consciousness?

[Neo-Scholastic]

For the sake of clarity, I am not using quote feature, but will try to address each of the relevant points raised by both of you, Gen and Apo. Before proceeding I thank Gen for your persistence and patience and Apo for your detailed response which I know takes great effort on your part. I agree with much of what you say, meaning both Gen and Apo. I do not consider your opinions wrong, per se, just inadequate. Or I accept the premises but not the interpretation of their conclusions. If that sentence doesn’t seem to make sense hopefully, my meaning will become clear as I write. You will both find some of my response familiar, but I will try not to repeat myself too much. Hopefully, after providing my view’s account of the problems more fully, you will not judge my comments ‘intentionally dishonest’ or displaying ‘rank stupidity’.

Apo, you object to the idea that first-person observations provide reliable knowledge about the mind and its relationship to the brain. I do not disagree with that assessment. However, your assessment does not distinguish between the contents of consciousness and our conception of it. You can be absolutely certain that you are in pain, but incorrectly believe that your pain is caused by a demon. Likewise, people who took DMT cannot deny that they experienced a radical alteration of consciousness, but they can be wrong about how their interpretation of its true nature. So when you asked if I knew anyone who had a sensory experience of the nature of consciousness, I must say no. But if you had asked me if I know anyone who experiences consciousness then yes. I do. I don’t question that I have that experience, but I do question its nature.

Has introspection lead to any knowledge about consciousness? Yes and no. Introspection has not provided any answers about the physical nature of consciousness. That does not mean that introspection has not provided some knowledge about conscious experience. We can understand which feelings are closely related. We can learn what ideas follow from given premises. We can know what types of thinking produce reliable conclusions. While we do not know the physical cause of these mental-properties we can understand the formal relationships among them.

Continuing that line of questioning, you ask if anyone can present material properties of mind. Of course not. The fact that mental properties have no discernable material properties is what makes them so puzzling. We can take felt experience as a given, without taking it as given that felt experiences are purely physical. Such a position ignores the issue and does not take the question seriously. The ‘animal in question’ is one that does not have the material properties you require to accept its existence, only formal ones. A lack of quantitative qualities does not prove a lack of qualitative ones.

This leads to the next objection: “…different descriptions do not make either of them any less real - nor do they indicate that they are separate chains of causation.” I agree with the first part of this statement, but not the second. You can present different descriptions of the apparently identical events precisely because you can make distinctions between mental-properties/processes/states and material-properties/processes/states. But I disagree with the second part of the statement, because we can recognize two types of causal relationships: efficient causes and formal ones. Efficient causes relate only to the material. Formal causes relate only to the mental.
I believe physical theories are inadequate because they ignore formal, mental properties, and the role they play in literally ‘informing’ material properties and constraining physical interactions.

Now the question for me is why I would associate formal causes with qualitative experience. Simply put qualitative, felt experiences are a very real phenomena and any complete theory of mind must account for them.
I find it very difficult to believe that the qualitative aspect of reality is something emergent. I choose to believe that it is fundamental to the structure of the universe. I persist in that opinion, not for theological reasons, but because I think that it an adequate mind-brain theory must account for all the phenomena. And since there is at least a possibility that consciousness is arises our of a qualitative aspect rather than a quantitative one, I will choose a theory that preserves the things we most value in life: our free will, values, purposes, and meaning.

I have some speculations about why mind and brain are so intimately linked and I would be happy to share those speculations with the understanding that these are just things I am pondering and not positions to which I am committed. I would otherwise continue, but I am afraid of beating a dead horse with my on-going conception of the relationship between forms and substances.