@ ac64
What is to exist? And what is consciousness? All I know from OP is that consciousness is fundamental and a thing, and I suppose then to exist is to be conscious?
I think that we learn the meaning of “to feel” by making some connections in our mind.
First, we see that some people say “I feel this… I feel that…”.
Then we see that, when people say this, they connect it to certain reactions happening in their body. For example, people automatically withdraw their hands from fire if they get too close to it. In such situations they say that they have “felt” a lot of heat, or even burning. We also see that people pronounce and associate different words always matching similar experiences. For example, I can see that all people say “red” whenever they see a certain color.
As a third step, we see that we are able to find in ourselves certain experiences that make us agree with the connections we see other people making. For example, I not only see that other people say “red” whenever they see a certain color, but I also see that, whenever they say “red”, they associate it with things that create in my brain a similar kind of reaction. This makes me learn that, whenever I see that a specific kind of reaction is happening inside my brain, it means that the external object connected with that event in my brain is “red”.
This way even a machine can learn to say “red” whenever a specific reaction happens in its sensors. In the case of the machine, we set the connection, in the case of humans, our brain is already hardcoded in a way that creates connections based on repetition. We can program a machine as well to react similarly when it meets repetitions, so that the machine becomes able to learn without our instructions: repetition becomes able to replace instructions in that machine.
All of this can be applied to the self. The same way we or a machine can learn that certain reactions inside us mean “red”, we and a machine can learn that, when certain reactions point all towards a certain specific direction, what is present in the point where those directions converge towards is “me”. This way both a machine and a baby can become able to say “me” with reference to their body.
All of this is relatively simple and mechanical, to the point that we can even make machines able to do all of these things.
The “Hard Problem” arises when I realize that I am not just another body, we can even say another machine, able to learn, to make connections, to say “red” when I see certain specific things and to say “me” when they ask “who has done this?”
Apart from all of these things, I realize that my “me” is radically different from the other “mes” (meant as a plural of “me”), or the other “Is”. The difference is that I have knowledge about what is happening inside me, I have access to the inside of me, while other people don’t, and viceversa. It is similar to several situations, for example is like being in a car. I can see the inside of my car, I have access to the inside of it, other people don’t, and viceversa. This way I realize also that I am the only person, not only in the world, but also in the whole span of universal time, that has direct access to the inside of my body, my brain and the reactions that happen in them. This makes me realize that I am an absolute unique event.
I can go further in this reflection and realize that, if I consider all other people from my perspective, that is external to them, I can imagine all these things as referred to each of them: I can easily imagine that each person external to me is able to feel “inside their car”, or inside their body, or inside their brain. However, there is another point to add, that is the crucial point: to me I am not just another unique case, that can be considered a variation of a similar situation. I can be considered a variation by other people external to me, but to me, from my inside, the moment I look to my inside from my inside, I cannot but conclude that to me my uniqueness is not just another one, but a completely different kind of uniqueness, not just a variation of cases that are all similar to each other, but an absolutely unique uniqueness, so that I have to conclude that my uniqueness, my feeling me, besides being a variation from point of views external to me, is a completely new event that never happened in this world before. If I pay attention to my inner perspective, I cannot but conclude that the experience of being me has absolutely nothing similar in this world. To other people I seem undoubtedly similar to all other ones, but to me I am an experience that would require a new word, a new concept.
In this situation our mind starts like continuously jumping from our inner perspective to the outer one and viceversa, in an infinite loop that reminds me certain philosophical paradoxes, like, for example, the liar paradox. In this infinite loop my mind tells me that I am able to look at myself from an external perspective, so that I can easily realize that I am just another one, but then I cannot hide from myself that to me, from my inner point of view, I am as unique as the whole universe is. I am to me, inevitably, a totally absolutely unique event in this world.
I think that this loop cannot be solved, cannot be broken, because it is about the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivity can try to communicate with objectivity, but both of them cannot but realize, continuously, that, besides a possibility of dialogue, there is also an ultimate, structural impossibility of dialogue.
Well stated! I’ve been making this case for a long while, pleased to see someone that re-affirms it.
I agree that consciousness is fundamental, but I read the sign “consciousness” as a pointer to the “being” or “presence” of the world. So consciousness is a fundamental stuff. It’s just the “there-ness” of all kinds of different stuff.
