I don’t think I can describe it any more than I can describe my feeling when I listen to that Beethoven piece (or any musical composition), or when I see the color blue. We all know our feelings regarding these things, but can’t describe them in objective terms. That’s why we can’t make someone who can see all colors except green know what it is to see green.
But we all know our own consciousness. It’s the only thing any of us truly do know. It is the feeling of my existence.
I am interested in how people feel colour. I don’t know my fellings regarding blue. I see colour blue. Any thoughts on that?
I can feel my consciousnes, but feeling is tactile…
This seems to be an attempt to establish foundations. The brute facts of the Universe seem to lead to consciousness.
Whether all your questions converge on those facts depends on what questions it is useful for you to ask. Many of my questions concern emergent properties of the Universe.
Like will there be cake for tea!
I think “feel” is just a catchall. Like “see”. “Do you see what I mean”? “I see that the Yankees lost yesterday.” Emotions are aka feelings, although they are not tactile. What does “feel” mean in “I feel like a fool”?
Or “image” when Antonio Damasio talks about mental images. In Descarte’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, for example:
Thanks. Yes, that is pretty much how I use the word “feel.” But, I still don’t feel colours, and maybe that is part of what someone here on TPF mentioned as aphantasia.
Consciousness, will and wavefunction collapse are three different names for exactly the same process: the selection of classical actuality from quantum probability.
Would you go so far as to say that it isn’t something you have but rather something you are?
You can touch it?
You also wrote “my consciousness” as if it is something you have rather than something you are. Do you think i=of it as a property of sort, and if so, what is the “you” you identify as which has this property of consciousness?
Why do you think that? How can you show it is the case rather than seems to be the case? Have you thought about the possibility that it may be there other way around, and if not, why not?
What is this talk from Antonio Damasio based upon? Assumption or evidence?
This would seem to be the case, yes. This points to the Hard Problem specifically, which wasn’t introduced 400 years ago.
Not if the word “consciousness” is not understood. The HP points to this being the thing that makes it a “problem” not just why it exist at all, but what the heck IS it - exactly…
The HP reminds me of that blind men and the elephant story…
How did you come to this conclusion and why do you think it is the correct one?
It’s hard to say. I have a different feeling for different colors. Which I would say is best described as an emotional feeling. But it’s not like happy for blue, angry for red, peaceful for green, etc. “Emotional” isn’t exactly right, but I don’t know what is. We can’t even describe our emotions in such a way that someone who has no emotions would understand, and I think our feelings about colors or not even as clear as our emotions. Also, they aren’t profound, powerful feelings.
Maybe it is for some. People with Grapheme Color Synesthia say numbers are a specific color. So who’s to say people can’t have strong emotional feelings for colors?
Yes. I say consciousness is my felt experience of my being. Of all aspects of me. Of my likes, dislikes, memories, both external and internal sensory input, proprioception, etc.
Yet, it is consciousness which acknowledges and experiences the sensory inputs, rather than creates those.
That is to say that IF “you” are “consciousness” THEN you are experiencing being human through the form you occupy and the sensory system that form provides for you to experience.
Consciousness is the experiencer.
The form is the medium.
The sensory system is the interface.
Being human is the experience.
The original version of the same problem first appeared in the work of David Hume in 1738. Different name, same problem.
Yes, the real problem is that nobody is looking for the whole elephant.
A new kind of paradigm shift | Two-Phase Cosmology
The new paradigm begins from the same impulse that gave rise to modern science in the first place: the wish to understand reality as a single, intelligible whole. The difference is that this time, instead of just collecting ever more fragments, we must look for principles that can make the fragments fit together. The central example of what this is the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. I will start with a relatively unproblematic claim: that quantum wavefunction collapse and consciousness are both processes. More controversially, there are five notable similarities between them.
1: Both have proved extremely difficult for scientists to pin down, define and test.
