I hate to break it to you Kym but you can't be a materialist. You're not cunning enough. :-)

It is the material of the world that gains self awareness, however imperfect and limted. — Kym

Or, if one is to go with Idealism, it is the Cosmic Mind that conceives of the idea of matter, and a finite locus of that mind that experiences it as such, while there is never any actual separation between them.

As well, there's the Advaita Vedanta take, as per this Shankara quote ...

Brahman alone is real
The world is illusory
Brahman is the world

Take your pick :wink:

Hey snowleopard,

While you were replying I just edited that last post and Hippied it up a little more.

Hey, I'm old enough to claim to be an original hippie, so you can't pull the flower-power garland over my eyes.

Snowleaopard,

Lol, I was a hippie back in the Paleolithic. It wasn't till those yuppy Greeks showed up in the forum that all the arguing started.

Gotta love those halcyon days of so-called 'free' love and pre-prohibition, paranoia-free psychedelics.

Back on topic ... Your question just triggered this thought about the materialism vs idealism debate, in that the question could be rephrased as follows: Is it 'real' matter that is experiencing the illusion of mind? Or is it 'real' mind that is experiencing the illusion of matter? Wadya think?

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines just then. I suppose if one really opts to thouroughly deny the dichotomies of mind and matter, self and world etc. then it just becomes a linguistic issue of whether you call yourself a materialist or an idealist. Freaky!

Now, my argument in favour of Chalmer's position, is that experience is irreducibly first-person. In other words, it is not an object or a phenomenon, in the sense that things that we experience are objects or phenomena. So the question is not 'why do we have consciousness?' but 'what is consciousness?', which is really a question about the first-person nature of experience. — Wayfarer

I'm only nitpicking: The way I read this it might, or might not, convey an implicit assumption of the permanency of the self … even in so far as consciousness/experience not being possible devoid of something other which is experienced. I’m presuming this will be much ado about nothing new to you, all the same:

Where one to take the experiences of all those who are reputed to have had intense spiritual experiences—this via meditations or otherwise—their awareness/consciousness in such instances increase far beyond what our average commonplace states of consciousness are. Hence, were such experiences to be believed as non-bogus, then the magnitude of our consciousness can become greatly amplified in terms of both quantity and quality of awareness.

Hallucinogen-based experiences, such as those of Aldous Huxley in his “Doors of Perception”, greatly complicate matters in terms of preferred ontological explanations, but they are reported to occur all the same. When not going haywire, these again purportedly endow selves with increased awareness that is often enough coupled with a highly increased sense of selfless being (i.e., increased impartiality of awareness relative to all that is other in normal states of being, with its hypothetical zenith being that of an experienced, complete non-duality of being/awareness ... attested to by some within history).

Cases such as these speak toward the possibility of consciousness becoming far more and qualitatively far different than what we take it to be in everyday life.

Having addressed the generally more pleasant, in not wholly imaginary (as many atheists will believe), aspect of the conscious self holding the potential to transmute into something much greater than ordinary human conscious being, there then are the more explanatorily accessible instances where human consciousness can become diminished, fragmented, or else cease holding presence.

To dwell a great deal on DSM examples of mental disorders would get depressing, but, in passing, there is everything from extreme cases of schizophrenia, to multiple personalities, to catatonia, to sleep walking with awareness of the external world, to states of indefinite unconsciousness. In these cases, at least typically, the awoken human consciousness becomes less and other than what it ordinarily is as a unified point of view, such that it is no longer as functional, if at all so.

Less unnerving are the ordinary transitions from wakefulness to sleep, in which our ordinary awoken consciousness becomes gradually reduced in magnitude; would be termed hallucinatory if its sometimes occurring, half-awoken experiences would likewise occur while fully awoken; and eventually cease to hold presence—until, in some instances, it then holds presence as a first person point of view during REM dreams—after which it again awakens and thereby holds an awoken presence.

In all aforementioned cases, what it is like to so be/experience still holds. But all these examples—both of increased magnitude, including instances of non-dualistic awareness rich in meaning, and of decreased magnitude of human consciousness, including that of a lack of presence—do point to there not being such a thing as a permanent conscious state of being—ultimately, not even to a necessary first person point of view in order for awareness to be.

In other words, there is no requirement for awareness to be a self as typically understood and held onto by most everybody: one which is differentiated from everything that is other and is thereby dualistic in its experienced being; one which defines itself (e.g., I am stupid/smart, talented/a klutz, poor/wealthy, etc.) and then clings onto its own self-produced definitions of what it is as an otherwise intangible awareness/self.

I get that there’s a linguistic quagmire when it comes to what consciousness signified and how the term is used; to me, though, it nevertheless seems blatant that there is a clear cut distinction between consciousness per se and being conscious of, this as a staple part of our commonsense understandings.

