing of a mind. The map is not the terrain.
You haven't given any argument to think such a thing though, just a pointless digression into the Chinese room.
Let's get back to brass tacks: I'm in agonizing pain. Is this pain an illusion, and if so, what's the difference if the illusion is also painful?
Bad argument - cameras are not aware. Consciousness is an attribute of conscious organisms - devices including cameras, computers and telescopes are no more aware or conscious than are bicycles, abacus, or mirrors. None of them are sentient. So a camera image and a mental image are worlds apart - that's without even mentioning the fact that camera images are created by humans in the first place.
Imagine being burned at the stake as you keep telling yourself the pain is an illusion.
Is there any difference between the image in your eyes and the image on a camera's image sensor? Before you answer that remember a camera is defined as a device that records events/people/places. What good is any kind of recorder if it isn't faithful to the actual things it records. In other words, if instead of your eyes, you had a camera, the image would be identical. You have absoloutely no reason at all to say the image in your eyes is consciousness and that in the camera is not. Consciousness then is a difference that is unreal. Consciousness is an illusion, Dennett has, for better or for worse, hit the nail on its head.
That said, I recall trying to offer an exploded-view of the phenomenon of consciousness. It's as below,
1. X, the thing capable of awareness
2. Y, the thing that X can be aware of [includes the external world and the internal world, X itself]
3. X becoming aware of Y, consciousness.
4. In my humble opinion, X = the brain = the camera
5. Y = the world = the brain (self-reflection) = the camera (selfie)
6. X becoming aware of Y = the image in the eye = the image on the camera's image sensor
Pay close attention to 6. The image in the eye = the image on the camera's sensor. There's absolutely no difference between the two. So, if anyone does claim that there's a difference - consciousness - that difference can't be real. Consciousness is an illusion.
Worlds of difference. A camera image is either chemical emulsion if it's old-fashioned film, or patterns of pixels if it's digital photography. It's arguably not even 'an image' until it's recognised by an observer; cameras don't recognise images. An image is not an image to a camera, because no camera is capable of intentional action or interpretation.
Let me ask you a counter question: do you know what an 'ontological distinction' is? Do you know why it might be argued that there is an ontological distinction to be made between devices (which are constructed by humans) and sentient beings?
That, or you overestimate it.
Exactly.
In the case of digital cameras, data is stored in some file format that would likely be meaningless without knowing the format. There's no direct 1:1 correspondence between this data and the real world (especially if it's using lossy compression) because that's not its purpose; the purpose is to store data that when unpacked or whatever will allow us to display images at the required fidelity for the (human) users.
Quoting TheMadFool
Again, what image in your eye? As I mentioned upthread, there is lots of reason to doubt that a single image mapped to the world exists anywhere except on the retina*.
A hell of a lot of processing of image components happens within the neurons of the eye, long before it gets to the brain, and those pieces appear to be separately processed on different sections of the visual cortex. Meanwhile, a huge number of neurons feed back to the eye, because what we see is also in large part a function of what our prediction and categorization engines are expecting to see based on the past data.
* And even in the case of the surface of the retina, the cells do not fire synchronously, so even there there is no image corresponding to a single time slice of reality.
Quoting TheMadFool
I always know that someone is about to handwave consciousness, because they focus on awareness.
Awareness is the low-hanging fruit. A good description of awareness, that makes testable predictions, would indeed be incredibly useful, but it would be a foundational step in understanding consciousness.
Instead the tendency with people like Dennett is to throw out some explanation for awareness that they find plausible, and imply that solves the much harder problems of consciousness because reasons.
Read the rest of the post. The tree ring example doesn't clarify things for you?
What is the distinction? Both cameras and sentient beings are physical objects. Seems to me that you'd have just as difficult of a problem explaining how images are in brains.
The same can be said about eyeballs. Connect eyeballs to a brain, or a camera to a computer, and then you have interpretations of images.
No worries then.
There are a number of subcultures and individuals who claim to be able to demonstrate just that. That said, I still maintain that walking barefoot over hot coals hurts like hell.
Such a thing as what? That calling consciousness an illusion brings to the table only the temptation of beliefs as fanciful as unicorns? I haven't yet given an argument for that thing. True. I merely shared my impression of the likely flow of assumptions, in order to explain my initial suggestion that we answer this,
Quoting Mijin
with this,
Quoting bongo fury
...and thereby return to the important job of distinguishing consciousness (or conscious-illusion-ness if you must) from non-consciousness (or non-conscious-illusion-ness).
Since it appears you now want to gratefully tuck in (now that's it's on the table) to the temptations offered by calling consciousness an illusion, I guess this (my advising against) is what you understood to be the thing I need to back up with argument. In which case let me know if I still should. Or else you didn't get my drift, in which case, my bad signposting.
