(Sep 20, 2024 01:29 AM)Secular Sanity Wrote: Self-sustaining flesh-bags that care about their own persistence seems to sum it up.
What if instead you said that you don’t leave life, it leaves you?
This view evokes a sense of both connection and profound loss. You are part of a larger cycle, but when you die, you become absent from that cycle, highlighting the impermanence of individual existence in the face of the relentless flow of life and decay. It reflects a poignant awareness of the fragility of life, the inevitability of death, and the continuity of the universe despite individual experiences fading away.
As long as we apprehend that the greater continuity is transpiring "in the dark" (sans the conscious observers still surviving in their tiny bit) if it is being fathomed from an anti-panpsychism or anti-
panexperientialilsm perspective. That's part of what this is about. If the examiners are
extinctivist materialists, then they need to be consistent with what falls out of their view (or at least aware of when they're departing from the path).
Quote: [...] I might be misunderstanding what the cynic side of you is saying. When you get a chance, can you try to explain it better. Thanks, CC!
Well, the "Cynic" is occasionally just an excuse to append some commentary to a posted item (as if this were Sciforums, where management can get miffed if you don't provide personal opinions, rantings or praise or inquiries or outraged perplexity about whatever thing of interest that one is submitting).
Since I'm unsure what needs to be elucidated upon -- or to put another way, even if I try to isolate what the target of any "cynical sarcasm" might be... I probably have to go through all the following, anyway, just to get there in some kind of incrementally orderly way or appearance of that.
So I'm going to approach it by pretending there's a larger audience that needs missing pieces filled in. That imaginary, baffled audience should first read the Erwin Schrödinger quotation at the bottom of this post, then return.
Clearly, this conception of death isn't grounded in panpsychism or pan-phenomenalism -- where the universe or matter at large would be manifesting to itself as something even if life (or brains) had never arisen in it. And any card-carrying hardcore or "conventional" materialist in the audience who does conflictingly believe that should correct their confused sense of identity by relabeling themselves accordingly.
One occasionally sees both philosophers and scientists still moaning along the line of: "we don't really know or can't agree on what consciousness even is". That goes all the way back to William James, if not before him: "
We know what consciousness is as long as no one asks us to define it."
But "non-consciousness" -- which we might construe as its opposite -- is pretty simple (with some assistance from materialist doctrine).
non-consciousness: 2. Relating to the lack of consciousness of inanimate things.
The most unmitigated example of non-consciousness that an
extinctivist materialist can encroach upon and declare something solid about (on the basis of their doctrine) is death. After death, the brain/body rejoins the classification of what most of the universe is: matter not arranged and functioning in a biological manner.
In that context (extinctivist materialism or naturalism), what ensues after death is the absence of everything ("nothing"). The deceased brain is no longer rendering representations (manifestations) of the external environment and personal thoughts, feelings, dreams, etc.
By inverting this meaning of non-consciousness, we can thereby finally obtain a bare meaning for [phenomenal] consciousness: The presence or "showing" of anything (image, sound, odor, tactile feeling, or alien phantasms that we perhaps cannot conceive of). Which can be seen to jibe with the metaphor of a formerly dark room being lit-up.
Obviously, the cognitive aspect of consciousness (identification and understanding) is being left out here. Something might be present (a manifestation), but there is no meaning and interpretation taking place about it (what _X_ is). Consciousness as cognition is dependent upon a memory system that retrieves and applies stored information to the manifestations of phenomenal consciousness (or their neural correlates).
It is those phenomenal experiences that the "
hard problem of consciousness" concerns. Whereas cognitive issues (identification and understanding) are part of the "easy" problems, as more advanced AI now demonstrates. There are lots of specific details to work out yet, but cognition (how I define cognition and make it distinct from the other) has been solved in the "big picture" sense. It can be tackled by researchers and engineers, it is vulnerable to them -- there is no enigma or barrier or massive challenge there.
To assert that it is instead cognition that is the "great problem" -- is -- analogy wise, like complaining in 1950 that humans lack even a broad conception of how to land on the Moon. Contrast that to there not even being a Moon to travel to (analogous to the problem of phenomenal consciousness within a view of the world where no capacity for manifestation is even attributed to matter).
And if there was any target for cynical sarcasm, hopefully it was just a strawman for setting-up those four paragraphs in the OP.
For instance... Any "materialist" fitting the following scenario, who can accept that the world and personal thoughts disappear after death, but then astonishingly fails to apprehend that such "absence of everything" is thereby what matter normally is to itself. IOW, a materialist that either does not grok the consequences of their own belief orientation or practices such inconsistently.
And how that realization (if instead they did "get it") should clarify what the problem of experience is (the "uncanny gap" as Schrödinger puts it below in terms of explaining those manifestations of perceptions, dreams, thoughts, etc). But -- maybe if making it to this stage, the materialist bogs down and still doesn't "get it". At which point we shift back to the top of this post and ask if the "materialist" is actually a panpsychist, etc.
It was over 14 years ago, when I stumbled across Erwin Schrödinger's passage below, that it dawned on me how utterly specious the sentiment of "we can't define what consciousness is" was. Because he trashed it with one "everyday" word (and its modifications) that is not found in the common nomenclature of Philosophy of MInd: "manifestation" and the verb version "manifest".
Erwin Schrödinger: 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?
A rationalist may be inclined to deal curtly with this question, roughly as follows. From our own experience, and as regards the higher animals from analogy, consciousness is linked up with certain kinds of events in organised, living matter, namely, with certain nervous functions. How far back or 'down' in the animal kingdom there is still some sort of consciousness, and what it may be like in its early stages, are gratuitous speculations, questions that cannot be answered and which ought to be left to idle dreamers. It is still more gratuitous to indulge in thoughts about whether perhaps other events as well, events in inorganic matter, let alone material events, are in some way or other associated with consciousness. All this is pure fantasy, as irrefutable as it is unprovable, and thus of no value for knowledge.
He who accepts this brushing aside of the question ought to be told what an uncanny gap he thereby allows to remain in his picture of the world. For the turning- up of nerve cells and brains within certain strains of organisms is a very special event whose meaning and significance is quite well understood. It is a special kind of mechanism by which the individual responds to alternative situations by accordingly alternating behaviour, a mechanism for adaptation to a changing surrounding. It is the most elaborate and the most ingenious among all such mechanisms, and wherever it turns up it rapidly gains a dominating role. However, it is not sui generis. Large groups of organisms, in particular the plants, achieve very similar performances in an entirely different fashion.
Are we prepared to believe that this very special turn in the development of the higher animals, a turn that might after all have failed to appear, was a necessary condition for the world to flash up to itself in the light of consciousness? Would it otherwise have remained a play before empty benches, not existing for anybody, thus quite properly speaking not existing? This would seem to me the bankruptcy of a world picture. The urge to find a way out of this impasse ought not to be dumped for fear of incurring the wise rationalist's mockery. --What is Life? Mind and Matter
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Sep 20, 2024 12:31 AM
