proto-consciousness field theory

Darat said:
The old standby is show me the "run" in a person running, you obviously can't since the run is the process itself, it can't exist separate from the process because it is the process . The same with consciousness, we can't show the "conscious" in a person being conscious as it can't exist separate to the process.
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Why, then, is there no Hard Problem of running?
 
baron said:
Then you haven't grasped my position (missus). The brain doesn't experience anything, our consciousness is the thing that experiences. Our brains process, and that's it.
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Why can't it be the brain that is experiencing, why add an additional factor?
 
baron said:
Why, then, is there no Hard Problem of running?
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Because no philosophizer with too much free time on his hands decided to make one up for no reason.

There's exactly as much a hard problem of running as there is a hard problem of consciousness or a hard problem of where the fire goes when I blow a candle out or where a hard problem of why when I take a pocket watch apart I can't find the "ticking" in it anywhere.
 
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baron said:
Why, then, is there no Hard Problem of running?
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Yes, it took mankind centuries to establish that legs were the main mechanism involved with running.

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Darat said:
Why can't it be the brain that is experiencing, why add an additional factor?
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Unless you don't believe consciousness exists it isn't an additional factor. You believe consciousness exists in place A (the brain), I believe it exists in place B (the field). Or more accurately, it is place B.

If you don't believe consciousnesses exists that's fine. Inexplicable, but fine.

JoeMorgue said:
Because no philosophizer with too much free time on his hands decided to make one up for no reason.
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Yep, the morons from Descartes and Locke to Chalmers and Nagel just made stuff up for something to do and JoeMorgue (ISF, 2019) has the right of it.
 
Dancing David said:
So it isn't indicative of consciousness.

Not that I am a p-zombie or anything
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I know. Because if you look at a red thing you'll have a conscious experience of red, there's no need to base p-zombieness on a failure to imagine.
 
There used to be a hard problem of vision.

From ancient times it seemed obvious that for your eyes to see something at a distance, either the distant thing must send something to your eye, or your eye must send something to the distant thing. But neither of those explanations made sense. If your eye is sending, how does darkness happen? But if your eye is receiving, how does the distant thing "know" your eye is there and successfully "aim" its rays at your eye?

Note that one can (and the ancients did) work out quite a bit of practical and theoretical optics (lenses, geometric laws, mirrors, etc.) without resolving that question. The geometry works the same whichever way the rays are going. The ancient Greek and Roman world never figured out the answer, but the Islamic world did early in the second millennium CE.

The stumbling block might have been simple incredulity at the possibility that everything that's visible and illuminated is sending unimaginably vast numbers of rays in all (or at least many) directions all the time. After all, without modern instruments observers only have evidence for the existence of those rays that do reach their eyes.

I guess this is, weakly, a point in favor of baron's ambient consciousness hypothesis. It certainly seems non-parsimonious, but so would the hypothesis of ambient light way back then.
 
Red Baron Farms said:
The universe may be conscious, say prominent scientists

Is this real?
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It's definitely (still) a legitimate direction of research, along the more general line that consciousness may involve more than the neural network of the brain. Personally I am sympathetic with this view, I would not be surprised that at some point in the future (rather distant now) it would become the first choice research program in science. In my view its growing popularity among philosophers and even scientists these days is a good thing, all sort of (premature) 'no-go' theorems in science can only do harm on long run.


The Case For Panpsychism
 
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Chanakya said:
Well, we were discussing whether free will and perhaps consciousness itself might be illusions. God seems intuitively self-evident to many, yet that does not put the burden of proof on to atheists.

Right after, you said that because the mind can be shown to have been tricked in some instances, doesn't mean it always is tricked.

I took that to be a response to (or at least in reference of) my post, immediately preceding. As such, what you say, while true, seemed special pleading as far as placing the burden of OBJECTIVE proof on those positing a God, while apparently holding free will and consciousness to a different standard (or so I understood your post to imply).

And nor is special pleading necessarily fallacious, provided one has valid reasons for one's exceptionalism. I was wondering if you did.
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I usually don't have any interest in evoking or participating in a burden of proof (BoF) argument. My observation is that it is most commonly used to win arguments, not to expand our understanding. I do not get that vibe from you though.