In either case,
Quoting Mijin
But for me, the important difference is,
Quoting bongo fury
Thus avoiding unnecessary talk of either internal pain qualia or internal pain-illusion qualia or internal pain qualia-illusions.
But nonetheless distinguishing non-conscious from (according to me) conscious.
I agree with you about the whole issue of pain being part of the equation because we are sentient beings. The whole argument that consciousness is an illusion speaks as if we are like computers, with consciousnes as silmulcarum.
It also excludes the whole emotional dimension of perception of the world and I would argue that the emotional intensity and depths of the internal world is the seat of consciousness.
But I realise that I come from a different perspective really because I there may be layers of consciousness, including the more subconscious ones, as spoken of by the psychoanalytic theorists. Personally, I think that the neuroscientists capture a lot of truth. However, if philosophers speak from the perspective of neuroscience as the only relevant psychological foundation what we end up with is a one dimensional model of consciousness.
Have we been talking past each other all this time?
No, I don't want to call consciousness an illusion. In fact, to me I don't see the point: it's essentially saying that we don't have feelings, we just feel we do.
Quoting bongo fury
I don't consider this "unnecessary"; I consider this the most fascinating and difficult issue within consciousness.
If one were to say "Let's put the hard problems of consciousness to one side, as they seem intractable, and focus instead on the more digestible parts" then sure, I'm game. My background is neurology and I'm familiar with the need to be pragmatic, and choose modest progress over none.
I'm just a bit touchy when it comes to consciousness, because Dennett and his adherents don't just put the hard problem to one side; they handwave it. Sadly, handwaving has zero predictive or inferential power. If everyone subscribed to this way of thinking, we'll never make real progress in understanding consciousness.
Indeed. Even the illusion is itself being conscious of something.
Quoting Mijin
Indeed. It's like some of the more staunch behaviorists in the earlier part of the 20th century. They didn't just want to put mental content to the side, they wanted to handwave it away in favor of stimulus and response, as if that alone could explain everything humans do.
We'll always have Paris.
Quoting Mijin
Are you sure you don't want to call it "the illusion that proves it's not an illusion"? Oh, hang on...
Quoting Mijin
Likewise,
Quoting Marchesk
Thereby getting nowhere, but perpetuating the myth of an internal world.
Our an external one? That sword can cut either way.
This neuroscientist is going somewhere:
[quote=Anil Seith]The real problem of consciousness, it's in distinction from Chalmers hard and easy problems that we talked about before. The basic idea of the real problem is to accept that consciousness exists, it's part of the universe, we have conscious experiences. And brains exist. One thing we know about consciousness is that it depends on the brain in quite close ways. And the idea is to describe as richly as we can the phenomenology of conscious experience. And to try to build explanatory bridges, as best we can, from brain mechanisms to this phenomenology. This has been called the mapping problem by Chalmers himself.
https://philosophybites.com/2017/07/anil-seth-on-the-real-problem-of-consciousness.html[/quote]
I'm glad you find that obvious. But you digress.
I don't actually think that. I'm okay with my dualism. Physicalism doesn't have to be true.
It's just if consciousness can be an illusion, why not the external world?
Exactly. Pushing doubt is a two-edged sword.
"Conscious" is what we call certain kinds of thinking, which are real brain shivers. Those kinds of thinking cause us to indulge fictions about an internal world, which are fictional.
Calling a fiction an illusion is an unnecessary conceptual hazard.
Thought you'd never ask. What you are doing is shivering your brain to make it ready to choose among color symbols and pain symbols, thereby ordering and classifying external illumination events and trauma events. It's hardly surprising, when you shiver about it, that the readying would habitually (and usually harmlessly) infer that features characteristic of the events and the symbols were true of the shivers.
I've been watching some videos on YouTube : Journey to the MicroCosmos. And the minuscule single-cell organisms, swimming freely and nosing about, seem to have purposeful behavior. So, they are "animals" by definition. But what goes-on in their brainless blobs -- what it's like to be an amoeba -- is a moot question, until we are able to communicate with them. So, until then, I would attribute only a minuscule amount of Consciousness. :smile:
Why "rather"? Sound events and illumination events are clearly external and public.
Quoting Marchesk
Shivered into classes and orders, more like. E.g. pitches and hues.
Ducks into rows, as @unenlightened might or might not be on about.
As physical waves, not experiences of color or sound.
There you go again.
Do you think photons are actually colored?
I think illumination events are actually colored i.e. ordered into hues.
For the entire electromagnetic spectrum? Do these hues correspond exactly to the three cone combinations in human eyes?
Not sure what you're getting at.
Quoting Marchesk
Isn't there a whole science about that, and the huge inexactness?
Visible light is part of the EM spectrum. We call it visible because that's what we evolved to see, since it reflects off surfaces. But what makes the visible light special such that its colored, unlike radio and gamma rays? They have the same kinds of properties in terms of frequencies and wavelengths.
