How is consciousness even possible? : Philosophy Forums

Philosophy Forums » Metaphysics and Epistemology » How is consciousness even possible? » How is consciousness even possible?

How is consciousness even possible?
materialism implies it cannot exist

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Last

How is consciousness even possible?

rakis
Student

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 19, 2008
Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 66

Posted 04/25/08 - 04:05 AM:	#91
Reincarnated, You look like an Odysseus between dualist Scylla and eliminative Charybdis … I think you opt for the second, and I’ll explain why For a reductionist to deny some sort of emergence seems foolhardy – even for a philosopher! Emergence appears to be ubiquitous throughout the world. Just about everything that exists now, which is at least a potential topic of scientific interest, has emerged since the Big Bang. So, any purported scientific model of any phenomenon must be able, at least in principle, to account for the ontological and historical emergence of that phenomenon since the Big Bang. Any model that does not provide such an account has to be reckoned as thereby incomplete. In the light of this, we can turn around physicalism’s exclusion of the very possibility of novel emergence and use such exclusions as a powerful negative criterion for assessing scientific theories. That is, any purported model of X that makes the emergence of X impossible is thereby self-refuting. On the other hand, accepting emergence, in the sense of higher-level, causally efficacious powers that are not explicable in terms of the lower-level powers of physical constituents, is to give up physicalism. Unless there is some way of explaining how higher-level causal powers are derived from lower-level powers, a physicalist is at a loss to explain how mental events can cause physical changes. It would seem that mental events can be causally efficacious in themselves. For a physicalist, that amounts to embracing dreaded dualism. On all sides, the presumption has been that the fundamental level of the natural world consists of micro-physical entities of some sort, with their primary properties. These physical entities are clearly some sort of particular. the particle view is deeply related to the micro-reductivist position. Particles do not have a configuration. They are points. But they do participate in configurations relative to each other. Particles are the purported locus of causal power, and the configurations in which they participate are ‘merely’ the stage setting for the working out of the particle causal interactions. That is, causal power is resident in entities that are not configurational, and configuration or organization is merely a stage setting, with no causal power of its own. In this view, organization is factored out as a legitimate locus for causal power – it’s just stage setting – and such delegitimation succeeds because there is a non-configurational candidate available to be such a causal locus: particles. The particle view supports the reductionist view by motivating the elimination of configurations as legitimate loci of causal power. So, abandoning a particle physics in favour of a quantum field physics, a process metaphysics, is not an innocent choice with respect to the issues at hand. The critical point is that quantum field processes have no existence that is independent of their configurations: quantum fields are processes, and can only exist in various patterns. Those patterns come in many sizes, of many different physical and temporal scales, some as large as a human person, or a social institution – but they are all equally patterns of processes. There is no ‘bottoming out’ level in quantum field theory – it is patterns of process all the way down, and all the way up. That is the rub. To be a reductive physicalist (or an ‘eliminative materialist’) at all, is to believe that ‘higher-level’ entities are nothing other than complex configurations of lower-level entities, in such a way that the higher-level properties and powers are explicable in principle in terms of the properties and powers of the lower-level entities (or at least, determined by them). Consequently, some entity is reducible just in case it is a configuration of lower-level entities. But now the supposed base-level entities are nothing but configurations of process as well! If there is no ‘bottoming out’, there are no bases to which all other phenomena can, even in principle, be reduced. A reductive physicalist has lost the ground on which he wants to stand. If being configurational makes a property or power epiphenomenal, then everything is an epiphenomenon. That is the reductio ad absurdum of this position. The physicalist issue simply is: Are all the truths determined at that level sufficient, in principle, to determine all the truths in the world? If so, that is all the physicalist needs. This riposte is deeply ambiguous; the answer to the question depends upon whether those truths determined at the level of finest resolution include all the relational truths. The physicalist is committed to this being so. But not all the relevant relational truths are discernible at the ‘finest level of resolution’; some, probably most, of the patterns that are causally significant are of a larger scale than that. If we are restricted to just those that are of a small enough scale to be discernible at such a fine grain, then the answer to the question must be negative. Any metaphysics that respects contemporary physics has to accommodate genuine emergence, and not treat it as merely ‘apparent’. I believe you have to work harder on your “philosophy”, or else, repeating the same thing without bringing it under scrutiny, it’ll become a dogma

rakis
Student

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 19, 2008
Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 66

