Consciousness: Is It Possible?

[Souron]

I don't see turning the conscious into a physical thing happening until some one can explain where thoughts come from. Now the method that you have prescribed may be able to predict and catalogue behavior, but I see it doing little to explain that behavior or nature in a way that takes it from the "unknown" into the known.

Even if we could eventually stop the ongoing process of thoughts appearing, what have we accomplished? It would seem we would have lost something. Not gained it. If we could come up with thoughts on our own where would we get new thoughts to send to ourselves?

Why do we have to know how it works to be able to call something physical? That seems backwards; we should assume it's physical until we have reason to think otherwise. Which we don't. Being not yet fully understood does not make things immaterial.

We also do have some knowledge of how it works. Not the whole picture, but neuroscience is not without merit. We have some idea of how neurons work, and some idea of how that might lead to the more complex behavior of the brain as a whole. And we have knowledge of other things that are made up of as simple components that can do as complicated things.

 

[timtofly]

I am not the one who demands "reality" to be real without a physical objective presence. I hold that there is a real "spiritual" element that is an unknown, and subjective.

What is backwards is trying to explain this reality away, by bringing it into the physical domain. Mystics tried to explain it. Then came the philosophers who had a go at it. Now the scientist think they have a grasp on the concept. I am dismissed, because I state it has been there in the Bible since Moses. So, no, I do not assume it is physical, because I have no need to.

 

[Souron]

I am not the one who demands "reality" to be real without a physical objective presence. I hold that there is a real "spiritual" element that is an unknown, and subjective.

What is backwards is trying to explain this reality away, by bringing it into the physical domain. Mystics tried to explain it. Then came the philosophers who had a go at it. Now the scientist think they have a grasp on the concept. I am dismissed, because I state it has been there in the Bible since Moses. So, no, I do not assume it is physical, because I have no need to.

Consciouses has an objective presence. We think. Well I do, and Inductive reasoning you probably do. It has observable effects; we can tell a person from a rock. On top of that there is good evidence that consciousness is manifest in the brain -- damage the brain, and you can damage a persons ability to act with apparent awareness. This places understanding of the mechanism of consciousness squarely in the domain of neuroscientists. And the right approach to the study of something as physical as the brain is that you try to build the simplest theory that fits the data. That effectively precludes inventing extraneous details such as those commonly associated with souls and spirits. There's no reason to invent such a thing as non-physical existence.

Mystics were just guessing, they had no sound method. Philosophers study what is logically consistent; their explanation can only tell you what could be, more they cannot convince each other of. Scientists study what is. And there is a proper method to studying what is.

 

[timtofly]

I am not the one inventing non-physical existence. Who would you say is inventing such a thing? Can you prove they invented it? Until we find out where thoughts come from, we could probably assign any abstract idea to it. Some people choose to call it magic, some religion, some just leave it alone awaiting science to explain it better. I am not sure why accepting what the Bible says, is any less unique or demanding than any of the other options.

 

[Souron]

I am not the one inventing non-physical existence. Who would you say is inventing such a thing? Can you prove they invented it? Until we find out where thoughts come from, we could probably assign any abstract idea to it. Some people choose to call it magic, some religion, some just leave it alone awaiting science to explain it better. I am not sure why accepting what the Bible says, is any less unique or demanding than any of the other options.

Until we find of the detailed mechanism of the mind, we should except that we don't know how the mind works, not make stuff up and pretend it's true. I don't mind assigning words to abstract ideas, so long as those words are not loaded with implications that go beyond the stated idea. The seat of consciousness is the human mind, and that's good enough word to describe that idea. But we have no reason to say the mind is not physical. That's an unfounded claim.

Accepting what the Bible says is unscientific, because it adds superfluous details without evidence. When explaining natural phenomena, in proper a theory every detail of the theory should have directly explain a specific observable result. In particular the claim that some part of the mind in not material does not aid in explaining how the mind works.

The above describes the scientific method. It also describes the only way to acquire true knowledge, for knowledge requires justification, and superfluous details do not have sound justification.

 

[timtofly]

How can you use the word mind? How can you say the seat of consciousness is the human mind? How can you say that knowledge requires justification? What does it mean to have sound justification? If you are using them as part of your argument, then you have accepted the Bible. Now you contend that the Bible adds superfluous details without evidence. What evidence are you looking for? All I am pointing out is that no one seems to know where thoughts come from. Perhaps one day they may come up with a convincing explanation that passes the test of the scientific method.

I concede that perhaps one can come to the same conclusion the Bible has, and still hold to the scientific method as one's final authority on the matter. The word mind is just a concept of what happens within the brain. It may be just as physical as the brain itself, but that is not really the point of ruling out whether the "unknown" cannot be "spiritual" or not. Humans decided the word "spiritual" could represent something they could not explain, but are you saying they made up their own experiences and hallucinated everything they wrote down? You may be right, but there is no scientific method available to test that hypothesis.

