I know these words are about the thing you’re NOT writing about, but I hope you don’t mind an observation anyway?
I think consciousness cannot usefully be described as present or absent, when one atom can make the difference between one and the other. I think consciousness, and its emergence, are more progressive than that, more like a gradual awakening than a sudden manifestation. Not a binary phenomenon, but a flexible one, IMO.
Good topic, though. 
We could start with a useful and usable definition of “consciousness”, and then proceed from there? 
Your bodymind is one thing, not a collection of discrete things. You are as much your heart, or your stomach, as you are your brain. You are you, where “you” includes and embraces any, every, and all parts of your bodymind.
You might use “sails” as a synecdoche for yachts, but it is not true to say that a yacht is a sail. There’s more to a yacht than that, of course.
You are ALL of you, not just one (small?) part.
No but he is asking why he is not experiencing being his heart for example, and why he only is one mind. I am saying that he is one mind because literally that is what he is. The thing having the experience of reading, and thinking is not his heart, it is his mind. Obviously, HE as a human is his entire body, but my point was that he only exists under one numerical mind because the thing that is talking to me is that one mind.
Surely you realise it has nothing particularly to do with the quantity of atoms… That’s not what emergentists think.
Well, I mean, there isn’t some set number of atoms, but if you have a system that creates emergent consciousness, then if you take atoms away, it will eventually change the system to not be conscious. This is what I meant. If this is also a misrepresentation of emergentism, then please correct me.
Also, in the future, if you are going to say someone made a mistake, it’s usually nice to put in the time to correct it and explain why rather than just saying they made the mistake and leaving it at that.
You would not say I was no longer me if I got an artificial heart, or I lose both Legs in an accident, or could no longer speak because I had to have my voicebox removed because of throat cancer, or went blind or deaf, or anything else.
Except my brain. it’s silly to think I could get a brain transplant. If they were able to perform such an operation, putting someone else’s brain into my head, does anybody think I would still be me?
If you have a system that does any function, and you take enough atoms away so that it doesn’t do that function anymore, then… it no longer does that function. You accept that about televisions, I don’t see why it’s not acceptable to think the same about consciousness. You don’t have to think the same, but the way you worded it and strawmanned it was unnecessarily dismissive for a rather intuitive idea.
But that’s a question of identity rather than consciousness. Given a pan-psychistic attitude, you might think an electron has a consciousness, but you wouldn’t assume that means an electron has an identity.
If someone implanted my brain into your body, would you get a brain-transplant or would I get a body-transplant? Given that my brain would have to contend with most of your nervous system, that chimera would certainly create an identity for itself, in some form. But it’s the entire new bodily system that would be conscious (even if only briefly in case of non-functionality). We’d have one new conscious system, with a huge potential for identity problems. And as alien as that might sound, it’s still very easily comprehensible as a conscious system.
If what’s typing this post is my functional-brain consciousness, and if I were to die just after hitting send, would my body still have its own consciousness, one that’s now in the decomposition phase, while my functional-brain consciousness simply stops? Is my body inhabited by countless consciousnesses, all of which part of what makes me myself, and yet all which entirely alien to my functional-brain consciousness? Does this go all the way down to quarks, and all the way up to the universe? Are there consciounesses I don’t even recognise as units?
I’ve always found panpsychism attractive, but I found it erodes the term “consciouness” to the point of uselessness, if you take pan-psychism seriously. To each of my hairs its own consciousness; it needn’t even be on my head.
Indeed, I think an electron is conscious. It subjectively experiences. But it does not have things like a mind, emotions, or sensations.
Agreed. Your brain’s experience of my body is different than your brain’s experience of your own body, or my brain’s experience of my body. I suspect the combination would be closer to your brain in your body, rather than a 50-50 mixture. The brain is what controls homeostasis, neurotransmitters, and so many other things that we subjectively experience.
I don’t know about identity problems. Your brain would have to get used to a taller/shorter body, longer/shorter arms, fingers, legs. New chronic pains, or no more chronic pains. Such things might change the identity that your brain now knows. But I don’t think my body would be fighting for control of identity.
I’ll give my comments on the rest of your post later tonight. Must run right now.
Given that the brain’s responsible for the identity narrative I agree. I expect the new creature to be closer to something like a newborn, or someone recovering from a storke. Your memories don’t quite fit, and it’s total. Think of the trans-experience, and then explode that to everything, not just gender: there’s nothing left to anchor your identity. System shock. You need to start anew. (Obviously, that’d be an empirical question, if that were possible.)
I mean I said in the post it’s just about my own intuition, and to me consciousness doesn’t feel like something that can just emerge. Maybe being a television is a property, but it feels more like a linguistic one rather than consciousness which feels much more like some genuine metaphysical/physical property. They just feel like different things to me.
Yes, one human is one bodymind, including (of course) one body and one mind. More than one doesn’t seem to make sense, while less than one (!) means no human.
Interesting ideas! Of course, if it’s like starting anew, that means you lose your memories. I doubt we’d be performing these transplants if it wasn’t letting the brain’s identity continue, more or less. Why bother?
Only what is there, what is happening, can be experienced. What does a corpse experience? Not a functioning brain.
If consciousness is what I think it is, then the countless consciousness are not countless minds that somehow add up to one mind. There are countless particles in you, each experiencing its own being. But its being does not include mechanisms or processes that can be experienced as thinking, preferring, wanting. There is no emotion, no awareness.
The entire person has mechanisms and processes, information processing systems and feedback loops, that are experienced as those things. That’s you.
But I don’t think every particle in your body is part of the consciousness that you think of as you. You could lose a toe, or a whole leg, or arm. What effect does that have on your consciousness? Does it change the information processing systems or feedback loops that are experienced as you? I guess a little. There is feedback involving the toe. But how much does it change what you think of as you? The toe played at least some part in the development of your identity/personality. But that identity/personality in your brain, which is not much affected by the loss of a toe. And the consciousness that you think of as you is the subjective experience of the workings of your brain.
I don’t know about consciousness going “all the way up to the universe”. Is the universe a unit of information processing systems and feedback loops that are all working for the continued existence of the unit? Even without reproduction? And is the universe a thinking unity?
I don’t think any of that applies to the universe, but I really don’t know.
Actually, no haha. Think of the first word ever created. How was it defined? Well, it wasn’t. Words are inventions made for the sake of expressing specific ideas and experiences. I think we are arguing about the very definition of consciousness here, so the definition I would propose would be like begging my conclusion. That’s exactly why I believe we are shutting the door to what might be lying behind “consciousness,” since most people adopt a definition of consciousness more ontologically complex than seemingly necessary.
But if you want to hear mine: “The ability to be stimulated.” I would argue that anything that reacts is doing so because it can sort of sense the thing happening to it, and to me that is rudimentarily speaking consciousness.
Exactly. I am going for the most basic definition. The core that lies at the heart of most other definitions.
Which I think you are also doing with…
And, amusingly, we are coming up with different cores/rudiments. Hehe
So let’s see how you mean this. Does ice sense heat, and react by melting? Does hydrogen’s electron sense oxygen’s need for another electron in its outer shell, and react by spending time there? Does a boulder sense gravity, and react by rolling down the hill?
If walls were conscious, we would have no privacy.
Too late. My cat will not let me be in the bathroom alone.
I have defined objects as dormant-consciousness in a theory I’m currently writing. Colour/texture in objects is dormant-brain-space.
OK.
The “thing” that is talking to you is HIM, a person. A whole bodymind, not just part of one. But not more than one either, I suppose…