(January 16, 2023 at 11:38 am)Angrboda Wrote:(January 16, 2023 at 11:10 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: That would certainly apply if a person catching a ball did so with no sensation or memory of the event. One could catch a ball without subjective awareness, certainly, but the act of catching the ball can’t be anything but a subjective experience: the movement of your arm, the feeling of the ball striking your hand, the weight and texture of the ball - all of these sensations and the subsequent memory of the event qualify it as a subjective experience.
Boru
That's not at issue and is simply a red herring as it isn't required that those subjective elements of catching the ball play a causal role in actually catching the ball, and as such go nowhere in demonstrating that consciousness plays a causal role, which is what is at issue. Like pain, it doesn't appear obvious that the aspects you mention perform a causal role in the behavior. There is nothing about them that is inconsistent with epiphenominalism. Indeed, those elements can be present in cases where no ball was caught.
I'll add a couple of points.
One, if being aware of the properties of an object in our environment is not required for predicting and accurately responding to that information, then it's not clear what, if any, causal role is being posited as belonging to consciousness. In one form or another, if awareness isn't necessary for responding to some information about the environment correctly, then exactly what do non-epiphenomenalists propose consciousness is actually providing?
The second is a caveat to all the foregoing. It occurs to me that most of this is predicated upon the notion that consciousness is both unified and singular in any given brain. Experiments with split-brain patients significantly undermine this assumption in that they suggest that in split-brain patients, there may be multiple centers of the type of cognitions typically associated with consciousness. Under this hypothesis, it's possible that consciousness is aware of the location of the ball in blindsight patients, just not that consciousness, or those parts of it, that are involved in reporting upon one's conscious experience. In some hypotheses, that aspect of consciousness is purely confabulatory. If that is the case, it becomes rather unclear what we actually mean by the term 'consciousness' if we have no reports from the parts of consciousness with causal cognitions and only reports from aspects of consciousness that play no causal role.
In response to One, and what drives these individual cells to process this information on a scale and ability as to create a unified center of awareness for themselves that 'increases their chances of survival'. They appear to me to be very 'intelligent' in this regard as every cell serves a specific purpose for a multi-cellular organism and works in a comparatively 'sentient' way that would leave one to wonder just exactly how they managed to form themselves into such a 'society' the high end of this synergy is sentience, that these 'creatures' which number in the trillions, are able to have one centralized cortex which relates to them pain, (the destruction of individual cells), that they might fight back against what caused that 'pain' is nigh unexplainable according to atheistic logic. You are not a singular entity... you are a plural... a magnificent conglomerate of entities, ie cells, which do not demand your attention with themselves, but rather as history would have it, flood your thoughts on why you exist at all. The end result for most of us is that there is a sentient entity, a supreme being, that created us following the laws of a universe which He created because that universe is His Body and has always existed, I've taken a poll on a Christian forum, the last Christian forum that I'm not banned from, and would you believe it? None of them believe in the Big Bang Theory.