The world has to be “there” in the first place for inquiry. I grant you that. But we also need a creature that cares. Visceral inquiry is problem solving. An animal finds a path around an obstacle or predator to get food. As inquiry becomes linguistic, we already have community.
So “inquiry proper” (in the fully human logocentric sense) requires a community of creatures who care.
Descartes can be “fixed” by understanding the thing that says “I” to also understand the community from which that “I” emerges. The necessary object of ontology is not the man in the box but the community that trades signs as it cooperatively copes with a shared environment. As Avaenarius saw, we should start in the “marketplace” — in the ongoing social world.
Yes.
One can argue that a single pebble exists but that does not mean it is conscious but that would be straying from the intent of the concept “to exist is to be conscious.” This, because - one would have to be conscious in order to acknowledge that the pebble exists. So if the pebble itself is not conscious, it can still be acknowledge by something that is conscious, to exist.
This also open the door to the realisation that along with being conscious and existing, one would also have to have the ability to “voice” outwardly acknowledgment of being conscious and existing (something a pebble cannot do) to other existing forms which also have that ability.
I hesitate-regret to inform you that only humans are conscious to the level required to matter to your thesis; put another way 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999 \% of the universe is not even alive, forget conscious.
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You are drawing a metaphysical conclusion from an epistemological fact. This is never justified.
Everything comes to us via consciousness, and that is why the Hard Problem is unavoidable. It is why eliminative materialism is absurd, even though it is the only logically coherent form of materialism. This is what sets up the HP. But it does not mean neuroscience ceases to be relevant. We have a vast amount of empirical data which demonstrates, beyond reasonable doubt, that brains are necessary for consciousness. It follows that idealism, dualism and panpsychism cannot be the correct solution to the HP. All three of them work as solutions to the HP specifically, but they create other problems which are sufficiently serious to ensure that none of them can sustain a consensus either.
“Consciousness is fundamental” is cop-out. And, in my experience, it is almost always accompanied by “Yay! Life after death!”, revealing the true motive of the people who defend this position.
People who say those who say ‘consciousness is fundamental’ reveals a hidden motive, only say so because they themselves want to kill their father and have sex with their mother.
But I agree with your substantive critique that it does not straightforwardly follow that just because everything is known by consciousness that consciousness is fundamental. It might not-straightforwardly follow, I’m not sure.
Being irritated by suspected woo mongers is understandable, but too easy and not really philosophy
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A form of emergent physicalist argument, or even panpsychic, depending on viewpoint. If the materialistic point of view describes our building blocks of consciousness to be physical, then our level of consciousness is a fundamental emerging thing out of the right configuration of matter and energy.
I also think that there’s a categorization problem people have when thinking about materialistic perspectives. We categorize all sorts of layers of how reality is structured: quantum systems, atoms, molecules, large bodies, etc. But at some point, our categories turn away from the physical into abstractions, when we could very well continue in the physical.
Meaning, why not categorize life as the next category of the physical? That life is a “form of matter,” just as we categorize matter by molecular structures as a higher category above atoms.
Life would then be a natural independent category of the physical world.
Which could also lead to categorizing complex consciousness as another category of the physical. A category of combined biological physics, forming a new definition of a physical aspect of reality.
And it may be that it is impossible for us to understand it, as we exist at this point on the ladder of physics. That what we’re doing in physics is rather looking downward, back across the categories to explain the fundamentals of reality.
But we are unable to look above or within. Because understanding the above is impossible by the means of where we are.
The thing cannot know itself. An atom cannot fully understand itself, only its components, by the result of itself.
We can know only ourselves by the result of the categorical groups forming us, but we cannot know ourselves by the means of ourselves.
It forms a hard line that might be impossible to transcend. And especially what formation the result of our consciousness might form above us. We can calculate that something is or might be, but not an understanding from within it.
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Unfortunately, this begins to read like a confusing Hegel paragraph. But bottom line is that the hard problem might be part of the limit of knowledge itself. Just like we cannot form any real knowledge or understanding of reality beyond the physical laws and reality we experience; cannot measure without measurement being made by our reality, and cannot imagine with the consciousness rooted in this reality.
