Consciousness

[Alan V]

Consciousness is not a substance because it is abstract information processing.

So consciousness emerges from a non-conscious substance. At what point does the "abstract information processing" somehow become conscious qualia? This is the hard problem of consciousness.

I discussed the hard problem in some detail with other posters above.

As I mentioned, consciousness did not emerge from non-living matter but from life.

I didn't say it emerged from non-living matter. I said life emerged from non-living matter. But life can be entirely explained in terms of its parts and how those parts interact. Thereby life emerges. It's not radical emergence. But when it comes to consciousness from non-consciousness it is radical emergence. It doesn't matter how you put together non-conscious stuff it doesn't suddenly become conscious. That would be a discontinuous leap, something very unlike how evolution actually works. Any other time we talk about stuff evolving it doesn't contain any discontinuous or radical leaps. Going from non-consciousness to consciousness would be a radical leap.

I also mentioned that this is a problem for reductionist materialists.  It is not such a problem for emergent materialists.  I am an emergent materialist.

Consciousness evolved gradually, along with life, from lesser forms of subjective experiences.

I agree that greater forms of consciousness evolved from lesser forms of subjective experiences (consciousness). But that's easy. That's not the hard problem. The question is not how higher forms of consciousness can evolve from lower forms of consciousness, the question is how any form of consciousness can evolve from zero consciousness.

Emergence.  And it happens all the time in our day-to-day experiences, when we wake from deep sleep.  That is evidence.

Perhaps you and I can't, but scientists are making great progress in understanding consciousness.

They aren't touching the hard problem though. That's not something that can be solved by science. How consciousness or subjective experience could emerge from non-consciousness isn't something science can answer.

I disagree.  If you understood the concept of emergence, you wouldn't so easily jump to such conclusions.

It's thought by some scientists that to store all possible reactions to circumstances in our brains would take much larger brains.  So consciousness evolved as an economical shortcut, a way to improvise reactions based on perceived circumstances.  In other words, just because something might be possible doesn't mean that was the way we evolved.

It makes a lot more sense for consciousness to have already existed and higher forms of consciousness evolved from lower forms of consciousness. You don't have any evidence of how lower forms of consciousness evolve from zero consciousness.

On the contrary, you are the one maintaining that consciousness always existed.  You are the one without evidence.  The theoretically economical assumption is that consciousness evolved with life, and also that it is on-again-off-again, just as it appears to be. If you are denying appearances, you have the burden of proof.

The brain activity which underlies consciousness is not in evidence when we are in deep sleep, in a coma, or under an anesthetic.

There is no reason to think that no consciousness is going on in such situations. Just that higher level consciousness isn't.

Sure there is.  According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, certain "patterns of neural activity are exclusively associated with conscious processing."  Others are unconscious stimuli processing.  The signatures of consciousness include:
1) "a sudden ignition of parietal and prefrontal circuits" which is similar to a phase transition between unconscious and conscious processing,
2) a P3 wave, a late slow wave, 1/3 to 1/2 second after a stimulus,
3) "a late sudden burst of high-frequency [gamma band] oscillations,"
4) "a synchronization of information exchanges across distant brain regions."

This information was gathered by multiple experiments, with consistent results, comparing subjective reports from experimental subjects with their brain scans, during tests playing with threshold conditions, i.e. those which in various ways were right on the edge of awareness for various reasons.

Consciousness studies have become a real science which is beyond mere philosophical speculations at this point.