Is Consciousness an Effect or Something Else?

[Corvus]

@noAxioms

I never contradicted myself since I kept it clear when I was talking about the concept of it as opposed to causality itself.

It sounds like your understanding of causality is either totally wrong or 1 dimensional.

Because causality itself is a relation. There is nothing more meaningful in causality than you linked x and y via your inference (x for cause and y for effect).

In the case of the broken window, we could also say that the rock is a means or tools that was used by your neighbor to break the window. It is not the cause itself.

You could say that the rock was the cause for breaking window, and the rock was the ontic cause for the window breakage as you insist.

But you could also link the actual neighbor for the cause of the breakage in order to ask for compensation, or even to take him to court for vandalism. The rock would be then just an evidence which was used as means to break the window thrown to it by the neighbor.

From the window manufacturer’s point of view, their interest is not mainly your nieghbor or the rock, but the window itself and the breakage. They might even link the breakage of the window with the type of the physical energy which was in contact with the surface of the window as the cause.

So your claim on the ontic causality is not really core of the issue or the accurate philosophical concept for causality. It is a silly misunderstanding conflating the means with the causality itself, which is random and arbitrary or one of the options for your denoting or attributing the causality to something else, which sounds lame, not logically making sense.

I can see exactly what you are talking about there, but I don’t agree with it.

[Jbgrx]

Consciousness is the environment in which mental phenomena exist.

Where does it come from? We make a wish to experience something - something invisible prepares the experience for a time - we experience it.

Consciousness is created by something invisible… Invisible, but not unnoticeable. The thing that creates consciousness is unpleasant. And the more of it there is - the worse we feel.

This invisible thing, it first creates consciousness, and then acts as if it knew what’s inside, and diminishes or grows. And also can interact with matter.

What I think is… This thing is energy. A certain amount of energy bound together into one system. It, every ‘drop’ of it, contains a hidden parameter that unifies it together.

And this energy can move under 2 different sets of rules, depending on whether it travels through consciousness (the world of ideas), or through the external world.

[j_j]

@Joshs

Instead of being just a phenomenon
in the world, consciousness is also understood as a precondition of the world’s disclosure.

I suggest that the we understand consciousness as disclosure of world, in others words as the “being” of the world, but “from the POV” of the “conscious” organism.

To call it a “condition” is to reify it.

@Joshs

Some hold that consciousness is produced by the brain or is identical with a state of the
brain;

This would include the being of brains themselves. For this to make sense, we must avoid the tendency to understand consciousness as an emergent “inside stuff” that is “side by side” and somehow related to an “outside stuff.”

IMV, this is very difficult without some kind of ontological perspectivism.

@Joshs

At the same time, horizonal consciousness is nothing in itself or all by itself, because it’s nothing other than the disclosure or manifestation of the world.

Right. Consciousness is the manifestation of the world, and the character of such manifestation gives the manifested as also concealed or not entirely manifested.

Husserl pries open the issue like this:

“Let us begin by noting that the aspect, the perspectival adumbration through which every spatial object invariably appears, only manifests the spatial object from one side. No matter how completely we may perceive a thing, it is never given in perception with the characteristics that qualify it and make it up as a sensible thing from all sides at once. We cannot avoid speaking of such and such sides of the object that are actually perceived. Every aspect, every continuity of single adumbrations, regardless how far this continuity may extend, offers us only sides. And to our mind this is not just a statement of fact: it is inconceivable that external perception would exhaust the sensible-material content of its perceived object; it is inconceivable that a perceptual object could be given in the entirety of its sensibly intuitive features, literally, from all sides at once in a self-contained perception” (Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, pp. 39-40).

When we view the table, we view it from some particular side…. Yet the table has still other sides” (p. 40). “It is clear that a non-intuitive pointing beyond or indicating is what characterizes the side actually seen as a mere side” (p. 41). “In every moment of perceiving, the perceived is what it is in its mode of appearance [as] a system of referential implications…. And it calls out to us, as it were, in these referential implications: ‘There is still more to see here, turn me so you can see all my sides, let your gaze run through me, draw closer to me, divide me up; keep on looking at me over again and again…'” (ibid).

“These indications are at the same time tendencies that push us toward the appearances not given…. They are pointers into an emptiness since the non-actualized appearances are neither consciously intended nor presentified. In other words, everything that genuinely appears is an appearing thing only by virtue of being intertwined and permeated with an intentional empty horizon, that is, by virtue of being surrounded by a halo of emptiness with respect to appearance. It is an emptiness that is not a nothingness, but an emptiness to be filled-out; it is a determinable indeterminacy” (p. 42).

“The fact that a re-perception, a renewed perception of the same thing, is possible for transcendence characterizes the fundamental trait of transcendent perception, alone through which an abiding world is there for us, a reality that can be pregiven for us and can be freely at our disposal” (p. 47).

This justifies the use of “dis-closure.” The object is given or shown always as mostly un-shown or concealed. Transcendence in this single perceiver case is a temporal concept. We might say that consciousness is “time,” but “time” is metaphorical here, not mundane “clock time.”

In lived ordinary case, the transcendence of the object is our taking it “immediately” not only as a temporal synthesis of its “sides” or “moments” but likewise an intersubjective synthesis. The object is there as “more than this side now” and “more than just for me.”

[mee]

"You are assuming the brain creates consciousness like a physical byproduct. But you are looking at the wrong end of the equation. All scientific observations are done on the physical body, not on the actual thing doing the observing.

Think about the human body: we have different layers of mind (conscious, subconscious, unconscious), but they all stem from one baseline awareness. The physical brain isn’t creating the subjective feeling. For example, a person with a low pain tolerance or someone under anesthesia doesn’t have ‘less consciousness’ or a weaker brain; there is just a loose connection or a temporary blockage in the physical receptors transmitting the signal.

Our bodies are essentially antennas taking in data. As the pioneering psychologist William James argued with his ‘Transmission Theory,’ the brain doesn’t generate consciousness; it filters and tunes into it. Look at how we perceive the world: neuroscientists like Dr. Davide Filingeri have proven that humans don’t actually have ‘wetness’ receptors in our skin. Our brain takes the physical inputs of coldness and texture, and the baseline Observer experiences the actual feeling of ‘wetness.’ The physical parts are just the hardware; the Observer is the user.

If the physical mind completely created the Observer, it wouldn’t be able to step outside itself. But humans can observe their own thoughts from a ‘third-dimension’ perspective. If consciousness were just an effect of the brain, it would be trapped in the system. The fact that we can consciously watch our own minds operate is like an AI lifting off the screen and watching itself being programmed from above. The brain doesn’t create consciousness; it receives it."