Consciousness & Space-Time

[Neo-Scholastic]

Can you feel pain without knowing it? Well yes you can, there have been times when I have injured myself and only noticed the pain when I stopped doing what I was doing, adrenaline can mask pain as can some drugs....There has even been times when I have found that I have been in pain for a little while and not noticed straight away.

True, you may have awareness of a pain-causing injury before actually feeling the pain. If you “don't notice pain” you aren't actually experiencing the pain are you?

Obviously, the Anton-Babinski sufferer is not actually blind, and the doctors are mistaken, because she has "primal knowledge" that she is seeing things.

Using severely damaged brains to argue against a healthy brains ability to make accurate assessments of their internal state of mind makes for a very week case. So what exactly is going on inside the head of Anton-Babiniski sufferer? I haven’t a clue. Yet I find it hard to believe that they do not experience something directly. The plasticity of the brain has been well documented. One area taking up the functions of damaged areas. I am not suggesting that another area of the brain has taken up visual processing, but it is conceivable that a combination of imagination and memory could be generating sensations. Or the patient is compelled to issue verbal reports for non-existent sensations. These and all other interpretations, including your suggestions, are highly speculative.

I notice that you are not interested in presenting something you believe must be true and from which you can build a logical argument about conscious experience.

[Angrboda]

Obviously, the Anton-Babinski sufferer is not actually blind, and the doctors are mistaken, because she has "primal knowledge" that she is seeing things.

Using severely damaged brains to argue against a healthy brains ability to make accurate assessments of their internal state of mind makes for a very week case. So what exactly is going on inside the head of Anton-Babiniski sufferer? I haven’t a clue. Yet I find it hard to believe that they do not experience something directly. The plasticity of the brain has been well documented. One area taking up the functions of damaged areas. I am not suggesting that another area of the brain has taken up visual processing, but it is conceivable that a combination of imagination and memory could be generating sensations. Or the patient is compelled to issue verbal reports for non-existent sensations. These and all other interpretations, including your suggestions, are highly speculative.

You seem to be playing both ends against the middle, here, Chad. If a damaged brain can be mistaken about the nature of its experience, and its unreliability is dependent on the integrity of the physical mechanism, it would seem that you require demonstrating that the mechanism is indeed reliable when intact, as well as acknowledging that the physical mechanism is determinative of its reliability. This you haven't done. If you'll remember, my goal was to demonstrate the unreliability of introspection, which I've done. I need not demonstrate anything more. (Though for the benefit of others here, I will point in the direction of a) intentionality (consciousness is always consciousness "of" something; I'm more than happy to grant the brute fact of experience, however without any reliability with respect to what consciousness is conscious of, we have no reliability as to the nature of consciousness [for in order to even begin to be knowledge, knowledge of consciousness is derived by "consciousness of consciousness," which I think, at minimum, I've demonstrated we do not have any valid reason for believing to be reliable; consciousness' testimony about itself is unreliable], and b) I haven't read it myself, but Dennett's influential essay "Quining Qualia" likely has relevant things to say as well.)


And no, I'm not overly invested in continuing. I'm not well psychologically, the ideas I'm trying to communicate may not be communicable in this instance, and on top of that I have people like you coming and taking cheap shots at me, likely simply "because you can." So, no, I'm not particularly interested in your reindeer games today.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I hope you are feeling well enough to continue again soon. Best wishes.

[Muslim Scholar]

I'd like to begin by making a few observations about space and time that give us, what I think to be, pretty fascinating conclusions:

Firstly, the things that we see around us are in fact things that happened in the past. This is because the photons (light particles) that entered your eye and gave you the image of what you see had to travel from the object to your eyes, meaning that time passed (however small it was -- doesn't matter) as the photons were on their journey. This means that the world we percieve around us isn't "the present", because when "the present" occurred, it was impossible for you to visually experience it as the photons hadn't begun their journey yet.

Secondly, if we keep the above in mind, we can then come to the conclusion that "the present" doesn't actually exist, physically speaking. If we imagine a cube of length x floating in front of us, we could say we define the space within it as "the present", but if we place ourselves at the very centre of it and look out towards the walls of this cube, we can conclude (from the above) that the walls of the cube aren't in "the present". For our cube to truly represent "the present", we must then make it smaller so that we are excluding anything that is in fact in the past from our perspective in the centre. The logical conclusion here will be that our cube will in fact shrink to the point that x -> 0 which means that we end up with a singularity -- a point in space which doesn't occupy any volume, therefore "the present" doesn't occur anywhere in space i.e. it doesn't occur at all.

Now, from here, this is where we bring in ideas about consciousness. If we think of our consciousness as being the same thing as the brain, then because the brain has a volume, it implies that we are in fact in the past from ourselves at any given time. The sorts of questions I personally have about this conclusion are: is this even possible?! Can I exist in the past from myself relative to a certain point in my brain from the other part of my brain? If the answer to these questions is "no" and therefore our consciousness can only be in one place at any given time, then I propose that the consciousness must therefore be like our notion of "the present" i.e. the volume where our consciousness is located -> 0 i.e. it exists at a singularity i.e. it isn't located anywhere in physical space. I know I exist though, which means I must have consciousness, so therefore it must be an independent entity from the brain.

Is it reasonable to assume that the brain is the consciousness' "vessel" that it utilises to exist in this universe/space-time/reality? Is it then also reasonable to assume that our consciousness doesn't end when our tool for peeking into this universe/space-time/reality stops functioning?

You just proved the existing of the soul