The definition of consciousness is different from the definition of experience.

We can change our experiences and our identity by altering our brains, but we can't change our consciousness. We can change what is experienced, and what experiences, but we can't change the fact that experience happens whatever we do.

I left this forum forever.

Consciousness without an active brain does not exist. — Vladimir Krymchakov

How do you know that?

I left this forum forever.

Consciousness without an active brain does not exist. — Vladimir Krymchakov

I think this is a very reductive take on the relationship between consciousness and the brain. For example; define brain? Can a brain be artificial also? And if so what makes inanimate non biological matter (robots etc) have the capacity to have a brain?

Can it be constructed of much larger systems for example ecosystems and if so why not even larger celestial systems?

Are simple organisms with only neural tissues rather than an organ (ie.brainless) creatures not conscious then? Are jellyfish completely unaware of their existence at all -just an automaton of biological tissue aimlessly reproducing with zero agency?

If the brain is naturally occuring then why could it not be a organ which amplifies and diversifies the behaviour of a fundamental force (consciousness or perceptions, or reiteration of information onto itself, just as the body amplifies and diversifies the behaviour of fundamental units of matter - atoms - to build things that do not have qualities the same as their basic components.

Only such a complex system as the brain can produce consciousness — Vladimir Krymchakov

Does the universe not have to be by logical implication a more complex system than the systems within it? (The brain) and therefore your reasoning would point to the universe being of greater potential for awareness than the minute compact system that is the brain.

We can change our experiences and our identity by altering our brains, but we can't change our consciousness. — bert1

I think you would find our consciousness very much can be changed by altering our brain. Taking psychedelics -ie adding chemicals to the composition of the brain, being inflicted with brain damage, meditating, sleeping. All of these actions dramatically influence our state of consciousness

I left this forum forever.

Only such a complex system as the brain can produce consciousness. — Vladimir Krymchakov

Why?

For the existence of consciousness requires complex organic matter. — Vladimir Krymchakov

Why?

I think you would find our consciousness very much can be changed by altering our brain. Taking psychedelics -ie adding chemicals to the composition of the brain, being inflicted with brain damage, meditating, sleeping. All of these actions dramatically influence our state of consciousness — Benj96

They change what you experience, of course. And we can call the content of consciousness 'states' of consciousness. But this sheds no light on what the general necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness (or identity in my view) are in anything other than humans.

I left this forum forever.

They change what you experience, of course. And we can call the content of consciousness 'states' of consciousness. But this sheds no light on what the general necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness (or identity in my view) are in anything other than humans. — bert1

If I were to die - i am dead for an hour we'll say - due to severe hypothermia, my metabolism has shut down and an EEG shows no signs of brain activity at all, my heart has stopped. The medics re-warm my body and resuscitate me and luckily I have little to no impairment due to the protection offered by extreme cooling of my body.

If the content of consciousness is 'states' of consciousness and I experience a point at which I died and a point at which I came back to life, is temporary death therefore a state of consciousness?

And if not, then what was I for the moments I was dead and furthermore the moment at which I became alive again? Is my identity completely different if I come to life a second time? Am I somehow now a compeltely new conscious individual or does my consciousness transcend the gap in my living state - in which case death would be a state of consciousness.

If I went on to say that I had experienced during the time when I was dead, or could account for events that occurred while in that state -such as is provided in anecdotal evidence from hundreds of rescucitated individuals what then do we make of death as a conscious state or not a conscious state?

From an idealists perspective, we do not really interact with a material world so much as the information about a material world – where consciousness entangles, integrates, and unifies information.

Consciousness is a mental state of entangled, integrated, and unified information.


But consider this:

Is the universe entangled, integrated, and unified?

Dose a black hole entangle, integrate, and unify ( compress )?

Is a rock entangled, integrated, and unified?

Are we entangled, integrated and unified?

Can we do anything other than express our consciousness ( our entanglement,integration, and unification) ? Either physically or mentally.?

It seems consciousness is everywhere under this definition.

The definition of consciousness is different from the definition of experience. — bert1

What is consciousness then? If you introspect into your consciousness you will find experiences and emotions. Nothing more. Remove the experiences and emotions and your consciousness will be empty.

But this sheds no light on what the general necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness (or identity in my view) are in anything other than humans. — bert1

First of all, we don't know whether other animals have a conscience or not. We're talking about human consciousness and more especially our own.
About sufficient and necessary conditions I suppose you mean 'causes'. About this we have a certain amount of evidence: We do not know of any cases of a brain dead which speak of Cartesianism, of the last Premier League football match or of his unfortunate love for Jennifer Jones. I think it's good evidence that the brain is a necessary condition to produce conscious behaviour.
Besides, I don't know of any case of a chair, a cockroach or an electron that were singing in the rain (you know, Gene Kelly) or similar. It is good evidence to think that a living human brain is a necessary and sufficient condition to have a human consciousness. That is, the cause of consciousness.

