Thread: What is the substance of Consciousness?

Then I would have to say that you haven't thought about the implications hard enough.

Nevertheless, its important to learn the basics of the different perspectives before delving deeper into more secular notions...wouldn't you say? It keeps you from getting too, how do you say, lopsided.

Anywho, i'm not sure I caught any of your opinions on the subject Carosoul. How about some insight?


Xaq, i do believe that the brain may indeed be enough to explain the sensations of consciousness, despite the brain, nowadays, still being somewhat shrouded in mystery. Of course I'll have to leave that up to neuroscience and there lust for the death of psychology.

But as for some of your specific concerns, I will do my best to try to present some possible explanations.

"Obviously the presence of a brain is not enough; as even wasps have a rudimentary brain(actually three) but I would definitely argue are not conscious; at least not as individuals."

Perhaps consciousness isn't an all or nothing quality, in which case wasps (and animals) who posses brains or brain-like structures do indeed have consciousness, just not as sophisticated or complicated as our own, for example. If consciosuness is essentially a sense of awareness, surely wasps are somewhat aware of reality, if only minutely in cpomparison to ourselves. Never the less, couldnt that limited sense of awareness still be considered consciousness, or is there a "threshold" somewhere in which awareness becomes consciousness, and if there is, what is it?

"There are parts of the brain that can be completely removed leaving a person's sense of consciousness intact, and there are people who appear to have about the same brain functions as the rest of us but do not appear to be conscious (although I will point out that often appearances can be deceiving). "

If we look back to the Yale example, imagine the loss/damage of certain aspects of the brain being equal to the loss/damage of a building or two. Would such a loss, like the demolition of the library, somehow make the difference between that university being "Yale" and not being "Yale"? I wouldn't say so. If the consciousness is indeed composed of multiple and different components, like Yale is composed of many different complexes, I feel that it would be possible to loose one or more of those components and still have what would be called "consciousness" or "yale", but perhaps just not as complete as it orginally was....which seems to be inline with evidence surrounding partial brain damage. Yale is still Yale without the library, and people can still be conscious without certain faculties.

"I would argue then that consciousness stems from the level of ability to communicate with the outside world. This is in part due to our complex sense organs, and also the speech centers of our brain as well as our tongue"

Would you say its possible that, perhaps our advanced ability to understand and communicated with the outside world is not just partly due to our physiology, but potentially completely due to it? We are far from ruling out that our brains are "not enough" to be capable of such things. On the contrary, I would say that the more we learn about the brain, the more possibility there is that the brain/body is fully and independently capable of such things.

If our advanced sence of consciousness is the result of EvoDevo, as you may have been implying, then I would have to argue that consciousness is, at least, primarily physical, if not totally...seeing as evoltionary developement is genetic, or biological, in nature.

What do you think?

Originally Posted by ethen

Then I would have to say that you haven't thought about the implications hard enough.

Nevertheless, its important to learn the basics of the different perspectives before delving deeper into more secular notions...wouldn't you say? It keeps you from getting too, how do you say, lopsided.

Anywho, i'm not sure I caught any of your opinions on the subject Carosoul. How about some insight?

too tiredd..

Originally Posted by ethen

If our advanced sence of consciousness is the result of EvoDevo, as you may have been implying, then I would have to argue that consciousness is, at least, primarily physical, if not totally...seeing as evoltionary developement is genetic, or biological, in nature.

What do you think?

I don't believe that there is any metaphysical universal consciousness that exists without physical conscious beings. I do, however, believe that there is a collective consciousness, but I believe it is a result of individual consciousness and not vice versa. "The Chinese Brain" thread encapsulates my views on that particular subject; and it is something I actually brought up in another thread called 'On the nature of reality and intelligence'. I'm assuming this is what you are asking about; to be more direct, I have always believed consciousness to come from a physical source. Any of the non-physical aspects of consciousness are effects, not causes.

Originally Posted by NonDualistic

I notice you never did respond directly to my comments:

Oh, sorry. Someone else made a similar point about consciousness having emergent properties, and when I responded to them I must have mixed both of you together in my mind and thought I had responded to you as well.

