(February 5, 2013 at 1:05 am)justin Wrote: what is conciousness? what best explains it?
IMO
Consciousness is very poorly defined, it can mean many different things to many different people. Some elements used in it definition (in varying amounts) are, self-awareness, cognition, sentience, subjectivity, the ability to experience or feel or as in the post above a combinational of sensory input and emotions and there are plenty of others.
My own personal opinion is that consciousness is a conceit.
Contrary to what our Theological friends would have people believe, it seems unreasonable that the human brain fell out of the sky, an inscrutable artefact of unknown origin, and there is no sensible reason for investigating it in ignorance of the causal processes that constructed it. It seems evident to me that the human mind acquired its particular functional organisation through the process of evolution.
The idea of consciousness is, as I've said, badly defined, which leads me to consider what function it might have. This is where it all falls down. The main reason the idea of consciousness is so poorly defined is because it has no discernible function when we consider it against the possible combinations of better defined functions listed above. Why would we need 'consciousness' when all the other constituents function perfectly well and it adds nothing new to the mix, this is where it gets interesting.
The French Philosopher Deleuze postulated that in relation to identity we are all totally unique entities [more recently backed up by genetics]. Identity is not constructed on similarities but rather our identity is constructed on a lack of difference, this is significant because it turns centuries of philosophy on its head.
Consciousness as an idea seems to me to be a construct designed to create species centric similarities where none exist, built on the (false) historic priori that we have inherent similarities. In other words, it is a conceit designed to make us feel more connected as a species.
MM