Whether my dog has consciousness is another matter. I think so, but I admit I'm not impartial.

If the content of consciousness is 'states' of consciousness and I experience a point at which I died and a point at which I came back to life, is temporary death therefore a state of consciousness? — Benj96

I think you should clarify what you mean by conscience. Is it the same as mind?

Your hypothesis of resurrection is quite curious, although not very plausible. I suppose you want to question the concept of mind and identity. So as not to get tangled up in religious preconceptions, I'll give you another example.

In an unlikely future, having mastered global warming -this is the improbable-, human beings can move from one side of the universe to the other by means of a fictitious dematerialization. I mean that the dematerializing machine sends by intergalactic rays the complete data of their body and brain, memory, personality, etc. and a similar machine materializes them in Alpha-Centaur. Then the Earth machine removes your Earth self and that's it. But one day the machine has a problem and does not eliminate the Earth self.
The problem is in the Galactic Supreme Court since years ago because each one of the two Selfs pretends that it must dematerialize the other one and the World Bureaucratic State does not admit that there can be two equal human minds (the inhabitants of the planet Krypton enjoy an exception since the times of the Great Luthor, be his Name always praised).

How would you solve the problem? The Galactic Supreme Court would certainly appreciate it.

I didn't make up the story. It' was conceived by a warm-minded philosopher whose name I don't want to remember.

It seems possible to make a distinction between various states of awareness, such as our thoughts, feeling, perception and emotions, and consciousness, or that in which our states of awareness show up or appear. From within our various states of awareness, consciousness appears to be that which is doing the looking, thinking, feeling and so on, and these states appear to be internal to consciousness, whereas the things we perceive, think about, and feel appear to be external to consciousness. However, one thing to note is that our internal states and the external things become aware of both appear within consciousness. What differs is their form appearance. Based on this difference in appearance, we conclude that consciousness lies within us and things exist outside of consciousness, but this is a conclusion we draw based on the way that everything appears.

One that ascribed to panpsychism might argue that in order for any form of awareness to occur, things must appear as though they are external material bodies that lack consciousness in essence, but this is merely a form of consciousness which leads us to conclude that consciousness is in us and not in what we see based on the form of its appearance.

Martin Heidegger was not a panpscyhist, but he is famous for arguing in Being and Time that our the objective analysis gives us a distorted and fragmented view of reality if we take it to be fundamental. What is more fundamental, according to Heidegger, is the holistic and referential totality of meaning consistent with the activity we are normally engaged in in life. In other words, he uses phenomenology as a tool to show that the subject-object distinction is not fundamental to reality, and neither is the idea of an inner and external world.

Consciousness is a mental state of entangled, integrated, and unified information. — Pop

And what is mental?

n other words, he uses phenomenology as a tool to show that the subject-object distinction is not fundamental to reality, and neither is the idea of an inner and external world. — Mickey

If that's what Heidegger says, I find it incomprehensible. Hammer the television. Then hammer your finger. You'll catch a vital difference between inside and outside. How does Heidegger explain that?

In your normal experience, the hammering shows up in a referential totality, in terms of why you are hammering something. You experience the hammering as a task you are engaged in order to x, y, or z. You don't experience the hammer as an object with properties, such as metal, heavy, hard, and so on, until you step back from your activity and engage in a state of reflection, and then it takes on the appearance of something that is an object devoid of the type of qualities we typically attribute to or ordinary "subjective" experience. It is our normal experience which grounds our thinking about the world, and not the other way around, according to Heidegger's argument.

To be fair, it is one thing to try and characterize the structure of Heidegger's argument in Being and Time, and another to see phenomenologically how he shows this is the case, and that is what he spends the majority of time doing in his book.

In your normal experience, the hammering shows up in a referential totality, — Mickey

It's much simpler than that. When you hit your finger with the hammer, it hurts. When you hit the TV, it doesn't. Pain is a subjective experience. There is someone who is in pain (you call him the Dasein if you like) and this someone is oneself. The TV is not me. It is something in the world that I share with my mother-in-law. There is also a radically different experience in hitting my mother-in-law with the hammer and hammer the TV. What is it?

I would like if you disagree with my analysis (very phenomenological, by the way) to let me know in order to have a fruitful discussion.

About Heidegger I prefer not to talk too much. Sometimes I find him unintelligible.

