I really don’t want to derail it, either, but I have to ask. Are you familiar with fantasy books called The Chronicles of Thomas covenant, the Unbeliever, by Stephen R Donaldson?
I wanted to add this to my other post. Can’t seem to make that happen.
Matter. Just as mass and charge are.
So you’re saying that the capacity for experience is a property of matter. What argument or evidence do you have fr that?
I don’t know where our thinking diverges, but it’s not here. I entirely agree.
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By the way, here is a link to Thomas Nagel’s chapter on panpsychism from his early book Mortal Questions. Also this critique of same, with a summary of Nagel’s argument.
My argument…
In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers writes:
We have many physical, measurable characteristics, such as height, weight, and density.
There are many physical processes, our life processes, taking place within us. These are also measurable. How fast does our blood flow? How fast does our hair grow? How many ATP molecules do our cells use per second? How many times do we breath per minute?
Our actions can be physically measured. How far can we walk? How fast can we run? How much weight can we lift?
Consciousness is not physical. I don’t see any physical characteristics of consciousness, and, to my knowledge, nobody has ever given any evidence of any. I’ve never even heard anyone suggest that there were any. As Chalmers said, nothing about the physical suggests consciousness. Why do the physical processes not take place without our subjective experience of them?
Our processes and actions are particles and structures in motion. Everything about our physical structure can be traced back down to the properties of molecules > atoms > particles. None of that helps us with consciousness, since it isn’t physical. As Brian Greene said in Until the End of Time:
If consciousness is not physical, then there is no reason to think it can emerge from the physical. It doesn’t make any sense to think that you can put any kinds of physical things together and get something non-physical.
The incredulity increases with the idea that evolution caused the non-physical to pop out of the physical at some point. Mutation (a physical process) changes the physical characteristics. Physical structures evolve, until, one day, BAM, this entirely new thing happens, which can’t be traced back to the physical, but which is arguably the most important thing of all.
It has to be there at all times.
Chalmers “forgets” that (genuine) physical objects are “qualitative” or “sensory.” The “objective” view is basically the carefully constructed scientific image, which is scientific because it is constrained by “articulated sense experience.” If your technology doesn’t give me what I want, then I won’t keep paying for it. If your predictions don’t square with my experience, then I stop believing that your hypothesis is a “law of nature.”
The confusion in Chalmers is understandable, because “the hard problem of the physical” remains basically unseen. Consciousness is ( among other things) the presence of the physical. We might also say the present “quality” or “being there-ness from a POV” of the physical.
So the concept of the physical is already just as baffling as the problem of “consciousness.” To me Chalmers and many similar thinkers don’t “really see” the physical at all yet, theoretically speaking. They just blindly presuppose that the concept is secure.
So here is maybe where we differ, though I am grateful that we are largely in agreement. Physical processes “are” “subjective experience.” But “subjective experience” is just world-itself-from-point-of-view. Consider the way that a spatial object manifests, adumbration by adumbration. That’s how it “shows up.” The problem, IMV, is that people “infer” from this that the manifestation of the physical is “really” psychical stuff that is or that is “inside” consciousness understood as stuff rather than as presence.
In other words, the problem of “consciousness” is exactly also “the problem of the meaning of being.” Being tends to be understood as a “stuff” or as a “vapor” ( a uselessly hyper-general all-inclusive category.) While the word can be intended this way, its most important possibility of its meaning is “through” the ontological difference.
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I’m in agreement with quite a bit of what @j_j has already said. But I’ll try and spell it out a little more formally.
I think you’re still trying to identify or understand consciousness (I prefer ‘mind’) as an object of analysis, some property that characterises conscious beings that can’t be explained in terms of their constituent particles. Unless, you say, it is already there, as an attribute of those fundamental entities. So the attempt is still to identify the objective nature and basis of consciousness. It’s like naturalism that has been expanded to include qualia.
