I meant that I can no longer see reasons to believe in this immutable, reified essence of being (or let's just say the word - soul) behind the scenes to make us the same in essence from day to day. I certainly didn't mean to reject the lifelong personal identity.
— HuggetZukker
But that is all that a soul is. Aristotle define a soul as the actuality of a potentially living body, and Aquinas seconded him. To have a soul is simply to be alive. It is neither some kind of "stuff" nor a "thing" living within us.
This definition leaves open, as definitions should, the question of whether any aspect of life, such as awareness, survives physical death. If something does, it is not a holistic person, but the remanent of a person. — Dfpolis
If we can be aware of some intelligibility that does not require neural encoding to make itself present, then there is no reason why awareness cannot continue after the brain ceases to function. After reading W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy, I am convinced that we can be aware of such intelligibility. — Dfpolis
One can imagine virtually anything. — Dfpolis
Imagine that you can make two carbon copies of me, but only by destroying the original in the process. Now you can ask whether or not I will survive, and if I will, which one of the copies will I become?
— HuggetZukker
One can imagine virtually anything. Imagining a "world" does not mean that it is actually self-consistent, for many "worlds" we may think possible have covert contradictions, For example, one may imagine a world in which life evolved, but in which the physical constants are slightly different than in ours. This seems very possible, but the calculations underlying the fine-tuning argument shows it is physically impossible. So, I give no credence to experiments that cannot be performed, or to experiments in which the result is assumed, not observed. The whole point of experimenting is to allow nature to shock us out of our misconceptions.
Devoting attention to imagined issues diverts attention from what we actually know and experience -- which alone should be the basis of our theorizing. — Dfpolis
I am not saying you did. I am saying that the physicalist approach is inadequate. — Dfpolis
I am only made of my physical self, which is undergoing constant change, meaning I'm basically a new me every day.
— HuggetZukker
Materialists are inclined to base identity and being made of the same "stuff." Of course, that is not the basis of personal identity. Identity is more about the continuation of the same, identifiable process. even if every atom in my body were replaced over the course of my life, I am still the same person I was when I was born, because a single life process links the present me to my infant, even zygote, self. So, while I am evolving and maturing, I am not "new" everyday. I am the continuation of my same self. — Dfpolis
That there is no "eternal" you is as much a faith position as your previous construct. Your account offers no rationale for this belief. — Dfpolis
And, there is a very sharp line between being conscious and not. It was drawn by Aristotle inDe Anima iii. What awareness does, that noting else does is make what was merely intelligible, what was only knowable, actually known. There is a huge difference between having and processing information and knowing information, and that difference is bridge when we become aware of (conscious of) intelligibility.
Now you may say that consciousness is "emergent," or that it is "breathed into us by God." There is no operational difference between these views — Dfpolis
What is clear is that awareness, by making the merely intelligible actually known, transforms information from being latent in the physical world to being active in the logical order -- and that transformation is not within the competence of physics to explain, because physics has nothing to say about logical entities, — Dfpolis
Anyone else could be HuggetZukker
— bert1
What does this mean? I used to find the notion meaningful, because I (more or less automatically) thought of a being as having some non-physical essence of being. It led me to ask myself, "why am I me instead of someone else," but hidden in this question was the actual meaning of "by what means and criteria or logic did this spectator (I) enter this particular life?" So there was the assumption of a discrete essence of being built in.
My current thinking is that to be is to experience, such that one is identical to one's whole experience. Within this framework, X could not experience exactly what it's like to be Y without actually being Y as a consequence. The brain interprets sensory information, steers the body appropriately, and everything it does, including the very important storage of, and access to memory; a prerequisite for the sense of continuous being.
Then one could still ask "why am I me instead of someone else," but within this framework, and presuming that dead objects also do not have discrete essences of being (another topic), the question drops to the same level of meaning as that of "why is the pencil on my desk not a carrot?" (Or why is A=A?) That is a completely different type of question than "by what means and criteria or logic did this essence (I) enter this particular life?"
— HuggetZukker
Sure, I see that the questions we ask (Such as 'Why am I bert1, and not HuggetZukker?) seem to be theory-laden, and perhaps they are.
Consider, though, how "Bert1 is bert1" is a very different proposition from "I am bert1". I am bert1 tells me who I am in a way that bert1 is bert1 does not.
Some analyse this in terms purely of language use and see no metaphysical significance in it. I do see metaphysical significance in it. — bert1
Another way of approaching this is to ask "By examining all non-indexical information in the world, can I figure out which one I am?" Again, even if the answer is 'no' there is further argument to be had over the metaphysical significance of that. — bert1
My own view is that consciousness could not be an emergent phenemenon, because it does not admit of degrees. All emergent things emerge gradually (to a greater or lesser extent) because or the complexity of the interactions that they emerge from. Consciousness is one of those few concepts that does not seem to admit of degree. Consider your suggested examples, both of them involve experience, and so fall clearly withing the definition of 'consciousness'. There is 'something it is like' to be in those states, to use one formulation.