Yes, so what makes the colors real?
I would need to translate that: what makes human visual orderings of illumination events special such that they are discernible by humans, unlike machine or alien or (dunno) insect (?) orderings of the same events?
Still don't see your point.
Quoting Marchesk
You lost me.
Are our orderings of illumination events out there in the world as such?
Are the ducks in a row?
Computers are metaphors for how the mind works, but the mind is not a computer. It doesn’t process bits of data. Conversely, computers don’t make judgments.
Actually, the hard problem of consciousness is recognised by neuroscience. In a paper called The Neural Binding Problem(s), Jerome S. Feldman addresses the 'problem of the subjective unity of perception':
[quote=Feldman]We will now address the deepest and most interesting variant of the NBP, the phenomenal unity of perception. There are intractable problems in all branches of science; for Neuroscience a major one is the mystery of subjective personal experience. This is one instance of the famous mind–body problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008).
We normally make about three saccades per second and detailed vision is possible only for about 1 degree at the fovea (cf. Figure 1). These facts will be important when we consider the version of the Visual Feature-Binding NBP in next section. There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).
Traditionally, the NBP concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.
There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.
But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time.[/quote]
The Matrix movies illustrate that philosophical quandary : how can we distinguish between the illusion and reality? Maybe that's the job of empirical Science, which is an extension of the role of Philosophy. :smile:
Cypher : "You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious".
The Thirteenth Floor explores that a little bit better, but the movie eXistenZ ends on that note of doubt.
So does Inception, for that matter.
I forgot to mention this to you but when I talk of images, whether in a camera or the mind, I refer to the finished product - the final output as it were. The physical processes/chemical reactions on an image sensor/film and the purported neural processes of vision, both, eventually become images that, if the same object is being photographed or looked at, are indistinguishable from each other. Kindly note the fact that the alleged neural processes that are involved in seeing aren't things we are/can be aware of to my knowledge - they take place outside our consciousness - and so the difference you're talking about - that the processes in photography and that of the eye are not the same - are irrelevant insofar as consciousness is concerned.
As an illustrative analogy, consider how we buy the things we need for our home - a microwave, TV, bulbs, etc. - these items are bought/consumed only after the manufacturing process is complete. There's an entire chain of processing that have to be completed before these items hit the shelves - mining the raw materials, transporting them to the manufacturing centers, treating them chemically/physically, putting them on an assembly line, etc. - but, for better or worse, we're not involved in them. We only see/handle the end product of all these processes.
The same with the mind. There maybe many neurochemical steps that go into vision, hearing, taste, etc. but we're not, as far as I can tell, aware of them. All we're aware of is, as I've been saying, the finished product.
The problem for those who feel that there's such a thing as consciousness is that the image in a camera is identical to the image in our eyes and by extension every kind of perception (states of awareness) - whether of the external world of oneself - must be identical to one that can be replicated in a non-human sense as for example in an instrument or, if we're clever enough, in a robot. This being the case, to see a difference between human awareness and non-human awareness can only be an illusory difference for the simple reason that they're identical. This illusory difference is what we've labeled as consciousness. Consciousness is an illusion.
Quoting Mijin
Please read my reply to Wayfarer
Quoting Mijin
Awareness is the cornerstone of consciousness. If it weren't then there would be no difference between you and a stone - again the same difficulty of seeing a difference (consciousness) that, as per your own claim, isn't there rears its ugly head.
You do know this is a philosophy forum, right? Not a home electronics or photography forum, right?
Because the question here is not about what photographic images are or how cameras work. You keep saying that 'an image in a camera is identical to an image in a mind.' Now there's a philosophical issue with that assertion, that really has nothing to do with the workings of cameras. But I won't try to explain it further at this point, because I don't think it will be understood.
Your response is just to again assert your claim:
Quoting TheMadFool
This claim is false, and I'm trying to explain to you, repeatedly, why.
Consider for example that the eye only has a narrow range of high-resolution vision within the fovea. However, there is a two-way communication between eye and brain that allows us both to interpret the low-resolution peripheral data in a specific way, while at the same time directing the post-processing in the eye in the best way to get a meaningful categorization of objects, edges etc.
There is likely no single merged image, but if there were, it wouldn't look like a camera image. It would be some kind of metadata image.
Quoting TheMadFool
I'm aware of the importance of awareness. I myself called it foundational.
The point is, if you had a good explanation of awareness (and I don't think you have), you would still have all the work of explaining the hard problem of consciousness still to do. And there would still be no justification for the thread claim of consciousness being an "illusion".
It is, right? If it weren't the very purpose of cameras becomes moot. Why have them at all if they aren't or can't be faithful to the eyes? Since the image in a camera and one in our eye are identical to see a difference between them must mean that difference is illusory.
