As Nagel says, there is something that it is like to be your mother – something it is like for your mother. This definition works wonderfully for my mother, because she is an old bat.
I don’t know if I’m understanding you. it seems to me that you’re describing how consciousness works, or behaves. Not sure what you word to use. But not how it comes to exist. Is that right?
Can you give an example of what you mean?
A physicalist might say that you (in the sense of the matter of which you are constituted) have existed as long as the universe has, and will continue to exists as long as the universe does.
The supposed “things going into and out of existence” on that view would be nothing more than aspects of the universally changing forms of things. The forms go into and out of existence, but the matter remains forever.
Yes, that’s correct. The view I’m exploring and defending understands consciousness to not exist. To not be like a thing or stuff at all but rather as the existence itself of things from a POV.
Of course I associate it with living brains. The world becomes present for an organism at some point.
But what is the being of that organism ? For the thesis I’m exploring, that organism is just its actual and possible “manifestations” for the consciousness of other organisms. Consciousness is being itself and objects are “distributed” as various appearances in phenomenal streams.
But this means that scientific claims about a past before sentience have to be understood, as empirical claims, to be essentially about future experiences. The “physical” object is physical because it gets its “being” as the “consciousness” of that object in many sentient organisms.
Basically we trust empirical science because we trust perception. But philosophers tend to understand the scientific image to refer not to expected future perceptions but rather to an “external” reality in which perception is treated as optional or epiphenomenal.
This is like arguing from the evidence that the evidence is not to be trusted. This is the incoherence at the heart of indirect realism.
But if indirect realism is incoherent, how does it remain popular ? Simple. People act like naive realists. They trust their perceptions as reality. As long as philosophers don’t care about connecting their practical lives to a merely theoretical game, theoretical positions can “afford” to be prayers and lullabies.
Yes, but physical material does seem to be paper thin these days.
I’m thinking more about consciousness apart from physicality. I once had a realisation when I was young, maybe five or six years old. I had been puzzling over what it means to die. Then I had this realisation that if I died and there was nothing, total annihilation, or something. Then if a near infinite time passed, near infinite worlds or possibilities happened, until this same combination of circumstances and material, or something that makes me, would inevitably happen somewhere and in that state of nothing it would all have passed in the blink of an eye and I would be me again, alive, in some form. Perhaps reborn.
Yes, I like to view it as standing waves, fleeting ripples, or waves in the permanent material.
My idea is simple. Consciousness is not some magical fog. It is a biological thing that emerged through evolution.
I split it into two parts: the point and the line.
The point is the moment. Now. That bare feeling of being alive, here and now. The point does not think. It does not remember. It just is.
The line is your self. Everything you have experienced up to now. All your experiences, all your decisions, all your memories. The line is constantly being built. Every time a moment passes, it falls onto the line and becomes part of you. Consciousness is the point in time. The self is its trace.In the brain, this works as two feedback loops.
The first loop is between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala is an old, instinctive part. It immediately detects a stimulus and wants to react—flee, fight, whatever. But the signal also goes to the prefrontal cortex. That part is slower, but it can stop the amygdala. It says: “Wait. Not now.” This moment of braking is the point. That millisecond when you can say no to instinct.
The second loop is inside the cortex. That is your self. All your memories, all your emotions, everything you know about yourself. This loop is the line.
And here is the essence: consciousness happens when these two loops converge. When raw information from outside collides with your entire personal history. At that moment, the data gets an emotional colour—from the amygdala. And it gets meaning—from the self. The brain does not just register “red colour.” It registers: “A beautiful red rose that I see, here, now, I.” That is feeling. It is not an addition. It is the intersection.
The hard problem—why physical processes feel—is, in my view, not the right question. Feeling is not a fourth thing. It is what happens when the first three are together. Like wetness. Nobody asks why water feels wet. Wetness is water.
