"That's all fab, but why can't that happen in the dark? Why does any of this constitute or necessitate subjective awareness. or consciousness, or the capacity to experience?" — bert1
I realize that this is a tentative and superficial conclusion that some would say is pure heresy, but this is what has been bothering me for decades. — Jacques
Aha, you're a panpsychist, right? My assumption was a different one: That all functions of our brain would also be possible without any personal experience.Much of the linking of brains and consciousness seems to me to be assumed on the basis of alterations in brain function altering what we experience. But why can't the alterations in a rock's functioning alter the rock's experience? I'm not quite sure why it's considered reasonable to focus on brains particularly when looking for consciousness in nature. — bert1
If you think we have phenomenal consciousness, then how do you square that with physicalism? — Marchesk
...if you think you can make physicalism work with phenomenal consciousness... — Marchesk
And if you if you think you can make physicalism work with phenomenal consciousness, then good luck with that. — Marchesk
I've never understood why people think there is any contradiction between believing that phenomenal consciousness is a mental, neurological, process that manifests itself as personal experience. — T Clark
We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.
Any nuance of meaning coming from any part of the larger context can ground the because of reason. “I blushed because I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes”. But I might not have blushed if his left hand had slightly shifted in its characteristic, reassuring way, or if a rebellious line from a novel I read in college had flashed through my mind, or if a certain painful experience in my childhood had been different. In a meaningful context, there are infinite possible ways for any detail, however remote, to be connected to, colored by, or transformed by any other detail. There is no sure way to wall off any part of the context from all the rest.
The Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher, Zenon Pylyshyn, once neatly captured the distinctiveness of the because of reason this way:
"Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws."
The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, including such things as our desire for pots of gold or our subconscious urges toward violence. I will therefore refer interchangeably to the because of reason and the because of meaning, by both of which I refer to all the semantic relations and connotations, all the significances, that weave together and produce the coherent tapestry of a life, or of any other expression of meaning, such as a profound text — say, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or, for that matter, the text of a biological description. — Stephen L. Talbott
The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer
The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer
Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation. — Pierre-Normand
Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation. — Pierre-Normand
The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, — Stephen L. Talbott
The curious thing, however, is that despite this emphatic recognition of the purposive organism, we find in textbooks of biology virtually no mention of purpose — or of the meaning and value presupposed by purpose. To refer to such “unbiological” realities is, it seems, to stumble into the unsavory company of mystics. Yet we might want to ask: if purposiveness in the life of organisms is as obvious as many in addition to Monod and Dobzhansky have admitted, why should it be impermissible for working biologists to reckon seriously with what everyone seems to know?
It’s a question we will ask. Be aware, however, that in struggling to answer it we may stir up unsettling doubts about the central biological concepts of evolution and natural selection. — Talbott
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role.
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Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology.
this entire discussion of ideas and meaning in the world brings us face to face with a haunting specter we need to exorcise once for all: the specter of vitalism. The accusation of vitalism seems inevitably to arise whenever someone points to the being of the organism as a maker of meaning. This is owing to a legacy of dualism that makes it almost impossible for people today to imagine idea, meaning, and thought as anything other than ghostly epiphenomena within human skulls. So the suggestion that ideas and meaning are “out there” in the world of cells and organisms immediately provokes the assumption that one is really talking about some special sort of physical causation rather than about a content of thought intrinsic to organic phenomena. That is, ideas and meanings are taken to imply a vital force or energy or substance somehow distinct from the forces, energies, and substances referenced in our formulations of physical law. Such an entity or power would indeed be a spectral addition to the world — an addition for which no one has ever managed to identify a physical basis.
But ideas, meanings, and thoughts are not material things, and they are not forces. Nor need they be to have their place in the world. After all, when we discover ideal mathematical relationships “governing” phenomena, we do not worry about how mathematical concepts can knock billiard balls around. If we did, we would have made our equations into occult or vital causes. But instead we simply recognize that, whatever else we might say about them, physical processes exhibit a conceptual or thought-like character. And so, too: the meanings that give expression to the because of reason do not knock biomolecules around, but — like mathematical relations — are discovered in the patterns we see. The thought-relations we discover in the world, whether in the mathematical demonstrations of the physicist or the various living forms of the biologist, need to be genuinely and faithfully and reproducibly observed, but must not be turned into mystical forces.
the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force.
This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer
This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer
Do you see our having reasons to do things itself being caused by neuronal activity? Because if it is then that would be "bottom up", no? — Janus
Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation — Pierre-Normand
In my view there is only one real form of causation: physical causation. All other forms are metaphorical or attributional. — Jacques
You might be thinking like Jaegwon Kim, and for similar reasons (i.e. the causal closure of the physical + the causal exclusion argument + the supervenience of high-level entities and processes over the physical domain.) — Pierre-Normand
I don't think there are higher and lower levels of reality, instead I do believe there are only different perspectives on one and the same reality. — Jacques
I watched a Quinn's Ideas YT video about blindsight a few months ago. — Marchesk
That's a good book, but at one point aren't they inflicting pain on one of the aliens? When they try to test its communication abilities? — RogueAI
Doesn't torture imply that the aliens have subjective experience? — RogueAI
personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning — Wayfarer
The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. — Wayfarer
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