It seems to me all this distils down this to two short questions:
• Why do we have consciousness?
• How can we have consciousness? — Kym
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
Consider that consciousness contains mental models of the world and its phenomena. — Kym
It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. — Kym
Herein lies a questionable assumption: That consciousness consists of "a single point of view". In reality internal experience is often quite conflicted, and we are in least two minds about everything from a menu preference to ideas of jurisprudence. Despite what we say, we often aren't even fully aware of how we feel about things until our emotional responses to events interact over time with our thoughts about them. Personally I don't hold much faith in Freud, but one thing he got right is that a mental persona consists of far more than a "single point of view". — Kym
Indeed, if you think there are two realms - the physical and the mental, the subjective and the objective, the inner and the outer - you are likely to face problems connecting the two together — jkg20
... if the idea is that a physical description of the world is incomplete, and a subjective description actually goes on to fill in the gaps, then that still sounds a little like dualism. — jkg20
Hey good people. Any recommendations of online sources of easy access (read cheap) and comprehensive collections of philo articles? I've been out of the game since the late paleolithic. — Kym
I agree, and don't in fact think there are two realms. Rather, I have some kind of materialist view. — Kym
think spiritual experiences can provide important insights. However, I am currently of the opinion that these have a phyisiological basis. — Kym
I'm not familiar with James's wedding ring analogy, but if the idea is that a physical description of the world is incomplete, and a subjective description actually goes on to fill in the gaps, then that still sounds a little like dualism. Frank Jackson at one time argued precisely that a complete physical description of the world would leave some facts undescribed - exactly the kind of facts that Nagel purports to exist, although argued for in a different way. — jkg20
The impulse to locate the explanatory basis of experience in the physical, is surely rooted in the desire for a scientific certainty in which to ground all of the existential anxieties of life. We want the assurance that the same astounding power which science has used to create the devices that now fill our every waking moment, can also explain to us who we are, to banish the nagging feeling that this is something we don't know. That's what I think the underlying impulse is. — Wayfarer
I'm not sure I can make sense of this. Who or what is conscious of a material world? This would seem to imply two categories, mind (subject) and matter (object). How would one make them not-two? — snowleopard
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