RE: Trying to simplify my Consciousness hypothesis
February 15, 2017 at 3:02 pm
(This post was last modified: February 15, 2017 at 3:05 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
(February 15, 2017 at 12:53 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:(February 14, 2017 at 2:37 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I never understand the mystery about consciousness.
As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.
And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.
You are engaging in the pathetic fallacy - attributing subjective internal thoughts, feelings and intentions to objective external phenomena. Mental properties are intrinsically teleological; whereas, all physical processes, including brain processes, are not. It takes a mind to give meaning to any and all the phenomena presented to it. Mind is logically prior to any assigned meaning given to physical objects and events, of which the brain is a part. Emergence theories are basically a kind of sympathetic magic, like manipulating a voodoo doll to make your enemy sick.
No I'm not committing that fallacy at all because I am not attiributing anything of the sort. I am saying that the mental can be physical and to say it's a contradiction is to commit the equivocation fallacy. I'm not saying objects without brains have thoughts and feelings
Your (mis)understanding of logic is often as simplistic and cartoonish as your god belief. It's no surprise you believe in such nonsense.
(February 14, 2017 at 5:46 pm)bennyboy Wrote:(February 14, 2017 at 2:37 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I never understand the mystery about consciousness.
As far as I'm concerned it's just an evolutionary by-product, a side effect. We don't need to be conscious but we just are. I guess consciousness is the side effect that naturally happens when brains get complex enough.
And the whole "How can consciousness emerge from the physical?" thing is just a complete equivocation. Mental can be physical. It's not a contradiction.
Why would evolution arrive at a by-product which cannot be seen, cannot be measured, and is known only to exist through subjective agency? Saying "consciousness is useful" is pretty meaningless when consciousness is only a collection of material interactions. Why wouldn't a brain just take in data, process it, and output behavior, without the organism ever knowing what it's like to experience hot chocolate in early fall or whatever?
This is the real problem-- if physical interactions are sufficient to explain behavior, then why would the universe give us this added "bonus" of being aware of those physical interactions?
What do you mean "Why would it?" Why wouldn't it? Evolution has useless side effects and by products left over all the time. There's no purpose to it it's purposeless.
