Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

Let's look at this because it seems to be the crux of the matter.

What does it mean to 'vividly experience things'? 

Is there a difference with 'dimly experiencing things'? What does the word 'vividly' actually modify?

I guess I only add the word "vividly" to distinguish two different senses of the word "experience" that a person may use. The "dull" sense is when we talk of something that happens to some entity but without being taken in by that entity in a first-person perspective form. The example I mentioned in a prior post was a rock in a river experiencing the splash of water against itself. Now it may be the rock, after all, does have some rudimentary first-person perspective, but intuitively we don't see it as having such. So it only experiences in the "dull" sense.

And the rock does not have complex processing of information from the environment. So it doesn't have the basic requirements of consciousness. But if it *did* it would have a first person perspective, right?

Or, if you want, we can ditch the words "vivid" and "dull" and "dim", and instead contrast "experience" with "no experience" (as long as we understand and agree that we mean experience to be something that is taken in as a first-person form that feels what is happening through the various senses).

Let's take two examples of information that the brain processes. One is the color red when we are looking at it in good light. The other is carbon dioxide level in your blood.

Both of these are processed by the brain, but only one of them is 'conscious': the perception of the color red. The perception of the carbon dioxide levels happens, but is not conscious. The brain reacts to both. For example, it will trigger deeper breathing in response to high CO2 levels.

The question is why? What is the difference in how the brain processes those two pieces of information?

This is a 'soft' problem, but it seems to me to be the key to the question of consciousness. Knowing the differences between how those two pieces of information are processed would point to what, precisely, is happening in 'conscious perception'.

I guess the first question is : do you agree with this assessment? Does it seem to you to be a key question? If not, why not?

If I'm understanding this correctly, I wouldn't cleanly classify this as a 'soft' problem actually. If you're trying to explain the differences by partly explaining how the sensation of "red" is processed, then in my view, that's crossing over into the "hard problem" realm.

Why? What is the difference between 'seeing red' and 'processing the information from the eyes that encodes the color red'?

But if you're not trying to explain how "red" is processed in explaining the differences, then yes, it's a "soft" problem.

So, now, what actually *are* the differences? One big one is that the autonomic nervous system only links to fairly low levels of the brain stem and NOT to the higher regions in the brain (limbic system, cortex).

This suggests to me that the limbic system (which deals with emotions) is the key to what we usually call 'consciousness'. And, in fact, the role of anesthesia is to suppress parts of the activity just above the brain stem to achieve *unconsciousness*.

So why is it 'vivid'? Because the limbic system is strongly connected to the other areas of the brain, making the results of its processing *important* for the processing of other areas.

Now, admittedly there are a LOT of details, but does not this seem like a plausible route towards explaining consciousness? Why we 'feel' strongly: the connections are *important* across the brain. That *is* vividness, only from a different perspective.

The issue I see with this is that it still seems to be providing only a correlation. Contrary to what you're suggesting, it doesn't address why we feel vividly. And just as importantly, it doesn't address how either. I'll grant you that this might be in the right direction, but that's the best this approach you describe would be doing.

What do you expect other than a correlation at this level? A consistent, universal, testable correlation without complicating factors *is* a cause.

Maybe that is the question: what do you mean by the terms 'explanation' and 'cause'? What, precisely, are you looking for?

I'm not sure what that means in context. It seems to me to be simply the concept of identity. So, when a comet hit Jupiter, it did not hit the Earth. From the perspective of the Earth it was third person, from that of Jupiter, it was first person. Now, Jupiter doesn't have a complex enough processing of information for it to be 'conscious', but the comet strike hit there and not here.

Assuming panpsychism is false, then no, I don't agree that planets have perspectives in the same sense we have perspectives. They are two qualitatively different senses. Of course the perspective you speak of is trivial, but first-person perspective (in the typical context of discussions on consciousness) is not trivial in the eyes of many philosophers of the mind.

And they do not do the required complex processing of information. But if they did, they would have a first person point of view.

So, I see first person vs third person to simply be a description of where something happens. Consciousness, on the other hand, seems to be related to complexity of processing of information, probably in real time. The two seem to be very different questions.

If you say so, but first person vs third person is an important consideration when pondering the hard problem.

See this article in which third-person views of consciousness are contrasted with first-person.

I'll take a look, but I have read Chalmer's book 'The Conscious Mind'.