I tend to think you’d agree with more rather than less of what I’ve mentioned … ?

Yeah, what he said!

Or at least tentatively.

To clarify,

I think Descartes has to shoulder much of the blame for the confusion. In an extreme bout of scepticism he asserted "I think therefore I, am" as at least the one thing he could be sure of. (Discourse on the Method, and Principles of Philosophy)

But really, it doesn't follow that a conventional isolated 'self' must exist to do the thinking. If he was just a little more curmudgeonly he would uttered the more accurate "Thinking occurs, therefore ... well, just thinking occurs".

Not much to build an academic career on I admit. But it may have reduced centuries of insomnia for the rest of us now snared in the dichotomy.

I tend to think you’d agree with more rather than less of what I’ve mentioned … ? — javra

What I make of David Chalmer's point is simply that because of the first-person nature of experience, then it's not fully describable in objective or third-person terms. And this is the very nub of the argument between Chalmers and Dennett. Chalmers basically says that, because experience is first-person - a 'what it feels like to be something', as he puts it - then no functional description in terms of what consciousness does, can ever fully capture it. And that is exactly what Dennett objects to. He says there is nothing but the activity of objects - in this case, organic molecules and neurotransmitters - which gives rise to the illusion of first-person experience. This quote from his well-known (some would say 'notorious') book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, makes it very clear:

Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:

'Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe'.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3, quoted by Steve Talbott, Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness

And this opposition between Chalmers and Dennett throws the whole question into relief, in my opinion. You don't need to posit an 'immortal soul' - all you need to show is that any 'objective account' of the nature of consciousness (or the self, or experience) must necessarily be incomplete. But rather than admit that, Dennett must argue that actually being itself, the apodictic and first-person nature of experience, is itself an illusion (hence D B Hart's review of his latest book being called The Illusionist). The small coterie of so-called 'eliminativist materialists' which includes him, P & P Churchlands, Alex Rosenberg, and sundry others, all maintain this (what I would regard as an) obvious fiction. And that's because to admit that mind or experience or the first-person perspective has an innate reality basically undermines their entire project. No need to mention mysticism or altered states or anything else. Plain old 'subjectivity' (or actually 'subject-hood') will do the job.

I've never felt I've really understood the 'Hard Problem' of consciousness. Although not a new problem, David Chalmers seems to be the contemporary go-to source. — Kym

I like to concentrate on one aspect of Conscious sensory perception and stick with it. I like to think about how we Experience the color Red. I like to ask the following question ... Given:

1) Neural Activity for Red happens.
2) A Red Conscious Experience happens.

How does 1 produce 2?

That is the Hard Problem of Consciousness. The Physicalists will say that the question is irrelevant because 2 is just an Illusion. I disagree with the Illusion argument. Even if we could settle on what an Illusion is, the Physicalists will still have to explain how we Experience the Red in the Illusion. The key is in thinking about the Redness of the Red. What is that? It's something. But what is it? It's in our Minds.

I like to call the Red Experience in our Mind, Conscious Red Light. We think that Redness is a Property of Physical Red Light. But Physical Red Light does not have Redness as a Property. Conscious Red Light in the Mind has the Redness Property. Physical Red Light has wavelength as a Property. Conscious Red Light has Redness as a Property but does not have Wavelength as a Property. I view Physical Red Light and Conscious Red Light as two different things that both exist as a reality. One is in the Physical World and the other is in some kind of Conscious World.

First, if they are genuinely two distinct realms, then there must be things that exist in the one that will not correspond with things that exist in the other. — jkg20

Why would you think that things in one realm ought to correspond with things in the other? Shouldn't they just be two complimentary aspects of existence?

Hi

1) Neural Activity for Red happens.
2) A Red Conscious Experience happens.

How does 1 produce 2?

That is the Hard Problem of Consciousness. The Physicalists will say that the question is irrelevant because 2 is just an Illusion. — SteveKlinko

Hey Steve,

I agree with half of this physicalist view: Yes for the illusion part. No for its irrelevancy.

An illusion? Well, a convenient fiction at least. It turns out the these is no distinct redness in the material world. There is in fact a seemless array of available wavelengths across very wide spectrum (most of which is quite invisible to us but still real). We perceive a distinct redness after our red colour cones are triggered by a certain range wavelengths.

This is outlined succinctly in a Wiki article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
(I'd love to post some illustrative graphs here but that seems beyond my Palaeolithic skill-set I'm afraid)

I agree there is an absurd incongruousness to it all! Despite our gloriously nuanced experience of colour vision we only have 3 kinds of receptors! (Red, blue and Green). I too felt the internal revolt when I nerdily informed my artist friend of all this.

