Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cro...ness-real/

"Of all the odd notions to emerge from debates over consciousness, the oddest is that it doesn’t exist, at least not in the way we think it does. It is an illusion, like “Santa Claus” or “American democracy.”

Descartes said consciousness is the one undeniable fact of our existence, and I find it hard to disagree. I’m conscious right now, as I type this sentence, and you are presumably conscious as you read it. (I can’t be sure about you, because I have access only to my own consciousness.)

The idea that consciousness isn’t real has always struck me as crazy, and not in a good way, but smart people espouse it. One of the smartest is philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has been questioning consciousness for decades, notably in his 1991 bestseller Consciousness Explained.

I’ve always thought I must be missing something in Dennett’s argument, so I hoped his new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, would enlighten me. It does, but not in the way Dennett intended.

Dennett restates his claim that Darwinian theory can account for all aspects of our existence. We don’t need an intelligent designer, or “skyhook,” to explain how eyes, hands and minds came to be, because evolution provides “cranes” for constructing all biological phenomena.

Natural selection yields what Dennett calls “competence without comprehension.” (D.D. loves alliteration.) Even the simplest bacterium is a marvelous machine, extracting from its environment what it needs to survive and reproduce. Eventually, the mindless, aimless process of evolution produced Homo sapiens, a species capable of competence and comprehension.

But human cognition, Dennett emphasizes, still consists mainly of competence without comprehension. Our conscious thoughts represent a minute fraction of all the information processing carried out by our brains. Natural selection designed our brains to provide us with thoughts on a “need to know” basis, so we’re not overwhelmed with data.

Dennett compares consciousness to the user interface of a computer. The contents of our awareness, he asserts, bear the same relation to our brains that the little folders and other icons on the screen of a computer bear to its underlying circuitry and software. Our perceptions, memories and emotions are grossly simplified, cartoonish representations of hidden, hideously complex computations."...continued in link..

Quote:But he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are zombies, creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:

“The only support for that conviction [that you are not a zombie] is the vehemence of the conviction itself, and as soon as you allow the theoretical possibility that there could be zombies, you have to give up your papal authority about your own nonzombiehood.” Think you’re conscious? Think again.

[...] Dennett, an outspoken atheist, fears that creationism and other superstitious nonsense will persist as long as mysteries do. He thus insists that science can untangle even the knottiest conundrums, including the origin of life (which he asserts that recent “breakthroughs” are helping to solve) and consciousness.

I'm afraid their militant "mysterio-phobia" or scientism probably is the underlying motive, dogmatically strong enough to drive adherents to assert that we're all deluded p-zombies. 

Ironically, it's that indifference to experience, treated like an elephant in the room -- the refusal to address or attempt to explain experience at all -- that very much attracts attention and keeps the "woo activity" alive that they dread. ("Explain" here is purely in the broadest sense, and not outputting a nuts&bolts system or science that could literally grapple with phenomenal properties. That's probably beyond human capacity, though maybe not for a potential archailect of the future.)

For instance, something general along the line of Russellian monism would alternatively satisfy the issue (for physicalists, anyway) without the silliness of denying that there's manifested content to sensations and thoughts. It's hardly inconsistent to assert that matter exists in some other way than artificial, abstract description -- if one indeed believes that there is a non-psychological world devoid of human representations, that exists in some manner independently of the latter.

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Bertrand Russell: I maintain an opinion which all other philosophers find shocking: namely, that people's thoughts are in their heads. The light from a star travels over intervening space and causes a disturbance in the optic nerve ending in an occurrence in the brain. What I maintain is that the occurrence in the brain is a visual sensation. I maintain, in fact, that the brain consists of thoughts --using thought-- in its widest sense, as it is used by Descartes. What I maintain is that we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads, and that we cannot witness or observe anything else at all.

Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.

Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity.

David Chalmers: It is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical - the properties that causation ultimately relates - are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information. This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience - a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive.

John Gregg: It is worth noting that, properly speaking, physicalism itself can be seen as a kind of functionalism. This is because at the lowest level, every single thing that physics talks about (electrons, quarks, etc.) is defined in terms of its behavior with regard to other things in physics. If it swims like an electron and quacks like an electron, its an electron. It simply makes no sense in physics to say that something might behave exactly like an electron, but not actually be one. Because physics as a field of inquiry has no place for the idea of qualitative essences, the smallest elements of physics are characterized purely in functional terms, as black boxes in a block diagram. What a photon is, is defined exclusively in terms of what it does, and what it does is (circularly) defined exclusively in terms of the other things in physics (electrons, quarks, etc., various forces, a few constants). Physics is a closed, circularly defined system, whose most basic units are defined functionally. Physics as a science does not care about the intrinsic nature of matter, whatever it is that actually implements the functional characteristics exhibited (and described so perfectly in our laws of physics) by the lowest level elements of matter. Thus physics itself is multiply realizable.

Quote:The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.

Very profound and certainly undeniable. But we are not just brains. We are in essence, in our very being, conscious persons or selves, adorned with the interactions and relations of the external world. But without those relations there wouldn't remain much of any consciousness. Being conscious assumes a reality to be conscious of--an all encompassing matrix of events and regularities that exert agency over our bodies and brains to emerge as something real in itself. In this sense consciousness would also seem the essence of everything real in that without it it would be unexperiencable, sealed off in its own private noumenality. It is the essence of Being to manifest or appear. We share in this manifestation by manifesting to ourselves and to each other as world-embedded conscious persons.

An argument can be made that atheistic scientists who support material reductionism are simply running the whole gamut of confusion. As they puzzle at the wonders of nature.