Wow. This is news! Next you will be telling me you can think of things, but not do them.

Just sayin' There may be no action that testifies to consciousness.

And does medicine treat that as spooky woo or does it search for the mechanistic explanation? Wouldn't you like the docs to be sure whether you happen to suffer curare muscular poisoning or a brain stem lesion?

I give sedation with paralytic drugs. It's just a fact. A person can be conscious though unable to produce the action necessary to breathe.

But so what? If you think this somehow impacts on any position I've expressed, please explain why.

So the folk psychology term of consciousness has huge problems once you try to apply it in science. It confounds biology and sociology in believing things like introspection to be a biological function rather than a linguistically structured skill. It makes the big mistake of thinking awareness to be a running realtime representation of reality rather than having this complex internal temporal structure. It makes a big mistake in creating this homuncular self that is then witnessing the representation.

So consciousness - and all its crew: unconscious, non-conscious, subconscious, preconscious, semi-conscious - is a very familiar social construct that just ought to be junked so we can start over again on a better metaphysical and scientific basis.

But no hope of that of course. — apokrisis

Of course there's no hope because this is nonsense or can you explain why there's no hope?

Habit and action are irrelevant.

Or your conception of consciousness demonstrably impotent.

There's no hope because the way general beliefs about the mind are socially constructed are socially useful. You can't fight what culture wants you to believe as part of its own self-preserving mythology.

Talk about consciousness is a way to fix individual humans within some social state of conception. If we think of ourselves as freely choosing souls or rational beings, separate from our gross animal physicality (or Freudian unconscious), then that is exactly the myth by which we will learn - get into the habit of - acting. If you think about the nature of consciousness in the conventional fashion, then society is assured you will behave within the scope of that conventional construct.

Or your conception of consciousness demonstrably impotent. — apokrisis

Could be. I wasn't trying to give birth to a virile concept. Just tellin' the truth. Action and habit are irrelevant.

And as I have also explained, the actually important relation between attention and habit is that attention produces some general state of intentionality ahead of every moment of action. — apokrisis

There you go again. Remember, you agreed with me that the general state of intentionality directs the attention, not vise versa. The general state of intentionality directs the attention, producing particular intentions. Attention does not produce a general state of intentionality. You agreed with me that this general state of intentionality is prior to, and active in the directing of atttention. And I told you that I'd correct you whenever I saw you slipping back into these old habits. You need to learn how to break these bad habits, that's why I will continue to bring them to your attention.

Telling the truth now, eh? Get over yourself dude.

Where's the problem with one thing's general being another's particular.

Put these various items in hierarchical order - cat, Fluffy, animal, persian, mammal. It's not hard is it?

It's definitely the truth. A person's totally paralyzed by a neuromuscular blockade and they're conscious. Not sure why it's cause for hostility.

I asked how it was relevant to any position I've advanced. You can't explain. Oddly that is tiresome.

A person can be conscious without having any particular intentions. Being vs doing. If you agree with that.. then why did you get hostile? Just say: "Yes. I agree."

There's no hope because the way general beliefs about the mind are socially constructed are socially useful. You can't fight what culture wants you to believe as part of its own self-preserving mythology. — apokrisis

We can obviously resist what a culture wants us to believe. Culture doesn't dictate our metaphysics or scientific investiagions.

If we think of ourselves as freely choosing souls or rational beings, separate from our gross animal physicality (or Freudian unconscious), then that is exactly the myth by which we will learn - get into the habit of - acting. If you think about the nature of consciousness in the conventional fashion, then society is assured you will behave within the scope of that conventional construct. — apokrisis

Granted a faulty or limited understanding may effect our abilities, but this is beside the point of there being no hope of bettering our metaphysic and scientific foundations on the subject.

We can obviously resist what a culture wants us to believe. — praxis

Roll that rock, Sisyphus. :)

You were saying medicine is no folk craft. So that is why medicine would try to understand what goes on exactly in the mechanistic information-processing fashion that I originally said was the better way to even enter a conversation about the unconscious.

If you want me to agree to my own point, well sheesh, just take it as read, dude.

If you thought you were challenging anything I said, have a go at tidying up your posts.

