Consciousness

[Paleophyte]

Well it's not complex because consciousness is just brain stuff and everyone's brain is almost exactly the same.

Driving is just car stuff, so everybody's road trips are exactly the same.

Explains why we can never tell the difference between Albert Einstein and Pol Pot.

[GrandizerII]

I don't disagree that we're not suffering some framing issue when it comes to the hard problem of consciousness. Maybe it is better considered in the field of study dedicated to biological evolution. But even then, I am not seeing how this isn't just pushing the problem backwards. It's still not really clear, even theoretically/conceptually, how these subjective experiences come about from what are otherwise physical processes.

In that other thread, you said that we experience subjective states because we are subjective lifeforms. Ok, fair enough, but how did we come about to be subjective lifeforms in the first place? How did we come to be "first-person-perspectivists" from a "third-person" world, experiencing things in colors and shapes and sizes and such in a very vivid manner, feeling all sorts of feelings that are surreal or intense (whether pleasurable or otherwise)?

The part about biosemiotics is interesting, but again, I don't see how the study of the effects of signs and symbols on biological life is going to get us closer to addressing the hard problem of consciousness.

Our discussion is getting very close to the limits of my own reading on this subject, so I won't be able to offer many suggestions beyond a certain point.  I assume scientists who specialize in consciousness studies could tell you a lot more, but I am not a specialist.

However, my personal perspective is that self-organization necessarily organized selves, in the sense of evolving organisms who selectively responded to certain stimuli and reacted in certain ways.  That is how biosemiotics connects with this.  Life emerged from non-living matter when it internalized and evolved its own sematic rules in addition to the physics that control material objects: RNA, DNA, chemical reactions, reflexes, instincts, directed attention, emotions, habits, consciousness, and finally the self-consciousness of humans.  We experience the whole range of conscious evolution in our own bodies, and much of it served its best purposes long ago (instincts and emotions for instance).  Even the details of our visual and auditory experiences are likely more highly developed than we really need these days, except perhaps for their aesthetic pleasures.

Consciousness may seem all-or-nothing, but it is not.  We experience it both in degrees and on and off.  So like any other part of our body, it is divisible.  It has been accumulative through biological evolution, and started as little more than encoded chemical reactions.

We are our bodies, so of course we have subjective experiences if we have experiences at all.  Subjective states serve their organisms.  Perhaps evolution could have taken a different course, but it didn't.

Fair enough, Alan. I do appreciate your efforts to address my concerns as I have stated them. I still think that when it comes to the how, not the why, question that is posed by the hard problem of consciousness, the answer continues to elude us. If it started out as little more than encoded chemical reactions, the question is how did we get from that to this rich "inner world" that we experience subjectively. It's such a bizarre kind of emergence like nothing else and comes off as quite magical because you now shift from third person to first person, from the "darkness of chemicals" to the "light of consciousness".

I would agree that consciousness may not be a unitary thing but a product of accumulations. But again, doesn't get us any closer to addressing the hard problem. Because whether it's a unitary kind of consciousness, or a bunch of aggregated consciousnesses, the same question holds.

And sure, we are our bodies, but mechanistically, it's difficult to see how we came about being able to have subjective experiences in the first place. It's not like subjective experiences just naturally emerge from being our bodies. We could be our own bodies and not need to experience anything phenomenologically.

[GrandizerII]

Sure, consciousness is complicated, the same with the human brain, and the same with the human body overall. And the same with a lot of other things in this world.

But there is one aspect of what we are labeling "consciousness" that appears to have a whole other layer of complexity, and it's the one to do with phenomenal awareness.

All these other aspects, as complicated as they may be, are relatively easy to come up with [at least plausible] theoretical/scientific explanations for. Even if neuroscience were still sort of in its infancy, we have already been able to unearth various mechanisms underlying these aspects, and if we haven't yet, we can at least conceptualize potential mechanisms to account for these aspects without needing to invoke something mystical. We can "reverse engineer" these aspects, so to speak, to the underlying physical/biological processes. 

We don't currently have this same luxury when it comes to phenomenological experience, though. The mechanistic explanation for this continues to elude us, even conceptually.

My bolds.

This is an excellent explanation. I get frustrated in conversations like this because I have a hard time getting this point across.