 

[Borachio]

Consciouses has an objective presence. We think. Well I do,.

Can you demonstrate that you think?

What kind of objective evidence does an outside observer have that you are thinking? And that you are aware of yourself thinking?

Wouldn't that be evidence of consciousness? But I can't imagine what form this evidence might take.

 

[Kyriakos]

Souron is correct in this, although you approach it differently, Borachio. Everyone is (normally*) aware that he exists, and this happens through his consciousness. Almost always it consists of both mental and sensory input or goings-on. Equally true is, indeed, that we only can know this for our own self.

*Some mentally ill people can form the sense that they don't exist. This is (i have to suppose) ultimately a fallacy given that they still sense something, which they take to mean that they don't exist.

 

[Borachio]

I'm not suggesting for a moment that someone isn't aware of their own existence.

All I'm asking for is some objective evidence (or an example of such) that would convince an unbiased observer that any particular individual* was actually thinking.

Is this too much to ask?

*other than the observer him/herself.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yes, there is objective evidence of consciousness, but it can only be observed by a single observer. Cognitive neuroscience started making huge, huge leaps once we got 'past' the solipsism issues and just 'agreed to agree' that people are conscious. After that, it was greatly a function of self-report when conducting experiments, but we've even learned to distinguish self-report from other cognitive tricks ("you think you saw something").

It's a hard field to make progress in. Firstly, well, it's hard. Secondly, there's a massive lure towards working on neurodegenerative diseases if you're interested in neuroscience. It's all baby-steps.

 

[Souron]

Can you demonstrate that you think?

What kind of objective evidence does an outside observer have that you are thinking? And that you are aware of yourself thinking?

Wouldn't that be evidence of consciousness? But I can't imagine what form this evidence might take.

I'm aware of myself thinking, and I'm aware of other people behaving in ways similar enough to me that they're probably thinking too. It is induction, which does have epistemological problems, but they are no worse than any product of science.

 

[Kyriakos]

I would say that (to get back to Anaxagoras and his friends ) it is very different to know that you exist, and on the other hand to suppose that others exist as well. I have not much reason to think they do not (although when i was in elementary school i actually had the theory that they are a collective other-entity, and i am not part of it), but i don't have any actual knowledge that they do, either, in terms of "existence" meaning a consciousness which i would replicate in at least a general form of it. The latter seems impossible to me (not to make a general note about someone else, which can be done, but to be sure that this note, however general, is not really critically ignoring the different parameters which the other person may have in his own consiousness, thus rendering the note to a degree quite useless in my view).

I generally see my own consciousness as the core of my own existence, with the rest of my mental world being unconscious but potentially becomming part of my consciousness to some degree. Other people's consciousness is beyond the vanishing point in the horizon, so i can theorise of it, but not "know" it.

 

[El_Machinae]

You don't have a good reason to assume that other people think? Really? Solipsism aside, it's a pretty good mechanism for getting by day-to-day.

 

[Kyriakos]

You don't have a good reason to assume that other people think? Really? Solipsism aside, it's a pretty good mechanism for getting by day-to-day.

Actually i pretty much said the opposite of that (ie that i do not have a great reason to think that they do not exist). Are you trying to make me think you don't think? I think you do, don't you?

 

[El_Machinae]

Oh! I missed the double-negative. Yes, you said the opposite of that.
And I've been failing the Turing Test since 1999, baby!

 

[Borachio]

Yes, there is objective evidence of consciousness, but it can only be observed by a single observer.

I'm aware of myself thinking, and I'm aware of other people behaving in ways similar enough to me that they're probably thinking too. It is induction, which does have epistemological problems, but they are no worse than any product of science.

Do either of these qualify as objective observations?

Notice I'm not denying that other people think (that would be silly), I'm just asking for an indication of what would qualify as objective evidence for it.

I'd have thought an objective observation would be one that's independent of any one individual's perception. The first quote fails on this count, doesn't it?

Does the second one fail too?

 

[Kyriakos]

Do either of these qualify as objective observations?

Notice I'm not denying that other people think (that would be silly), I'm just asking for an indication of what would qualify as objective evidence for it.

"Silly" is wrong in this use of it, in my view It would be like claiming something like "i'm not denying that other sentient/intelligent/self-reflecting species exist in our galaxy, that would be silly", it would not, it is unlikely they don't exist in such a vast space, and even more unlikely in the entirety of the universe or cosmos. But it is not silly to claim they might not exist

In general if we are theorising about something which can be proven only beyond a point that we can reach, it is never silly to think that any of our hypotheseis of it are not correct.

 

[peter grimes]

I don't see turning the conscious into a physical thing happening until some one can explain where thoughts come from. Now the method that you have prescribed may be able to predict and catalogue behavior, but I see it doing little to explain that behavior or nature in a way that takes it from the "unknown" into the known.