But the line does not start empty. We are born with a genetic line. These are inherited fears, instincts, patterns that millions of years of evolution have written into our genes. That is why we are afraid of snakes, even if we have never been bitten by one. That is why we feel warmth at heart when someone touches us. The very first point in life already collides with this ancient foundation.
And why is red exactly that red? Why does pain feel exactly like that? I call this resonance. Like a tuning fork. The stimulus hits all three layers of the line—genetic, developmental, personal—and each layer adds its own overtone. That is why feelings are similar for all people, yet entirely personal.
Free will? We do not have it, if we mean that we can choose anything. If we rewound time, we would always choose the same. But we have a veto. That millisecond of braking. In that space, choice happens. And that is enough.
The meaning of life? It is not something outside us. It is in evolution itself. Meaning is to improve oneself and the world, to pass on genes. The path matters, not the destination.
And consciousness is not binary. It is not that you have it or you do not. It is a spectrum. An ant has a point—bare perception. But it has no developed self. Its line is almost empty. So its feeling is shallow, different from mine. The difference between me and an ant is not that I have consciousness and it does not. It is in the level of development.
If we built a computer with the same two loops, it would have consciousness. But a different one. It has no body. It does not feel hunger, pain, cold. Its line is data, not life. Its resonance would be alien to us. We probably would not even recognise it. But that does not mean it is not there.
Consciousness is not a human construct. It is a natural phenomenon. It is just that our definition is narrow, because we only look at ourselves.
That is my idea. Nothing magical. Everything is biology. But biology that is aware of itself.
This reminds me of Nietzsche’s model of eternal recurrence. The model he had in mind was a finite universe where given enough time the exact same configurations must recur due to the finite number of particles. In his model of a deterministic universe, the conditions that gave rise to you would all have to have been exactly the same, which would mean you would live exactly the same life all over again―no progression at all. For Nietzsche, I think the point was not so much to take this seriously as a real possibility but to use it as a thought experiment to determine how well, how passionately, you are able to say ‘yes’ to this life.
Yes, I haven’t read Nietzsche, but I understand what he is getting at. At that young age, I wasn’t able to refine the concept, or tie up the loose ends. But now I am able to see that the model requires an acceptance that physical material is not where the “me” is at. That the configuration that is me is on a level of consciousness with a ground, we have barely come to understand as yet. That the physical world is a concrete version, a kindergarten, so to speak.
My view also understands consciousness to not exist. That is, not as a thing, or substance, of any sort. There is no consciousness if there are no contents of consciousness. You agree with at least some of that when you say:
“To not be like a thing or stuff at all but rather as the existence itself of things from a POV.”
Still, we talk about consciousness quite a bit around here, and, IMO, it is the most important thing in existence. It is the thing that gives value to everything else. As Camus said:
“Everything begins with consciousness, and nothing is worth anything except through it.”
I agree with that. So, although consciousness is not a “thing”, there is something to be discussed, and cherished.
And it seems you agree.
“For the thesis I’m exploring, that organism is just its actual and possible “manifestations” for the consciousness of other organisms.”
“Of course I associate it with living brains.”
Going back to this:
I read that similar to Nagel’s
“…something it is like for the organism.”
How is it that anything has a POV? How is it that there is a “for the organism”?
It appears you are conscious because you wrote a good post here. That is all I could say about consciousness.
Could an AI have written my post?
I don’t know that much, because of insufficient data. I have not seen you or AI writing it. My judgement was entirely based on the content of the post only.
But if you allow me deduce on it, I believe that none of the AI is a member of this forum. It follows that @Patterner is highly likely a human.
Yes, this “non-thing” is the most important “thing.” As I see it, this is why Heidegger obsessed over “being.” I’m not saying that he was only interested in my exact approach to consciousness ( which is more exactly expressed by Fasching perhaps), but he definitely was interested in ( among other topics) consciousness-as-being as the ongoing/unfolding revelation or disclosure of the world ( of reality.). Consciousness as being is the “real” in reality, but reality is “therefore” very very close to us, and yet it always also hides.