Yet it happens.

That sight is a 'physical' process must surely be acknowledged by those who are unfortunate enough to lose the physical equipment to produce it (either the eyes or their associated brain hardware) . Certainly, the newly blind can still vividly recall 'redness' ... at least until the years pass and redness fades from memory. But this this recollection is not usually what we mean as 'perception'.

Still, yes, there seems to be a huge qualitative gap between the hardware and the experience. Clearly, work still needs to be done to chart all the steps (this is not the only field that can be said of). I hope the info here goes some way towards bridging it. I hope even more that my pet theory of a multiple processor model (presented in my original post), might turn out to be on the right track.

I view Physical Red Light and Conscious Red Light as two different things that both exist as a reality. One is in the Physical World and the other is in some kind of Conscious World. — SteveKlinko

Oh yeah. The second part: How can illusiory subjectivity be important? Although illusiory in nature, the subjective experience itself forms a reality that has very real and external consequences. An astronaut might look down say: "Wow, no lines - it turns out those geographical borders are all just an illusion!" Well yes and no. You only have to walk too far north along the Korean peninsular to learn a painful lesson of the truth of 'social' realities. Beside which, in-the-illusion is where we live. How can it not be important to us?

Cheers then

Question. If physicalists are so on board with consciousness being illusory, why do physicalists so often gag at the notion that our phenomenal reality is an illusion (as per Eastern philosophies--and not per commonsense notions of illusions concerning what is otherwise commonly shared/objective phenomena)? Never quite got that.

@javra

Even as a physicalist I'm not sure either. I can speak from experience that the meditational practices are often difficult and psychologically discomforting.

I don't want to get too ad-hominum about all, but I suspect it's just an over-enthusiasm for empiriicism. It's great tool that has been very productive for us. But even the best tools have their limits.

(By the way, how can I make that lttle arrow+name link you guys all do?)

Fair enough. I'll leave the issue at that, for my part.

(By the way, how can I make that lttle arrow+name link you guys all do?) — Kym

when logged in, go to the bottom of the post next to the time posted, an arrow will appear labeled "reply"; clicking on it puts the arrow+name in the post you're writing

Thanks

The next question is function. Should this, or else my former @name techinique, alert the named person that there is a message for them?

Yup. If they're logged in.

... Wait, just checked: the @mane style didn't leave a message indicator for me. But the reply-arrow will.

I think there is not just one "hard problem" but four.
1. the one Chalmers concentrates on..how does physical activity generate sensations or qualia. Maybe this one is not that hard. It is clear that certain physical vibrations or energy deterministically generates sounds and colors. I would assume something like this also happens in the brain.
2. This may be the most "hard problem". How are the different sense modalities bound together into a single conscious entity. I think that Chalmers and most philosophers make a critical error here by assuming that problem number one comes first and number two second so that qualia are first created and then bound together into a unity. I think number two comes first and has no dependence on number one. Conscious entities exist and are fundamental aspects of the universe. We can say that all animals (even single celled protozoa) are conscious and come with the inherent ability to sense qualia in there environment.
3. This and the next problem are ignored entirely by Chalmers. Conscious entities are efficacious. If they were not so we would not be having this discussion. Given the existence of quantum physics and probability waves I dont think this is such an impossible idea anymore.
4. What is called indexicality. Why I am I me and not you. Even if we concede that points of view or perspectives exist in the world, why am I this one particular point of view. Nagel pointed out that even in a world where everything is understood objectively this one very important fact would be missing.
see: https://philpapers.org/rec/SLETLO-2

I'm loathe to fess up to this right now, but I am in fact a bot agorithm so I'm probably not the best one to answer this.

More seriously, I need to think on those points before replying - after my CPU cores have cooled little.

I'm often left with the intuitive sense that the real illusion is the maya-spell that the dream of reality is not a dream.

:grin: :up:

I often presume that from an Eastern philosophy perspective, the ultimate reality is taken to be that of non-dualistic being/awareness. Hence the occasional Eastern metaphor of dualistic experience—that of self and other—being “illusion” or “dream” or some such—like you said, the veil of maya. As per Buddhism, that whole “neither is there a self nor not a self” predicament.

Having said that—to be more pragmatic about things—the world of dualistic experience will likely continue for inestimable eons yet to come, is replete with facts unearthed by the empirical sciences concerning our commonly shared world, and is for us selves about as real as real can get. Besides, if one for example buys into the Anima/Spiritus Mundi motif, our world still has a lot to teach us about ourselves.