For the sake of clarity, consider the following argument,
C = image in camera, E = image in the eye
C = E means the image in the camera is identical to the image in the eye
"~" means not or is false that
1. IF consciousness is real THEN (C is not consciousness AND E is consciousness)
2 If (C is not consciousness AND E is consciousness) THEN ~(C = E)
3. If ~(C = E) THEN cameras, ceteris paribus, don't faithfully reproduce what the eyes see.
4. Cameras, ceteris paribus, do faithfully reproduce what the eyes see
5. ~~(C = E) [from 3, 4 modus tollens]
6. ~(C is not consciousness AND E is consciousness) [from 2, 5 modus tollens]
7. Consciousness isn't real OR Consciousness is an illusion [from 1, 6 modus tollens]
Quoting Mijin
Read above.
Quoting bongo fury
If there is no internal world, why don’t you see what other people think? They don’t really think? You’re a solipsist?
Reminds me of the aliens in Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem trilogy. Their thoughts are always visible to one another as patterns of lights which was the result of their neural activity. They communicate directly in that sense. Which means they can only engage in primitive forms of deception when separated by enough distance. When they figure out how deceptive humans can be, they become afraid of us.
C is misleading at best. There is no image per se, only data which may be meaningful for a human running a program that can parse a particular file format.
E doesn't point unambiguously to any single thing. As I've explained about three times already and you continue to ignore.
Quoting TheMadFool
The notion of labelling representations or data as themselves "consciousness" seems absolutely absurd and of course I don't agree with the logical inference. So you argument falls immediately IMO.
Please do not simply post your assertions yet again, without actually trying to address what I am telling you about neurocognition.
First, look at your phone's or computer's screen. Then, if you're on a phone, take a screenshot or if you're on a computer, use the PrtScrn button. Is there any difference between what you saw and the screenshot and the image you get with the PrtScrn button? No! I rest my case.
Oh brilliant, just throwing out another argument and ignoring the points being put to you, yet again.
The first answer to your rhetorical question is of course, yes, there is a difference because of the differences between my eyes and the camera's sensor, and my brain and the internals of the computer or camera.
Take the famous example of a gorilla walking across a basketball court that volunteers don't notice because they were given a task of counting the number of times the basketball was passed.
Did the volunteers see the gorilla?
---------------
But I think perhaps what your question means, is that if you were to ask me whether the screengrab matches what I saw, would I answer that they are the same?
If so, that's a question about memory. While it's true that I would say the screengrab is the same as my recollection, there are numerous ways we could nefariously change the screengrab and I would still identify it as the same. Even an image I'd seen a thousand times.
If you do figure out how this relates to "images" in the brain (including with things like the gorilla example), and can show your working, I would really love to see that. And you'd probably get the Nobel for Phys or Med.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, because the problem is dividing the world into physical and mental parts, and then explaining how the two interact. The solution is to not divide the world into two separate parts - monism.
But then you're stuck with explaining everything from that monism. And some things don't fit quite so well. Take information before the evolution of life. What does it mean for a bunch of rocks to be information? Information to whom?
Is the brain a metaphor for how the mind works? Is the computer a metaphor for how the brain works, or how the mind works? What is the relationship between brain and mind?
As I have said numerous times: Information is the relationship between cause and effect. A bunch of rocks is the effect of what caused the bunch of rocks - a landside, earthquake, etc., therefore a whom is not a necessary part for information to exist - only causal relationships are necessary.
Your second question is asking what information is useful, and for what purpose, so you are asking questions about usefulness and purpose, not information. Do you agree that some information is useful and some is not? It's not that the information doesn't exist. It's a judgement of which information is useful or not for some goal in the mind.
It is often used that way.
Quoting Harry Hindu
One is three pounds of flesh, and the other has something to do with the resulting subjectivity, intelligence, intentionality and behavior of a person or animal.
What is often used that way? It was a question. Read it again.
Quoting Marchesk
This doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between mind and brain. All you are doing is just re-explaining the differences. How do these different things relate to the point where they can be metaphors for each other? IS the brain a metaphor for the mind?
What you asked. I'm not terribly fond of using computers as a metaphor for brains and minds, as I think it's misleading. But there are some similarities like handling information.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No. It's what's responsible for the mind when it's alive.
Why don't I see how their brain shivers are readying them to choose among which symbols to point at which objects? Why would you think that was a likely consequence?
Quoting leo
Ditto.
Quoting Marchesk
Either (1) their brains are pre-connectionist symbolic computers, literally storing and retrieving symbols, in which case Searle's critique might or might not convince us to doubt whether they have a proper semantical understanding of their discourses; or (2) their neuroscience has advanced to the stage where they can see how each other's brain shivers are readying them to choose among which symbols to point at which objects.
Or (3) or (4) etc., of course.
That’s all thinking is to you? To you there is no fundamental difference between the way a human thinks and how a computer operates?
