My take on why indeed the study of consciousness may not be as simple

[Fontwell]

Introspection is the best place to start.

For example, when you look at a tree you are not conscious of all of the leaves. Yet, you can also be conscious of leaves or a group of leaves on a tree.

What is the difference?

Furthermore, when you are conscious of a leaf, what does it mean? What goes through your head?

I should refer you to my edit above.

Anyway, I've introspected for England and it has been very interesting at times. If I do your leaf and tree experiment it will tell me all sorts of things about everything that isn't consciousness (using my understanding of the word consciousness). All the things you mention, awareness of groups of leaves not individuals, what goes through my head etc. are all things I am conscious of. The aren't the consciousness.

To use an unhelpful analogy, we can project a movie onto a screen, the pictures dance and change. But we only see the movie because the pictures hit the screen. Without the screen there is nothing to see. Consciousness is the screen. Thoughts, feelings, emotions and perceptions are the projected movie.

OK, so its a crap analogy but to me the difference between consciousness and perception is as big and obvious as the difference between the projected light of a movie and the screen it lands on. It's not an intellectual thing either, my consciousness feels very real.

 

[Fontwell]

Do you have even one empirical example of this?

I don't think it's possible to have consciousness without perception (that is, without "consciousness of" something).

In one or another long discussion on this forum with a dualist, I ran into the assertion that it's possible to conceive of p-zombies...

Not interested in p-zombies for your reasons.

If I had an example from my own experience, I could never make you experience it, so it would be pointless. All I can do is try to point you towards what I mean. Funnily enough, my first proper realisation that I was conscious and what that fully meant was through introspection in a philosophy class when I was about 30!!

So it's like this. I see red. But I am not the redness I see, I am what sees the red. I have organs of perception. But I am not the organs of perception, I am what experiences through the organs of perception. The red has an effect on my organs of perception. But I am not the effect on my organs of perception, I am what experiences the effect on my organs of perception. The effect on my organs of perception produces a quality that is what it is like to experience redness. But I am not what it is like to experience redness, I am what experiences that redness.

'I' being used here to mean consciousness. This isn't meant to be spiritual, it is an exercise in introspection and observation. Consciousness is the final observer.

I think you are right that its not possible to have consciousness without perception, even if that perception is restricted to brain generated inputs, thoughts, emotions, feelings. I just don't see how that helps really. Being conscious implies being conscious of something, even if it is only the feeling of existence, which is the lowest level I have ever achieved. Anything else is called falling asleep.

 

[Dancing David]

I think our discussion is still relevant to at least trying to clarify what this consciousness is that Penrose hopes will be explained by QM.

I am not rejecting neuroscience and the analytical approach as having no role to play. I am questioning the justification in going outside of thinking (subjectivity) to explain thinking. I think the problem with this approach becomes clear when one then asks questions about objective measure and gets told its an emergent property and therefore numbers are irrelevant.
Well then this property needs to explain itself if its components cannot be used to explain it.

I disagree with that, I am not the one who said that you can't define at which level of neurons consciousness occurs. I stated that it is directly dependant upon the number and properties of the neurons, how they intect and the defintion of consciousness.

So i am not sure why you are saying that. I am not RandFan, again. I would not chose any arbitraty number of neurons to say 'this is consciousness' it is a dependant property upon the defintions as well.

What are you trying to say?

I believe that it takes both methods, the methods of introspection as well as observation and testing.

The honest approach perhaps is to reject any notion of a subjective consciousness/thinking and embrace a universal objective consciousness/thinking.

I don't follow that at all, i have not rejected the subjective value of anything, so i don't understand. In fact the alleged subjective/objective divide I find to be un-needed. Perceptions are always real to the person having them, the ability of those percpetions to align with reality and its behavior are another issue.

The methods of 'the objective model' are manipulated through the subjective events of individuals.

the two are part and parcel, inextricable.

This is the honest intuition I believe is behind Penrose's argument, but I don't think he is being honest by further projecting our consciousness experiences as derived from the world of atomic particles, because this world happens to be "different". This is the underlying dualism in Penrose which is what I suggested earlier in this thread.

To maintain honesty and avoid dualism one would also have to accept that our consciousness/thinking has some objectivity and is not something different but equivalent to what we can observe. The thing-in-itself is not a thing after all.

Perhaps the phenomenologists were onto something

Sorry, you will have to lay it out in little steps for me, I don't agree with two of the premises. Subjective events are all we can observe, it is the consistancy of them between observers and aceoss settings of observation that is the basis of the scientific method.

So i am really confused here.

 

[Dancing David]

That's right. At the level of organs of perception we can follow signals into the brain and see what happens there. But that is just like looking inside a T.V. or an X box and trying to figure out how it works. What it doesn't do is explain the feeling of hot, or put another way, what it is like to be hot.