Here I’m going to refer to another source altogether, namely, Husserl’s criticism of naturalism:
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge,all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism…—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role ~ Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology p.144
This approach is radically different—radical meaning ‘from the root’ — because it calls into question the idea of the objective knowledge of consciousness and the attempt to ‘naturalise’ the mind. Not from a mystical or spiritual perspective, but by acknowledging the distinction between the nature of the objects of the natural sciences, and the nature of the subject for whom that knowledge is meaningful. So this takes into account the experiential nature of knowledge from the outset, which is the particular contribution of phenomenology to consciousness studies.
I’ve always held the position that consciousness is exactly the qualitative state of being conscious, in the same way redness is the relative degree of being red, thinness is the degree of being thin, and so on.
So I noticed your first disagrees with that position, re: the content of consciousness is not what consciousness is, but then you seemed to accept the validity of it, by agreeing that consciousness is the presence of the totality of is-ness. Which is another way of saying consciousness just is precisely that totality of content of which the subject is conscious.
But it is the case consciousness is not a thing, whatever the form “thing” is supposed as having. It is, instead I think, nothing more than that which represents the fundamental condition of the subject with respect to the full aggregate of his rational machinations over time.
Anyway, I only spoke because your wording was exactly the negation of my own thoughts, which I’d not witnessed beforehand.
My position is that mind and consciousness are different things. I think things without minds subjectively experience. They just don’t have minds to recognize/think about what they are experiencing.
And I think minds are what (generally speaking) humans (and some other animals, to different degrees) experience.
No, I don’t think consciousness is any kind of object. No more than mass is an object. And we cannot analyze consciousness. We can only analyze what we are conscious of/what we experience.
No such a thing called consciousness is perceivable by human perception. What is perceivable is just objects and changes in the world, and also other humans with their actions and linguistic expressions.
Hence consciousness is not some object which exists in space and time.
Rather it is the human attitude, ability and mental disposition to be alert and to be able to communicate linguistically and respond intelligibly with other humans and the world around them.
Husserlian phenomenology also acknowledges the distinction between the objects of the natural sciences and objects as understood after we shift from the natural attitude to a reducing consciousness of objects. This shift in attitude is more than just a turn away from the empirical world toward the subject. It rethinks the ‘for whom’ in a radicalizing way such as to reveal a more primordial basis of both subject and object.
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I see you morphed from Husserl to Heidegger here. Other than Heidegger, phenomenology doesn’t ask the primordial question of Being in order to reveal the ontological difference between beings and Being.
@Mww
I can’t say my understanding of how others mean things or how I express my thoughts are always top notch. To put it mildly. I have also found my thoughts on various things changing as I discuss them here and try to write down what’s spinning in my head. I very much appreciate any requests for clarification.
Regarding this exchange, and my apparent self-contradiction:
Sorry. Hadn’t meant to post yet. I’ll edit asap.
I’m not sure how to word this. Consciousness is not a thing. They’re is nothing to study, analyze, whatever. But something is happening. I mean, were talking about it, eh? Maybe what jj said and I agreed with isn’t there best way to say it. Or maybe I didn’t realize jj’s wording is not something I really agree with. Something other than physical things or events, or anything explainable by physical things or events, is under discussion.
I agree with the overall. I’m not sure if I agree with all the details. But my overall point is that the physical events could be taking place without any subjective experience, and, to quote Chalmers again:
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We don’t say “When you say that, it is clear that your electrochemical signal via the neurological nerve must have just reached cerebral cortex of your brain.”
We just say, what you are saying is making sense.
It’s all good. Thanks.
@Corvus
Potato, potahto? 
@Mww
I do appreciate the feedback. Heck, I appreciate being read at all. I don’t have anywhere near the time to read everything posted here, much less respond to everything.
Sorry to say, I just can’t follow this. I read it, and think I know what you’re getting at. I read it again, and I think you’re saying the opposite. You may be saying things that are commonly understood by people who have read various standard things, and the problem is that I haven’t read them.
I’ll read it some more times. Never know.
The problem with any assumption about the value of consciousness is that its entirely unfathomable to us to not have it. If it were so advantageous for survival, why would so few animals and literally zero plants have it? It’s possible that its a symptom rather than a soluition maybe?