Why do some ‘shivers’ give rise to the experience of thought, while other shivers give rise to the experience of color, or to the experience of love?
Also presumably if you crack open their skull you will see a brain there, and you can measure its shivers all you want, you still won’t see its thoughts or its feelings.
John: Where have you been lately, Jane?
Jane: Oh, here and there, nowhere special except...there was this restaurant with a funny looking sign on its door.
John (intrigued): I see. What was this "funny sign"?
Jane (pulling out here mobile): My brother and I were looking for a place to eat when I saw this [pointing to a photograph] on the door of a restaurant. Isn't it funny?
John (looks at the photograph): Hahahahaha...I've been there too...Hahahaha...It is a funny sign that! Hahahaha
Had the camera not been faithful to what the eyes see, neither would Jane have pointed to the photograph and nor would John have recalled being there. The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera.
You did say something important though and I've been giving it some thought but it's not taken a definite form in my mind. I'll remember to invite you and @Wayfarer to a conversation if anything interesting comes up.
Sufficiently similar, surely. The people seen through the window would be different, for instance. And the photograph is analogous to the restaurant, not the subjective image of the restaurant: it is the cause of the second, similar image.
You're arguing from the perspective of naive realism. It sounds a pejorative, but it's not intended as such. 'In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are.' So, from that perspective there's no difference between a mental image and a camera image, because it doesn't consider the fundamental differences between minds and devices.
I don't detect any awareness in your posts of that issue, which is why you think it is 'baffling and shocking' that the realist attitude would be questioned. You take for granted that an image in a camera is the same as an image in a mind. Whereas I question that an image in a camera is an image at all, in the absence of it being recognised as such by an observer. The mind is what recognises an image as an image, categorises it in relation to other images, etc. I question whether an image is real the absence of that cognitive act.
As far as minds and computers are concerned:
The Empty Brain
I think Searle identified precisely the fundamental difference between the way a human thinks and how any contemporary model of a Turing-test-aceing computer operates. We have a proper semantics, while the computer might be relying on syntax.
Quoting bongo fury
And you are still failing to reply to a single thing I write.
I would be quite interested to know how your "screenshot" notion of the brain would make sense of people failing to see the gorilla both in the moment and when thinking through their memories.
But I guess we'll never know because you don't respond to points.
Quoting TheMadFool
Sure there are a lot of words you can use colloquially that would need to be defined more concretely if they are being used as the basis of philosophical (and neurological) statements like "The image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera".
Quoting TheMadFool
Not necessarily, no. You can actually make numerous changes to a photograph that a human would be unlikely to notice. Indeed, if it's a digital camera, that's built into its design; it will ignore details that humans cannot notice.
And if it's a photo of the basketball game, Jane may well exclaim "What the hell is a gorilla doing there?!"
But, if we're purely talking about the camera sensor vs the sensitivity of the eye's rods and cones...yeah there's obviously some crossover there, by design. e.g. perhaps the sensor is better at detecting green than blue or red because so are our eyes.
Not the same by any means, but deliberately similar in some ways.
Quoting TheMadFool
No I would disagree about a single image existing "in" our eye or that it is identical to the image in a camera. I have studied neuroscience (and indeed, computer graphics) and that's just not how it works.
Look, let's try to pull all this back. As I recall, your ultimate point is not that our brain's image is identical to the image in a camera; that was merely the premise for a bigger argument.
Premises should be uncontentious. How about you think of something else to be the premise for that argument?
Jane could have also just scribbled a few lines on a piece of paper, and it’s likely that John would have recalled being there. It isn’t that ‘the image in our eyes is identical to the image in a camera’, it’s that certain predictive patterns match what has been rendered by the camera.
The Matrix may have touched on the verification problem indirectly, when someone notices a cat's movement replaying. Such "reality" defects indicate that the Matrix is not omnipotent, and may have technical glitches. But, even our normal perception of nature may experience perceptual glitches, in the form of illusions or mirages. So, it's the same old Brain In a Vat scenario. Ultimately, we can't be absolutely certain of anything. So we must just accept our personal view of reality as true most of the time. But a modicum of skepticism is warranted as a safeguard against deliberate deception. :smile:
glitches in the matrix : https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/11-stories-of-people-who-experienced-a-glitch-in-the-matrix-434460/
Brain in Vat : Here is the skeptical argument. If you cannot now be sure that you are not a brain in a vat, then you cannot rule out the possibility that all of your beliefs about the external world are false.
https://iep.utm.edu/brainvat/
Late Lament by the Moody Blues : But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?
Glitches of Perception : https://open.spotify.com/album/7HFnb4ZHBSCS9gU5dxanqI
But I agree, we can't be certain. I'd say the skeptical scenarios are unlikely.
I read up the gorilla experiment and it's an intriguing phenomenon to say the least. What's relevant about this experiment to our discussion is something that bothers me too.