If you just want to express your usual hostility, big deal.

You think I'm usually hostile?

More nonsense, apparently.

Wake me up if you want to engage in the substance of my posts, which have been about how the conceptual dichotomy of attention~habit makes neuroscientific sense of what folk talk about when they're feeling baffled by conscious and unconscious thought and action.

A person's totally paralyzed by a neuromuscular blockade and they're conscious. — Mongrel

A person can be conscious without having any particular intentions. — Mongrel

Maybe you just don't realise how disjointed your thinking is? Two different points and you ask don't I agree as if you were still talking about the one thing - which still remains unexplained.

Why should either present a difficulty in terms of the attention~habit conceptual framework of a neuroscientific account?

Of course if there is a block between the central nervous system and the skeletal muscle system, then "conscious wishes" are thwarted. A runner with no legs can't run. Big deal.

Likewise if attention doesn't focus your state of mind, it is unfocused. If you have no need to act, then you rest. And if you want to talk about intentionality as something very general, then rest and other forms of inaction are how organisms save energy and avoid risks.

We could go on to talk about vigilance, creativity, the right brain's mode of attending. It's all standard fare within an attention~habit neuroscientific framework.

But as I say, you don't seem to be realising that your replies don't even stick to the point you were making an instance ago.

I thought you had said something about action. My bad.

Where's the problem with one thing's general being another's particular. — apokrisis

Category mistake, that's what the problem is. A particular is an individual thing. We might use a word to refer to that particular. If that same word is used to refer to a general in relation to something else, then we have a different sense of that word. So the word "cat" may be used to refer to a particular cat, or it may be used to refer to cats in general, but to confuse these two is category error, or equivocation. The particular cat is never a cat in general. And cat in general is never a particular cat.

And thought and feeling and planning and imagining aren't actions? Muscular action isn't both voluntary and involuntary?

So the word "cat" may be used to refer to a particular cat, or it may be used to refer to cats in general, but to confuse these two is category error, or equivocation. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's really great, MU. But you are the one barking about there being only the one possible use of "intent" here. I'm happy not to confuse them the way you keep doing.

I thought we already went through this all, and had agreement. There is intentionality in the general sense, and there are particular intentions. We agreed that what attention forms is particular intentions, not general intentionality. And so it is incorrect to say "that attention produces some general state of intentionality", as you just said.

I can only repeat what I've already said.

The brain is already an "intentional device". It is full of potential intentions at all times.

Then what we call being conscious is centrally about focusing this general state of intentionality so that some concrete goal emerges to dominate the immediate future. This requires all contradictory intentions to be suppressed. Some particular attentional focus and state of intentionality emerges.

Then this in turn becomes the general constraint that places limits on habit-level performance. Attention can't control rapid, smooth, highly learnt behaviour with latencies of milliseconds. And nor would that even make sense - as attention is there to be slow and deliberate, to break things apart rather than stick them together in unthinking complexes, to do the learning that masters novelty rather than the performing in which novelty is minimised.

So the dichotomy of attention and habit is no accident. It is what logic demands as it dichotomises our response to the world in exactly the way that has to happen. It is an obviously reasonable division of labour.

Let me run you through it again.

General brain-level intentionality is the ground for attentionally-focused particular states of intention.

Attentionally-focused intentionality is the generalised constraint on the freedom of learnt habits and automaticisms that arise to fill in the many particular sub-goals necessary for achieving that greater general goal.

I don't have to notice what my feet and hands do when turning a corner in the car. If it's routine, the mid-brain/cerebellum fills in those blanks unthinkingly. I form no reportable working memory in the prefrontal cortex. What I experience phenomenally is what folk label "flow". Or smooth action with an "out of the body" sense of not having to be intentionally in charge.

You can obsess about trying to make my right words wrong. But haven't you got better things to do?

And thought and feeling and planning and imagining aren't actions? Muscula — apokrisis

Thought and feeling can be pretty passive. That was my point: not that consciousness isn't involved in habit, intent, and action, but that those things aren't necessary. Newborn infants are conscious after all.

Involuntary muscles (smooth muscles) are usually maintenance entities.