More to the thread’s topic, when it comes to what consciousness is and how it should be conceptualized, the issue reminds me of some of the lyrics to an old-time song called “Epic” by the band “Faith No More” (the song can be found on youtube):

You want it all but you can't have it
It's in your face but you can't grab it
What is it?
It's it
What is it?
It's it
What is it?
It's it
What is it?
It's it
[…]

I suppose the issue is this: if you are a realist about mental phenomena and a realist about physical phenomena, then - because we know from our own case that mental phenomena impinge on physical phenomena (e.g. what I want affects how I act in the world) - then there is some sort of correpondence between them to account for. One can avoid the issue by becoming a monist of some kind, but then one is no longer a realist about (at least) one of the realms, and possibly both. Donald Davidson, for example, tried to circumvent the issue monistically by saying that the world was made up of events, and the same events can be described using different vocabularly, mental or physical.

I agree with half of this physicalist view: Yes for the illusion part. No for its irrelevancy.

An illusion? Well, a convenient fiction at least. It turns out the these is no distinct redness in the material world. There is in fact a seemless array of available wavelengths across very wide spectrum (most of which is quite invisible to us but still real). We perceive a distinct redness after our red colour cones are triggered by a certain range wavelengths — Kym

I have never quite understood arguments that end up with the conclusion that Consciousness is an Illusion. In my way of thinking an Illusion is something that doesn't really exist. The Red Experience certainly Exists. So how do Physicalists understand the meaning of the word Illusion?

Also, I think that the experience of Red does not need Color Cones or even a Retina or Eye (Except during the development stage). Think about the Red you can Experience while Dreaming. Dark room no Light.

I like to start with the Redness that I See and contemplate on that. Redness is a Property of a Conscious thing. Redness is a Property of the Physicalist Illusion of Red. How can an Illusion have a Property? Something that has a Property must be more than just an Illusion or a Convenient Fiction.

I suppose the issue is this: if you are a realist about mental phenomena and a realist about physical phenomena, then - because we know from our own case that mental phenomena impinge on physical phenomena (e.g. what I want affects how I act in the world) - then there is some sort of correpondence between them to account for. — jkg20

I'll assume then, that you mean interaction or something like that, when you say "correspondence". So, there is interaction between the mental and the physical. Where's the problem?

Hello

I think there is not just one "hard problem" but four...
2. This may be the most "hard problem". How are the different sense modalities bound together into a single conscious entity. — lorenzo sleakes

I think this idea of a single conscious entity has been misleading assumption in the debate since Descartes (at least).

How are the different sense modalities bound together into a single conscious entity. I think that Chalmers and most philosophers make a critical error here by assuming that problem number one comes first and number two second so that qualia are first created and then bound together into a unity — lorenzo sleakes

Me, I see it as a two-way causal flow. On one hand the other outside world is certainly a cause of internal experiences - via perception etc. On the other hand this is doubtless effected by the equipment we have available - including neurological wiring of a-priori concepts .. like causation for instance (ow... my head hurts).

. What is called indexicality. Why I am I me and not you. Even if we concede that points of view or perspectives exist in the world, why am I this one particular point of view. Nagel pointed out that even in a world where everything is understood objectively this one very important fact would be missing. see: https://philpapers.org/rec/SLETLO-2 — lorenzo sleakes

I haven't read this yet but should. I the meantime I'd posit as a place-holder a notion that the distinction between me and you is just a temporary anomaly. For most of the time we are just universe stuff. Right now there are two patterns in the stuff (at least) that has some consciousness of universe stuff in general. Don't worry though, things will return to normal shortly!

* End application file run *

I have never quite understood arguments that end up with the conclusion that Consciousness is an Illusion. In my way of thinking an Illusion is something that doesn't really exist. The Red Experience certainly Exists. So how do Physicalists understand the meaning of the word Illusion? — SteveKlinko

I'm not sure I've done enough reading of the Physicalist boffins to answer for them. But years back asked a big-time Zen teacher why Buddhists said we all live in the 'Maya' world of illusion - when there was so obviously correspondences beween the world and my experiences of it. He said, yes a material world does exist but it's SO different from how we perceive it that we more accurately should say we're living in an illusion.

Hope that is of some comfort .

He said, yes a material world does exist but it's SO different from how we perceive it that we more accurately should say we're living in an illusion. — Kym

Not sure what zen makes of the Heart Sutra, as its mention may just earn a whack from the master's keisaku and some more zazen in the zendō. However, it may still be applicable here ...

Avalokiteshvara
while practicing deeply with
the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,
suddenly discovered that
all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,
and with this realisation
he overcame all Ill-being.

“Listen Sariputra,
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.

“Listen Sariputra,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.

“That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities ...

And so on and so forth ...

Not sure what zen makes of the Heart Sutra, — snowleopard

Well, I can tell you for certain that my mob certainly liked to chant it a lot. I have to admit it used to stick in my throat though.