Since I haven't engaged in the BoP argument before I'm not sure how it works...Isn't the default position of consciousness among the majority who are studying it, that it is NOT an illusion? Therefore, the burden is on those who provide any contradictory positions?

I think we can agree about this statement: If we agree that the brain can be sometimes tricked, it is not a definitive position to conclude that the brain is always being tricked. That to me is pure logic. Admittedly, this agreement doesn't necessarily get us any closer to solving the problem of consciousness. That means that there is more work to be done. My original comment was intended to express my lack of impression for the claim about illusion.
 
baron said:
Yep, the morons from Descartes and Locke to Chalmers and Nagel just made stuff up for something to do and JoeMorgue (ISF, 2019) has the right of it.
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Jeez I was hoping since the Ying & Yang twins hadn't caught wind of this we wouldn't be subjected to "Well this philosopher said..." as a primary argument.
 
A person with their legs in certain motion is, by definition, running, because "running" refers to a certain motion.

You can't look at a video of Usain Bolt doing a 100 metres and say "perhaps there was no running happening", because that action we see is what we are referring to when we say "running".

On the other hand when we say "I am feeling pain", we are not referring to neural activity, we are referring to a feeling. People were feeling pain millenia before anyone had every heard of a neuron.

In addition, there is no reason anyone can state why any kind of neural activity could not happen in the absense of a feeling of pain, or pleasure, or taste of sweetness, or the experience of what red is like.

All neural activity can be explained in the absence of any of that.

That is, the "problem". Not something missing, rather it is something extra which is beyond what is necessary for an explanation of the neural activity.
 
baron said:
Unless you don't believe consciousness exists it isn't an additional factor. You believe consciousness exists in place A (the brain), I believe it exists in place B (the field). Or more accurately, it is place B.



If you don't believe consciousnesses exists that's fine. Inexplicable, but fine.







Yep, the morons from Descartes and Locke to Chalmers and Nagel just made stuff up for something to do and JoeMorgue (ISF, 2019) has the right of it.
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Brain = conciousness

1 thing

Brain + consciousness field = consciousness

2 things
 
metacristi said:
It's definitely (still) a legitimate direction of research, along the more general line that consciousness may involve more than the neural network of the brain. Personally I am sympathetic with this view, I would not be surprised that at some point in the future (rather distant now) it would become the first choice research program in science. In my view its growing popularity among philosophers and even scientists these days is a good thing, all sort of (premature) 'no-go' theorems in science can only do harm on long run.





The Case For Panpsychism
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Nah it's just yet more "consciousness of the gaps". Getting harder and harder for folk to try and keep conciousness special so they keep having to find smaller and smaller "gaps".
 
Darat said:
Nah it's just yet more "consciousness of the gaps". Getting harder and harder for folk to try and keep conciousness special so they keep having to find smaller and smaller "gaps".
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It isn't a gap, it is something extra that shouldn't be there.

No matter how much they find out about the brain, it will still be the case that whatever they find could all happen if there were no feelings of pain, feelings of pleasure, the experience of taste etc, accompanying it.


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Robin said:
It isn't a gap, it is something extra that shouldn't be there.

No matter how much they find out about the brain, it will still be the case that whatever they find could all happen if there were no feelings of pain, feelings of pleasure, the experience of taste etc, accompanying it.


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If X is supposed to explain Y and if every possible permutation of X could happen without Y happening and if X can be completely accounted for without there even being such a thing as Y then X can't explain Y.

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Anything the any scientist finds out about the brain we can ask, why it wouldn't it do this in exactly the same way if there were no such thing as the feeling of pain, the feeling of pleasure, the feeling of the touch of something cold, the taste of a peach, how red looks etc.

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Robin said:
It isn't a gap, it is something extra that shouldn't be there.

No matter how much they find out about the brain, it will still be the case that whatever they find could all happen if there were no feelings of pain, feelings of pleasure, the experience of taste etc, accompanying it.


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How do you know that?
 
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