Feb 7, 2022 01:05 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 7, 2022 03:05 AM by C C.)
What can the zombie argument say about human consciousness?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-the-zomb...sciousness
What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?
https://nautil.us/whats-so-hard-about-un...ess-13877/
INTRO: Because you are reading these words, it’s safe to say you possess consciousness—that magic of awareness that you are alive and awake, and that you are you, not somebody else. Consciousness is the scent of pine in winter, the sense of the color blue, the memory of a first kiss, the thrill of an exceptional performance—all of the rich and ineffable qualitative experiences that make a life worth living and that slide through time, knitting one moment to the next.
But while we may all be intimately familiar with what consciousness feels like, explaining why it exists or how it arises from physical and biological processes is another matter. These questions are as old as Aristotle, and yet millennia on, we still don’t have any definitive answers.
For much of history, the nature of consciousness was the purview almost exclusively of philosophers and poets. It was not taken seriously as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry because it was difficult, if not impossible, to do experiments. But over the past three decades, that has changed, as neuroscientists began to make some real headway in understanding the neural bases of consciousness-related phenomena.
Two neuroscientists who’ve made major contributions to elucidating consciousness, of different generations, are Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth.
In books that include Descartes’ Error and The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, 77, has plumbed the neural basis for feelings, emotions, and decision-making. Seth, 49, has left his mark on the field by illuminating the brain mechanisms behind perceptual experience, particularly vision, and the experience of selfhood. Both scientists published books late last year that deepen and expand their explorations of the brain and consciousness.
In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Seth lays out his theory of “controlled hallucination”—that our perceptual experiences of the world are inventions of the brain governed by a system of predictions—and makes the case that consciousness is intimately tied to the interior of the living body. In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Damasio sets out to demystify consciousness, which he argues evolved from primordial feelings such as pain and hunger, interactive processes that pair the physical with the mental and arise from a chemical orchestra deep in the viscera.
We arranged a Zoom conversation between the two scientists. We asked them to share their respective views of consciousness, ask questions of one another, and offer their wagers on whether we can ultimately solve this hardest of problems... (MORE- details)
Should you be upset? Cicero on the desirability of emotion
https://antigonejournal.com/2022/01/cicero-emotion/
“If you cannot do anything about what upsets you, you should attempt to free yourself from such negative emotions… If, by contrast, there is an opportunity for changing the distressing situation, then you should embrace the pain you feel and let it motivate you.”
EXCERPTS: It is probably fair to say that people these days are more than usually upset. The Covid pandemic, political divisions, and financial insecurity have exacerbated everyday mental strains caused by personal and interpersonal problems, with the result that experts are warning of a global mental health crisis. Fear, anger, grief, anxiety, and depression are on the rise. But should you be upset? Is it right to give in to negative feelings?
One person turning to this “therapy of the self” (to use a famous phrase of Michel Foucault) was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), who in 45 BC found himself at what was perhaps the low point of his life...
Cicero considers the question of the emotions in great detail in his perhaps most therapeutic book, Tusculan Disputations of summer 45, where he works through a list of mental disturbances to arrive at what any philosophically informed person would have known was a foregone conclusion: the wise person will not be affected by any “sickness of the mind” (aegritudo animi) whatever the circumstances. In fact (and here Cicero adopts a Stoic maxim that must have been a great comfort in his own situation), it is virtue and virtue alone that is sufficient for happiness. No need to be upset. So far, so expected.
It is thus surprising when little over a year later, we find Cicero taking a different approach to the emotions in his Laelius de amicitia (Laelius on Friendship). In this short work – one of Cicero’s most popular in the Middle Ages and early modern period – the main speaker Gaius Laelius shares his thoughts on friendship with his two sons-in-law...
