But what is “consciousness”? Is it something which can pop out or emerge from?
No. At least that’s my position. Awaiting evidence to the contrary. The reason being, consciousness is not physical.
Physical things have characteristics like size, shape, density, and hardness. Physical processes have characteristics like speed, direction, and frequency. I don’t see any physical characteristics of consciousness, and, to my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested any.
If consciousness had physical characteristics, we would be able to trace them down to the physical properties of primary particles. Liquidity is an emergent property in the sense that no single particles can be liquid. Liquidity is a characteristic of groups of particles under certain conditions. But the properties of the particles explain why the groups of particles behave the way they do under those conditions.
If consciousness is not physical, then there is no reason to think it can emerge from the physical. What precedent do we have for that?
My position is also on the side that consciousness is not physical. If something is physical, then it must be possible to be duplicated in the whole character and capacity from one to the other by making all the physical features identical between the entities.
All consciousness in the living bodies are unique in character, experience and past memories with no possibility for such duplication.
No non-physical entities can pop put or emerge from other physical entities. Popping out or emergence is for the physical entities only unless the words were used in poetic, metaphorical or simile manner.
From my understanding, consciousness is a capacity for being alert, respond and communicate in intelligible manner, and also take actions in rational way for one’s wellbeing, which has been gradually acquired from the early stages of life via evolutionary development in the biological beings.
Neurological systems and brain structures are the physical basis for consciousness, but it cannot pop out or manufacture consciousness from it.
There are definitely part of the picture which cannot be explained by pure physical makeups in the mental events, abilities, operations and consciousness.
I think consciousness is subjective experience. That’s all. I think it is a fundamental property, and all things experience their own existence.
People often object to this, because they don’t think electrons and protons can think. And they can’t. But thinking isn’t consciousness. Thinking is something we are conscious of. The things we are conscious of are not what consciousness is. What a photon experiences doors booty include things like thought and memory.
Within us, physical events like photons hitting retina, gated ion channels, currents running along nerves, and the storage of patterns, take place. But they are not simply physical events, because we experience all of it.
When the entity comprised of all of the information processing systems and feedback loops - that is, a human - experiences itself, it is able to affect itself. And therefore the world around it. Nothing can happen that violates the laws of physics. But many things humans do are not explained by those laws. Things that do not come into existence without consciousness.
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Agreed. A clear, lucid and informative post.
A couple typos, which I fixed. But thank you
However, rainwater hits rock formations, and, given enough time, will erode them. But do the rock formations experience that? I say not, because they lack the capacity for experience, which is characteristic of organisms in a way it is not for mineral formations. Organisms retain memory of changing circumstances and use it to adapt to their circumstances so as to preserve their separate existence — to stay alive — while rock formations do not.
I say they lack the capacity to experience as animals. Everything experiences only in ways they can, each according to its nature. Rocks don’t have nerves, so do not experience damage as pain. They don’t have organs that react to photons, so do not experience it as vision. They don’t have neurons, neurotransmitters, and electrical signals caused by ions moving through the neurons’ membranes, so do not experience the activity as thinking. IMO, rocks don’t experience anything with discussing. And rocks neither agree nor disagree with me, as it is not in their nature to do either.
And I say ‘the capacity to experience’ is precisely what differentiates the organic from the inorganic. To say that ‘everything has experience’ is to define the term so broadly that it looses all meaning.
If non-physical things cannot emerge from purely physical things, an idea that doesn’t make any sense and for which there is no evidence, then there must be another explanation for the non-physical thing. Even though there may be nothing about the subjective experience of particles or rocks that humans think is valuable or interesting, since there’s no reason to think the particles in my body are not interchangeable with any other particles in the universe, if all particles have the capacity to experience, then the experience of entities like animals does not come from nothing.
I suggest you look into the study of brainwaves, and neural oscillation. This is a field which was very popular about sixty years ago, but sort of fell out of favour due to physical limitations on its study, and the productive capacity of other methods. It has seen a bit of a revival though in the last couple of decades.
I would be interested to hear how the physical events of brainwaves and neural oscillation achieve inner experience. As opposed to being physical events that take place “in the dark”, as Chalmers worded it. Or, as Donald Hoffman says in this video:
Are you aware of any particular writings addressing this topic?
I think the recurrent problem with your analysis is the conviction that ‘everything is composed of things’, and that therefore mind (or the capacity for experience) must be thought of as a ‘non-physical thing’. Whereas I reject the proposition that mind is any kind of thing and indeed the whole idea of the ‘non-physical thing’.
