Is it or is it not an objective fact that we're all subjectively conscious? Just because neither of our first-person realities of consciousness appear as objects in the world doesn't mean they don't both come into being for the same objective reason/when the same objective conditions are present. — Patterner

But there's a big difference in perspective that you're glossing over there. Objectivity is already a step removed from the actuality of first-person experience. By treating first-person experience in those terms, you're eliding a real distinction. You're basically saying that it doesn't matter.

Does it somehow make more sense that consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain... — Patterner

That 'nothing but' is the essence of reductionism - it's what reductionism means. You've absorbed the accepted wisdom, that the world is 'nothing but' a concatenation of fundamental particles, and brains are just super-specialised instances of the same basic stuff. Which is why you're appealing to panpsychism, which attempts to explain how this model can account for consciousness, by presuming a kind of secret attribute of consciousness in matter.

And saying 'hey, nobody knows what consciousness is, so one guess is as good as another' is, well, not saying anything.

How Phenomenology and Idealism avoid the 'Combination Problem'

The combination problem is how to account for the unity of conscious experience. If each particle of matter (and leaving aside that it is dubious that matter is even really particulate) possesses some tiny sliver of consciousness, how is it that they can combine into a unified whole, which is how conscious experience invariably appears to the subject.

So why doesn't the same apply to organisms, and to subjective conscious experience in particular? Living organisms, unlike collections of inorganic matter, possess a principle of unity from the outset. This principle is not something that needs to be "combined" from smaller parts; it is the very thing that makes the organism a whole in the first place.

A pile of sand is a mere collection of particles. Its unity is an external construct, imposed by the observer who calls it "a pile." If you remove a grain of sand, the pile remains a pile. The grains do not work together for a common end; they do not have a shared life.

An organism, by contrast, is an integrated whole. Its parts—cells, tissues, and organs—do not exist independently but are organized by a principle that directs their activities toward the maintenance and flourishing of the whole. This is the very meaning of "organism" and "organization". The unity is intrinsic, not imposed (as it is in artefacts, for example).

This view doesn't face the combination problem because it doesn't assume the parts were conscious to begin with. It is an argument about emergence, not combination. The brain and nervous system, with their incredibly complex and integrated organization, are a special kind of matter. When, and only when, matter is organized in this way does the property of unified, subjective consciousness emerge. But then, look at the process which gave rise to organic life on Earth, starting with stellar explosions and the creation of complex matter, through the billions of years of terrestrial formation and so on. Who is to say that this is not the emergence of a distinct and separate ontological order to that displayed by non-organic matter?

Materialism has to avoid this inference, as, for it, there is only one fundamental substance, matter (or matter-energy, post Einstein). Hence it has to graft consciousness on to matter, to explain the explanatory gap or the 'hard problem'.

Phenomenology (and also idealism) don't face this problem, as they don't presume that matter is fundamental in the first place. They start with the undeniable ('apodictic' in philosophy-speak) fact of conscious experience, and seek to understand it as it is, without explaining it in terms of material interactions and neural substrates. The difficulty being this challenges the assumed consensus of materialism, and that requires a considerable re-thinking of fundamental philosophy.

It is an argument about emergence, not combination — Wayfarer

The combination problem is more or less the problem of strong emergence from a panpsychist perspective. Replacing combination with emergence does not really solve much because they are similar issues. You could justbite the bullet on strong emergence as a dualist, but then a panpsychist could do the same with combination problem.

Phenomenology (and also idealism) don't face this problem, as they don't presume that matter is fundamental in the first place. — Wayfarer

Given that we have very good idea about the exiatence of microscopic things, I think idealists either has to resort to some kind of solution that has problems like the combination problem: microconsciousnesses combine together, macroconsciousnesses dissociate; perhaps also some ad hoc hand-waving of something like "brains are just what our consciousness looks like through another perspective". Idealism might have some parsimony in terms of "everything is mental", whatever that even means; but I don't think any of these perspectives the fact that the irreducibility of experience means there isn't really any intelligible explanation available to us to explain why reality would have distinct experiences at different scales, how they emerge from each other whether upward or downward; and if not, why science seems to describe structures like brains which seem to have no reminiscence to our own first person experiences. Just saying everything is mental may in some sense be simpler than materialism or dualism, but I don't think it provides any deeper insights or amelioration to these issues.

Just saying everything is mental may in some sense be simpler than materialism or dualism, but I don't think it provides any deeper insights or amelioration to these issues. — Apustimelogist

You are missing the point. Husserlian Phenomenology is not at all concerned with material existence as it is focused on the experience of consciousness. It is not merely sayign everything is Mental it just does not care about material measurements -- the aim being to figure out an approach that can better ground science in subjectivity.

Husserl started as a physicist so he was not against empirical data at all.

What we are talking about in phenomenological terms is understanding how when we look at any given object of perception it is necessarily 'pregnant' (to use his term) with unseen aspects -- volume, back, bottm, side etc.,. When we look at other phenomena the same makes itself known to us, like with sounds. We cannot think of a sound that has no volume, nor a song that has no melody.

To Bracket Out the general material view we are used to allows us to reframe our experience and categorise it differently. This can then be used once we readopt material data and seek clues to how our subjective experience maps onto neural networks or not at all.