If consciousness is not strictly materialist in origin- being nothing more than a complex product of chemical reactions and electrical impulses of cells, then why can we completely alter the state of consciousness/our experience with chemicals, drugs or neurotransmitters. — Benj96

It's not too mysterious how consciousness could affect matter and how matter could affect it: there would need to be some direct or mediated coupling between the material world and the conscious realm. The latter might be materialistic in nature, electromagnetic in nature, some combination (most likely), or some new thing unobserved in the wild (the route you're going down): as long as there exists some coupling between it and the rest of the physical world, it falls under the purview of physics, and is amenable to physical study in principle.

For instance, let us posit that consciousness is a soul of divine origin. It might be that, by trial and error, chemists have been able to produce items they don't really understand but are in fact miniature prayers translated into chemical language. You pop a prayer, God listens, numbs the pain. Prayer and whatever it is that God does to affect the physical world would be the coupling. We could then examine that, see if prayer always works, works according to rules, works seemingly randomly, or, in the end, doesn't really work at all. (This has been done.)

Or we could posit that all drugs are placebos, and it is only the belief that the drug will work that impacts the patient, in which case the coupling at least in part is via standard sensory input. That would be and has been attractive to solipsists.

Is there a reason, beyond matters of taste ("I just cannot allow for a material consciousness" or "I just cannot allow for an explanation without God" or "Humans HAVE to be special ALWAYS"), why starting from the assumption that consciousness is completely different from anything else we know about, rather than starting from the assumption that it's explicable in terms of ordinary stuff in principle, is attractive?

What is consciousness then? If you introspect into your consciousness you will find experiences and emotions. Nothing more. Remove the experiences and emotions and your consciousness will be empty. — David Mo

You've given the two main options here. In your first two sentences you have identified consciousness with content. And in the last you have described consciousness as like an empty container, which is something more than its contents.

My view is that consciousness is the latter, so that consciousness does not entail content necessarily (it is possible for the theatre to be empty, the ocean to be still, to pick a couple of metaphors). In practice, of course, there is nearly always content.

It is possible to use 'consciousness' to refer to the totality of content, and this is a valid usage (and given in dictionaries). But I don't think this usage is typically what philosophers concerned with the hard problem are talking about. Or at least they are talking about consciousness as abstracted from individual experiences (and this sense is also listed in dictionaries).

I'd like to do a thread on definitions of 'consciousness', as discussions very often end up with haggling over definitions. I think a dictionary could help, as it is a neutral more objective voice in the discussion.

First of all, we don't know whether other animals have a conscience or not. We're talking about human consciousness and more especially our own. — David Mo

The OP isn't, it's consciousness in general.

It is good evidence to think that a living human brain is a necessary and sufficient condition to have a human consciousness. — David Mo

Yes, but that only evidences something about humans. And it's not completely clear what theory this evidence supports.

When you alter a brain such that the unified consciousness 'disappears' (e.g. gets KO'd) there's a couple of ways to interpret this. It's consistent with two theories:

1) It's the consciousness that disappears. Consciousness is dependent on certain brain function, and when that brain function does not happen, the consciousness no longer exists.

2) Consciousness is more like mass. When someone's brain function is disrupted, the identity is disrupted. There is no longer a strongly unified human subject which has experiences, but there is still consciousness. The units have changed - other things are conscious, maybe smaller units (if you are a microspychist). Just like with the mass of a car, arranged so it can function it is a car, arranged differently it is a pile of scrap, but the mass remains. The identities are different. That's what I think: when I lose consciousness, I do not remain. The consciousness that remains is not mine, because I don't exist. When consciousness 'returns' it is really my identity that has rebooted.

So we can discuss endlessly.
I am a materialist. — Vladimir Krymchakov

Yes, such endless discussion is not optional on a philosophy forum, it is mandatory. If you just express opinions without any engagement with arguments to and fro, you are not doing philosophy, and you have ended up on the wrong forum..

How would you solve the problem? — David Mo

I would venture that the two minds, though originally identical, have lived since the botched dematerialization through different experiences on different planetary systems, met different folks, fell in love with different females of different species, all of which made them two different minds nowaday.

Granted that one problem with Dualism I'm aware of has to do with the absence of a theory that explains how an immaterial mind interacts with a material body, I still feel that the OP needs to prove the following propostion:

M = Only material things are affected by material things

What needs to be proved is that if x is affected by something physical then that x has to be physical.

I think consciousness is decrete, not continuous. I.don't like when people ask "what do you mean by consciousness" because it's completely obvious.

I think free will is discrete too

He treats pain in his account as well. He is not arguing that subjectivity and objectivity do not exist. They exist, but are grounded upon a more basic and holistic form of reality, which philosophers tend to neglect and which is more familiar than the form that appears when we engage in a heightened state of awareness or an objective form of analysis.