(Jun 1, 2019 06:18 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: [ -> ]If consciousness is at the basis of reality, then it would explain why it is capable of affecting the external world.
The way people use "consciousness" (especially, and ironically, the ones supposed to be experts) is kind of like using "solar system" to refer to the Earth. If we don't narrow down precisely what we mean with a
hyponym, then yet another individual can be referring to the sun, another to asteroids, another to Saturn's rings -- and they're all conflated as the same thing because the label being used is too broad to provide specific distinctions.
The above allows what David Chalmers calls "bait and switch", where a rational dogmatist devoted more to an invented product, like say "scientific materialism", than to the immediate manifestations of his/her own senses and thoughts, begins by talking about _E_ but eventually switches to talking about less intimidating _B_. Thereby concluding at the end, after that sleight of hand identity swap or act of inconsistency, that _E_ is either not so obstinate to explanation after all or they even go to the extreme of declaring that there are no manifestations and feelings (we're instead some equivalent of philosophical zombies). Both _E_ and _B_ having been referenced by the same term "consciousness" throughout the whole process, albeit applicable descriptive features indicating two different sub-members of the more general category were actually being manipulated/switched.
In this case, however, you might actually need to be going in the opposite "hypernym" direction of needing a more general umbrella concept than consciousness. Since the latter is more construed as passively presenting objects, instead of "affecting the world" -- or at least the public world where multiple observers looking at the same scene lack another person's private hallucinations (departing from the norm) due to missed meds. Or maybe branch off to something like
cosmopsychism rather than referring to "consciousness".
But OTOH, there's those
methodological behaviorism inspired remnants who restrict "consciousness" to outward body motions and response interacting with the environment, including verbal reports -- in which case that is influencing the world. Whereas consciousness narrowed to experience (the private manifestations and feelings) makes no causal contribution whatsoever. Any explanation in the physical sciences for why the body is doing something recruits biological components and their mechanistic relationships, not subjective qualitative properties slash phenomenal events.
Quote:But if it is simply a chimera, then it is limited to the brain and lacks spatial extension. Broadly speaking, it would have a ubiquitous reach, since there is no such thing as an external world. Given this, the external world is the illusion and consciousness is the only reality. This may or may not necessarily relate to solipsism, but it seems that in order to explain the emergence of consciousness as a phenomenon, universal consciousness must be posited.
For possibly different reasons, an old-fashioned "direct realist" should probably agree with at least discarding the "external world" conception. That is, if there's no representation in the head or mind to begin with, then for them "external" should become an otiose adjective, a useless ornament to "world". But 21st-century and late 20th-century thinkers have turned what is meant by "representation" into such an obscured jumble that their distinction between "direct" and "indirect" is not so clear these days. "Representation" now might be purely referring to a semantic, conceptual, or language construct rather than a phenomenal simulation.