2: As a result of (1), a significant number of scientists have controversially concluded that they don’t actually exist (resulting in the Many Worlds Interpretation and Eliminative Materialism respectively).
3: Wavefunction collapse is typically described as being triggered by an “observation” or “measurement”. Consciousness is the internal subjective experience of some kind of external reality. Therefore, both processes fundamentally involve a relationship between a subjective entity (an observer or a conscious subject) and an external, objective reality.
4: Wave-function collapse is famously non-local: the collapse at one location instantaneously affects the entire wave function, no matter how far it is spread across space. Consciousness is equally resistant to strict localisation: there is no single “seat” or moment where a unified field of experience arises; it emerges all at once from processes distributed across the brain (and, I will argue, beyond it). Both phenomena refuse to be restricted to a classical space-time point; both demand a fundamentally holistic description.
5: Consciousness involves the modelling of a mind-external reality, and assigning value to the various possible futures in order to select a best option. Wavefunction collapse involves the reduction of a set of unobserved physically possible outcomes into a single observed actual outcome. Therefore, both processes involve the transition between a range of possible futures or histories, and a single observed outcome in the present.
Now the difference between the old paradigm and the new can be made clear. The old paradigm approach to this is to examine each claim individually, demand irrefutable empirical justification, and consider the alternative explanations which are available. This is likely to result in the rejection of all five, not because of any clear justification for ruling them out, but for inconclusive reasons: there are too many competing theories (some of which are more to our personal taste), empirical confirmation is complicated, elusive or impossible, and the whole thing feels like woo. And anyway, correlations aren’t evidence of causation, so even if we accept that there really are five structural similarities, it doesn’t prove anything. There the discussion will be extinguished, no new thinking will take place, and we can all go back to our comfortable lack of a coherent model of reality.
The new paradigm takes the opposite approach: instead of breaking things down, it tries to integrate them into a bigger picture. First it takes seriously the idea that instead of being unrelated processes which just happen to share five similarities, consciousness and wavefunction collapse could be two different descriptions of a single process. Perhaps consciousness is the internal, subjective (“view from somewhere”) and wavefunction collapse is the external, objective (“view from nowhere”). Then it tries to figure out how this might actually work, not just physically but metaphysically. If a coherent and elegant synthesis starts emerging, then the old paradigm will insist on empirical verification of the synthesis itself, preferably involving shiny new mathematics, before any more integrative thinking is attempted. The new one zooms even further out: it asks how the proposed synthesis might be related to other major problems, especially those in cosmology. For example, could such a model help us to understand why we can’t quantise gravity, or shed any light on the Hubble Tension or the Cosmological Constant Problem? The old paradigm forbids this approach**3**. It actively resists it, places obstacles in its path and tells us that this is the only way science has ever progressed. It insists that every proposed piece of the Big Puzzle must be empirically verified before we can even start to imagine how the pieces might fit together. This is why it so rarely succeeds in even fitting two pieces together, and why it has about as much chance of delivering a grand synthesis as it does of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The new paradigm simply asks what kind of whole could make sense of the pieces we already have. All of them. Not just the ones that that don’t challenge our own assumptions and belief systems.
Which part? There are, indeed, neurons between sensory and motor neurons, which are called interneurons.
His definition of mind, that it must have “the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought” is not a universal. In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write:
I don’t think Ogas and Gaddam are describing thinking, although it’s certainly three first step that leads to thinking. I think Damasio has a better definition, although I don’t know if it’s enough.
Certainly. Anything that has a different form than I have - which, to greater or least degree, includes everything in the universe - experiences itself as something different.
Hume asked how we can know the self - but he did not frame it as the problem of subjective experience.
Chalmers named it and framed it clearly. Earlier philosophers - including Hume - addressed related questions.
I will have a look at that thread and perhaps comment further, there.
Thus, mind is different from consciousness and mind can be said to be a construct of Consciousness - not the fundamental but a production of the ground which is consciousness.