Back in my college days I remember some of my friends doing their own funny little experiments on unsuspecting people and one of them was opening the eyes by gently tugging the eyelid up of sleeping colleagues. For sure, since the eyes were intact and healthy, an image did form in the retina of whatever was in front of the "subject" but, of course, the image didn't register (the "subjects" of this experiment were asleep) i.e. the "subjects" weren't conscious. It seems, from this fact, that the mere formation of an image in the eyes doesn't qualify as consciousness.
The image, of course, plays a key role in consciousness but, in and of itself, doesn't quite do the job of describing consciousness. There's something missing in the sleeping person who has faer eyes open - there's an image on faer retina but there's no consciousness. Let's call this missing piece of the puzzle X. I'm tempted to equate X with the soul or some other non-physical entity but kindly note that it can be a state of arousal of the physical brain. To keep things simple, let's call X the perceiver (of the image) and avoid commiting ourselves to any metaphysical position.
Coming to the gorilla in our midst, people didn't see the gorilla not because there wasn't an image of the gorilla in their retina - obviously there was - but because X (the perceiver) failed to notice it.
It's quite obvious then that there's something - we've labeled it X - that's scanning the mental image, understood in the broadest sense possible, and looking for points of interest. So, yeah, there's the perceiver (X) we have to reckon with in consciousness and the mental image simpliciter is only half the story.
Nevertheless, as I've repeatedly said, consciousness is, now acknowledging the necessity of an X, when we get down to the nitty-gritty, a confluence of X and the world outside or the X itself and that takes place at the level of what I've described as mental images.
X, by itself, though capable of becoming aware is not conscious unless there's a mental image it can be aware of/to. The world/X itself can't participate in consciousness unless there's a mental image, again, to be aware of/to. The mental image itself can't be part of consciousness unless there's an X that notices (gorilla) it.
In summary, there are three pieces to the consciousness puzzle:
1. The perceiver (noticer) of the mental image (X)
2. The mental image (sensations and thoughts)
3. That which can produce a mental image (The world and X itself)
In terms of my camera analogy, what a camera lacks is X, the perceiver, capable of examining the image on the film or the image sensor and noticing what's in it (gorilla).
Consciousness in such a setup is the phenomenon that can be described as one or both of the following:
1. The perceiver (X) perceives the mental image and X has the ability to scan the mental image and notice (gorilla) whatever.
2. The perceiver (X) bypasses the mental image and is aware of the world and itself in an immediate, direct, deeply intimate, visceral sense. To my reckoning this is what mysticism and esotericism is all about.
As you can see, there's been a shift in my position (thanks to the two of you for that). That a mental image, alone, constitutes consciousness is untenable. Consciousness requires the perceiver (X) to notice the mental image as a whole or parts of it as the case may be. This is what awareness - the essence of consciousness - actually means.
Observe how the perceiver (X) has now assumed a critical role in consciousness. The existence of a camera unequivocally proves that we can replicate mental images (think in the broadest sense of images) with high fidelity in the form of photographs of the world and of the camera itself with a little bit of ingenuity of course. The matter of the world or the camera itself is, ergo, moot. However, what's missing in the camera is the X, the perceiver, that which can go over the images on the film/image sensor and notice (gorilla) stuff in it.
What all this means is simple. We need to do an overhaul of consciousness as a concept. For clarity I would like to reiterate my take on the Consciousness Trinity as I like to call it:
1. The perceiver (noticer) of the mental image (X)
2. The mental image (sensations and thoughts)
3. That which can produce a mental image (The world and X itself)
The underlined part, X, is that which current science and technology can't create or have been in only a rudimentary, narrow, sense.
Consciousness must then be about X, the perceiver noticing (gorilla) the world or itself via mental images and this is what's meant by awareness. The world itself is out there - nothing much to comment on it - and the mental images that we form of it have been, more or less, artificially reproduced in the various gadgets that populate the modern era. In other words, to put it simply, consciousness is, at its core, about the perceiver (X) noticing (becoming aware of), not the [mental] images (modern gadgets are up to the task), nor the world (it's a passive component of consciousness).
We've finally reduced the entire consciousness business to,
1. X, the perceiver of mental images
2. The mental images themselves
All the action that we believe is consciousness (awareness) takes place where these two come together. X becomes aware of the mental images = consciousness [assuming you're not a mystic]
We can, for the moment, set aside the matter of the nature of X and focus our attention on awareness for that's the essence of consciousness. What exactly is this awareness (X being aware of the mental images)?
To get to the bottom of this puzzle, I suggest we do a little thought experiment. There's a person Y who's aware of an object T. Let's analyze the logic behind Y's claim that fae is aware of T.
Me: How do you, Y, know that you're aware of T?
Y: I am aware of T because I have (seen T) the mental image of T.
