Consciousness: What is 'Awareness?'

[Ichneumonwasp]

I think we could probably agree as long as we first decided on a common vocabulary to use for the purpose of the discussion, so that nuanced meanings become explicit and clear.

Yes, that would be an excellent start.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

I'd suggest restricting "consciousness" to states where one's mind is aware of itself.
Awareness can exist without consciousness.
Perception exists throughout it all, but also applies to things like plants and insects. And maybe machines and robots. It's a "detection" rendering any "effect".

So, self-consciousness or self-awareness? OK, seems as good a place to start as any other. We can always backtrack later to other forms of what has been labeled consciousness under other more appropriate names.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

That reflects my thoughts too.

Consciousness as "awareness of awareness" makes sense to me. The dictionary definitions muddy the water too much conflating awareness and consciousness. Although Wasp and many seem to agree that awareness means something deeper than stimulus/response, what other name to we give stimulus/response?

Under this structure, Pixy's SRIPs are aware, whether paramecium, plant, toaster, or human.

When and how "awareness of awareness" arises out of some number of active neurons is where we go awry in that a physical mechanism has yet to be defined . Awareness of awareness furnishes the gap between raw stimulus and response where cognition may become available to override or better select response or lack thereof.

Keep in mind, though, that my orientation away from stimulus-response is based on a particular definition of 'awareness'. There is a definition of awareness that includes mere stimulus-response, and I am certainly not opposed to such a definition.

I am perfectly happy defining awareness in terms of stimulus-response, but most people mean something more than that when they use the term. If we really examine what a paramecium does I'm sure we would see more than simple stimulus-response anyway.

 

[quarky]

Paramecium have passed the i.q. test.

I've observed a lot of them, and they all seemed quite clever.
They were smarter than me, had I been me, as a paramecium, playing that game.

The awareness; consciousness; intelligence is total in all the life I've observed so far.
To assume otherwise is presumptuous, and possibly even retarded.

 

[AlBell]

Paramecium have passed the i.q. test.

I've observed a lot of them, and they all seemed quite clever.
They were smarter than me, had I been me, as a paramecium, playing that game.

I'd agree. Lot's of SRIP going on.

The awareness; consciousness; intelligence is total in all the life I've observed so far.
To assume otherwise is presumptuous, and possibly even retarded.

By the dictionary awareness: conscious seems correct. Intelligence probably not.

For our definitional purposes here, I'd say the hurdle from awareness (which a paramecium displays, and seems based on SRIP to me at least) to consciousness (awareness of awareness) delineates the real problem. What makes the consciousness SRIP processes differ from the paramecium SRIP processes? I think we do agree neurons are the place to start looking, but to aver "SRIP" answers the question seems premature.

 

[PixyMisa]

Why is omitting dualism part of your plan?

Not specifically. We omit it because (a) there is not the slightests shred of evidence to support it and (b) it is either logically incoherent in itself or posits a universe that is inconsistent.

Like UE pointed out, if consciousness is non-materialistic, you're already doomed from the start.

Like I pointed out, it ain't, so who cares?

 

[Maia]

It doesn't matter if all is mind and matter is action of mind or all is matter and mind is action of matter or what I and many others believe -- who cares since we can't know and it really doesn't matter anyway.

Is it possible that this might make more sense when I haven't just finished a thirteen-hour-day with Alzheimer's patients? Or will it never be more comprehensible than it is at this moment?

If we assume monism, then there is much to solve with consciousness. If it's dualism, then there is nothing to solve because we already have that answer from Colin McGuinn -- it's unsolvable.

However, I think I now have a new understanding of the illusory nature of the dualistic paradigm. It seemed to come to me at about 5:30, while Mr. Croker was kicking me under the table, eating his bib, and trying to pull his tray to the floor... as so many profound ideas do...

 

[kellyb]

What's this dualism stuff people keep talking about? Is it some woo/soul/immaterial reality thing?

 

[blobru]

Ok. Migrating here from t'other conc-thread (except for the heat off the brickbats, too chilly)...

--

Another day, another quixotic whack at a definition. Here's one only a phenomenologist's mother could love: Awareness is the relation of the subject to the objects of experience for purposes of description (focussed awareness -- intentionality), framing description (contextual awareness -- the gestalt background), reaction (peripheral awareness -- of the 'shape' of one's environment), and monitoring (latent awareness -- alert to 'significant' change).

All very good, but you know the next step -- what do we mean by subject, object, description, monitoring, etc. -- how do we break down those issues?

