Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?

[bennyboy]

Are you advocating solipsism toward the cyberbenny 2000?! Truly though you'd be more justified in that suspicion than you would be in supposing the rest of us were zombies.

Yes, in the end, anything beyond solipsism requires an assumption. And the more apparently unlike myself something is, the more difficult it is for me to make that assumption.

The problem with studying consciousness in science is that you can only arrive at the conclusion that another physical system (organism, computer, etc.) is conscious by making a philosophical choice of convenience. All the brain scans in the world don't prove anything if we cannot directly access another organism's "what X is like" experiences directly, or to determine that they even exist. And we cannot.

Basically, studying anything but one's own mind begs the question, since you are starting with the assumption that others have minds. And if you are only studying YOUR mind, the scientific method fails, because others cannot verify your results without making the same philosophical choice of convenience that you originally avoided by resorting to self-study.

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Let's say the cyberbenny 2000 is up and running, and passing the Turing test with flying colors. Let's say it cries and shouts, and trembles when it is threatened. How would we know that we haven't just created a philosophical zombie?

Seriously, how should I possibly know that if I don't even know whether the original isn't one?

exactly.

[Alex K]

We can use the scientific method to a certain extent to study our own minds. Consider the split-brain experiments. It turns out that our minds produce an illusion of unity by rationalizing away and interpolating in real time internal inconsistencies. Inspired by this, I contest your premise that solipsism is a default for which no assumption is needed.

[Chas]

God has all the explanatory power of a shrug of the shoulders.

You and others like you seem to be quite confused. There is a very big difference between ontological and methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism has proven enormously useful for understanding the natural world. It only makes sense that if you want to study natural things you focus exclusively on natural causes and effects. You would have everyone take a leap of faith, and it is exactly that, and ignore the parts of reality that don’t fit neatly into the self-imposed limits of your own bias.

Your position is that everything true must be subject to empirical testing. Apply that to your own philosophy. The fact of the matter is that ontological naturalism doesn’t have any explanatory power. There is no way to falsify your stance.

The test of an overarching philosophy is its ability to draw together a wide range of phenomena within a single paradigm. As per the video and the OP, ontological naturalism has no place for intentionality. Any philosophy that leaves half of reality on the table, the inner world of subjective experience, is a failed philosophy. You can issue as many promissory notes about “someday, maybe” science will solve the hard problem, but they’re just that, promises. As far as that goes, you don’t even need to be a theist to consider consciousness fundamental in the same way that energy is.

That's a whole bunch of words that still add up to an argument from ignorance and broken logic.

We do not yet have a naturalistic explanation for consciousness, but that does not allow you to say "God did it".

I don't suppose you will ever understand that.

[Alex K]

What is consciousness? How can you keep on talking about whether there is an explanation for it or not if you don't say what it is!

[Neo-Scholastic]

To say that a thing is natural is one and the same with saying it is real or exists.

I think this plays on semantics. Today psi phenomena are considered supernatural. If somehow, it was confirmed (something that hasn't been convincing yet) then you would shift it into the natural column. If that is the definition then I guess I'm a naturalist too. I just have a more expansive concept of what is real and existing.

That isn't really a sincere criticism if you yourself don't require falsifiability of your own approach.

You are right. My comment is directed at those who lay everything at the feet of science. Not every important question is subject to the same tools by which we understand the natural, i.e. material world. Philosophical questions are an order higher than scientific ones. There we look for internal consistency and conformance with experience. As for me, I concluded some time ago that ontological nihilism was incoherent and logically excludes subjective reality.

...to say that natural accounts are not yet adequate is not in itself a point in favor of theological accounts. To explain one mystery in terms of another is no explanation at all.

I completely agree. That is why I do not form my opinions based solely on unsupported opinion. Intentionality is a real phenomena and must have a place in any coherent philosophy of mind. It's not that a naturalistic solution hasn't yet been found; ontological naturalism as a paradigm disallows it. I agree than just throwing around the word God does little to further our understanding. You will notice how I never use the word myself when discussing this issue, because I think the issue is about the fundamental nature of reality: whether its Whiteheads 'monads' or as I suspect a unified ground of being that also has dispositional properties.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Oh good, another page of horseshit from Chad where he advances a slew of claims and doesn't support any of them.

[Angrboda]

Whateverist, do you view mental objects as non-spatial? If so, how do spatial objects (such as microscopic brain processes) cause non-spatial objects to emerge (in the mind)? Any ideas? Reversely, how do non-spatial events (conscious thoughts) effect spacial events, such as physical changes (i.e. bodily health)? Or is our concept of space (to say nothing of consciousness) too incomplete to understand this phenomenon?

I view them as representational. Mental objects are how our perceptual-cognitive wiring registers the world around us. I don't have any theory about how that happens. But it is pretty apparent that something similar goes on in every animal no matter how small or simple. It is hard to appreciate what it would be like to be a one celled organism moving to or away from light. But I suppose that experience -minus our self awareness- would also have a 'first-person' quality. It surely is a wondrous thing just how refined this response to our environment has become through evolution + eons of time.

