Consciousness

[GrandizerII]

I don't disagree that we're not suffering some framing issue when it comes to the hard problem of consciousness. Maybe it is better considered in the field of study dedicated to biological evolution. But even then, I am not seeing how this isn't just pushing the problem backwards. It's still not really clear, even theoretically/conceptually, how these subjective experiences come about from what are otherwise physical processes.

In that other thread, you said that we experience subjective states because we are subjective lifeforms. Ok, fair enough, but how did we come about to be subjective lifeforms in the first place? How did we come to be "first-person-perspectivists" from a "third-person" world, experiencing things in colors and shapes and sizes and such in a very vivid manner, feeling all sorts of feelings that are surreal or intense (whether pleasurable or otherwise)?

The part about biosemiotics is interesting, but again, I don't see how the study of the effects of signs and symbols on biological life is going to get us closer to addressing the hard problem of consciousness.

Our discussion is getting very close to the limits of my own reading on this subject, so I won't be able to offer many suggestions beyond a certain point.  I assume scientists who specialize in consciousness studies could tell you a lot more, but I am not a specialist.

However, my personal perspective is that self-organization necessarily organized selves, in the sense of evolving organisms who selectively responded to certain stimuli and reacted in certain ways.  That is how biosemiotics connects with this.  Life emerged from non-living matter when it internalized and evolved its own sematic rules in addition to the physics that control material objects: RNA, DNA, chemical reactions, reflexes, instincts, directed attention, emotions, habits, consciousness, and finally the self-consciousness of humans.  We experience the whole range of conscious evolution in our own bodies, and much of it served its best purposes long ago (instincts and emotions for instance).  Even the details of our visual and auditory experiences are likely more highly developed than we really need these days, except perhaps for their aesthetic pleasures.

Consciousness may seem all-or-nothing, but it is not.  We experience it both in degrees and on and off.  So like any other part of our body, it is divisible.  It has been accumulative through biological evolution, and started as little more than encoded chemical reactions.

We are our bodies, so of course we have subjective experiences if we have experiences at all.  Subjective states serve their organisms.  Perhaps evolution could have taken a different course, but it didn't.

Fair enough, Alan. I do appreciate your efforts to address my concerns as I have stated them. I still think that when it comes to the how, not the why, question that is posed by the hard problem of consciousness, the answer continues to elude us. If it started out as little more than encoded chemical reactions, the question is how did we get from that to this rich "inner world" that we experience subjectively. It's such a bizarre kind of emergence like nothing else and comes off as quite magical because you now shift from third person to first person, from the "darkness of chemicals" to the "light of consciousness".

I would agree that consciousness may not be a unitary thing but a product of accumulations. But again, doesn't get us any closer to addressing the hard problem. Because whether it's a unitary kind of consciousness, or a bunch of aggregated consciousnesses, the same question holds.

And sure, we are our bodies, but mechanistically, it's difficult to see how we came about being able to have subjective experiences in the first place. It's not like subjective experiences just naturally emerge from being our bodies. We could be our own bodies and not need to experience anything phenomenologically.