It's like there is this realm that we know is there and we know it either interfaces with the material world or is entirely manifested by it yet seems to have properties completely outside the bounds of materialism. There is clearly a bridge between phenomenological experience and the material world but it might as well be made of pixie dust. It looks to me like there is a huge piece of the puzzle that is missing to us and until we fill in this gap in our knowledge, the solution to this problem will be outside our reach.

Actually, you have worded this better than I have. This is exactly what I'm trying to get at here.

I sometimes wonder when people can't see the hard problem, how often is it because they don't understand what the hard problem is about exactly? I can tell some out there appear to get it, but when some of them focus more on why we have consciousness rather than how, I feel like they're not understanding the concern exactly.

[Ahriman]

Well it's not complex because consciousness is just brain stuff and everyone's brain is almost exactly the same.

Driving is just car stuff, so everybody's road trips are exactly the same.

Explains why we can never tell the difference between Albert Einstein and Pol Pot.

Not sure what kind of point you're trying to make.

[Alan V]

And sure, we are our bodies, but mechanistically, it's difficult to see how we came about being able to have subjective experiences in the first place. It's not like subjective experiences just naturally emerge from being our bodies. We could be our own bodies and not need to experience anything phenomenologically.

When scientists have explained what they can about consciousness, perhaps phenomenological experiences will end up just being one of those brute facts. We are this way because that's the turn our evolution took.

I bet the dinosaurs, which were around for millions of years, didn't have anything approaching human consciousness. And they were successful enough without it.

[Paleophyte]

Driving is just car stuff, so everybody's road trips are exactly the same.

Explains why we can never tell the difference between Albert Einstein and Pol Pot.

Not sure what kind of point you're trying to make.

An analogy demonstrating that you're clearly wrong on several wrong levels.

[Alan V]

I sometimes wonder when people can't see the hard problem, how often is it because they don't understand what the hard problem is about exactly? I can tell some out there appear to get it, but when some of them focus more on why we have consciousness rather than how, I feel like they're not understanding the concern exactly.

The "how" is likely to either be frustratingly technical (if scientists ever unravel it), or just a matter of expanding our understanding of what is possible in a material world. For instance, since we have shown that all sorts of electronic inventions can do some amazing things, why not evolution?

My preferred perspective, which may only be a placeholder, is to say that consciousness emerges from life rather than from non-living matter, and that life obviously evolves into selves. So if we break the hard problem down into more and more evolved steps, each of which seems more probable, we are slowly chipping away at it.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

On the contrary, thinking it's not complex (as in hard to explain) is what's arrogant and stupid.

But hey, maybe I'm missing something here. Do enlighten me with your wisdom.

Well it's not complex because consciousness is just brain stuff and everyone's brain is almost exactly the same.

You've clearly never see the classic 1960s documentary 'Spock's Brain' where The Others removed Spock's brain (fortunately, Dr. McCoy was able to install a remote control) because his brain was the best one on the Enterprise.

Clearly, then, 'everyone's brain is almost exactly the same' is untrue. Some brains are better than others.

Boru

[GrandizerII]

I sometimes wonder when people can't see the hard problem, how often is it because they don't understand what the hard problem is about exactly? I can tell some out there appear to get it, but when some of them focus more on why we have consciousness rather than how, I feel like they're not understanding the concern exactly.

The "how" is likely to either be frustratingly technical (if scientists ever unravel it), or just a matter of expanding our understanding of what is possible in a material world.  For instance, since we have shown that all sorts of electronic inventions can do some amazing things, why not evolution?

My preferred perspective, which may only be a placeholder, is to say that consciousness emerges from life rather than from non-living matter, and that life obviously evolves into selves.  So if we break the hard problem down into more and more evolved steps, each of which seems more probable, we are slowly chipping away at it.

It may well be the case that eventually down the line, we will finally figure this out, perhaps by first figuring out the individual steps along the way. The issue is it just doesn't seem this way currently, considering how our conscious experiences seem so qualitatively different from the underlying processes happening in the CNS. And considering how we can't even come up with a potential account of the mechanism that's satisfactory and coherent (and that doesn't go beyond materialism).

[Alan V]

It may well be the case that eventually down the line, we will finally figure this out, perhaps by first figuring out the individual steps along the way. The issue is it just doesn't seem this way currently, considering how our conscious experiences seem so qualitatively different from the underlying processes happening in the CNS. And considering how we can't even come up with a potential account of the mechanism that's satisfactory and coherent (and that doesn't go beyond materialism).

I am comfortable thinking of myself as a material body with some interesting emergent properties. Consciousness is more of a problem for reductionists.