One thing that strikes me about consciousness is how it is made up of the same "stuff" that our perceptions are made up of. We imagine a pink unicorn, and we literally "see" a unicorn inside our mind. We have thoughts in sentences, in language, that we "hear" in our mind. Our consciousness has a "location" in our head that moves with it, and our proprioceptive senses keep track of where our limbs and body are in relation to the world. We have cognitive systems for "imagining" disembodied consciousness in other beings, whether human or animal, and we imagine ourselves as disembodied "things" floating inside our heads. Antonio Damasio in his book Self Comes To Mind explains that our memory is somewhat bidirectional; it can take inputs from our senses, yet it can also take inputs from other parts of the brain to elicit a response. I suspect that consciousness, the "what it's like to be me," is something similar, that the perceptual parts of the brain, which normally process sight, sound, motion, language, and other "agents," is in consciousness receiving it's marching orders not from the outside world of sights and sounds, but is being driven from inside to create a "construct" that is made out of the same stuff as our perceptions. Why, if consciousness is some special "third stuff" that the world isn't made of, is it composed of the elements of our perceptual systems? In an experiment on hypnosis, they scanned the brain of a hypnotized subject while it was being asked to "imagine" a stimulus; they found that the part of the brain associated with hallucinations and asserting that something is real rather than imagined, was active during the hypnotic imagining. What if consciousness is nothing more than our perceptual systems being fed specific inputs from inside, rather than outside, but this "is real" switch is stuck on, to give us the 'impression' that these "imaginings" are real things going on in our head?

[Whateverist]

To say that a thing is natural is one and the same with saying it is real or exists.

I think this plays on semantics. Today psi phenomena are considered supernatural. If somehow, it was confirmed (something that hasn't been convincing yet) then you would shift it into the natural column. If that is the definition then I guess I'm a naturalist too. I just have a more expansive concept of what is real and existing.

Don't be too sure.

Intentionality is a real phenomena and must have a place in any coherent philosophy of mind. It's not that a naturalistic solution hasn't yet been found; ontological naturalism as a paradigm disallows it.

I wonder though whether a coherent, entirely satisfactory philosophy of mind is anything we can reasonably expect. If the best that could ever be accomplished were a few observations on various aspect of the mind, I wouldn't be surprised. Philosophy is ultimately a verbal enterprise of description and I don't put a lot of stock in the powers of language.

I agree than just throwing around the word God does little to further our understanding. You will notice how I never use the word myself when discussing this issue, because I think the issue is about the fundamental nature of reality: whether its Whiteheads 'monads' or as I suspect a unified ground of being that also has dispositional properties.

Noted. So it is your disposition to impute dispositional properties to the great what-is? I suspect you are projecting but I respect your right to do so.

[Whateverist]

I suspect that consciousness, the "what it's like to be me," is something similar, that the perceptual parts of the brain, which normally process sight, sound, motion, language, and other "agents," is in consciousness receiving it's marching orders not from the outside world of sights and sounds, but is being driven from inside to create a "construct" that is made out of the same stuff as our perceptions.

I missed this post earlier when I responded to Chad and signed off. Interesting. As you were saying in another post, there are many parts of the brain simultaneously processing many things. We are or can be conscious of many of these. I suspect it isn't just in the theater of the imagination that the mind feeds back through the processors of perception. I suspect even when we are just listening or watching the world around us as objectively as we can, that emotive centers are adding shadings to what we experience. Memory is injecting associations. It really is a symphony of inputs to which a narrative of meaning too is overlaid. We don't (or at least don't have to) 'will' any of the instruments to play. Their playing is what has given rise to self awareness and our intuition of a personal identity. Cool stuff.

[Mudhammam]

Well, if we could replace the function of neurons with silicon chips and organize them in such a way as to simulate genuine volition, emotion, abstract imagery, etc. in a robot, then an explanation might involve the structural organization of information. But then again, some think consciousness requires a biochemical process.

Let's say the cyberbenny 2000 is up and running, and passing the Turing test with flying colors. Let's say it cries and shouts, and trembles when it is threatened. How would we know that we haven't just created a philosophical zombie?

Yeah, beats me. Maybe we'll be able to "watch" his (or her or its) thoughts via projecting radio transmissions onto some television screen, enabling us to tell if they have a "genuine" quality about them. Other than that, we would probably just have to go off the same assumptions we do when we accept the verbal reports of other people. One of the high marks of genuine intelligence, ironically, would be if the robot is prone to mistakes. In other words, perhaps we'll know he has truly received the gift of mind when we tell him not to eat the fruit off our garden plant and he does so anyway..

We're what, three hundred years out from Descartes and have made no significant progress? I wouldn't hold your breath.

And all the proposed mechanical theories since then have done so much better...I don't think so.

I wasn't suggesting they were. C'mon, I offer mutual ground for us to agree and you still got'a assume that I mean the worst! But that being said, I still think the reductive functionalist approaches to mind are all we have at this point. If you have an alternative approach, by all means. Beyond metaphysical speculation, however, I don't see much use for dualism. Whether or not functionalism succeeds in resolving consciousness through the cognitive sciences remains to be seen; either way, that approach will continue to be a worthwhile endeavor.