Posted 04/25/08 - 04:21 AM:	#92
jnuzzo wrote: One missing factor to this thread, which admittedly I haven't fully read yet, feels to be the aspect of what everyone's definition of consciousness is. If you define consciousness as any environmental awareness, then a grapefruit is conscious as it is reactively aware of it's surroundings. If you define consciousness as a full understanding of a being's surroundings, than consciousness does not exist as we can yet comprehend, and noone here is truly conscious nor can they even comprehend what it means to be so. I think anywhere in the middle needs to be specifically defined and set to boundary before dealt with or any topic concerning it will fall to continually arguing to define what each person feels to be the said definition of it. I think I've made a beginning writing about mental events http://forums.philosophyforums.com/comments.php?i...

reincarnated
should have known better

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 30, 2006
Location: Dubai
Total Topics: 14
Total Posts: 797

Posted 04/25/08 - 06:46 AM:	#93
rakis wrote: For a reductionist to deny some sort of emergence seems foolhardy..... .......at a loss to explain how mental events can cause physical changes…… …. It would seem that mental events can be causally efficacious in themselves. I’m most definitely not a reductionist. I most certainly do NOT believe that consciousness can be accounted for in entirety by reducing it to the accounts of it’s individual physical constituents. I believe there is a subjective aspect to consciousness which cannot, by definition, be accounted for from any 3^rd person perspective. Everything supervenes on the physical, but some properties of the world (whilst still supervening on the physical) entail a uniquely 1^st person subjective perspective, which cannot in principle be understood or explained from any 3^rd person perspective. You persist in calling mental properties “mental events” – as if they are somehow different from physical events? I look at it quite differently – mental properties are simply particular properties of a very special type of physical event. Why need all properties be efficacious, and why should the existence of non-efficacious properties imply dualism? The property of “being a pump” or “being a candleflame” is not causally efficacious, and the existence of pumps and candleflames does not imply dualism. rakis wrote: The physicalist issue simply is: Are all the truths determined at that level sufficient, in principle, to determine all the truths in the world? If so, that is all the physicalist needs. This riposte is deeply ambiguous; the answer to the question depends upon whether those truths determined at the level of finest resolution include all the relational truths. The physicalist is committed to this being so. But not all the relevant relational truths are discernible at the ‘finest level of resolution’; some, probably most, of the patterns that are causally significant are of a larger scale than that. If we are restricted to just those that are of a small enough scale to be discernible at such a fine grain, then the answer to the question must be negative. Some care is needed here - the above paragraph seems to confuse ontology (determined) and epistemology (discernible) within the same argument (my emphasis in the above). Whilst subjective mental properties are ontologically reducible to physical states, these properties are (imho) epistemologically irreducible.
�If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

rakis
Student

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 19, 2008
Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 66

Posted 04/25/08 - 01:03 PM:	#94
Reincarnated, A more analytic approach of the candleflame paradigm will answer your aporias. Systems like a candle-flame can maintain their stability only by dint of their interactions with their surroundings. Their very existence, and their persistence, are dependent upon their relations with external factors in that environment, from which they keep drawing sustenance. Consider once more the candle flame. What is its ‘lower-level emergence base’? Your answer is this: the molecules of vaporized candle wax and of oxygen. But those molecules that are present at any one time within the visible area of the flame are soon consumed, and the products of that combustion – mainly heat, light, carbon dioxide, and water – are largely either radiated or carried away by convection. All that persists within the flame is the wick, but it is not, in any relevant sense, a basal constituent of the flame, and it too is progressively consumed. It is true that some of the energy released by the burning at any one time is used to cause the combustion of succeeding molecules of molten wax and oxygen. But if this argument were sound, the molecules of wax and oxygen within the area of the flame at any one time would be nomologically sufficient for (i.e., be causes of) the combustion of other molecules within the flame, at a later time. My thesis is that this is nonsense. It is the flame, the process of burning, that causes the molecules even to be present within its own area for a brief period, before they are in turn burnt. The flame has no stable set of constituents that could sensibly be called its emergence base (not even the wick). There is just an inflow of waxen and oxygen molecules, which are consumed, and an outflow of carbon dioxide and water molecules (ignoring other trace by-products, which do not affect the argument), together with a release of energy. At bottom, the problem with the argument we are considering is its being framed in terms of entities and their properties, at both higher and lower levels. Its terminology of emergence bases and higher-level properties necessarily envisages only internal structures, not open processes. This is necessarily so, because an emergence base could not include any relations external to the system. To see this, consider the property of being the longest pencil in the box. The pencil’s having this property has nothing to do with the molecules and internal relations that make up that pencil. It is a relational property of that pencil, which it would lose if an even longer pencil were added to the box. Now, adding another pencil to the box would not alter in any way the molecules and internal relations of the former pencil. The property of being the longest pencil seems trivial, but the logic of the case would apply equally to any extrinsic, relational property. So, while any distinction between relational and non-relational properties seems contextdependent, and not purely formal, on any account extrinsic, relational properties such as these could not be part of any ‘emergence base’ of the type presumed by the argument. On the other hand, we cannot say what a candle flame is without mentioning its relations with external elements in its ambient situation. The very being of the flame, then, is a function of these external relations. These physically external relations are logically internal to any flame; they are constitutive of its being. If, say, the temperature of the atmosphere around the candle were gradually raised (independently) towards that of the flame itself, the convection currents required to suck in new oxygen and remove carbon dioxide would progressively become less effective. Either the flame would go out, smothered by the carbon dioxide it had been producing, or the entire candle would first melt and then vaporise. A reply could be “that is just a matter of the boundary conditions; no-one would seriously suggest that the temperature of the ambient atmosphere is a constituent!” But a significantly lower temperature of the ambient atmosphere is a necessary part of the nomologically sufficient conditions for the existence of the candle flame; fail to take those conditions into account, and the argument we are assessing collapses. A candle flame is necessarily open, lest it be snuffed out. Physically external relations are essential to the flame’s ability to maintain itself, an ability that is a genuinely emergent causal power.

