Daniel Dennett deflates consciousness

[C C]

Yazata said: That's why I'm inclined to think that the philosophy of consciousness is unlikely to advance until somebody clarifies what in the hell they are talking about. What is this "consciousness" that everyone wants to declare the existence or nonexistence of?

I take consciousness to mean the phenomenal experience of anything--a bodily state, an emotion, a sensation, a thought, a situation, an object, etc. This is the sense in which Chalmers defines it I believe. So for example feeling tired is being conscious of it. Sitting in a chair is being conscious of it. Remembering your grandmother is being conscious of it. Being terrified is being conscious of it. The smell of coming rain is being conscious of it. Being in pain is being conscious of it. Any experience of anything whatsoever. So in this sense I'd say that animals are conscious too. They clearly experience most the qualia and sensations that humans do.

Since a dog has memory, it can also identify and understand and react procedurally to the content that is manifesting to it, as well. But it's not the same kind of cognition we have, where much of our intellectual abilities are mediated by language (along with the greater complexity of ideas).

Whereas if the molecules in a rock existed as a phenomenal presentation of some kind to themselves (i.e., they had intrinsic states), there would be no comprehension of what they were or a conceptual apprehension of existing as _X_ in a surrounding universe. Because they lack a memory system, there would be no systematic association of any received environmental stimulus (absorbed energy) with stored information and ideas.

A scientist who was autistic once claimed that she thought in terms of pictures rather than via an audio-like language narrative. And suggested that's how animals (like dogs) would think. Images consume a lot more brain resources than a privately expressed voice that's classifying and describing and planning things in terms of words. Though most of us actually engage in a combination of both (sans those suffering from aphantasia, of course).

[Magical Realist]

David Chalmers on "What is consciousness?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLH8u2iEx_8

[C C]

David Chalmers on "What is consciousness?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLH8u2iEx_8

EXCERPT: I mean, so there's a thousand different components of consciousness, all of them unified by the fact there's something it's like to experience them. They're all part of my internal movie, but then somehow they all come together. So we call that the unity of consciousness, a single multimodal experience that subsumes all.

Some would disagree in terms of this Unity, Some would say it is an illusion. It's only those separate strands of information and they're somehow competing with each other in your brain, and some are coming popping up here, and then some other copying, and you have this illusion that it's all together in this one cohesive frame.

When I ignore background noise, it's that "roving focus" or language mediated part of my attention which is losing "awareness" of that activity, by not zeroing in specifically on that uninteresting activity. IOW, that supposed interval of "dis-unity" is not due to the background noise not being present (as part of the overall phenomenal presentation) when it is ignored like that. It's still very much manifesting in the general experience during that period. 

But this issue of "unity" in consciousness (self) -- of the Keith Frankish camp or whoever declaring it an illusion -- just points out the confusion that arises when they don't narrow down to what they particularly mean when uttering or writing the word "consciousness". The bird analogy I used in the first reply to illustrate such. 

Most of the community nowadays is addressing experience when they reference the umbrella concept "consciousness" in association with there being a problem or inadequate explanation. But here you have these other camps obsessed with different areas, so that one of them asserts "consciousness is an illusion"... And somebody who correlates consciousness with phenomenal experience may ponder to themselves: "Does this group have all its marbles?" Or another individual who correlates consciousness to cognition may similarly wonder the same, because it is pretty obvious that we can identify and understand things we either observe, think about, dream, etc. 

Even everyday workers participating in the construction of a house fundamentally realize that they need to communicate with each other properly, that they need to be precise and avoid ambiguity. Yet these scholarly experts seem to be infamously incompetent at being able to do that. Which is all the more astounding given that the "linguistic turn" is the bedrock that contemporary analytic philosophy arose from; and scientists are likewise known for having strict nomenclatures in their fields where _X_ specific term means one thing and one thing only.

[confused2]

I can't say I'm impressed by the whole philosopher thing but I'm happy to pick and choose where expedient.
A movie - yes of course - that makes perfect sense. In the movie there are shadows and if one of those shadows moves you have to run because if you don't whatever was hiding behind the shadow will jump out and kill you. Snooze and you die.

^^^ Edit .. If you were a squirrel I think you might well argue that squirrels are conscious and philosophers maybe not so much.

Edit2.. a week or two on one of the locations used for 'Naked and afraid' should be a requirement before philosophers are allowed to speak about consciousness.

[Syne]

Maybe the same should be true of armchair critics of philosophers.

[confused2]

Maybe the same should be true of armchair critics of philosophers.

I agree. There'd be less confusion if 'Philosophy' was graded from (say) Lounge Lizard to Street.

[C C]

More from the "self is an illusion" camp or thought orientation.

Rubber hand illusions shed new light on our bodily sense of self
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-15505-...l#pid62596

[Magical Realist]

Sam Harris on the self as an illusion..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQJWl4fC6EU

[Magical Realist]

Susan Schneider on panpsychism...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv1MIj0m9fY

[C C]

Susan Schneider on panpsychism...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv1MIj0m9fY

I don't understand what the panpsychists mean when they claim that these little elements of reality are subjects of experience. [...] I think that there is a view that's like panpsychism ... That work, by the way, is within an area known as quantum gravity [pregeometry]. ... So even if there's nothing like time, and even if there's nothing like space, it would seem friendly to the idea that there's protospace and prototime. And if that's the case, that is quite friendly to a view that's known as panprotopsychism, which is, by definition, a view that says that the fundamental ingredients as they combine give rise to conscious experience, and that those fundamental ingredients are quasimental.

For those who aren't trying to mimic some aspect of Buddhism, "panprotopsychism" is probably closer to what they mean. But somewhere along the way they tend to drift off into using panpsychism again.

Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness [phenomenal experience] 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. --Time Reborn ... page 270

IOW, matter has intrinsic states. It has a manner of being or of existing which the abstract descriptions and technical representations of physics (that are artificial) accordingly do not capture and express.

These intrinsic states may be phenomenal in some primitive respect (i.e., manifest), or they at least have the latent capacity for such. But "in the wild" or outside of brains they do not normally constitute psychological activity. They are not organized to simulate and identify and understand themselves and anything else. They are not regulated by a memory-based system that enables cognition and intellectual processes.

This is not really the view called panpsychism, since the root of "psych" in that term implies some if not all features and attributes of "mind". Again, these intrinsic states of matter would be ontological, not psychological. The latter classification only pertains when matter has evolved into a peculiar kind of biological sophistication.

The brain or an equivalent functioning arrangement recruits and combines the intrinsic nature of matter to create elaborate sensations and thoughts that privately "show themselves" (manifest) within the performing system and its applicable processes.

There is no science for predicting what combinations of dynamic relationships would result in certain qualia being produced and the overall phenomenal images, sounds, odors, tactile feelings, etc that those qualia compose. Only by engineering a synthetic brain -- that truly had private experiences -- and could report about them, might there be a possibility of devising such a theory and field of study. Due to the synthetic brain being able to precisely communicate what changes it was experiencing as researchers tweaked and modified its structural activity and operations. 

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. --The Enigma of Sentience (1998)

Erwin Schrodinger: The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --What is Life? Mind and Matter