How much evidence do you need to see before accepting that consciousness is the result of neurochemical and electrical activity in the brain?

So far we have no reason to doubt that as we learn more this basic understanding will be an insufficient foundation for a more detailed understanding.

 

[Souron]

How can you use the word mind? How can you say the seat of consciousness is the human mind? How can you say that knowledge requires justification? What does it mean to have sound justification? If you are using them as part of your argument, then you have accepted the Bible. Now you contend that the Bible adds superfluous details without evidence. What evidence are you looking for? All I am pointing out is that no one seems to know where thoughts come from. Perhaps one day they may come up with a convincing explanation that passes the test of the scientific method.

I concede that perhaps one can come to the same conclusion the Bible has, and still hold to the scientific method as one's final authority on the matter. The word mind is just a concept of what happens within the brain. It may be just as physical as the brain itself, but that is not really the point of ruling out whether the "unknown" cannot be "spiritual" or not. Humans decided the word "spiritual" could represent something they could not explain, but are you saying they made up their own experiences and hallucinated everything they wrote down? You may be right, but there is no scientific method available to test that hypothesis.

"spiritual" is another loaded word. The unknown is not spiritual, it's unknown. But the mind is not even wholly unknown, we know some stuff about how it works. So not only can you not call in spiritual just because it's unknown, you cannot call it spiritual because from what we know about it it isn't.

But I am not a Christian. So to me the Bible is no different than the Greek myths. It does make some claims about the nature, but they are arbitrary. We can explain rainbows as God's covenant with man, or we can explain rainbows as the only way optics work with light and water. But the former A) doesn't explain much about rainbows, and B) explains too much. Specifically, it explains too much because looking at a rainbow you cannot deduce the nature or existence of the covenant from it. (So you asked what evidence I'd need, and this is an example -- I'd need to be able deduce the covenant from rainbows.) Furthermore, there is a contradiction between science and the account of the Bible, because the Bible posits that there were no rainbows before the covenant. So it makes more sense to explain nature by the scientific method and disregard the Bible completely.


As to the Bible, I can understand that a Christian would consider it a source of knowledge. However, the bible occasionally conflicts with the results of science. There are two ways to resolve that. One is to say that the Bible takes precedence, which results in a variant of Last-Thursday-ism. The other is to say that the Bible is not wholly literal. In that case it becomes a question when reading a particular Biblical passage, how do you know if it's literal? Even if it's not contradicted by modern science, it might be in the future. So you're left to assume that the Bible may be wholly metaphor. But even that leaves claims about nature.

How much evidence do you need to see before accepting that consciousness is the result of neurochemical and electrical activity in the brain?

So far we have no reason to doubt that as we learn more this basic understanding will be an insufficient foundation for a more detailed understanding.

Well put.

 

[Souron]

Do either of these qualify as objective observations?

Notice I'm not denying that other people think (that would be silly), I'm just asking for an indication of what would qualify as objective evidence for it.

I'd have thought an objective observation would be one that's independent of any one individual's perception. The first quote fails on this count, doesn't it?

Does the second one fail too?

Presumably any person in my shoes would be able to observe themselves think. That observation isn't a feeling, it's an observation of nature. Yeah it's a little odd compared to other kinds of objective evidence, but it's odd compared to subjective opinion too.

And really if my observation of my own mind is subjective, that would cast doubt on the reliability of that observation. That's not evidence that it's not subjective, but it underscores the profound nature of the claim. My existence as a thinking entity is the thing I am most sure of, if you can cast doubt on that I'll be impressed.

And the observation that other people can think can be objective, because it can in principle be divided into specific observations that map to specific cognitive abilities.

I would say that (to get back to Anaxagoras and his friends ) it is very different to know that you exist, and on the other hand to suppose that others exist as well. I have not much reason to think they do not (although when i was in elementary school i actually had the theory that they are a collective other-entity, and i am not part of it), but i don't have any actual knowledge that they do, either, in terms of "existence" meaning a consciousness which i would replicate in at least a general form of it. The latter seems impossible to me (not to make a general note about someone else, which can be done, but to be sure that this note, however general, is not really critically ignoring the different parameters which the other person may have in his own consiousness, thus rendering the note to a degree quite useless in my view).

I generally see my own consciousness as the core of my own existence, with the rest of my mental world being unconscious but potentially becomming part of my consciousness to some degree. Other people's consciousness is beyond the vanishing point in the horizon, so i can theorise of it, but not "know" it.

Yeah, the evidence that other people are conscious is weaker than your own consciousness. However, I'd say that we can be confident enough of it to still call it "knowledge". IMO, The strictness of the term "knowledge" depends on context, so at different times it may be reasonable with the same amount of evidence to say that you do or don't know something.