rakis
Student

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 19, 2008
Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 66

Posted 04/25/08 - 01:14 PM:	#95
A comment on method and the epistemic/ontology dichotomy If we want to understand observers themselves, we cannot validly do so only by adversion to still further observers. What I propose is a functional model of representation. That is, it presents a functional explication of representation (or representing), rather than a characterization of representations. Any representation, in fact, is a representation for any epistemic system only insofar as it functions appropriately for that system — whatever such appropriate functioning might be. According to you an encoding(e.g. an atom, a particle) serves as a representation for a system insofar as the system makes use of it as a representation — makes use of it as carrying representational content. But, the ability of the system to make use of it as carrying representational content constitutes its having that representational content. In other words, an encoding’s having representational content is a property of the functional usage of the encoding by the system — it is a property of the system knowing what the encoding is supposed to represent — and not a property of the encoding element itself.

Simple Occam
Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: May 14, 2007
Total Topics: 6
Total Posts: 518

Posted 04/25/08 - 01:39 PM:	#96
perseus wrote: Simple Occam: This describes the 'mystery' of consciousness better than anything else I have read. There are naturalistic events we describe through causation, these describe physics. But physics says nothing about the intrinsic character of things that are naturalistic also. By this I mean not just consciousness, but things we normally associate to be physical such as matter, space and time. In this view physical v mental is possibly the wrong distinction, it is causal v ontological. So when we refer to the physical working of the brain we refer to causal effects whilst when we refer to qualia these are ontological in nature. Thanks for your thoughtful response. I'm glad you put "mystery" in quotes becaue my purpose in writing about consciousness was to de-mystify it somewhat. I refer to qualia when I say my tummy hurts or the light in this room is dim. Each of the brain-states associate with the reports can be fully described by reference to the chain of causes and effects which explain how they occured. But to explain what consciousness is to someone who is conscious himself is to be able to refer not only to the neural firings and whatnot but also to the phenomenal properties associated with the brain states in consciousness. This dichotomy in the explanation creates the illusion that the phenomenal properties must be some other kind of thing caused by the brain. This, of course, is where we start to fall hopelessly into the abyss of the mind-body problem. The solution to that problem is the empirical ontological theory that the brain has the intrinsic property of consciousness, such that to BE the animal with the brain is like something. This avoids mind-body dualism because the qualia are identical to the brain part. And it avoids eliminative materialism because it can explain how the qualia are both real and material. The brain state and the qualia are just 2 different aspects of the same physical thing. The scientific descriptions of the relevant neurophysiology are about the extrinsic nature of the brain... as it is observed by others. The phenomenal properties of the animal's consciousness require no entities other than those in the brain and nervous system to exist and the qualia-reports given by the animal about it's experiences are references to the intrinsic properties of the animal's brain. The extrinsic properties are described in terms of efficient causation, while the intrinsic properties are postulated as an ontological assumption. The assumption becomes validated when it can be shown that it provides the BEST explanation of what consciousness is. Hence the distinction is epistemological. However, how can we learn anything about the true intrinsic nature of something other than what we sense? It is difficult to learn anything other than the obvious, how can we build up something analogous to what science has done for the physical. We seem to rapidly reach an impasse. If all there is, is the computer, we can never 'see' the silicon chips from which it is made. Here you get farther away from what I am saying. We don't learn about the intrinsic nature of something by sensing or perceiving it. Perception is one way we learn about the world we live in. It can lead to the efficient cause explanations I mentioned. But the intrinsic nature...what it is in itself... of a thing is what it is like to BE it. I have access to my intrinsic nature as you do to your because you ARE you and I AM me. Finally, it's not like anything to be a silicon chip any more than it's like something to be a potato chip.

