• Brock Harding
    51
    You may have heard of the concept that consciousness, or the mind, is merely an ‘illusion’. The idea that consciousness is an illusion is primarily put forward to counter the dualistic stance that we, as humans, consist of a physical body and a separate ethereal consciousness or mind.

    The concept of dualism was initially founded in ancient beliefs and philosophy which is thousands of years old and lacked the contextual benefit of contemporary physiology and science. Even so, I do not think that this is sufficient to explain why we developed dualism in the first place.

    The belief in our ethereal selves also sprang from a desire to explain what we experienced in the past, and still experience today, as that undefinable seemingly undiscernible thing within ourselves that is perceived as a presence aware of our bodies, sentience and place in our environment.

    So, what is this ‘thing’ that we seemingly observe in ourselves?

    The concept that the mind or consciousness is an illusion does not mean that we are all mindless robots but rather our perception of this illusion is not what it seems. The interplay of subjective awareness can be explained by underlying biological processes within the human body. This body consists of a nervous system which contains multiple organs, one of which is the brain.

    The body and the brain work together to produce sensory responses that form patterns of neuron-firing within the brain structure. I will call these patterns ‘activation matrices’ for want of a better term. Various activated matrices can affect cognitive areas of the brain prompting predisposed recognition and active response. This activity is supplemented by the release of neurotransmitter chemicals.

    These matrices can also cause the formation of wave patterns across the brain structure which can activate different brain areas. These processes are further nuanced by time variance in that the quality of cognitive activation can vary dependant on the time delay between pattern propagation and brain area stimulation.

    We are not conscious of these dynamic, complex and layered processes. We are only aware of their consequence. For example, when we pat a dog, we may experience seeing the dogs tail wag and feeling the texture of its coat.

    We do not experience the light meeting our retina, travelling to our optic nerve as an electrical signal and into the brain structure and IT cortex where 16 million neurons activate in different patterns and register seeing a dog.

    Nor do we experience the simultaneous chemical changes in the brain that may alter our mood and the firing of neurons in the somatosensory cortex that create a response that registers as ‘feeling dog hair’.
    When we think about the dog, we do not experience the electrical activity of neurons in the visual and auditory cortexes, the prefrontal cortex or the activation of the motor cortex in preparation for saying ‘good dog’.

    These consequences do not require an ethereal intermediary mind or consciousness entity to occur. They simply, or more accurately complexly, just happen. The combined inherent ability of the nervous system and brain to recognise and produce sensory responses simultaneously does all the work.

    Our experience of our bodies, our sentience and its presence in our environment is a complex biological, electrical and chemical process. These processes are necessarily filtered and prioritised in order for us to efficiently react, intellectualise and behave in a way that makes sense in our environment.

    I believe that nowadays, with the benefit of modern science and an understanding that the source ancient ‘thinking’ that led to dualism was relatively uninformed, we can dispense with the illusion of consciousness, or the mind, and shift our perspective away from these imagined ethereal forms.
  • Raymond
    815
    It are materialists who say the mind is an illusion. They overlook the mental content of matter. As simply as that. Calling the mind an illusion is perfectly sensible, for a materialist, who robs nature of an essential ingredient, which has led to our nakedly-born freedom.
  • Hermeticus
    181
    The idea of consciousness, or rather, the idea of a "self", of a "soul" seems to be so enticing to people, that many a philosopher seems downright repulsed by the idea that their mental realm might just be put on for a show.

    With a passion for biology I can quite easily accept the idea that anything conscious may arise from the material world. I think people are too invested in themselves and in their lifes that they tend to not consider themselves anything "less than human" - for instance a walking living power plant. From a biological perspective that's essentially what we are. A constant chemical reaction that requires fuel to be added regularly to keep running.

    Most cells in fact match the basic criteria for life: they sustain themselves (through proteins), they reproduce, they die. There's no real consensus in the scientific community where we should draw a line between "life" and "matter". Now if we do consider those smallest units of life as living themselves, there's suddenly not one of me but there's roughly 37 trillion of me.

