Mind Over Matter?

[bennyboy]

Pretty confident statement of material monism you have there.  And yet we are talking about something you can't see, interact with directly, or even prove conclusively that it exists anywhere. 

You (or the opponents of monism) seem to be claiming the separate existence of this thing called consciousness, not me. Burden of proof not on my side

The BOP is on anyone making a positive assertion about the nature of reality.  You don't get to claim the default position just because you've made philosophical assumptions that necessitate your being right.  That's begging the question.

Fine.  What's this "thing" called consciousness, do you believe it exists outside yourself, and if so why?

Material monists don't normally spend time writing posts about things that they can neither see, nor are required to explain what can be seen.  That you do talk about it seems to indicate that YOU think it's pretty special, too.

It is sufficient reason to talk about it that we all seem to share a pervasive illusion that it's special in a metaphysical sense. It's not necessary to actually be special in order to talk about it. Skeptics talk about ghosts because people believe they exist. That's not a tacit admission that they really do exist. That's a very stupid argument.

You are the one who started making assertions about how "special" consciousness was or wasn't, not I.  You are the one who keeps making the assertions about the nature of mind (It "is simply what a brain with such skills looks like to itself."), and then claiming that others should carry the BOP.  What you haven't done is show any understanding of why mind exists at all, or a plausible mechanism of how it's created in the brain, or any method by which anyone could establish whether any given physical system is or is not actually experiencing qualia.  There are some definitions of the mind which imply that it's inherently related to the mechanism of the brain, and some which don't, and you haven't identified any useful tools in determining between them.

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Are you talking about Panpsychism? I have read a few books on that and the jury's still out for me but I have to say I am a biased against it for the reason that the particular form of consciousness in an animal (not that I can do anything but guess what other species experience) is very highly correlated with the brain and its functions. In other words it seems too brain/body specific to be universal.

I didn't mean panpsychism exactly, but let's look at that, starting with the assumption that the brain, and only the brain so far as we know right now, allows the existence of consciousness, and see where it goes.
 
So we have a brain, and we start pulling out those neurons involved in conscious experience, one by one, in a search for a "quantum" of consciousness-- the most primitive system which we would say has some sense of subjective experience.  Would the quality of experience gradually degrade as each of billions of neurons was removed from the "neural network," right down to the last neuron, or would there be a kind of critical mass, where fewer than exactly "n" number of neurons would not be capable of anything called consciousness?  I believe that the experience would degrade gradually, and that you'd have a harder and harder time calling it "conscious," not because you've crossed a critical mass, but because what is going on is so primitive that you are unable to conceive of it as conscious.  In other words, it's not thinking about taxes or getting laid, can't see colors, can't understand sounds, etc.  But so long as you have at least one neuron, you have the capability to process (kind of) information and produce an output.  You could map a fairly complex neuron from a hardware input to a hardware output, and have it perform a simple processing task, hypothetically.

At this level, does it matter that the neuron is organic?  What if it was silicon-based?  Is there something magic about organic processing that makes consciousness, or is it just about the information?  Well, without a good theory of the mechanism of mind, I would assume no magic, and that consciousness is about information processing.  Then the simplest form of processing would be called the simplest form of mind.

Okay, now let's take out our silicon chip and replace it with mostly empty space-- using laser light to transmit information across a distance.  Could this qualify as a "thinking" structure?  What if you had a few billion of them?

Until someone has a good enough explanation of the physical mechanism of mind, then I would assume that ALL interchanges of information, no matter how simple, represent simple manifestations of mind-- in other words, that the simplest physical particles represent the simplest mechanisms of "mind" as well, and that all interactions among them can be seen as processing information.  A photon leaving an atom in one galaxy and being absorbed into another involves a very small change of state in both systems which can involve a subtle causal cascade which could reasonably be defined as a "behavior," even though it doesn't involve someone scratching their nose or something.

This is not what is normally meant by panpsychism, but at least it eliminates the need for an evolving mechanism to magically figure out how to turn data processing into the rich subjective experience that we call mind.