When I'm too hot I want to cool down. This isn't because I've deduced or recognised that I'm at an unhealthy temperature. It has a quale, I have an experience

And that implies, history, retention of memories, associative patterns and a level of abstraction.
Which part is specifically the quale?

of being too hot. This automatically implies consciousness. Without qualia and consciousness, all we have is data.

ETA 50th post!

 

[westprog]

Just thinking about this has made me wonder if I really mean 'my objective experience'!

It's subjective in the sense that it's personal to you and you alone. You can attempt to communicate what it feels like to be hot, but you are the only person who can actually feel it. It's not subjective in the sense that you can decide to feel cold if you want.

 

[Dancing David]

Calling them "hot", you do

I could drag in the chinese giant if you want. But it probably won't help.

 

[PingOfPong]

But I am not the organs of perception

Let's say there's a terrible car accident and I'm partially blinded. The change in me is immediate as I worry over my blind future.

Let's say that I'm working on the rail road when an accidental blast drives a spike through my head. Now I am argumentative when before I would have been amiable.

The relationship between me and the environment is intimate. It can be demonstrated in so many ways. IMHO, this thread is filled with what amounts to a lot of semantic trickery to prove that consciousness is some isolate-able concept.

 

[westprog]

(If anaesthesia is not about the subjective experience, then I don't know what is!)

I think anaesthesia is an excellent example of the difference between being cold and feeling cold. If you are under anaesthesia, you don't experience being cold.

 

[Fontwell]

And that implies, history, retention of memories, associative patterns and a level of abstraction.
Which part is specifically the quale?

(I don't know how to keep the already quoted text when re quoting)

Yes, again to the heart of it, none of the above The quale is what it actually feels like to be hot. It is what is actually feels like to be cold. My thermometer never feels hot or cold, it just is hot or cold and responds accordingly. Somehow, I have an experience of hotness. That experience has a 'hot' quality to it. I don't need to remember, associate, compare or think about it. That experience of hotness is the raw hotness quale. And what experiences the hot quale is consciousness. I can't conceive of it any other way so far.

 

[westprog]

Looks interesting but at 51 pages I don't think I can bear to take it on.

Hi westprog, you and me seem understand each other here. So tell me, how does consciousness arises then?

• I have no idea
• Nor does anyone else
• We haven't even defined consciousness adequately
• It may well be impossible to define consciousness precisely
• This does not mean that consciousness is not "real". On the contrary.

 

[Fontwell]

Let's say there's a terrible car accident and I'm partially blinded. The change in me is immediate as I worry over my blind future.

Let's say that I'm working on the rail road when an accidental blast drives a spike through my head. Now I am argumentative when before I would have been amiable.

The relationship between me and the environment is intimate. It can be demonstrated in so many ways. IMHO, this thread is filled with what amounts to a lot of semantic trickery to prove that consciousness is some isolate-able concept.

It's certainly not my intention to trick anyone. I'm just trying to get to a better understanding. Actually, the terrible accidents you use are probably the nearest we have gotten to semantic trickery. In this context 'I' can be used to mean several different things which we don't normally need to distinguish between but which become important when personal beliefs about mind and body are being discussed. I do know people who if blinded, would consider that their body has been injured but that they are still the same. I think this is tosh but that argument really does seem to come down to definitions.

When I went on my 'red rant' I specifically stated " 'I' being used here to mean consciousness ". If you don't think 'I' can mean consciosness thats fine, just replace every occurrence in that paragraph with 'consciousness'. I was just a rhetorical device. Apart from anything, it takes me forever to type the word consciousness without getting it wrong.

ETA Turns out it wasn't me

 

[westprog]

If the limitation you think neuroscience faces is that it relies on self-reporting to correlate these various brain activities with the subjective experience, then I would point out that it is a limitation that neither New Agey QM approaches nor dualist philosophy (or any other flavor, for that matter) have found a way around either.

That's how we define a hard problem. Something we can't find a way around.

 

[PingOfPong]

It's certainly not my intention to trick anyone.

Sorry, that comment wasn't directed at you. I read most of this thread and it's filled with "dualists" and "dualists in denial". Many of them never put an effort into defining it as you did. In spite of that, they insist that consciousness is isolated from materialism somehow.

ETA:

It's certainly not my intention to trick anyone. I'm just trying to get to a better understanding. Actually, the terrible accidents you use are probably the nearest we have gotten to semantic trickery. In this context 'I' can be used to mean several different things which we don't normally need to distinguish between but which become important when personal beliefs about mind and body are being discussed. I do know people who if blinded, would consider that their body has been injured but that they are still the same.

I didn't mean to trick anyone either. I meant "I" as in my mind. I suppose you're right that someone could claim that being blinded did not effect them. I would doubt their claim. That still serves to make it a weak example though. Phineas Gage gave us a more stark and undeniable example.

