I don't see how anything I've read here is inconsistent with the idea that the experience of consciousness is a manifestation of biological and neurological processes. — T Clark
Phenomenology, insofar as it understands consciousness to be intentional, is still working in dualistic terms, and I see it as helping to understand how things seem to us in our everyday dualistic mindset; I don't see how it it can offer anything beyond that. — Janus
Joshs - I read in the above blog post 'Hence, any individual object necessarily belongs to multiple “essential species,” or essential structures of consciousness, and “everything belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too…”
Do I not detect the echo of hylomorphism in these kinds of sentiments from Husserl? Where 'forms' or 'ideas' are now transposed as 'essential structures of consciousness'? — Wayfarer
The authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia article would agree with you. They are among those who believe that a ‘mutual enlightenment’ between cognitive science and phenomenology is desirable and attainable. Husserl himself believed that trying to ground phenomenology in empirical science was putting the cart before the horse. I believe that it can eventually be possible to naturalize phenomenology , but this will require innovations in thinking within the psychological sciences that haven't taken place yet. Using current models within biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology to underpin Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology would completely misrepresent the subject matter. — Joshs
Of course consciousness is a state. At any time you may be either conscious or unconscious. The point of general anesthesia is to change your state of consciousness to off. An anesthetic works if it changes your conscious state, and doesn't work if it does not. If consciousness is somehow merely a description, how does an anesthetic have causal efficacy? — hypericin
If consciousness were something in addition to that activity then anaesthetics would not work since they only act on chemical activity, not 'the realm of consciousness'. — Isaac
. When phenomenologists claim to be transcending dualism what they mean is the splitting of the subjective aspect of experience from the objective. Their solution is to be make the subjective and the objective indissociable poles of all experience — Joshs
But an individual object is general for Husserl not because a particular car belongs to a general category of cats, but because the unity of an object is an intentional achievement produced by a synthetic act uniting memory , anticipation and actual presence. The self-same object is an objectivating idealization concocted out of a changing flow of senses , and thus a generalization. — Joshs
You have to explain how it is — hypericin
Imagine a technologically naive culture, cut off from the rest of the world, or maybe part of a multi-generational dystopian experiment, where DVDs and DVD players are a given. There would eventually arise a hard problem of DVDs. You can't answer that problem by saying "movies are just a name we give to certain DVD microstructures". You have to explain how it is that the material DVD "contains" audio and video. — hypericin
I agree with all of that. I think the quest for a theory of consciousness will be a grand adventure. It's fed by a lust to know. Maybe it will generate technologies that allow some aspect of subjectivity to be recorded and that could be used for medicinal or artistic purposes.
Every step of the way, someone will be pointing out that we're fooling ourselves and the truth we're finding is relative to a particular culture? That's ok. That's always how it is, right? — frank
It is not about describing in detail how consciousness works - that is supposed to be the Easy problem (hah!) — SophistiCat
What's the answer to "how does a DVD contain audio and video?" — Isaac
The audio and video of a movie is encoded as a set of 0s and 1s, which is one enormous base-2 number. This binary number is encoded on the DVD platter as tiny unreflective pits on a thin mirror, in a spiral pattern, which most of the material of the DVD simply protects. The laser of the DVD player shines on the spinning mirror, and a sensor interprets interruptions of the laser's reflected light as 0s, and their absence as 1s (or the reverse). These 0s and 1s are then translated on the player into a format amenable to the display device, which produces audio and video. — hypericin
What trips people up is conflating an understanding of consciousness with understanding the NCCs (neural correlates of consciousness). — hypericin
You can imagine in the future that we might have a complete accounting of the NCCs, a complete description of all the relevant brain structures and how they interact with one another. But nonetheless, we still can't conceptually make the leap from this description to the first person features of consciousness: qualia, what-is-it-like, etc. — hypericin
I actually suspect that the brain does not produce conscious experience, but rather conditions it. — Constance
Experience exceeds the physical delimitations of the physical object, the brain. Call it spirit?? — Constance
One radical solution is to say S and P are bound in identity: In some describable way, P is part of S's identity, and the brain/object separation has to be dismissed. — Constance
Consciousness is encoded as a set of neural signals, which is one enormous dynamic network of continual signals. This flow of data is encoded on the brain as axon potentials and neurotransmitter concentrations, which most of the brain is not involved in most of the time. The working memory of the brain receives some of these signals, and the network of logic gates created by forward and backward acting signal propagation interprets signals as something to pass on. These signals are then translated by our language cortices and conceptual recognition neural clusters as suiting the term 'consciousness'. — Isaac
I don't want to get into a long discussion about how science has to proceed. — T Clark
I will say that there is no reason the mind would not be among entities amenable for study by science. — T Clark
I think at this point in history there are a few key issues left to people who wish to find support for higher consciousness/idealism/theism worldviews - the nature of consciousness, and the mysteries of QM, being the most commonly referenced. — Tom Storm
...it has become a 'god of the gaps' style argument, a kind of prophylactic against naturalism and a putative limitation on science and rationalism — Tom Storm
Are you not evading an essential problem science (unwittingly) created for itself vis-a-vis study of first person experience when it defined itself as objective examination of entities, phenomena and facts, thus cordoning off itself from the personal mind, a something inherently subjective? — ucarr
Subjective mind might not be out of bounds of effective scientific examination, but it shows promise as a good axis for pivoting into examination of scientific boundaries. — ucarr
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