"The Invention Of The Soul"

[Magical Realist]

https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-con...YaDVd5MVgg

"If, however, we believe the modern scientific story, that mind and brain are the same thing, we have a problem. Philosophers today do tend to assume that mind is matter: res cogitans is actually a form of res extensa. And then the problem of explaining how this can be so drives them to distraction. The philosopher Colin McGinn has put it colourfully:

'Isn’t it perfectly evident to you, as it is to us, that [the brain] is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness … You might as well assert, without further explanation, that space emerges from time, or numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb.'

It’s hard. The answer must be worth knowing. Yet here is the surprising thing: turn to the wider world, and the problem that has philosophers tearing their hair out is not seen by most ordinary human beings as a problem at all. Rather, it’s a cause for celebration and for pride. A mystery? Yes, that’s exactly what I am, a blooming marvel! What a fine fellow! And you, and you too..."

[C C]

https://aeon.co/essays/you-know-what-con...-soul-land

[...] The philosopher Colin McGinn has put it colourfully:

'Isn’t it perfectly evident to you, as it is to us, that [the brain] is just the wrong kind of thing to give birth to consciousness … You might as well assert, without further explanation, that space emerges from time, or numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb.' [...]

It's not the wrong kind of thing for making memory possible and enabling basic degrees of intelligence, cognition, and knowledge communication (which have been realized in AI and robots). Those complex interactions can occur "in the dark" without any need to be "shown" and "felt" (conversion to phenomenal representations).

It just seems the wrong kind of thing for bringing about those latter private manifestations, which by their very nature can't be found in the purely external relationships and public affairs of matter. The latter is a substance that exists outside itself, without an internal view or perspective attributed to it.

[Magical Realist]

You are never merely a passive receiver; you are a doer. And the way you do sensations has evolved to be something quite special. I’ve argued, for example in ‘Seeing and Somethingness’ (2022), that it works like this: when red light arrives at your eyes, your brain doesn’t simply log it like a camera registering a wavelength. Instead, something more active and more interesting happens. You mount a subtle, internalised bodily response to the stimulus that I’ve called ‘redding’ – a response that expresses what’s happening to you and how you feel about it. What makes this conscious is a further step: your brain generates a running commentary on its own activity, a feedback signal that loops back and tells you what you are doing as you do it. As it were, your mind watches itself reaching out toward the red, and it’s this self-monitoring that constitutes the conscious sensation. Sensation is, in a sense, always a self-portrait. It’s not a readout of the world; it’s a readout of you.

Describing consciousness or even sensation as an "introspective illusion" seems very brash to me. I don't experience qualia like pain and warmth and color or drowsiness only when I am reflecting on it. It is in fact there whether I introspectively consider or not. Even when I am on autopilot I find that I have stopped at the red light. Which suggests to me we are quite conscious whether we are aware we are or not. IOW, the experience of pre-reflective consciousness:

"Non-reflective (or pre-reflective) consciousness is the fundamental, immediate awareness of experience as it is lived, occurring before active reflection, introspection, or self-analysis. It is a constant, "transparent" self-awareness that accompanies actions and perceptions, such as being aware of reading this text without actively thinking "I am reading".

Key aspects of non-reflective consciousness include:

Fundamental Subjectivity: It is the subjective "mineness" of experience, where the self is the subject, not an object of thought.

Sartre's Perspective: Jean-Paul Sartre argued that consciousness is primarily a non-positional consciousness of itself, meaning it is aware of itself while being positional (focused) on an object in the world.

Distinction from Reflection: Unlike reflective consciousness (introspection), which turns back on itself to analyze, non-reflective consciousness is an ongoing, "pre-reflective cogito" that acts as the foundation for future reflection.

Phenomenological View: According to researchers like Danz Zahavi, this form of consciousness is not an "inner monitor" but an inseparable structure of any lived experience.
Examples: It is present when one is engaged in absorbing activities (e.g., engrossed in reading, running, or driving) where the sense of "I" is not explicitly in focus."

[C C]

You are never merely a passive receiver; you are a doer. And the way you do sensations has evolved to be something quite special. I’ve argued, for example in ‘Seeing and Somethingness’ (2022), that it works like this: when red light arrives at your eyes, your brain doesn’t simply log it like a camera registering a wavelength. Instead, something more active and more interesting happens. You mount a subtle, internalised bodily response to the stimulus that I’ve called ‘redding’ – a response that expresses what’s happening to you and how you feel about it. What makes this conscious is a further step: your brain generates a running commentary on its own activity, a feedback signal that loops back and tells you what you are doing as you do it. As it were, your mind watches itself reaching out toward the red, and it’s this self-monitoring that constitutes the conscious sensation. Sensation is, in a sense, always a self-portrait. It’s not a readout of the world; it’s a readout of you.

Describing consciousness or even sensation as an "introspective illusion" seems very brash to me. I don't experience qualia like pain and warmth and color or drowsiness only when I am reflecting on it. It is in fact there whether I introspectively consider or not. Even when I am on autopilot I find that I have stopped at the red light. Which suggests to me we are quite conscious whether we are aware we are or not. [...]

Nicholas Humphrey is an eliminative materialist like Keith Frankish and bygone Daniel Dennett. There is no clear-cut understanding of what these illusionists are claiming, since depending on what they assert in a particular instance, the reader or listener will keep shuffling around among three conclusions:

(1) Our brains are merely pretending in a rule-abiding way, via language or physical response, that there is "shown" or presented content to consciousness. (There is actually nothing.)

(2) They're not really denying manifested content, but only asserting that it is not subjective or does not belong to an immaterial self.

(3) They are obscurantists, and there is simply no way to penetrate to what they actually mean. Or it's all meandering double-talk, with no actual significance.

[Ostronomos]

CC,

I agree with number three, as consciousness is no illusion. They've simply dispensed with one problem and replaced it with another. They continue to perpetrate the lie that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter. It isn't. I have written elsewhere that consciousness can affect reality. They do not have access to the metaphysical reality that I do, thereby they are left groping in the dark. Foolish indeed. Any argument that dispenses with God, metaphysics and immaterial reality is not to be trusted. These fools know nothing of what they speak. I have access to a 6th sense in which I can perceive demonic forces sans the other five senses. These idiots are ignorant on another level. And they lack the humility to admit to their shortcomings.

Pathetic.