Anyways, my response is that you can't possibly have an 'emergent property' of something like consciousness, because consciousness is itself an emergent property. By definition, you need smaller, simple parts to emerge from - consciousness does not fit that requirement. Consciousness refers to the emergent properties of the neurons in our brains, which includes awareness and emotions, etc. - awareness and emotions do not arise FROM consciousness, they ARE consciousness. I think that's where I see the problem.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

Perhaps, just you should avoid conversations in philosophy. Personally, I believe the only way science can progress is if one explorers every crazy and seemingly absurd possibility in the mind and then, as almost the final step, picks out those that make the most sense and applies scientific rigor. It seems like you are only comfortable dealing with existing scientific concepts, and if this is the case, I feel sorry for you because you will never progress in the field of science and the only hope you have is becoming a teacher of it.

I'm not saying we shouldn't explore possibilities, I'm just saying that we should avoid being overly vague and nonsensical about how we explain these possibilities. When your idea of a possibility is something like "What if our minds are really made up of chakras which are all a collective part of the overarching higher-plane consciousness of the earth's being?", you're not really discussing a possibility, you're just throwing empty words around.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

The next step is to formulate ideas and then construct new hypotheses. Since no one here will be getting a research grant any time soon, and none of us have access to extensive labs, all we can do at this point is discuss the possibilities

I completely agree with you here. All I ask is that we attempt to keep this conjecture to a reasonable level, where it might be possible for us to actually reach some measure of clarity in our thoughts. The first order of business, as far as I can see, is to attempt to define consciousness. Here again there are many possibilities, but it is a much more manageable task. As you've noted, we already have a fair amount of empirical data at hand, and every last one of us has a nearly endless supply of phenomenological experiences to draw from.

It just makes more sense than talking about what it's made of, how it looks, or what it's connected/not connected to... what is it?

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

all we can do at this point is discuss the possibilities; something I've noticed you are not very good at. You are amazingly good at talking about what is, but your ability falls off drastically when talking about what could be.

Thanks for the compliment, but I can't help but feel that it's a bit back-handed. This may come off as a bit pompous of me, but I think I see a recurring trend here. People almost always decide that I am very good at one particular thing, but am terrible at everything else (or one other crucial thing). This, to me, seems to be an effort (perhaps even a subconscious one?) to devalue my contributions by portraying me as a hopelessly lopsided, skewed individual. I really don't think that I am.

Just to clear things up, yes I do try to be a very scientific person. However, I love fantasy books, I've won a fair amount of awards/recognition for my photography and art, I independently came up with the idea of causal determinism before I was ever exposed to the concepts involved, and I do sometimes have emotions.

I'm no robot, and I'm pretty well-rounded.

Some cool discussion going on here...

The point of this example is that, perhaps consciousness is like this example in the sense that consciousness may not really be a separate entity in of itself, but rather the totality of components that, themselves cannot be called "Yale". The author used this example to try to explain a different position on the subject (amongst several others).

Yeah, this is called the phenomenological argument. Important essays on this, if you are interested, are by Nagel (what is it like to be a bat?) and others. Nagel basically argues that we can study all there is to know about how a bat uses sonar, about its body and organs and DNA and the like, but we can never know the 'qualia' or 'what it is like to be' of a bat's experience. Thus, he argues, we can never adequately explain consciousness.

It's an interesting thought-experiment, but I think Nagel is misguided. He seems to have subjective experience and explanation mixed up - there is no 'other' thing of consciousness that we cannot explain, it's simply that it is impossible to subjectively experience what it would be like to be a bat. Nagel seems to be proposing some kind of 'subject.' As Dennet observes:

"…if your theory still has tasks for a Subject to perform, still has the need for a Subject as Witness, then although you can be falsely comforted by the sense that there is still somebody at home in the brain, you have actually postponed the task of explaining what needs explaining (229)." Consciousness Explained

It's a sort of ghost-in-the-shell scenario. Consciousness is likely to be adequately explained in the next two decades, but conscious subjective experience, by definition needs to be experienced. As it is, our consciousness is very likely simply a method of representation allowing survival. We are aware of and experience the world around us to enable us to find food, shelter and sex etc. We need a representation of our 'selves' in order to know that 'if I save this food for when I may be hungry i'll have a better chance of surviving.' Long-term survival decisions depend on us having a concept of ourselves as a being - if thought that 'I' will not exist in this body tomorrow, what's the point of eating today?