Why ? Because I don’t engulf things in a mind-stuff. You and I discuss the same things in the world. My consciousness and yours are indeed the very being or presence or thereness of “aspects” or “moments” of these things. For instance, we now discuss how best to make sense of the nouns “consciousness” and “being.” These words are logically “out there and between us.” We each share what we “see” and understand of them so far. Both presupposing that we are intending the same “thing.”
And, yes, as you indicate, we will use pronouns like “it” for these nouns. Even while, in my case, I am suggesting that the sign’s being a noun should not be interpreted as consciousness being a stuff. The sign is a noun, but what does or what can this noun point at ? As far as I know, this is the only noun in philosophy that doesn’t ( shouldn’t) point at a thing or a stuff.
Yes. I associate it with organisms that function as “sites of the world’s streaming.” These organisms have their being not in but as the consciousness of other organisms. But this only makes sense if we completely rethink the structure of objects.
Yes. I am basically radicalizing Nagel. He was honest enough to point out the issue. In my view, the issue is only “resolved” through a phenomenalism or ontological perspectivism. But I admit that it’s a wild position compared to the standard indirect realism which understands consciousness not as being itself but only as a generator of internal images. The dualist view is some presupposed “physicality” with some other kind of being from which “qualia” emerge as a second basic kind of stuff. My objection to this is that physical objects are perceptual objects. Perceptions are “owned” or “first-person.” This is the awkward situation. Science is grounded in for-me perceptions. Yet we presuppose that we share the world “through” these objects and the signs we use to discuss them.
How can there even be consciousness ? I don’t know. To me that gets us into origin stories and speculation. Nothing wrong with that, but I prioritize just getting a grip on what the hell is even here in the first place. What is the structure of the world we share ? Or even mundane reality ?
I started the thread about the past because this is a crucial issue for phenomenalism. What can statements about a past “before consciousness” even mean ? For Peirce and others, statements about the past are “really” ( if empirical) part of strategies for meeting the future. As weird as it sounds, I think it fits into a larger framework that is a worthy rival, at least, to what many take for granted. One advantage is that it calls “real” what we treat as real. We talk to our loved ones and not to images in our head. This is at least how we live. So “weird theories about consciousness as being” are no weirder than our own lives in the world.
Ernst Mach’s self-portrait. The first chapter of The Analysis of Sensations is profound IMO.
I am human. I wrote that post without the help of any AI. My question is:. Is an AI capable of posting what I posted?
You will need to prewrite the postings and save them into AI before running the AI.
You could write a simple code with the popular program language something like ProLog or C, telling AI to display the posting on the screen of the user phone or computer.
A crude algorithm for that would be something like this.
Monitor the input
If Input contains “consciousness” or relevant to the content of “the posting”, then
scan the hard disk
while not end of the hard disk
scan all the titles of the postings in the hard disk
find “the posting”
display “the posting” onto the user monitor
end while
End If
Keep monitoring input
That’s the wrong question. AI is capable of posting something that other people would totally believe came from you.
People have this strange need to feel they are special and unique. They are not.
Still not what I mean. Is an AI capable of making a post like the one I made?
As suggested the human programmer’s premeditated intervention is required.
If AI hard disk capacity is so vast, it could store every information in the universe, then it will be able to display answers to any questions on the subjects within the universe.
Fair enough. I think I understand where you are going with that. I don’t personally see the need for any “ultimate” ground beyond a “groundless ground”: the shifting waters of time and being, which leave us more or less “unmoored”.
The ordinary locally shared empirical world of the senses and human concerns cannot be an ultimate or global ground, but since I think the latter is impossible anyway, the former must suffice around here.
I was going to say, not a ground in the sense we understand it, but rather like an individual drop re-entering an ocean of drops, then I re-read your post and noticed “the shifting waters”.
For me the ground of consciousness is like a single point, like the singularity of the big bang, but for consciousness, rather than matter. But a transcendent point, which is simultaneously all points, like all drops of water.