reincarnated
should have known better

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 30, 2006
Location: Dubai
Total Topics: 14
Total Posts: 797

Posted 04/25/08 - 05:59 PM:	#97
rakis wrote: It is the flame, the process of burning, that causes the molecules even to be present within its own area for a brief period, before they are in turn burnt. I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion here. A process is simply a property of a particular dynamical system - processes have themselves no causal power over and above the causal powers of the component parts of the system which gives rise to that process. We can (in principle) understand the chemistry and fluid dynamics and interactions of all of the component parts of this system (if we wish) without once mentioning or thinking of a "candleflame". The higher-level property of candleflame is thus in principle superfluous in terms of our understanding of what is going on. The “process of burning” is simply that – a process. It does not “cause” anything – rather as a process it is itself the dynamical higher-level result of interactions between the individual component parts of the wax, wick and air. These interactions give rise, under certain high temperature conditions, to the process that we label “the property of being a candle flame”. Another analogy - think of the legal process of trial by jury in the case of a murderer who is subsequently sentenced to death by the court. Is the legal process the "cause" of the defendant's death? Based on your analysis of the candleflame I guess that you will say yes. However in my philosophy the cause of the defendant's death can be found in the interactions of the system components at a much lower level - what we call the process is simply a higher-level property of that system as viewed from a particular perspective.
�If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

reincarnated
should have known better

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 30, 2006
Location: Dubai
Total Topics: 14
Total Posts: 797

Posted 04/25/08 - 06:09 PM:	#98
rakis wrote: If we want to understand observers.... .......and not a property of the encoding element itself. Sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to say here.
�If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

rakis
Student

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 19, 2008
Total Topics: 0
Total Posts: 66

Posted 04/26/08 - 05:23 AM:	#99
Encodingism is built exactly on an assumption of basic representational atoms — correspondence atoms — out of which other representations are to be constructed. But encodingism cannot account for the origin of those atoms. Encodingism presupposes such atoms rather than explaining them that is its basic circularity. That is why you are trapped in a first and second person’s perspective. Such a start cannot overcome solipsism or engage the so-called inputs and outputs of a learning system(including humans) In the inreractivist model I propose, such a dichotomy is been transcended, because it sees representations as results of an open functional system which uses representations in a meaning of usefulness and does not uses them as an inherent teleological design. So I can explain the content of a representation, because I’m able to see if it functions appropriately for that system. Representational content is no longer a property of the encoding element itself, is not a Kantian noumenal, but rather it becomes a knowable content as a property of the functional usage of the encoding by the system.

reincarnated
should have known better

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Jan 30, 2006
Location: Dubai
Total Topics: 14
Total Posts: 797

Posted 04/26/08 - 06:24 AM:	#100
rakis wrote: Encodingism is built exactly ...... Each person’s conscious experience is unique. There is no way that agent A can know exactly what agent B’s conscious experience is like, because “being agent B” is part and parcel of the conscious experience of agent B. There is no way that agent A can “be” agent B, there is no way that agent A can get inside agent B’s head without thereby changing agent B, hence it is impossible in principle to get an accurate perspective on someone else’s consciousness which is identical with their own subjective perspective. Another way of saying this is that it is impossible to get an accurate 3^rd person perspective understanding of a 1^st person subjective state. Thus ontologically everything is reducible, but epistemologically some things are irreducible. This gives rise to a form of epistemic dualism, but a dualism which is emergent and supervenient on the physical, hence we preserve ontological monism.
�If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Last

You don't have permission to post.

Please login or register.