Evidence of this can be seen in developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology. The more intelligent a species is, the more self-awareness they display (chimps recognise themselves in the mirror, but cannot recognise that the chimp next to them in the mirror is the same chimp that is next to them if there is another chimp.) For example, childeren reach a point of 'theory of mind.' Here's the experiment:

A child is shown a chocolate box. The researcher opens it and takes out the chocolates, then puts pencils in there, with the child watching. They then let another child into the room. The researcher asks the first child "what will child B think is in here?" Up until about 3 1/2 years of age, the child will answer 'pencils.' Beyond that age, the child will answer 'chocolate.' Once at this age, the child is able to develop a 'theory of mind,' which is to say that he/she can represent other people and acknowledge and represent the beliefs they will have.

This is evidence of how our brains have evolved to become highly intricate. In a highly social world, we need to be able to see other people as 'people' capable of (false/true) beliefs. It has been proposed that people with severe autism have reduced theory of mind, and being unable to predict and attribute beliefs to other people can be seen as a significant problem in survival.

I mention all this, because from a naturalist, materialist and reductionist viewpoint, consciousness (my experience of being me) is simply a highly complex means of representation. Not only can I represent my body (pain, emotion) but I can represent the world I see, and also the people I meet. If I didn't have a sense of self-identity, I would be in big trouble trying to survive: I wouldn't. I would not be able to distinguish my own body from the rest of the world and I would not have any motivation to eat etc.

Evolutionarily speaking, our brains developed from the spinal chord (simple organisms) up, all the way to the prefrontal cortex (pretty much behind your forehead. It is the prefrontal cortex that performs the most abstract thinking, and seems to be the location of most of the things we would see as 'consciousness.'

As for the science-philosophy debate, it's actually quite multi-faceated. Increasingly, philosophy of mind is becoming a science, and philosophers are drawing upon the wealth of new cognitive findings to form and expand their theories. Analytic philosophy, which seems more detatched and meaningless, actually serves the purpose of allowing us to work out what we mean by concepts and words we use, through thought experiments etc. It's not a case of theory being opposed to experiment - both are in symbiosis. You cannot have one without the other.

Originally Posted by thegnome54

Oh, sorry. Someone else made a similar point about consciousness having emergent properties, and when I responded to them I must have mixed both of you together in my mind and thought I had responded to you as well.

Anyways, my response is that you can't possibly have an 'emergent property' of something like consciousness, because consciousness is itself an emergent property. By definition, you need smaller, simple parts to emerge from - consciousness does not fit that requirement. Consciousness refers to the emergent properties of the neurons in our brains, which includes awareness and emotions, etc. - awareness and emotions do not arise FROM consciousness, they ARE consciousness. I think that's where I see the problem.

How do you know those two qualities are "consciousess"?

I do see where you are coming from in drawing your conclusions, and if your assumptions are true, then I would think such is valid.
However, what I am playing around with is the idea that "energy" as we discussed, and "consciousness" are one in the same.

"If" such were to be true then, would it not be possible that the quality of consciusness would through the quality of energy manifest into material form ( matter converted from said energy) to produce the quality of awareness. ....and having done so, such would then produce the quality of emotion due to attachment and desire of/for those things now material to be aware of?

Answer from a hypothetical standpoint, if you would.

Originally Posted by NonDualistic

"If" such were to be true then, would it not be possible that the quality of consciusness would through the quality of energy manifest into material form ( matter converted from said energy) to produce the quality of awareness. ....and having done so, such would then produce the quality of emotion due to attachment and desire of/for those things now material to be aware of?

Answer from a hypothetical standpoint, if you would.

Well, if energy were consciousness, then everything which had energy would be conscious - so unless you're saying that every single bit of matter in existence has consciousness, it's not very plausible.

It's possible that energy could be one of the ingredients necessary to produce consciousness, but then consciousness itself would still really just be an emergent property of the ways energy interacts with other energy and matter. I don't really see a way for energy to BE consciousness.

Originally Posted by thegnome54

Well, if energy were consciousness, then everything which had energy would be conscious - so unless you're saying that every single bit of matter in existence has consciousness, it's not very plausible.

It's possible that energy could be one of the ingredients necessary to produce consciousness, but then consciousness itself would still really just be an emergent property of the ways energy interacts with other energy and matter. I don't really see a way for energy to BE consciousness.

Interesting answer, I do appreciate the way your mind looks at things. I'd like to borrow your hypothetical thinking on this for a little while longer if I could.

As you suggest, If energy were conscious then all matter would also therefore be conscious as well. Kind of difficult to imagine under our usual thinking of how we define consciousness.

Hypothetically, If energy itself were consciousness, how would/could such express itself? How would it know itself, or be self aware?