The materialist's case for brain-generated consciousness

[Magical Realist]

This excerpt from a debate on consciousness makes a good point about the brain causing consciousness. Is their point valid?

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1653082876624917

"Materialist Outlook: The hope of materialism is that being is one—that if we follow the trail of physical processes far enough, we will find our qualia and our "selves" there too, finally understood in the language of physical reality."---- https://theoriesofconsciousness.com/mate...ciousness/

[Syne]

Faulty logic. Just because we know "that consciousness exists," or that gravity exists, doesn't, itself, lead us to the origin of either. It's like claiming the winds or the tides are caused by the spinning of the earth, when the former is the heating of the earth and the later is the pull of the moon. Both caused by external forces, which, IMO, is much more likely for consciousness as well.

[C C]

[...] https://www.facebook.com/reel/1653082876624917

"We don't have to know how the brain creates consciousness in order to know that it creates consciousness."

Even ancient culture knew that the sun was the source of light and warmth. But couldn't truly explain how the sun did it (crushing gravity, fusion, etc). Science didn't have a problem pursuing and finding the explanation for the latter. But for some reason it balks when it comes to phenomenal experience -- it wants to be more like ancient culture. "We don't need to do that. Enough to know that the brain does it (somehow)." 
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And philosophers...

They're not even addressing the capacity of manifestation in general. Or how matter can be associated with "a presentation of something" rather than the usual "not even a presentation of nothingness". Instead, it's only about the specific characteristics of the manifestations: qualia. Whether they should be classified as real or not. 

Illusionism -- the view of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett -- is the current "golden boy" of materialism. Ironically (below), it posits that qualia are immaterial, that they're ideas, or products of the imagination.

Presumably trying to be opposite of qualia realism: "Qualia realism is the view that subjective experiences—such as the "redness" of red or the taste of wine—are real, intrinsic properties of conscious experience that cannot be fully captured by objective, physical descriptions."

Wrangling over the status of the subordinates seems pointless if the superordinate is going to be ignored.
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Nicholas Humphrey: In recent years, one of the most promising attempts to solve the explanatory mystery of consciousness is a theory that, to many people, has seemed to be decidedly unpromising: the theory that consciousness exists only in the imagination.

The starting point for ‘illusionism’, as it’s come to be called, is the realisation that conscious experience is no more – and no less – than a set of ideas. It is the way each of us represents in our minds what’s happening around us, to us and because of us.

Mental representation means invention and construction. As Daniel Dennett wrote in Content and Consciousness (1969):

    "No afferent [incoming sensory signal] can be said to have the significance ‘A’ until it is ‘taken’ to have the significance ‘A’ by the efferent [outgoing and action-generating] side of the brain."

Sensations are what you as a subject make of sensory stimuli impacting your body: the pain in your toe is horrible; the sweet taste on your tongue is sickly; the red light before your eyes stirs you up.

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.

This means – now you can be shocked – that Descartes was essentially right: sensations have no material substance; they are indeed just thought stuff.

Of course, as scientists see this today, it is the material brain that, functioning as a computer-like ‘semantic engine’, takes this view of its own doings. No one today believes, as Descartes did, that the brain receives fully fledged thoughts from outside transmitted as coded messages via the pineal gland. But before we dismiss Descartes’s telegraph model as totally naive, let’s note that neuroscientists today are actively investigating the possibility of implanting externally generated thoughts into the brain via a physical ‘neuralink’. Descartes’s model of how the soul might be added to the body no longer appears to be scientifically ridiculous.

What does illusionism buy for us theoretically? The crucial point is that mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter, and are therefore not restricted to having properties that conform to physical reality. And in that case, much of the difficulty and mystery of explaining consciousness falls away. We don’t have to explain the existence of brain-states that possess strange non-physical properties such as phenomenal redness, but only the existence of brain-states that give rise to the idea of these properties. As Dennett has put it: the phenomenal quality of a purple sensation can be like ‘a beautiful discussion of purple, just about a colour, without itself being coloured’.

In short – sorry if this is a mouthful, but I’d better be explicit – we have only to explain how the brain situates a person, propositionally, as the holder of a certain kind of belief about redness, sweetness, coldness, pain or whatever. I say ‘only’– no doubt it’s not going to be easy; it is indeed a remarkable kind of belief – but there’s no reason to think it’s going to be impossibly hard.

Should we be worried by the implicit claim that this conscious self, founded on a discussion of imaginary properties, ‘doesn’t really exist’? The philosopher Galen Strawson has called this ‘the silliest claim ever made’. I agree that if illusionists were really saying this, Strawson might have a point. But the great denial, as Strawson calls it, is not what illusionism proper, as I understand it, implies. To say that sensations are representations is not to deny that they exist: they exist precisely as imaginings.