And how do we do it without lapsing into dualism-speak?

By the way I don't really expect answers to those questions.

Well, that's Heidegger's tack in invoking Being-there for consciousness in situ: you are already out there in-the-world in experience, it's only when you abstract -- 'draw from' and 'draw back from' [pardon: a little brand-H wordplay] -- "experience" to refect upon it that dualism crops up. I think he manages it, delving into the presocratics even researching monism and where it started to go wrong in Plato's cave, but the peculiar German via Greek hyphenated-nomenclature becomes such a burden that to sustain it we often end up back in our everyday dualistic speech patterns ("ahh, nominative case, especially first person, missing to being-there was: that is, 'how I've missed 'me''"). So there are such versions of monism-speak available, but they always leave us nostalgic for English as she is spoke: grounded neologisms in Being and Time instinctively flocking to the intellectual coast to gaze longingly across the channel at the flown facts and elementary propositions of the Tractatus. It's enough to make an old pragmatist cry... excuse me.

Anyway, screw the "level"-stuff for now. "Awareness is the relation of..." is a promising start I think, given that relating thing-A to other things, to class them as "A-things" or "not-A-things", must almost surely be near the base if not the basis of cognition, and its part in awareness (in the AI [LISP] paradigm, it's all relative: truth-functions all the way down, turtles).

It's hard to pin down a subjective process, alright. But don't despair: things aren't as bad as the Titans' start to the season. My sense is perceptions are just processes, stable processes, sometimes discrete, sometimes overlapping, within the process of awareness. When we freeze cognitive processes to talk about them as separate objects, we sometimes forget they're originally embedded processes, I think, muddying up the water a bit.

Excellent point. One that we need to keep in the foreground.

...of our awareness? (oy vey, with the gestalt again.)

What's this dualism stuff people keep talking about? Is it some woo/soul/immaterial reality thing?

Pretty much. Goes back to Descartes most famously. The idea that the "mind" is an 'immaterial' thing, not subject to the laws that describe "matter".

 

[yy2bggggs]

Pretty much. Goes back to Descartes most famously. The idea that the "mind" is an 'immaterial' thing, not subject to the laws that describe "matter".

I thought it was the view that there were two types of substances.

 

[blobru]

I thought it was the view that there were two types of substances.

Yes. Mind and matter in the context of consciousness debates; though not those necessarily in the larger metaphysical context, you're right.

 

[PixyMisa]

I thought it was the view that there were two types of substances.

Yes. Two types of substances, fundamentally distinct and separate, that never ever interact... Except when they do.

 

[yy2bggggs]

Yes. Two types of substances, fundamentally distinct and separate, that never ever interact... Except when they do.

Except for property dualism, which as far as I can tell is a dual of monism.

(I actually suck at math... I have severe problems counting types of substances)

 

[blobru]

Yes. Two types of substances, fundamentally distinct and separate, that never ever interact... Except when they do.

Via the pineal gland, don't forget (& not the pituitary, cuz that would be silly).

 

[Maia]

However, I think I now have a new understanding of the illusory nature of the dualistic paradigm. It seemed to come to me at about 5:30, while Mr. Croker was kicking me under the table, eating his bib, and trying to pull his tray to the floor... as so many profound ideas do...

A quick and further note about the "Mr. Croker-Related Revelation (tm)". Yes, I do now think that the "hard problem" of consciousness exists, except that it's not really a problem. Also, its actual content is completely different from the way it's been defined (and in some ways, is almost the opposite of its conventional definition.) In essence, I don't know what David Chalmers has been smoking (although an analysis of his hair would probably turn up some frightening results.) More later.

 

[PixyMisa]

Looking forward to it!

 

[James in New York]

Looks like a new books from Chalmers next year:

The Character of Consciousness

Starting with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of consciousness. He replies to many critics of The Conscious Mind, and then develops a positive theory in new directions. The book includes original accounts of how we think and know about consciousness, of the unity of consciousness, and of how consciousness relates to the external world. Along the way, Chalmers develops many provocative ideas: the "consciousness meter", the Garden of Eden as a model of perceptual experience, and The Matrix as a guide to the deepest philosophical problems about consciousness and the external world. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in the problems of mind, brain, consciousness, and reality.