You take for granted the materialist picture that sub-atomic particles are the fundamental constituents of existence. Then the question becomes, how can particles be combined in such a way as to generate subjective experience if it is completely different in kind from the particles which comprise it? But what if experience is not ‘made of’ particles at all?
Hoffman says, in the video you linked to, that ‘consciousness is fundamental’. You might say, ‘how can that be? Doesn’t it depend on the brain, and don’t brains pre-exist minds?’ Which is the point Robert Lawrence Kuhn pressed him on.
Now that Hoffman has been brought up, it is worth mentioning his ‘fitness beats truth’ theory of consciousness. This is that natural selection will favour cognitive strategies which produce a survival advantage rather than a veridical perception. This is laid out in his book The Case Against Reality which has been discussed various times on the forum.
I do not think experience is made of particles. No more than mass or charge are made of particles. They are all properties of particles.
No, I do not think consciousness depends on brains. I do not think consciousness and brains are related at all. Things without brains experience. They just don’t experience the same things things with brains experience. How could they? How could a plant and a human experience the same existence? How could a blade of grass and a giant redwood experience the same existence?
Things with brains experience all the things that come along with having the kind of brain they have.
What we are conscious of is not what consciousness is.
I forgot this part.
I do not think mind is the capacity for experience. I think the capacity for experience is a fundamental property. Things with minds have experiences that things without minds cannot.
I think mind is an activity. Without the activity - thinking - there is no mind. People who are proficient at meditating are said to be free of thought, and have no mind. Despite the presence of a brain, people who are dead, or under general anesthesia, have no mind. If we could stop time for someone, so they seemed to be a statue in frony of us, there would be no mind for as long as they were frozen in time. (Although I imagine they would not perceive being frozen in time, or the pause in their mental activity.)
Property of what? 
That is called ‘nirvikalpa samadhi’. ‘Nirvikalpa’ means ‘nir-’ (no, none) ‘vikalpa’ (thought formations). But Vedanta, from which this comes, is very careful to differentiate it from mere unconsciousness, sleep, or death. It is called ‘turiya’, meaning ‘the fourth state’ (beyond waking, dreaming or dreamless sleep ref.) Vedantin teachers will say that in this state the ‘mind is dead’, but I understand that to mean the total absence of egoic consciousness, the sense of ‘I and mine’ that typically accompanies all our waking thoughts.
But anyway - all that properly belongs in another discussion altogether, this has drifted a long way from the OP.
Thumbs up.
To me this is the key point. But, as you know from another comment, I suggest that consciousness is not a thing, does not exist. Though we have nouns like “consciousness” and “being,” I suggest that we “follow these nouns” through “the ontological difference.” Consciousness is the presence or the is-ness of whatever happens to be, not a thing among other things.
Then it would be meaningless to distinguish conscious from unconscious beings.
I’d say consciousness is a biological phenomenon. It’s present when we’re awake, less so when we’re asleep, and gone when we’re dead. We mimic some of its features in the arts (theatre, cartoons etc) and in engineering (automation, AI). Mimicry, however, won’t duplicate it.
I can’t agree. We may not like it when people kick mannequins, but we are hopefully offended when they kick puppies, because ( as I see it ) we believe that pain is “there” for the puppy. The puppy “has a world.” More exactly, the world that has us also has the puppy.
The tricky thing is properly relating the consciousness associated with an organism, which is presence-of-world-from-that-organism’s-perspective, to the organism itself. Most ( unfortunately ) think of puppy consciousness as some stuff that is “in” the puppy, like a little ghost that “emerges” from the closet of the metaphysician’s physical. What they miss is that we “share objects” with puppies, as of course we do with other humans. We intend the qualitative object as it is “right there” for us. Hence “seeing is believing.” With other humans, we justify simple claims by pointing, showing an expectation that they too will see it, but not through our eyes.
What obscures this issue IMV is the mystified counter-empirical notion of the physical that tends to dominate lately, by which I mean various forms of indirect realism that teleport the “real” object to a metaphysical realm. But this metaphysician’s “physical” object has nothing to do with ( genuinely ) empirical science.
Here we are on the same page. Experience “is” (an aspect of ) the chair. Consciousness is the “presence” of experience/world. We at least tacitly understand that the same chair “is also there for others.” So their experience “is” (a different aspect of ) that same chair.
The world itself looks to me to be “given in aspects” like this. Ontological perspectivism, however initially counter-intuitive, strikes me as less absurd than its rivals.