    Time for a quick detour to dualism and sex.
    Even so, I do not think that this is sufficient to explain why we developed dualism in the first place.Brock Harding
    I think the concept of dualism arose quite naturally through observation. Personally, I am a fan of it, of the essential message it transposes: One can not be without the other.

    The first obvious instance of such a thing is biological sex. Long before we learned of self-reproducing organisms, people saw the male and the female coming together to create something new. Duality is basically used to draw up the contrasts of life - and it's the constrasts that are so noticeable; male-female, night-day, cold-warm, life-death. It's something our brain does all the time anyway. Comparing and categorizing. Dualism holds importance to this principle because often we will define things through what they are not: Cold is not warm. Warm is not cold. Dry is not wet. Wet is not dry. Etc.

    Let's stay on the topic of sex though, because that's what's most relevant to this topic here. While we consist of over 37 trillion cells now, our very beginning consisted of only two cells; a sperm cell and an egg cell. Everything that we are grew from those two; the genetic replicators of our parents. A curious question is, supposing consciousness comes first, how exactly does it tie into this? Are the cells what is conscious and does that mean we originally consisted of two consciousness that became one? Or is the very process our consciousness, making us, so to say, our parents sexual desire?

    Or perhaps consciousness is not quite there yet at the beginning? Perhaps it lingers around a bit and waits for that clump of flesh to develop before inhibiting it. Week 5 would be a good candidate because that's roughly when the fetus starts forming it's brain. Gives the consciousness something to do. Existence without a central nervous system might be quite dull afterall.

    All in all I'm not really here to say that consciousness is or isn't an "illusion". Though I do think it's perfectly reasonable that consciousness may "just" be an expression of electrical currents darting through our brain. Personally I don't see why this wouldn't be consolidatable with many of the concepts about consciousness - the idea that consciousness is an expression of energy even spiritually seems satisfying to me.
  • Raymond
    815
    Though I do think it's perfectly reasonable that consciousness may "just" be an expression of electrical currents darting through our brain.Hermeticus


    It could be that all this patterned charges together are consciousness. If an electron encounters a proton, their charges cause them to move towards each other. They possess a kind of longing to be with each other and be united for ever. There are evil charges, longings, who want to break up this happy unity by means of a photon field. Some photon fields don't even have a charged longing from which they originated. The more complicated the charges inside a lump of matter, the more complicated the mental longings. Without the basic ingredient of charge, the material world can't develop.
  • Cuthbert
    1.1k
    We do not experience the light meeting our retina, travelling to our optic nerve as an electrical signal and into the brain structure and IT cortex where 16 million neurons activate in different patterns and register seeing a dog.Brock Harding

    By the same argument, digestion is an illusion. We may eat food and feel satisfied. But we do not experience the enzymes at work and the chemical transformations that occur in our bodies. These forums are also an illusion. We may think we are 'reading posts' but we do not experience the stream of 1's and 0's that constitutes the data. The 1's and 0's are also illusions: we may think we are dealing with binary numbers but we do not experience the electrical impulses of which the numbers are mere symbols fitted for our understanding. Further, illusion is an illusion. We may think we are seeing an illusion but we do not experience the nervous processes that we call 'seeing an illusion.' Since everything is in those terms an illusion we can jettison the concept of 'illusion'. It divides every term in every equation and so we can multiply it out without any loss of information.

    On the other hand, some things are illusions: the rabbit from the hat, the winnings from your scam lottery ticket. Other things are not illusions: the hair of the dog you're patting when you pat the dog, for example. The hair of the dog when you think you're patting the dog but are just absent-mindedly patting the collar of your parka - that's an illusion.
  • Brock Harding
    51
    I am in no way suggesting that physical processes are an illusion. I am proposing that our non-physical interpretation of them is. To cite your example about digestion, do we go around saying that there is a non-physical entity that consumes food and produces poop in our bodies?