 

[Maia]

Looks like a new books from Chalmers next year:

The Character of Consciousness

Starting with a statement of the "hard problem" of consciousness, Chalmers builds a positive framework for the science of consciousness and a nonreductive vision of the metaphysics of consciousness. He replies to many critics of The Conscious Mind, and then develops a positive theory in new directions. The book includes original accounts of how we think and know about consciousness, of the unity of consciousness, and of how consciousness relates to the external world. Along the way, Chalmers develops many provocative ideas: the "consciousness meter", the Garden of Eden as a model of perceptual experience, and The Matrix as a guide to the deepest philosophical problems about consciousness and the external world. This book will be required reading for anyone interested in the problems of mind, brain, consciousness, and reality.

(raises hand)

Can I drop the class right now and still get a 100% refund?

You know, this entire thing reminds me of a philosophical conundrum we were all talking about on the secular group hike this weekend. "If you were trapped in an elevator between floors with Wesley Crusher and Jar Jar Binks, and you had a gun with only one bullet in it, who would you shoot?" I think the most popular answer was either "yourself" or "force them to fight to the death for your entertainment and then shoot the winner." Let's just say that I had a mental image involving Dennett and David Chalmers as their replacements...

Um, this is only a theoretical situation, of course, and I actually wish everyone all the best, happiness, rainbows, unicorns, and lollipops.

 

[Maia]

All righty! Moving on to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” tasty roasted qualia with garlic butter, PTSD, and John Shelby Spong. The “hard problem of consciousness,” (term by David Chalmers, although he hardly made the concept up, “ refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. Chalmers contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set, and he assumes that the problem of experience will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained.” This POV is opposed by reductive materialist such as Dennett, and also by eliminative materialists such as Paul and Patricia Churchland.
First of all, I do think that there are some very valid points in the entire argument, both for and against, but that nobody is really going about it in a way that ultimately makes much sense. This doesn’t particularly matter if people enjoy philosophical ideas for their own sake, but the final implications continue to elude everyone involved. David Chalmers is getting at something valuable, but he doesn’t seem to know what or why; Dennett correctly opposes the content of what he actually does say but severely overreaches in his own conclusions (as usual. And as always, the eliminative materialists are idiots.)

The “hard problem of consciousness” isn’t hard at all, and doesn’t really exist. When we clear away all of the excess verbiage, all that Chalmers is really saying is that experienced consciousness is subjective to each person. But this isn’t a “problem”. This is nothing but a common-sense observation. What becomes a problem is that he doesn’t seem to actually believe that this reality can co-exist with physical explanations for consciousness in the brain. This is why, strange as it may seem, this argument and others like it are actually based on theological ideas, although this basis will often not be overtly expressed. Once this single fact becomes clear, everything else falls into place.

A number of bizarre concepts, such as qualia, would otherwise never become bones of contention in the first place. If a qualia is actually a “subjective quality of conscious experience”, per Wikipedia, then there’s just no reason at all for it “pose a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem.” It has nothing to do with materialist explanations or with the “hard problem” one way or the other, because a qualia is something entirely different from the way it has been defined by either side. This is how we see that arguments against theology can never themselves rise above the level of anti-apologetics. Dennett’s elaborate arguments against qualia miss the point as entirely as do Chalmer’s passionate advocacy for it. The fundamental question is and remains: “So what?” At the end of the day, I am still the person that I was before we had the entire qualia discussion. If everything about a reductionist materialist view of consciousness is true, here we still are, reading a thread about consciousness, puzzling it, pondering it, arguing passionately for our points of view, still wanting one outcome or another, still being whatever it is that we actually are.

This is the point of view which nobody in the “consciousness camp” really seems to be starting from: as accidental beings, as physical beings, as beings in the non-theistic universe, we still strive desperately to understand ourselves. We use our minds to try as hard as we can to comprehend our minds. We struggle to penetrate mysteries. Maybe we are scared and unhappy at the thought that we might be “only machines”, but if we reject this idea, if we try to prove that we are more, then at the very least we’ve proven that these machines want more. These machines have become human. This is what it means to be human, no matter what words we are using. If there is a “hard problem of consciousness”, this paradox is it.

 

[quarky]

Maia,

I feel lucky that you're here.



You probably know that there are old traditions of mental inquiry that tried, in there way, and still do try to minimize our self-importance...almost as if its a path to greater clarity and objectivity.


I play Devil's advocate whenever I sense humans getting too serious about what they pretend to know or not know. On both sides.

I really like the third side, frankly. Not dualistic. Trilistic, and then some.

Anyway,

thanks for your efforts here.