. It doesn't follow that if consciousness is simply a brain state, then everything is a brain state. I have no idea what your argument would be for that, but surely the argument isn't sound. — Terrapin Station
You know about your body (including your head) and the world around you through conscious experience. Therefore the body you experience and the world you perceive around you must be equal to the state of a brain. — dukkha
Non sequitur. That you know about things via your conscious experience doesn't imply that only your conscious experience exists. — Terrapin Station
And re the way you're stating that, you're contradicting yourself anyway. You say, "You know ABOUT THE WORLD AROUND YOU." Well, on your view, there is no world around you to know about, since you think that everything is just conscious experience. —
"Equal to" is "identical to," which implies that that's all that exists (on that view). But again, that you know about the world via your consciousness doesn't imply that the world is identical to your consciousness (or equal to it). How you know about something isn't the same thing as what you know about. That line of reasoning makes no more sense than saying that you're eating a toaster because a toaster is how you make toast. A toaster may be the means by which you make toast, but that doesn't imply that the toaster is the toast. — Terrapin Station
So there's a physical world, with a physical brain state. And then there's the "world around you", and what I mean by that is the lived world, your experience of being a body in a world. — dukkha
than your sense experiences of being a body in an environment is equal to the state of a physical brain. — dukkha
Or put it like this, sense experience can't be located as the state of a physical brain while also be a direct perception of the head that encapsulates it — dukkha
So am I wrong in thinking that you think there is a physical brain inside your head, and your conscious experience is equal to the state of this physical brain? — dukkha
I don't see how you can state that consciousness is literally equal to the state of a physical brain, and yet you directly (or at least non-representional) perceive the physical world existing beyond this brain? — dukkha
. . . because? That would require an argument. — Terrapin Station
What do you mean by 'states'?
— csalisbury
Nothing at all unusual, just the normal sense of "state:" the particular (dynamic) conditions, that is, the particular set of materials and their (dynamic) relations at a set of contiguous points of time (or abstracted as a single point of time). — TerrapinStation
that you know about the world via your consciousness doesn't imply that the world is identical to your consciousness (or equal to it) — 'TerrapinStation"
Also, by the way, my guess was correct. It turns out that you're yet another representationalist/idealist/solipsist-if-you're-consistent. What the heck is going on that there are so many of you folks around lately?
So consider this argument. If you two people share the same experience, — Wayfarer
So when it is said that the brain state is 'the same' as an experience, what does 'the same' mean?
Does it feel the same?
Does it have the same meaning?
So to even answer those questions means accepting that a configuration of brain tissues and neural chemistry 'feels like' something. But that is subject to the arguments of David Chalmers in his analysis of the 'hard problem of consciousness'. A brain state considered as an objective array of material, doesn't 'feel like' anything;
There was a well-known Canadian neurosurgeon, by the name of Wilder Penfield, who was a pioneer of open brain surgery techniques. He used to stimulate patients brains whilst they were conscious (as there are no nerve cells in the brain and the patients, under local anaesthetic, don't feel pain from the contact). He could elicit responses and sensations from the subjects by doing specific things. But the subjects seemed to know when these sensations originated with his actions, rather than as a consequence of their own decision. They would say 'you're doing that'. He also noted that despite rigourous and disciplined mapping of the areas of the brain by literally touching parts of it and seeing what parts of the body were affected by it, he was never able to trigger or elicit an abstract thought. At the end of his career, he had become a convinced dualist (as documented in his 1975 book Mystery of the Mind.)
. . . But the 'binding' process is the act whereby various kinds of visual and auditory data - shape, colour, number, location, direction - are combined into a whole.
But, how can you get outside of your consciousness, to compare 'your consciousness of the world' with 'the world'? — Wayfarer
You can't step outside your own cognitive apparatus and look at the world as it is. — Wayfarer
I am not sure. Do you think all experiences would have to be down loaded? — Cavacava
It's your argument that brain-states and experiences are the same, but as soon as you're asked to justify that, you say that two people can't share the same experiences! — Wayfarer
Well, I think that's fine then, but it doesn't seem to leave much of an opening for discussion. — John
To even think that there's something contradictory about that suggests that you're way off base re having the faintest idea what I'm even talking about.
That brain states and experiences are the same means that, say, experience x, which is a unique, particular experience that only occurs in person S at time Tn, is identical to brain state y, which only occurs in the same person S at the same time Tn. — TerrapinStation
Two people can't literally share the same experience. Two people can have similar experiences, we could say, however, and they'd be in similar brain states in some respects. — TerrapinStation
The brain state and the experience are identical. — TerrapinStation
"Does it feel the same?"
Are you talking about in the case of two different persons? Again, they can't have the same experience literally.
What I'd be interested in for someone who thinks the idea of nonphysical existents is coherent to attempt to explain it to me so that I could make some sense out of it. I wouldn't bank on the possibility of success there, but I'd be interested in trying to understand it as someone who can make some sense out of it understands it. — TerrapinStation
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