    I should have probably been clearer in my post, but I also introduced time-variant systems mechanics to the mix of things that our brain does which, in my opinion, fills the 'qualia' gap between the physical and non-physical subjective insubstantial-seeming mental world.
  • Gnomon
    3.7k
    I believe that nowadays, with the benefit of modern science and an understanding that the source ancient ‘thinking’ that led to dualism was relatively uninformed, we can dispense with the illusion of consciousness, or the mind, and shift our perspective away from these imagined ethereal forms.Brock Harding
    Yes. Consciousness is not a magic trick, but it is imaginary. Everything we are aware of is an image (or meaning) created by the Brain to represent the reality "out there". According to Daniel Dennett, those "unreal" pictures are projected onto the Cartesian Theater screen. And that mental mirror of the world is what I call "Ideality".

    Donald Hoffman calls those subjective images "icons", referring to the little simplified symbols on a computer screen that represent the complex processing operations going on inside the CPU. Those subjective images may create an "illusion", but they are all we ever know about objective reality. "A map is not the territory". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

    Those "projections" in the mind are "illusory" in the same sense that a slice of reality recorded on film, when projected on a 2D screen, creates the illusion of dynamic 3D reality. Those mental images are also "ethereal" in the sense of "lacking material substance". They do have a real material substrate (neurons), but the pictures are ideal immaterial concepts. So, in my personal blog, I reconcile the ancient notion of real-vs-ideal or Qualia-vs-Quanta Dualism with the modern doctrine of all-encompassing Materialism, in a monistic philosophical perspective I call "BothAnd". :cool:

    The Case Against Reality :
    The interface theory of perception
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

    IDEALITY SYMBOLIZES REALITY
    1*AP15N3XJJVnWoCUQWAwVbQ.png

    CARTESIAN THEATER
    Cartesian_Theater.jpg
  • Kenosha Kid
    3.2k
    A curious question is, supposing consciousness comes first, how exactly does it tie into this? Are the cells what is conscious and does that mean we originally consisted of two consciousness that became one? Or is the very process our consciousness, making us, so to say, our parents sexual desire?Hermeticus

    :up:
  • theRiddler
    260
    So...what we are conscious of is an illusion...except our interpretation of our brains?
  • Kenosha Kid
    3.2k
    According to Daniel Dennett, those "unreal" pictures are projected onto the Cartesian Theater screen.Gnomon

    Iirc Dennett's description here is meant to be disparaging. Good post though, I enjoyed it a lot.
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k
    You may have heard of the concept that consciousness, or the mind, is merely an ‘illusion’.Brock Harding
    Don't pay attention to rumors! :grin:

    Oh, come on, if consciousness, thinking, etc. were an illusion, then this discussion would be also an illusion!
  • Gnomon
    3.7k
    Iirc Dennett's description here is meant to be disparaging. Good post though, I enjoyed it a lot.Kenosha Kid
    Yes. He was trying to show a materialistic alternative to dualism. But he merely succeeded in kicking the immaterial can down the road. :smile:

    Kick the can down the road :
    put off confronting a difficult issue or making an important decision, typically on a continuing basis.
  • theRiddler
    260
    He didn't succeed in any of that. Like all men, is only recalled in the heart, whatever that entails. Unevolved and thus buried deep in DNA.

    There is no answer. I can't explain you, and you can't explain me. We are entirely different, experiencing machines...but why? Why are there identities and peculiarities in a world devoid of chaos?

    How things seem is on the surface. We have meteors crashing into planets, and then we have life, which avoids all obstacles. But why, if the essence of everything is a void of reason?
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    Oh, come on, if consciousness, thinking, etc. were an illusion, then this discussion would be also an illusion!Alkis Piskas

    Are you saying that if we were all merely the fabled philosophical zombies, then this discussion would be an illusion?
  • Brock Harding
    51

    Thinking is not an illusion, the concept that you need a non-physical entity to think is.
  • Bartricks
    6k
    First, it is a category error to conflate the mind and consciousness. Consciousness is a state. The mind is an object. Consciousness is a state of mind.
    My cup has a shape. But it is not itself shape. It 'has' a shape. Shape is a property of my cup.
    Similarly, consciousness is a property of my mind. It is not itself my mind. That's just confused. Minds 'have' consciousness, but they are not themselves the consciousness.