That is why I asked for examples of intermediate stages between conscious experience and no experience at all. What people usually offer is examples of very vague and diffuse experience, and contrast that with sharp wakeful experience. But both these are still examples of experience. What I'm after is some intermediate stage between experience (no matter how vague and diffuse) and no experience at all. It seems to me that the concept of experience does not allow for this, and that makes any theory of conscious emergence fatally problematic. — bert1
Here's what the Inter Mind website says about the two way connection:
With any Conscious experience there seems to be an implied Conscious Self (CSf) that experiences the experience. One approach is to say that the Conscious experience and the CSf are all part of a single Conscious Mind thing. I think the best thing to say is that we really don't know how to understand this yet, which is ironic because this is what we are.
The CSf can have Good experiences, Neutral experiences, or Bad experiences. The CSf will try to seek out Good experiences and try to avoid Bad experiences. The CSf must have a Conscious Volition (CV) capability in order to satisfy it's desires. This means that the Inter Mind must not only connect forward from the Physical Mind to the Conscious Mind but must also connect backward from the Conscious Mind to the Physical Mind. With the forward connection the Inter Mind is monitoring the Physical Mind and converting Neural Activity into Conscious experience. With the backward connection the Inter Mind is monitoring the Conscious Mind and converting CV into Neural Activity to move the Physical Body. — SteveKlinko
Science just denies Consciousness and Conscious Volition even though it is the 800 pound Gorilla in the Scientific room. — SteveKlinko
I don't like the sound of your friend, sorry. — bert1
Could you give an example of a creature, or a state of being, or structure or function or whatever, which is neither clearly conscious nor clearly not-conscious? — bert1
Anyone else could be HuggetZukker — bert1
I simply recognize two Categories of things that happen. First Category is all the Neural Activity that can happen. Second Category is all the Qualia that can happen. It appears that Neural Activity leads to or produces Qualia. You cant just say that the Neural Activity is the Qualia. The Neural Activity is one Category of Phenomenon and the Qualia is a different whole Category of Phenomenon. If they are the same thing then the burden is on you to show how these two disparate Categories can be one and the same thing. Nobody knows how the Neural Activity produces the Qualia. I don't have any theories of how this can happen. There's nothing to falsify. The Hard Problem remains. — SteveKlinko
That's quite clever. I laughed out loud! Thanks. — creativesoul
The outline is all about applying common sense to known temporal order(s) and arriving at knowledge of existential dependency(and vice-versa). — creativesoul
Conflating different time periods loses the distinction between Dennis prior to the heart transplant and Dennis after. — creativesoul
The question itself is conflating distinctly different time periods, according to your own example. — creativesoul
The sculpture with the box did not exist prior to the box. The sculpture with the box is existentially dependent upon the box. The sculpture prior to the box is not. They are not the same sculpture. — creativesoul
Here lies Dennis who got a heart transplant
2010 - 2018
RIP
Come now, let's not lose all sensibility. — creativesoul
The sculpture existed prior to the metal box. That which exists prior to something else cannot be existentially dependent upon it. The sculpture is not existentially dependent upon the metal box. — creativesoul
Are there examples that clearly negate any of the five 'rules'? — creativesoul
But we do know what we are looking for. We just are unable to find it, so we give up and say things like the Neural Representation is the Conscious Experience. This is worse Superstition than that which you started with. There is zero explanatory power in such a statement. The Hard Problem remains. — SteveKlinko
Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. — from Chalmers's formulation
I don't follow how this resolves the problem of what is consciousness or how is it that you are conscious. This seems to only answer the question of where consciousness come from. My understanding of emergent theories is that they explain how consciousness can arise in a purely physical environment — Hanover
If every effect has a preceding cause...
— HuggetZukker
How could you know that this is true?
How could you show it to be false?
So where does it stand?
— Banno
An infinite past seems impossible, because that would entail a completed infinity; it would mean TODAY is the conclusion of an infinite series of actualized past days.
By "emergent" - do you mean the mind is not reducible to the physical and operates (at least partly) independently of the laws of nature?
What if the first cause is causation?
That said, there are known uncaused events like photon emission or radioactive decay. There are metaphysical interpretations that say there are hidden variables that make such events actually caused, if not predictable, but that is just one possible interpretation, sort of matching your option B below.
If every effect has a preceding cause, as classical inquiry implies
A) If there was uncaused cause then
...
4. Something has come from nothing.
This doesn't follow. It assumes that 'nothing' is the first uncaused cause.
Infinite things having happened doesn't imply infinite time. There are infinite events (no end to space), so only finite time is necessary for infinite things to happen. I'm suggesting that C be worded as just infinite (non-cyclic) past time.
Any model of this needs to account for entropy. It defines the arrow of time, and something needs to reset it, or it doesn't describe the reality we see.