Consciousness

[Disagreeable]

Define "concrete". Does consciousness exist? Is consciousness "concrete"?

Administrator Notice
Ginormous wall of text placed in hide tags.

---

Concrete would be as opposed to abstract. I'm talking about stuff.

Yes, consciousness is concrete. There couldn't be anything more concrete than the stuff we feel.

I included a bit that wasn't directed at me because I think it speaks to our interaction - omitted the rest, just to keep it neater - the same impulse that guided me in recognizing that this one premise contains all that's necessary to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly.  If there's a problem with this premise, the entailments cannot salvage the conclusion, and that problem would, itself...ripple down through those entailments.  

Well the problem with the premises was repetition. The structure of the argument is still valid.

You've expanded on your idea of what is or is not radical emergence and decided that the emergence of life does not qualify.  Life coming from non life is not it.  What, then, makes consciousness coming from non consciousness radical?

Because life can be wholly explained in terms of the parts of non-life. But qualia cannot be explained in terms of the parts of non-qualia. It doesn't matter how much non-qualia, non-experience, we put together ... it doesn't suddenly leap into qualia, or experience. That's a radical emergence. Life from non-life isn't radical but experience from non-experience is.

  Further, your statement at the outset that no matter how we arrange nonconscious stuff it doesn't become conscious seems false on it's face, doesn't it?  Isn't there at least one way to arrange nonconscious stuff that does, then, become conscious?  Are we not exactly such a thing ourselves?  

That would be to beg the question against me though. Why are we assuming that we come from non-experiential stuff? Especially when there is zero evidence of non-experiential stuff in the universe. All evidence is empirical and empirical means experience-based. You can't get evidence of the non-experiential. Experience is all we have.

For the latter bit - what if there is no leap?  If consciousness is fundamental then you're dead wrong just in the framing without any regard for the facts.

Wait what? The fundamentality of consciousness is where my argument concludes.

  Information processing can lead to information processing with consciousness..and so can literally anything else.

But how can information processing without consciousness possibly lead to information processing with consciousness?

 If consciousness is fundamental there's no way your statements about information processing and what it can or cannot do could be true.

What statements did I make about information processing?

 If your observations about the scarcity of consciousness however arrived upon are true, then there's no way that consciousness could be fundamental as described.

I'm not saying that consciousness is scarce. I'm saying it's fundamental.

 The hard problem is not -then- why we seem to possess subjective experiences - but why drops of water do not.

Because just because stuff is made of consciousness doesn't mean that every single perceptual construct of things are conscious. That's no more plausible than saying that because football players are consciousness that then therefore the football team is conscious.

 Knowing everything about a world of consciousness and the mechanics thereof could not explain -that-.

Well there is primordial consciousness and then there is more complex evolved consciousness. We can get the latter from the former. But it doesn't seem that we can possibly get the latter from non-consciousness.

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

But nowhere did you explain how consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness. You just asserted that it happens and claimed that it happens when we wake up from deep sleep ...

We don't always remember what we were experiencing when we were asleep. That doesn't mean we were not experiencing. And just because complex consciousness may be switched off doesn't mean that all consciousness is switched off. The more complex consciousness can emerge from simpler consciousness. There is no way that complex consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness. There is no evidence of the non-experiential. All evidence is experience-based.

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.

Emergence is very much a problem for emergentists. You claim that consciousness emerges from non-conscious beings. But how can that possibly be the case? It would be like getting concrete things out of abstract things. It would be a very radical or brute emergence.

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

No, no, no, no, no, NO. We have zero evidence of non-experience because all evidence is experience-based. Not remembering what we experienced doesn't mean we didn't experience something. Science being unable to detect consciousness doesn't mean consciousness wasn't there. The hard problem can't be dealt with by science ... this is why it's the hard problem.

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

I do understand emergence. What's more, I understand the difference between legitimate emergence and radical or brute emergence. You don't seem to understand how emergence can be a problem for emergentists.

On the contrary, you are the one maintaining that consciousness always existed.  You are the one without evidence.

There is evidence of experience. There is not evidence of non-experience. We can't get experience from non-experience. But experience exists. Therefore it's always existed.

 The theoretically economical assumption is that consciousness evolved with life,

No, that would require radical emergence which is completely against how evolution works. Evolution doesn't use radical leaps like getting concrete things out of abstract things or getting consciousness from total non-consciousness.

and also that it is on-again-off-again, just as it appears to be.

We never experience non-experience. Not remembering something doesn't mean we didn't experience it. You are confused if you think we can have experienced-based empirical evidence of an absence of experience.

 If you are denying appearances, you have the burden of proof.

You are denying appearances. You are saying non-appearances appear when they haven't appeared to you. You have the burden of proof.

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.

---

None of this touches the hard problem.

That's my final word on the matter at least for now. Unless I forget to shut up or something. I don't want to keep repeating myself.