    I am clearly conscious. That is, I am in a conscious state. To be aware of anything at all is to be in some kind of conscious state.

    Anyone who argues that consciousness is an illusion is just plain confused. For really to be 'arguing' something is to be expressing some beliefs. And beliefs are conscious states, or dispositions to be in conscious states. And thus all genuine arguers are in conscious states.

    As it is manifest to reason that conscious states cannot exist absent a mind to bear them, we can also conclude that minds exist.

    There is no good case for the non-existence of either conscious states, or minds. For any argument that seeks to show that one or the other is illusory, will have a premise that is far less plausible than the reality of consciousness and the minds that bear it. Indeed, any argument - to be an argument - needs to be the argument of some mind or other. So it is entirely hopeless to try and argue for such views. At best all one can do is point to the metaphysical possibility that no minds or conscious states exist. But metaphysical possibilities are not evidence.
  • Raymond
    815
    We may think we are 'reading posts' but we do not experience the stream of 1's and 0's that constitutes the data.Cuthbert

    There are no zeroes propagating in the brain. Only bunches of sodium ions crossing the surface of dendrites through small channels. There are no charges pushed along a wire by an electric potential, as is the case in computers. The bunches of charges run in concert, parallel, and in large numbers, over paths determined by the strengths between neurons. The strengths between the neuron connections determines followed paths. Researchers in Kevan Martin's laboratory at the Institute of Neuro-informatics at the University of Zurich have shown for the first time that the size of synapses determines the strength of their information transmission, which seems logic. The connection strengths, the wide of the synapses, is important in memory. If you look at a scene over and over again the scene will be imprinted because the synapses in the neurons involved widen. If you look at a similar scene it will look familiar because the scene will, because of its similarity, follow the path of the strengthened connections. The falling in the engraved path is the recognition. Why can't this conscious recognition be contained in the physical process? Note that memories in this process are not stored as such. A memory is reconstructed by earlier strengthening of the connectivity of synapses. If you look at a circle shape there will run a corresponding shape of collective patches of ions on the neurons. This shape can be strangely attracted to the strengthened shape earlier engraved. So memory is a reconstruction process. Again, why can't a conscious thought not be the collective motion of charges. By which I mean, the content of the physical process. Not the process itself, but what's inside the process, literally the physical charge, of which no physicist has an understanding from the inside, only what it causes.
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    Thinking is not an illusion, the concept that you need a non-physical entity to think is.Brock Harding

    Are you saying that consciousness is not an illusion, the concept that you need a non-physical entity to have consciousness is?
  • Brock Harding
    51
    More or less. My citing of consciousness, mind etc is in the context of the dualistic view which I understand is why those terms were created. I guess the term consciousness etc is so ingrained into our modern vocabulary/concepts that it means different things to different people.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    Our experience of our bodies, our sentience and its presence in our environment is a complex biological, electrical and chemical process.Brock Harding

    In short, all the problems of philosophy are dissolved by physicalist reductionism.

    Question: are you familiar with the expression ‘the explanatory gap’?
  • Brock Harding
    51
    No, haven't heard of it.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Consciousness is processed data; to the extent this is an illusion, so is consciousness.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Illusion is a function of a mind.

    If mind is an illusion, that the mind itself perceives, then it's not possible, since something can't be borne by its very own self. A woman can't bear herself as a baby, a god can't create itself as a god, etc. A creation of any sort has a necessary condition that its creator predates it.