[...] Openly contradicting what Cicero himself had concluded in the Tusculans, Laelius ... maintains that the wise person will experience mental distress (cadit in sapientem animi dolor, §48) – and that to believe otherwise would be to rob the wise of their humanitas. A person without emotions would not be human:
“If you take away the affects of the mind, what difference is there – I don’t even mean between a human and an animal, but between a human and a log or rock or something of this kind?” Virtue isn’t “hard or made of iron” (a clear dig at the Stoics) but “soft and pliable”, experiencing both joy and distress. With this, Laelius brings the discussion back to friendship: “And therefore the anxiety we often have to experience on behalf of our friend is not strong enough to (make us wish to) remove friendship from life, just as we don’t reject the virtues because they bring us a certain amount of worry and inconvenience.”
Laelius thus proposes a path to the happy and virtuous life that crucially involves the emotions. It is only because we do get upset at bad things that we are motivated to do anything about them; at the same time, being open to emotions also means experiencing joy at the good things in life, including, crucially, our friends. Caring for anything or anyone thus carries the risk of having to experience cura, but this is the price we have to pay for not being logs or rocks.
Why did Cicero change his mind, moving from the emotionally unassailable wise man of the Tusculans to the more humane but also more vulnerable good friend of De amicitia? (Of course, it is the character Laelius who puts forth the ideas in the latter dialogue, not Cicero in his own persona, but it is still fair to assume that the views promoted in the work are the author’s own.) When it came to philosophy, Cicero was not dogmatic. Rather than adhering, say, to Stoic doctrine, he was a follower of the so-called New Academy, a version of Platonic philosophy that espoused the original skepticism of Socrates (469–399 BC).
An Academic Skeptic like Cicero would examine an array of philosophical positions and tentatively espouse the one that appeared to him “probable” or “similar to the truth” (not “true”, since truth can never be ascertained). However, he was free to change his mind at any time if he came to think that another view was more convincing after all. As Cicero himself puts it in Tusculans: “I live from day to day. Whatever strikes my mind as probable, that I proclaim.” It was thus perfectly in keeping with his Academic approach for Cicero to give up on the Stoic ideal of apatheia and espouse a view he now considered more similar to the truth. But do we have any idea why he would have done so? (MORE - missing details)
https://aeon.co/essays/what-can-the-zomb...sciousness
What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?
https://nautil.us/whats-so-hard-about-un...ess-13877/
INTRO: Because you are reading these words, it’s safe to say you possess consciousness—that magic of awareness that you are alive and awake, and that you are you, not somebody else. Consciousness is the scent of pine in winter, the sense of the color blue, the memory of a first kiss, the thrill of an exceptional performance—all of the rich and ineffable qualitative experiences that make a life worth living and that slide through time, knitting one moment to the next.
But while we may all be intimately familiar with what consciousness feels like, explaining why it exists or how it arises from physical and biological processes is another matter. These questions are as old as Aristotle, and yet millennia on, we still don’t have any definitive answers.
For much of history, the nature of consciousness was the purview almost exclusively of philosophers and poets. It was not taken seriously as a legitimate subject for scientific inquiry because it was difficult, if not impossible, to do experiments. But over the past three decades, that has changed, as neuroscientists began to make some real headway in understanding the neural bases of consciousness-related phenomena.
Two neuroscientists who’ve made major contributions to elucidating consciousness, of different generations, are Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth.
In books that include Descartes’ Error and The Strange Order of Things, Damasio, 77, has plumbed the neural basis for feelings, emotions, and decision-making. Seth, 49, has left his mark on the field by illuminating the brain mechanisms behind perceptual experience, particularly vision, and the experience of selfhood. Both scientists published books late last year that deepen and expand their explorations of the brain and consciousness.
In Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, Seth lays out his theory of “controlled hallucination”—that our perceptual experiences of the world are inventions of the brain governed by a system of predictions—and makes the case that consciousness is intimately tied to the interior of the living body. In Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Damasio sets out to demystify consciousness, which he argues evolved from primordial feelings such as pain and hunger, interactive processes that pair the physical with the mental and arise from a chemical orchestra deep in the viscera.
