Or to take it out of the realm of the body, it would be like needing to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden in some other metaphysical state or something like that. — Terrapin Station

Water is a substance that can move and sometimes can be inside a wash sometimes can be elsewere. Our theory about how it works doesn't include the possibility that this substance can stop existing and/or start existing, we consider the flowing substance to just change its location or shape within the framework of a "conservation law" (it can't pop up from nothing and/or vanish).
If we want to think about consciousness like water inside a wash it would lead us to think that when it is not inside the "wash" of matter it is elsewere (but where?).

"need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance" — Babbeus

Figuring that you'd probably read it as a reference to a feeling rather than a requirement to empty one's bladder because it's full, so that the body would automatically evacuate one's urine whether the feeling were present or not, — Terrapin Station

"Requirements" don't belong to the ontology, they exist in the world of "prescriptions", requirements don't exist in any scientific-reductionist account of the world. At most you could have transmission of information inside the nervous system which is ultimately a change in the shape/configuration of the physical world and therefore is still just a "property" and not a "substance".

"What would you think it would happen to the pehonomenal experience, to the self and/or to the consciousness when there is no "awareness of consciousness"? Would it stop its existence?"— Babbeus

Yes. It's not some single object that moves around. Consciousness, sense of self, etc. only obtain when particular brain states obtain. That it only obtains sometimes is no different than saying that something like the need to urinate only obtains sometimes. It obtains when your body is in a particular state, and not otherwise. You don't need to posit that you ALWAYS have a need to urinate, just sometimes it's hidden in the background, do you?

Or to take it out of the realm of the body, it would be like needing to say that an arroyo or wash is always flowing with water, just sometimes the water is hidden in some other metaphysical state or something like that. — Terrapin Station

There is a problem with your comparison with "need to urinate":
- need to urinate is a way of feeling of a conscious being in the same way as being bald or having brain/heart is a way of being a living organism, it is a property, not a substance
- there are other kind of possible comparisons, for example consider matter/energy or other stuff that satisfy conservation laws (maybe volume in incompressible fluids), they behave like "substance", not like properties, one wouldn't say that "you don't need to posit that you ALWAYS have the same amount of matter/energy, just sometimes it's hidden in the background", it wouldn't sound reasonable, it would violate intuitive and experimental conservation laws

Why do we have to think that consciousness behaves like a property (appearing and disappearing) and not like a substance (being conserved)? How can we know for sure that "consciousness only obtain when particular brain states obtain" if we never have direct access to the consciousness of anything but ourselves?

I'm fine with their being different "levels" of consciousness. I just don't see a good reason to buy that one level features the subject with no awareness of consciousness. — Terrapin Station

What would you think it would happen to the pehonomenal experience, to the self and/or to the consciousness when there is no "awareness of consciousness"? Would it stop its existence? Is consciousness something that can pop in and out from existence to non-existence and vice-versa, unlike matter-energy? Or is there a mental/phenomenal substance that can become conscious or inconscious? How would we call this substance?

What you take to be sufficient to believe or not believe a claim can't be anything other than a personal opinion. — Terrapin Station

The point here was to explain in which sense we can talk about different degrees of consciousness. One way of seeing it was to consider different "states" of the brain: it doesn't really matter if you take a coma to have a degree of consciousness or not, the point is that there is a wide range of possible mental states between being in a coma and fully aware.
Another reason to make a distinction between different degrees of consciousness is to consider the evolution from our monocellular ancestor to contemporary human beings: would you say that there is a precise point in this line of evolution where consciousness appears abruptly? Or would you think that consciousness evolves throught seveal steps?
Damasio for example identifies three main levels of consciousness.

"Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem undermines logicism because it shows that no particular axiomatization of mathematics can decide all statements" Can anyone explain to me why the theorems undermine logicism? — MonfortS26

It undermines the original project by Bertrand Russell to collect a set of rules and axioms that would allow to build all mathematical reasoning in a formal way. Godel proved that even the set of arithmetical truths cannot be reduced to a finite amount of information.

Maybe you could find this article interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicism

If you don't feel that reports of first-person experience matter, that's fine. That's how you feel.
Not everyone feels the same way. — Terrapin Station

We are not discussing about our personal opinion, we are discussing about arguments.

The difference is that in the one case we're talking about people who are conscious and who can give us reports of their first-person experience. (While in the other case, if the person can talk to us at a later time, they often tell us that they had no first-person experience.) — Terrapin Station

But this difference is not relevant for that specific objection: "Studies like this [...] only tell us about observable phenomena, while consciousness isn't actually third-person observable". Reports of first-person experience are just other kind of "observable phenomena" for any external observer. A machine can "report personal experience" if programmed appropriately without having any, while a human can be unable to report anything (for example if he didn't learn a language) yet he could be having first-person experience.