Me: How do you know you're aware of the mental image of T? [consciousness as per what we've discussed enters the stage here]
Y: I'm aware of it because I'm aware of it. That's all there is to it. All there is the awareness of the mental image.
Me: Ok. So, you, Y, is/are telling me that you're aware of the mental image but you don't have an explanation for it?
Y: Yes
Me: How do you, Y, know that you're aware of T?
Y: You've already asked me that question and I've answered it.
Me: Yes, I did ask and you did answer but I'm intrigued by how you have an explanation for the awareness of T but no explanation for the awareness of the mental image of T.
Y: I don't know what you mean.
Me: When it comes to T, the mental image of T satisfies the criteria for awareness, right?
Y: Yes.
Me: Well, then mental images of mental images should also satisfy the criterion for awareness of mental images, no?
Y: I guess so....it looks like right to me.
Me: Well, then, if that's the case, mental images are awareness. After all your awareness of T was based on a mental image of T and from that it follows that having [I]mental image[/i] is awareness itself.
Y: Hold on! Not so fast! Actually I'm aware of T because I'm aware of the mental image of T. The mental image, by itself, doesn't quite cut it, you know. There's the awareness that you've not taken into account.
Me: I see. So, 1) you're aware of T because you're aware of the mental image of T and 2) you don't know how you're aware of the mental image of T, you're just aware of it and can't comment any further?
Y: Yeah! That's more accurate.
Me: Ok. According to you there's thing we call awareness, it seems to be sticking point in our discussion, and that it describes the interaction between you and the mental image of T. Am I right?
Y: Yes.
Me: But of course, as you yourself admitted, you don't know how it is that you become aware of the mental image of T. Correct?
Y: Yes.
Me: Am I correct then to say you're unaware of how you're aware of the mental image of T?
Y: Yes
Me: What would aid you in your quest, if it is one you'd choose, to become aware of how you're aware of the mental image of T?
Y: I don't know. Any ideas?
Me: Well, a mental image of T helped you in becoming aware of T. That should be a big clue, no? If you had a mental image of your awareness of the mental image of T, it should do the trick in my humble opinion. Am I making sense?
Y: Hmmmmm...
Me: It appears that there are two important facts here: 1) your awareness of the mental image of T satisfies the criteria for awareness of T and 2) you're not aware of how it is that you're aware of the mental image of T.
Y: Ok
Me: Ergo, a mental image of the awareness of the mental image of T is what's needed for you to become aware of how it is that you're aware of the mental image of T.
Y: Yes. That seems to be the case.
Me: But then the problem now has taken on a different character for how are you aware of the mental image of the awareness of the mental image of T? Awareness of another mental image of course and then my question would be how are you aware of that mental image? Another mental image one has to be aware of, so and so on, ad infinitum.
Y: So?
Me: If you claim that the mental images aren't awareness itself and that awareness is something else, above and beyond mental images (to become aware of), it leads to an infinite regress of mental images necessary for you to become aware of what awareness means/is.
That being the case you have two choices, 1) accept, since an infinite regress occurs, that you're actually unaware of what awareness means and if that's true, how could you say anything is aware, and by extension, that anything is conscious (awareness=consciousness) OR 2) accept that mental images, by themselves alone, is awareness and if that's the case cameras too, because they have counterparts of mental images on the film or on the image sensor, must be conscious.
If, however, you assert that we're consciousness and the camera not, you're drawing a distinction where there's none and so, as Dennett said, consciousness is an illusion
Sorry for the overly long post. I was doing this on the fly.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is the crux of the issue.
Take a look at the [url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38427/38427-h/38427-h.html#toc7]first paragraph of Schopenhauer's 'World as Will and Idea'.
[quote=Arthur Schopenhauer]“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself.[/quote]
Quoting TheMadFool
This is basically representative realism, similar to that of the British empiricists, Locke, et al.
In all of this, you're assuming the independent reality of (let's call it) the sensory domain. From the practical point of view, that is perfectly sound. But from the viewpoint of philosophical analysis, it is the very thing which has to be called into question. And that is by no means an easy thing to do.
[quote=Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer's Philosophy ] We have to raise almost impossibly deep levels of presupposition in our own thinking and imagination to the level of self-consciousness before we are able to achieve a critical awareness of all our realistic assumptions, and thus achieve an understanding of transcendental idealism which is untainted by them. This, of course, is one of the explanations for the almost unfathomably deep counterintuitiveness of transcendental idealism, and also for the general notion of 'depth' with which people associate Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Something akin to it is the reason for much of the prolonged, self-disciplined meditation involved in a number of Eastern religious practices.[/quote]
Quoting TheMadFool
No matter how often you say it, it's still bollocks. An illusion is 'an error in consciousness', so can only occur in a conscious being who is capable of making a wrong judgment. A camera could never suffer an illusion. Many people have of course already said this about Dennett, but as he's a 'moist robot', he just keeps going, like Terminator.