    So "the mind is an illusion" is a necessarily wrong concept.
  • Hermeticus
    181
    since something can't be borne by its very own selfgod must be atheist

    Ways things birth themselves in biology:
    - Fission
    - Budding
    - Fragmentation
    - Parthenogenesis (Unfertilized egg birth)
    - Hermaphroditism (Self-Fertilization)

    Self-reproduction at some point was the standard. It still is in many aspects of our own physiology. Evolutionary, sexual reproduction has the benefit because it provides a larger genepool. More building blocks, more tools.
  • pfirefry
    118


    I think that you're right and there is a technicality that makes "the mind is an illusion" self-contradictory. But despite the technicality, I cannot resist to explore this further, just because the phrase makes an intuitive sense to me. So bare with me for asking ridiculous questions.

    Is the statement "trees are made of wood" necessarily wrong? Something can't be borne by its very own self. Wood is created by trees, therefore trees cannot be made of wood, because they cannot give birth to themselves. Is there a flaw in this logic?
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    trees are made by papa trees and mama trees, in its most basic.

    There is also no requirement for the creation to be the same or to resemble its creator. A man makes a chair. Or a man makes a pen. Or a woman makes a thermonuclear reactor.

    Now, you can argue that an illusion is very different from a mind, and on that basis, the creation could be explained.

    But the basic premise in the claim makes that impossible. "A mind is an illusion." There is no room left for argument. There are illusions; and one of them is the mind. A mind is a proper subset of the illusion. There is nothing about a mind that is not an illusion. That is what the basic premise states.

    I am only doing logic here, not the research for the validity of the assumptions in the claim. If you wish to reword the claim, then you're free to do so; but you can't do that without altering its meaning.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    Wood is created by trees, therefore trees cannot be made of wood, because they cannot give birth to themselves. Is there a flaw in this logic?pfirefry

    The concept of tree and wood are different. Wood does not give birth to anything. Trees give birth to wood, in a sense, by the process of creating wood; but wood does not give birth to trees. The process of giving birth to trees is via a seed, and seeds carry no, or very little fibre. (Which wood basically is.) Seeds carry a lot of energy, protein, and the specific DNA to the species.

    You can say then, how can a DNA give birth to a DNA. Well, they are different, separate DNAs. One is the successor to the other one. Much like a mother gives birth to a child, the child is almost the same as the mother, but the child is still created by the mother; the mother did not create herself. and the child did not create itself, despite the child and the mother may be indistinguishable from each other by some measurements.

    To carry the simile farther: wood is to trees as, say, bones and muscles are to a child. Is a child created by its bones and muscles? No. Are the bones and muscles of a child created by the child? Well, arguably, yes. But the formation of the child starts way before the formation of muscles and bones.
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k
    Are you saying that if we were all merely the fabled philosophical zombies, then this discussion would be an illusion?bongo fury
    No. In such a case this discussion would just have not taken place. Have you ever seen in movies any two zombies discussing? :grin:
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    In each of the instances you cited, the process is the same, but a fissioning nucleus is split by the beta particle of a previously fissioned particle. That's A. B. is that after fission, the newborn nucleus is different from the nucleus before the fission. So the fissioned nucleus goes under a change; the "parent" is different from the "child". The parent nucleus is not creating itself; it is creating a different nucleus.

    The same can be said of all your other examples.

    One more thing that may shed more light on the irrelevance of your examples: a parent can give birth to something, to the parent's child, which child is the same or very similar in structure to the parent. The child, however, is not the parent. Your examples, some of them, ignore this very subtle concept.
    Self-reproduction at some point was the standard.Hermeticus

    yes, but self-reproduction still creates a child by a parent. If a cell reproduces itself, there are two after that; not the same number as before the split.

    You can argue that they are both children, or you can argue that one is the parent, and the other, the child. But you can't argue that they are both parents, because both did not exist before the split. And a parent's definition is to exist before its child gets born.
  • Alkis Piskas
    2.1k
    the concept that you need a non-physical entity to think isBrock Harding
    I didn't get that. Something missing?
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