You further claim that the robot cannot "experience blue", why not? It is certainly detect blue, is affected by blue, and can make decisions based on this. — tom

I wanted to mean: maybe the robot can experience his own "robotic" quale of blue but it cannot experience our human quale of blue (assuming there is a unique quale of blue for every human) - that is what we could mean by the word "blue".

Furthermore you claim that "there is no point in considering the knowledge about the light radiation". Really?

What I mean is that the experience of the quale is unrelated with the knowledge of the radiation.

Secondly, for some strange reason you're apparently completely ignoring the factor of others persons' first-person reports of their mental experience. I don't ignore that. I consider that, in conjunction with confirmation that they have brains functioning in particular ways, if their mentality is at all in doubt (for example, if we have reason to wonder if the person isn't maybe really a robot instead), to be sufficient evidence for others' mental phenomena. — Terrapin Station

I was replying to your objection:

Studies like this [...] only tell us about observable phenomena, while consciousness isn't actually third-person observable.

My point is that this kind of objection also applies to consciousness of people that are awake with fully functioning brain.

Does it make sense to assign a (universal, not personal) "meaning" to "life"? — hypericin

What do you mean by "life"? Human life? Conscious being life? Every kind of life including vegetable and bacteria?

I don't think we experience qualities of experience at all; we experience activities involving things and those activities have qualities. So we experience the activity of drinking beer and the beer has a taste. We don't experience the quality of the taste of the beer; we experience the taste of the beer, and we assign different qualities to the different tastes of beer. — John

I think this can be confusing. When we drink beer we are not just experiencing "the activity" or "the taste OF BEER", we are instead experiencing the consequences of this activity to the human sensory apparatus, which is quite different from the consequences of the same activities to other kind of sensory apparati. The "feeling of drinking beer" of a human is different from the "feeling of drinking beer" of a horse. This is the point of the qualia: there is a mediation between the activity and the neural structure that encodes and present this activity to the "self".

But studies like this:

"In the 2006 study, Owen and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate if a 23-year-old woman in a persistent vegetative state would respond to a series of pre-recorded spoken statements. Owen and his colleagues found that the statements produced brain activation patterns that were very similar to those observed in healthy volunteers, in regions known to be important for the processing of speech."

Only tell us about observable phenomena, while consciousness isn't actually third-person observable. — Terrapin Station

You asked why would I "think" that a person in a coma is conscious, those ones are generally considered acceptable motivations to think so. If you want to assume the radical skeptic position that wouldn't acknowledge any consciousness until you are able to feel it in first person then you are a solipsist and it doesn't make sense to consider the problem of people in a coma since even perfectly asleep people are problematic.

Why would you believe that people are conscious while in a coma? — Terrapin Station

I would believe it with a certain specific connotation of the word "conscious", check these:

• https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2011/sep/02/detecting-covert-consciousness-vegetative-state
• http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-find-hidden-brain-signatures-of-consciousness-in-vegetative-state-patients
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4147439/

What would you say the difference is? Are you referring to reasoning with "high level consciousness" maybe? — Terrapin Station

For example if someone is in deep sleep (possibly drug induced) or is in a coma I would say he has a far lower level of consciousness than if he is awake and the brain is working at full potential.

the notion of "consciousness" of these papers seems to be different from the ability to have phenomenal experience and qualia, it seems to refer to high level consciousness

What about neutral monism? For Example:

• there is only one kind of substance (consciousness)
• it is distributed in atomic parts (for example elementary particles)
• atomic parts are individual conscious being
• atomic parts do interact producing conscious experiences on each other
• atomic parts have volition and perform actions in strightforward ways according to what they feel (which in turn is determined by what kind of interactions they are having with each other)
• the statistical behaviour of large numbers of atoms produces apparently deterministic or probabilistic behaviours that follow some "laws of physics"

The curious case of the robot and the scientist.

Consider a faulty scientist and a faulty robot. The scientist is an expert in light, but was born with a rare condition affecting her optic nerve, that makes it unable to transmit blue light signals. The robot has a loose wire, so it too is unable to transmit blue light signals from its camera. The scientist is fixed by a doctor, and the robot is fixed by an engineer.

So, what has changed? Both the robot and the scientist can now recognise blue and are able to use that recognition to perform certain tasks. Both the robot and scientist experience blue.

But, only the scientist now *knows* what it is like to experience blue, the robot does not. — Tom

I think this is quite misleading, there is a confusion about what we are denoting with the word "blue".
There are two possibilities:

• "blue" is denoting the radiation with wavelenght 450-495 nm: in this case saying "experience blue" doesn't make sense because the experience comes from the interaction between the radiation and the human sensory apparatus: one could experience the radiation in different ways if he is a different animal
• "blue" is denoting the quale produced by the radiation, in this case the robot wouldn't "experience blue" but there is no point in considering the knowledge about the light radiation that produces that quale on the human sensory apparatus