By semantic trickery I meant the habit of discussing the properties of an undefined concept. Of course it can be isolated if it has any number of unknown and mysterious qualities that we want to give it.

 

[westprog]

So here you are equating consciousness with any subjective perception at all. In that regard, biology can tell us with a great deal of precision how a mouse feels hunger.

What it can't tell you, in any way, is what it feels like to be a mouse.

There really isn't any big mystery.

Provided the wrong sort of questions are never asked.

 

[Fontwell]

Hi westprog, you and me seem understand each other here. So tell me, how does consciousness arises then?

• I have no idea
• Nor does anyone else
• We haven't even defined consciousness adequately
• It may well be impossible to define consciousness precisely
• This does not mean that consciousness is not "real". On the contrary.

Our thinking too similar for this thread, one of us has to disagree!

The definitions thing is a real bind. I know what I mean by consciousness and quale (and even hot). Definitions are an exercise legaleese to describe what I already know I mean. Unfortunately, it seems that people don't use the words in the same way, so a definition would be rather helpful. But the best I think you can ever do with consciousness (as I mean it) is to describe or point the way. It's like trying to define the experience of sound to someone who was born stone deaf. Defining it is a) very difficult b) they still won't get it until they somehow magically manage to start hearing.

 

[westprog]

The relationship between me and the environment is intimate. It can be demonstrated in so many ways. IMHO, this thread is filled with what amounts to a lot of semantic trickery to prove that consciousness is some isolate-able concept.

It's not only not isolatable, it's not even definable.

It might well be that consciousness has no meaning in total isolation, but no particular state of consciousness is dependent on any particular external condition.

 

[westprog]

And that implies, history, retention of memories, associative patterns and a level of abstraction.
Which part is specifically the quale?

(I don't know how to keep the already quoted text when re quoting)

Go to the previous post and press '"'. Then it will be inserted as above.

The Quale is the bit that isn't memories, associative patterns and a level of abstraction.

 

[westprog]

My thermometer never feels hot or cold, it just is hot or cold and responds accordingly.

You may be surprised to hear that a number of people don't agree with that. They think that a thermometer feels hot and cold in exactly the same sense as a person. Or if not a thermometer, a thermocouple. Or a thermostat.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I think anaesthesia is an excellent example of the difference between being cold and feeling cold. If you are under anaesthesia, you don't experience being cold.

Thanks.

It's subjective in the sense that it's personal to you and you alone. You can attempt to communicate what it feels like to be hot, but you are the only person who can actually feel it. It's not subjective in the sense that you can decide to feel cold if you want.

And I'm happy to report that I agree with you here.

I think Fontwell is trying to make subjective experience out to be something more than it is.
___________

I see red. But I am not the redness I see, I am what sees the red. I have organs of perception. But I am not the organs of perception, I am what experiences through the organs of perception.

I'm reminded of another Zen thing I've heard: if you think you are something that looks out at the world through your eyes, wouldn't it make sense that you'd have a better view if you plucked out your eyes?

More seriously, if you are not your sense organs and your neocortext (which is actually the structure where conscious experience of the sensory input takes place), then what are you?

Can you exist, but have no gender, no memories, no name (no language), no position, no posture, no sensations, etc?

I understand you're using the "I" (or from my p.o.v. the "you") to mean consciousness, but I think you're making a false distinction.

Again, I understand that my legs are not the equivalent to running, but it is utterly impossible to run without legs (in the conventional meaning of "run"--just to preclude any chasing of wild geese).

And again, neuroscience tells us very well how this process of sensory perception works. Red light stimulates sensory cells in the retina. Those cells basically convert the light into a pattern of action potentials in afferent nerves. Etc. . .

There is no place where there's a little person inside you that looks at the pattern of action potentials across various synapses. Rather that sensation of the subjective experience of perception arises from the pattern of action potentials across various synapses in various brain structures.

 

[westprog]

Our thinking too similar for this thread, one of us has to disagree!

The definitions thing is a real bind. I know what I mean by consciousness and quale (and even hot). Definitions are an exercise legaleese to describe what I already know I mean. Unfortunately, it seems that people don't use the words in the same way, so a definition would be rather helpful. But the best I think you can ever do with consciousness (as I mean it) is to describe or point the way. It's like trying to define the experience of sound to someone who was born stone deaf. Defining it is a) very difficult b) they still won't get it until they somehow magically manage to start hearing.

Think logically - how do we define something? It has to be in terms of something else. So either we define everything in a circle - so that nothing is defined to be anything in particular - or we have to have something irreducible that cannot, in principle, be defined. Nevertheless, we need to know what it means. So we define everything in terms of our perceptions, and our perceptions are defined by our sensations, which are subjective experiences, which are part of consciousness. Sooner or later we have to come to the end of the road. Everything cannot be defined.