//ps// I should add, I'm not quoting Schopenhauer because I consider him an authority or as having the sole correct view. But it's necessary to understand the claim he's making as an antidote to the kind of ingrained realism that Bryan Magee talks about. Philosophy involves questioning what we generally assume or take for granted, it's the very taken-for-grantedness of 'the external world' which sorely in need of questioning IMO.//
I didn't know that. Thanks!
Quoting Wayfarer
I've touched upon this elsewhere - can't remember where exactly. In line with Cartesian thought and the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, the only certainty that's available to us is our own consciousness (cogito ergo sum), the external physical world might very well be an elaborate illusion created by our consciousness. This, I feel, is the strongest argument against physicalism for physicalism can't get off the ground and claim a justifiable existence unless we can established that the physical world isn't a consciousness-generated illusion. Thanks for reminding me.
Quoting Wayfarer
As is obvious, I have to reconcile what I said above with my affirmation of Dennett's claim that consciousness is an illusion. First things first, the only thing we're 100% certain of is our consciousness and your refutation of my argument that consciousness is an illusion is Cartesian in spirit.
As far as I can see, the entire quarrel between physicalism and non-physicalism hinges on one crucial point - the existence/reality of consciousness itself. After all, the debate revolves around proving consciousness to be physical or non-physical. If Dennett can prove consciousness is not real or that it's an illusion it would be the ingenious removal of the most beautiful woman on earth, Helen of Troy, from the then Greek world - there would be no Trojan war, no debate between physicalists and non-physicalists.
If consciousness is an illusion it would severely undermine non-physicalism because the only thing they have to go on - the certainty regarding the reality of consciousness and what follows, the uncertainty of the physical world - vanishes into thin air. As you can see, the reality of consciousness is a bigger deal for non-physicalists than physicalists because non-physicalists would be approaching the issue from a Cartesian deus deceptor point of view but for that consciousness has to be real.
That said, I would like to discuss consciousness with the aim of finding out what it actually is. The wikipedia entry on consciousness states that it's - at its core - awareness but, the follow-up question is, what is awareness?
Let's look at an example. Suppose a John says that he's aware of something, say a golf ball, on a table. It only means that John is aware of the mental image - the internal reflection - of the golf ball. This is the basic scheme of awareness of the external world and also of the self, John himself. The awareness in John's awarness of the golf ball is what consciosuness is.
Suppose the mental image of the golf ball is A1. John is aware of the golf ball because he's aware of A1 and the awareness in John's awareness of A1 is what consciousness is. That means to be aware of what consciousness is John needs a mental image of consciousness that he can then become aware of. Basically, John needs a mental image of the awareness of the mental image of the golf ball, call this A2. For John to become aware of consciousness, John needs to be aware of A2 i.e. John needs to be aware of awareness (consciousness) and that can only happen if John has a mental image of awareness (consciousness) in order that he can be aware of it.
Sounds simple, right?
Not so! The problem is that John claims that he's aware of A1 and that means he must know, beforehand, what awareness is but he couldn't have known that for the simple reason that his awareness of awareness (awareness of A2) is premised on his awareness of A1.
I present below a conversation between John and I:
John: I'm aware of A1 (the mental image of the golf ball)
Me: Good for you. How do you know that you're aware of A1?
John: I know because I'm aware of A2 [the mental image of the awareness of A1 (the mental image of the golf ball)]
Me: You can't be aware of A1 unless you're aware of A2 because awareness of A2 tells you what awareness is and you had to know that before you can claim that you're aware of A1.
John: Right.
Me: But you can't be aware of A2 unless you're aware of A1. Awareness of awareness is only possible if you're already aware.
John: Correctamundo!
Me: So, to be aware of A1 you need to be aware of A2 (you have to know what awareness is before you can claim to be aware of anything) and to be aware of A2 you need to be aware of A1 (to be aware of awareness, you need to be first aware)
John: Right, again.
Me: So, you need to be aware of awareness to know what is awareness (before you can be aware of anything you need to know what awareness is) and you need to be aware to be aware of awareness (before you know what awareness is you need to be aware)
John: That's correct.
Me: That's a vicious circle if there ever was one. Let me make the circularity explicit:
1. To be (claim that you are) aware you need to be aware of awareness
2. To be aware of awareness you need to be aware
Since, awareness = consciousness, you can't know what consciousness is or, if one follows Dennett's footsteps, "consciousness" is an empty word for it doesn't mean anything at all and so, in his words, consciousness is an illusion.
If you consider angle of vision and the infinite obstructions as well as pre existing prejudice,
reality would appear to be a consensus.
did you see that? followed by description
also the particles in your line of vision usually mean that
(if you could see everything, you could see nothing) just the particles floating in the
mucosal lining of the eye.
Each morning I watch the sun rise over a pristine mountain range and within 15 min. it completely disappears behind smog. fact