Good read on consciousness
January 5, 2021 at 2:36 pm
(This post was last modified: January 5, 2021 at 2:39 pm by Apollo.)
https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-...ory-belief
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
Quote:... That way of thinking is, in fact, appealing to some greedy reductionists, but it truly is silly for the simple reason that it is unworkable. And it is unworkable because, when it comes to human understanding, different levels of description are useful for different purposes.
If we are interested in the biochemistry of the brain, then the proper level of description is the subcellular one, taking lower levels (eg, the quantum one) as background conditions. If we want a broader picture of how the brain works, we need to move up to the anatomical level, which takes all previous levels, from the subcellular to the quantum one, as background conditions.
But if we want to talk to other human beings about how we feel and what we are experiencing, then it is the psychological level of description (the equivalent of Dennett’s icons and cursors) that, far from being illusory, is the most valuable. Which is why Paul and Patricia Churchland’s old – that we should replace ‘folk psychology’ talk about, say, pain, with more ‘scientific’ talk of the firing of C-fibres (part of the neural substrate that makes feeling pain possible) – truly was silly. It’s just not going to happen, no more than all of us end-users of computers will suddenly learn machine-language, and forgo cursors and icons.
...
When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself. Take the visual system, which as I mentioned above is one of the best-understood instances of access consciousness, and which makes phenomenal consciousness possible. Our eyes in reality perceive a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, determined by the specific environment in which we have evolved as social primates, as well as by the type of radiation that comes from the Sun and passes through the filters of Earth’s atmosphere. There is, in other words, a hell of a lot that we don’t see. At all.
Think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, not dissimilar from the wetness of water.
