(January 26, 2023 at 8:13 am)GrandizerII Wrote:(January 26, 2023 at 7:59 am)emjay Wrote: And to varying degrees between - again using that word - tantamount and actual, my view on that nowadays tends to be that a full account of the easy questions, would amount to a full explanation of consciousness, to me.
If by full, you mean including how you can get from neural activities to [what appears to be] phenomenal experiences, I must admit I can't see how that would be possible. We'll have to wait and see, I suppose, when it comes time for such a full explanation to come into fruition (hopefully before I die).
That 'full'; no I don't think we can ever answer that.... that part I just have to take as is. But full in the sense of a full explanation of the processes and content of consciousness, full enough to be fully predictive, would be the fullest explanation we (or at least I) could ever dream to have of consciousness, and perfectly satisfactory, to me.
I will say though that occasionally within certain theories, and I'm guessing ast will be one of them, I get some ineffable feeling about the inevitability of qualia if not the mechanism of it... so that's when I vacillate between the aforementioned 'tantamount' and 'actual'. I know such an ineffable feeling would, could, or should not convince anyone else, such as yourself, philosophically but it's good enough for me.
Quote:Quote:Panpsychism just feels completely at odds with the, let's say process-driven or functional, way I think about consciousness, ie not some quantifiable unit present to different degrees in everything, but something that arises in some way from specific neural activity or processes. Panpsychism also feels like pre paradigm shift thinking for me; harking back to a time when I was happy with purely speculative theories. Granted I don't as yet know the ins and outs of Panpsychism (I'll get to that in your reading list) but on the face of it I can't see how it can be anything but speculative, and therefore likely unsatisfying to me.
Yes, there's pros and cons to each view. Every view of [the emergence of] consciousness (or what appears to be consciousness) is going to be radical in some way, whichever one ends up being true.
True, they will all be radical in some sense... but basically the more grounding they have in observable reality, the more appealing they are to me. For instance given two theories about consciousness, one purely speculative, and one that looks at the actual structures of the brain etc, the latter will always be more compelling to me.