Even so, the unease that many people feel about illusionism is understandable. Our language matters. Dennett’s analogy – like a beautiful ‘discussion’ – is, I think, a little too cold. Philosophers may indeed ‘discuss’ sensations. I’d rather say that ordinary people sing and dance them. Arguably, sensations are an evolved work of art, designed to raise our spirits. In the artist Pablo Picasso’s words: ‘Nature and art, being different things, cannot be the same thing.’

We tend to conflate ‘illusory’ with ‘false’, and ‘imagined’ with ‘imaginary’. In many areas of life, imaginings are indeed suspect. If you imagine there’s a lion under the table (when there isn’t), you are at risk of behaving maladaptively. If you imagine your leg is injured (when it isn’t), the same. But conscious experience is in a different category. If you respond to damage to your leg by conjuring up the sensation of pain, the possibility of your being wrong about it doesn’t arise. This just is ‘what it’s like to be you’. And, as I see it, if you act on the concept of self that arises from it, you are likely to succeed in life where a zombie who lacked phenomenal consciousness would fail. That’s precisely why it has evolved.

Illusionism as a theory is liberating. It means we can escape the quagmire of a generation of modern philosophers and neuroscientists who have started from the wrong place. If, like the scientist Francis Crick, you go looking for ‘the neural correlate of consciousness’, you are all too likely to get fixated on the possible existence of an impossible kind of mind-brain identity. But the truth is that sensations – as thoughts – don’t belong down there in the substance of the brain.

This isn’t to disparage cognitive neuroscience. Rather, it’s to recognise that the workings of the mind surpass the workings of nerve cells. Thomas Nagel, in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012), wrote:

    "The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything."

But, while he’s not wrong, he has begged the question. Whoever suggested that physics and chemistry account for everything? Physics doesn’t account for ideas in general. It doesn’t account for prime numbers or justice or Cubism – let alone for souls. Actually, it doesn’t even account for physics and chemistry. At best, it sets out the preconditions for these ideas to come to exist in our minds.  --The Invention of the Soul

[Magical Realist]

The crucial point is that mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter, and are therefore not restricted to having properties that conform to physical reality. And in that case, much of the difficulty and mystery of explaining consciousness falls away. We don’t have to explain the existence of brain-states that possess strange non-physical properties such as phenomenal redness, but only the existence of brain-states that give rise to the idea of these properties.

Kinda begs the question of what it means to be a representation at all if it is just a phenomenal illusion inside our brains. If his thesis were right, consciousness of the world would be little more than a self-contained dream state having no reference to anything real or physical. There has to be a phenomenal presentation of something real to us for it to be able to be represented AS something. Else how are we mentally representing anything? And this presentation assumes a capacity for being qualitatively and non-cognitively conscious. Even IF the mind is just a semantic engine, it could only be such in a phenomenal interaction with a real physical world. Language assumes already being-in-the-word. It's how words come to mean and refer and make sense of what is around us by already being a conscious agent in the world. IOW, we know anything only because we are subjectively pre-engaged with physical reality at the deepest level. We ARE physical bodies after all.

[TheVat]

The crucial point is that mental representations, even if they are made by matter, are not made of matter, and are therefore not restricted to having properties that conform to physical reality. And in that case, much of the difficulty and mystery of explaining consciousness falls away. We don’t have to explain the existence of brain-states that possess strange non-physical properties such as phenomenal redness, but only the existence of brain-states that give rise to the idea of these properties.

Kinda begs the question of what it means to be a representation at all if it is just a phenomenal illusion inside our brains. If his thesis were right, consciousness of the world would be little more than a self-contained dream state having no reference to anything real or physical. There has to be a phenomenal presentation of something real to us for it to be able to be represented AS something. Else how are we mentally representing anything? And this presentation assumes a capacity for being qualitatively and non-cognitively conscious. Even IF the mind is just a semantic engine, it could only be such in a phenomenal interaction with a real physical world. Language assumes already being-in-the-word. It's how words come to mean and refer and make sense of what is around us by already being a conscious agent in the world. IOW, we know anything only because we are subjectively pre-engaged with physical reality at the deepest level. We ARE physical bodies after all.

I have tended to see explanation as something that is only meaningful at a specific functional level.  Much as quantum mechanics is not much useful for explaining chirality in molecular chemistry, or bad haircuts, neuroscience isn't going to be useful in "explaining" a qualium.  Qualia are just a perspective that emerges in a neuronal network, they are what a brain state looks like from the inside.

[Ostronomos]

Consciousness is an immaterial reality while the brain is a material object. Consciousness itself is not an object. Rather it is the only reality. And creates the physical world. Matter itself arises from quanta or bits.

[Magical Realist]

It's a question of semantics as to whether the brain generates consciousness. In a sense it does, at least the phenomenal presentation of such to an individual self. Much like your cellphone or laptop generates the visual and navigable presentation of the Internet to you. But nobody would therefore assume your cellphone or laptop originates or causes the Internet to exist. Like the Internet consciousness (or more generally the mind) has a unified existence all on its own and is the instantly accessible source of all information outside of your brain's experience of it.

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else."--Edwin Schrodinger

“The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” ---ES