We arranged a Zoom conversation between the two scientists. We asked them to share their respective views of consciousness, ask questions of one another, and offer their wagers on whether we can ultimately solve this hardest of problems... (MORE- details)
Should you be upset? Cicero on the desirability of emotion
https://antigonejournal.com/2022/01/cicero-emotion/
“If you cannot do anything about what upsets you, you should attempt to free yourself from such negative emotions… If, by contrast, there is an opportunity for changing the distressing situation, then you should embrace the pain you feel and let it motivate you.”
EXCERPTS: It is probably fair to say that people these days are more than usually upset. The Covid pandemic, political divisions, and financial insecurity have exacerbated everyday mental strains caused by personal and interpersonal problems, with the result that experts are warning of a global mental health crisis. Fear, anger, grief, anxiety, and depression are on the rise. But should you be upset? Is it right to give in to negative feelings?
One person turning to this “therapy of the self” (to use a famous phrase of Michel Foucault) was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), who in 45 BC found himself at what was perhaps the low point of his life...
Cicero considers the question of the emotions in great detail in his perhaps most therapeutic book, Tusculan Disputations of summer 45, where he works through a list of mental disturbances to arrive at what any philosophically informed person would have known was a foregone conclusion: the wise person will not be affected by any “sickness of the mind” (aegritudo animi) whatever the circumstances. In fact (and here Cicero adopts a Stoic maxim that must have been a great comfort in his own situation), it is virtue and virtue alone that is sufficient for happiness. No need to be upset. So far, so expected.
It is thus surprising when little over a year later, we find Cicero taking a different approach to the emotions in his Laelius de amicitia (Laelius on Friendship). In this short work – one of Cicero’s most popular in the Middle Ages and early modern period – the main speaker Gaius Laelius shares his thoughts on friendship with his two sons-in-law...
[...] Openly contradicting what Cicero himself had concluded in the Tusculans, Laelius ... maintains that the wise person will experience mental distress (cadit in sapientem animi dolor, §48) – and that to believe otherwise would be to rob the wise of their humanitas. A person without emotions would not be human:
“If you take away the affects of the mind, what difference is there – I don’t even mean between a human and an animal, but between a human and a log or rock or something of this kind?” Virtue isn’t “hard or made of iron” (a clear dig at the Stoics) but “soft and pliable”, experiencing both joy and distress. With this, Laelius brings the discussion back to friendship: “And therefore the anxiety we often have to experience on behalf of our friend is not strong enough to (make us wish to) remove friendship from life, just as we don’t reject the virtues because they bring us a certain amount of worry and inconvenience.”
Laelius thus proposes a path to the happy and virtuous life that crucially involves the emotions. It is only because we do get upset at bad things that we are motivated to do anything about them; at the same time, being open to emotions also means experiencing joy at the good things in life, including, crucially, our friends. Caring for anything or anyone thus carries the risk of having to experience cura, but this is the price we have to pay for not being logs or rocks.
Why did Cicero change his mind, moving from the emotionally unassailable wise man of the Tusculans to the more humane but also more vulnerable good friend of De amicitia? (Of course, it is the character Laelius who puts forth the ideas in the latter dialogue, not Cicero in his own persona, but it is still fair to assume that the views promoted in the work are the author’s own.) When it came to philosophy, Cicero was not dogmatic. Rather than adhering, say, to Stoic doctrine, he was a follower of the so-called New Academy, a version of Platonic philosophy that espoused the original skepticism of Socrates (469–399 BC).
An Academic Skeptic like Cicero would examine an array of philosophical positions and tentatively espouse the one that appeared to him “probable” or “similar to the truth” (not “true”, since truth can never be ascertained). However, he was free to change his mind at any time if he came to think that another view was more convincing after all. As Cicero himself puts it in Tusculans: “I live from day to day. Whatever strikes my mind as probable, that I proclaim.” It was thus perfectly in keeping with his Academic approach for Cicero to give up on the Stoic ideal of apatheia and espouse a view he now considered more similar to the truth. But do we have any idea why he would have done so? (MORE - missing details)