Reminds me a little of Greg Egan’s “Schild’s Ladder”. In which scientists try to understand and probe the novo-vacuum, which is a vacuum formed out of other physical laws than our universe, and the problems with the tools not working within a reality that does not have the same physical laws which makes the tools operate and behave correctly in the first place.
The hard problem might not be a problem, but a paradox that isn’t solvable.
Not a fundamental problem for philosophy, but the fundamental ground, or shape which philosophy operates on.
The body of philosophy, not able to see or know above it, only below it, only able to examine its composed parts and building blocks that form it.
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I suspect so. If all the animals on our planet go poof tomorrow, it is my best guess that the planet will remain.
It was here before us, after all.
I feel lost in the language. Density is the space and everything inside the space?
It sounds like you are saying that consciousness = the universe.
I am frequently mistaken for a woo-monger myself.
What really irritates me is the over-simplistic nature of the thinking involved. If “consciousness is everything!” was actually the right answer, the debate would have been over at least 400 years ago.
I think the deep underlying problem is the failure to connect the Hard Problem to the Measurement Problem in QM. The right answer won’t be a solution to just one of these problems. The same answer needs to work for both of them, and “work” means that the new proposal is sufficently obviously correct that both debates are finally ended conclusively.
In the past 2 years I have come to realise that actually the same integrated answer needs to resolve all of the major problems in cosmology also. These are not three different problems. They are three manifestations of the same underlying mistake, and they require a unified solution. “Consciousness is fundamental” is not that solution. It is of no use whatsoever for addressing either the MP or the crisis in cosmology.
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Reality has both physical and non-physical aspects. I think consciousness is the capacity to experience, and everything has this capacity. Just as everything has mass and charge.
Like “love”, “feel” means many things. It does not mean only touch/tactile. I feel my own consciousness. I feel happy. I feel like watching a movie. Red feels different than blue. How does the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony make you feel?
When discussing consciousness, I prefer “felt experience” to “subjective experience”.
You misunderstand the depth of the question.
It is not asking “if I die and that is the end of my conscious awareness, would the universe still exist?” - that would be an obvious “yes”.
Rather the question being asked is “If consciousness simply did not exist, would anything be able to be said to exist?” and the answer to that is “no”.
This is also why “Consciousness is fundamental” is NOT cop-out and why " “Consciousness is fundamental” is not that solution." is indeed "that solution.
If nothing can be said to exist without consciousness, then consciousness is fundamental.
Can you describe that feeling? Is it “you” you are feeling, or something you “have” which isn’t all that you are?
Dualism.
Can you name those supposed “non-physical” aspects and why you think they are non-physical"?
I think dualism (the language of) is at the heart of the why Hard Problem exists
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Yeah, if there is no one to say anything, then I would agree than nothing can be said. I guess it seems an unremarkable observation.
Fundamental to the ability to observe? Sure.
At least I don’t think rocks can observe.
How does this account work according to your criteria?
What we call the subatomic realm is simply physical reality operating according to simple principles, but below the threshold of the animal sensorium (the mind’s medium of conscious life — the total field of felt sensations and structured “feeling-images” through which all information becomes present to awareness). It is the universe in its unobserved state — that continuous, undifferentiated quantum matrix …There are no pre-existing features in this mind-independent universe:
“If an object is definite, the identifying information is provided by an observer able to deploy computational power in order to produce the information. [Furthermore ] in order to select a particular object, an observer must have an underlying purpose: It must have intentionality.” (Mind and the Cosmic Order, p. 141)
So the “wave function” of quantum physics isn’t a physical cloud floating in space; it is a sophisticated mathematical Gestalt that describes a reality that has not yet been carved into pieces. It describes, quite literally, the degrees of likelihood for any observations that will subsequently be made. The act of observation makes manifest a specific outcome from that range of possibilities:
“When a subatomic phenomenon is witnessed by an observer, it may be that the event that is detected is something that occurs in the observer’s mind rather than in the external world. To understand this, it must recalled that we never see reality “as it is”: Instead, what we see is the way it appears to us in our world-model. Thus, when the scientist observes the result of an experiment, he interprets it — and indeed sees it — in the light of his own world-model.” (Mind and the Cosmic Order, p. 142)
This harks back to the well–known saying of that quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg, who said: “what we see is not nature as she is in herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning”.