Replacing combination with emergence does not really solve much because they are similar issues. — Apustimelogist

Yes. It is no better than stating something like "I don't know how it works, therefore aliens!" The issue becomes one of reductionism -- something else Phenomenology puts its hand to.

We are talking about consciousness so it makes sense to start at the source rather than shift to what our consciousness constructs (that is a representation of other in the idea of something being something). The question of how we obtain a pciture of a World is where conscoiusness is most readily at work. My conscious being appreciates physics not the other away around.

This is precisely why I favour Husserl's approach to a science of consciousness. — I like sushi

Pleased to find we have this in common.

Husserlian Phenomenology is not at all concerned with material existence as it is focused on the experience of consciousness. It is not merely sayign everything is Mental it just does not care about material measurements -- the aim being to figure out an approach that can better ground science in subjectivity.

I don’t know if this has any bearing on any of this, but it plays a role in my thinking.
The idea that each being is a pure consciousness (or spirit) and the world they are born into gives enough structure around them to articulate being and experience. Another way of seeing this is that each human is a consciousness, a pure being. But if this structure weren’t there no one would be able to determine who was who and where one person ended and another began. Also we would all know each others thoughts all the time. The whole world would just be a chaotic mess.

So the constraining structures in our world play a major role in defining who we are when we are in this world. But also they may play a role in educating us to prepare for a world where these structures are reduced and we need to be able to maintain our defining qualities without them. To anchor these features in spirit.

You are missing the point. Husserlian Phenomenology is not at all concerned with material existence as it is focused on the experience of consciousness. — I like sushi

I was directly replying to mention of the combination problem. If my answer was not coherent with the topic, it is because the combination problem was evoked in an improper context.

We are talking about consciousness so it makes sense to start at the source rather than shift to what our consciousness constructs (that is a representation of other in the idea of something being something). — I like sushi

The thing about experiences is that there is nothing much to say about them other than say we are directly aquainted with them and can distinguish them. What else we can do is organize them, relating them to each other, and giving them labels, like what science does.

But if this structure weren’t there no one would be able to determine who was who and where one person ended and another began. Also we would all know each others thoughts all the time. The whole world would just be a chaotic mess. — Punshhh

Conveniently for physicalism, the fact that we have individual brains that are not neurally interconnected with the brains of other people seems to explain this nicely.

How fortunate.
If only we could all behave sensibly, we could throw off all this physical stuff we are wearing like an old coat and hang out in peace and harmony. I think there’s a word for this.

I expect we'll all just continue acting like the social primates that we are, despite efforts on the part of many to deny our nature.

Then we have bleak future ahead of us then.

Then we have bleak future ahead of us then. — Punshhh

To me it seems likely that improved and more widespread knowledge of our natures is the best hope humanity has for avoiding the bleakness that the denial of our natures is leading towards.

I think emergent phenomenon can occur that are greater than the sum of their parts. For example the properties of water verses those of just hydrogen and oxygen. Likewise - mental acts, free will, imagination and subjectivity etc could be emergent properties that are derived from baser physical determined and finite ones and yet possess properties beyond that. In that waynthey may be caused by physical things but not neccessarily in some straightforward A => B.

I expect we'll all just continue acting like the social primates that we are, despite efforts on the part of many to deny our nature. ...

To me it seems likely that improved and more widespread knowledge of our natures is the best hope humanity has for avoiding the bleakness that the denial of our natures is leading towards. — wonderer1

There's a real problem with the naturalist account of human nature, which is that it doesn't or can't acknowledge the sense in which we're essentially different from other animals. Considerable weight is given to demonstrations of rudimentary reasoning skills by caledonian crows and chimps to press home this point. See? We're just like them! I think we take comfort in the kind of 'one-with-nature' aspect of evolutionary naturalism. But it also gets us off the hook of recognising that we're 'the symbolic species', as Terrence Deacon put it in a book of that name, with capacities and possibilities and also existential plights which they will never have.

But neither evolutionary naturalism nor scientific realism provide us with the moral resources necessary to cope with the human condition. The criteria of biological evolution aren't necessarily meaningful in a context as utterly removed from the natural state. But as many have commented, Darwinian naturalism dovetails nicely with myths of progress and capitalist economics. And with the prestige of science.

Unlike the other primates, we have concepts of nature, we sense ourselves as being different from it in ways they cannot. Acknowledgement of that has to be a part of philosophy, but it's not something inherent within naturalism.

There's a real problem with the naturalist account of human nature, which is that it doesn't or can't acknowledge the sense in which we're essentially different from other animals. — Wayfarer

That's just your strawmanning of naturalism. I could talk of all sorts of ways we are different from other animals. Language use and cultural evolution being two important factors.

Well, of course. But what did you mean, then, by 'accepting our true nature as primates'? In what way is that being denied, and how would acknowledging it rectify that?

To me it seems likely that improved and more widespread knowledge of our natures is the best hope humanity has for avoiding the bleakness that the denial of our natures is leading towards.

The only hope that humanity has is the transfiguration of our natures, otherwise we are doomed to become extinct due to the overstretch of resources and resultant conflict.* The fossil record has numerous examples, why would we be any different.

Cause; the self obsessed over use of resources.
Effect; extinction, or collapsed civilisation struggling to survive in a polluted world.

* I remember when I learnt of the plight of the mutinous crew of the Bounty. When they became shipwrecked on Pitcairn island. Rather than cooperate and survive, they killed each other.