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Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery -- It’s Matter (Strawson)

#1
C C Offline
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinio...atter.html

EXCERPT: Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay “Mind and Matter”: “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” he wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.

I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain. [...] First, though, I need to try to reply to those (they’re probably philosophers) who doubt that we really know what conscious experience is.

The reply is simple. We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don’t have to think about it (it’s really much better not to). You just have to have it. It’s true that people can make all sorts of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.

“Yes, but what is it?” At this point philosophers like to give examples...
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:The present point — it’s worth repeating many times — is that no one has to react in either of these ways. All they have to do is grasp the fundamental respect in which we don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff in spite of all that physics tells us. In particular, we don’t know anything about the physical that gives us good reason to think that consciousness can’t be wholly physical.

It seems then that the real issue of consciousness is in figuring out what we mean by "physical" and what the nature of this "stuff" called matter really is. It seems safe to assume that whereas consciousness occurs from the inside of matter and therefore must somewhat express the nature of that substance, not all matter is necessarily conscious. The brain is a meticulously structured and dynamic system of interacting components, not just a blob of living meat. The structuring of matter is very important for consciousness evidently. So we have to tease out the possibilities open to structure and form and those open to the mere composing substance.

We might say there are properties in silicon and metal that allow it to become a computer, but many of those properties are contingent on the structures the silicon and metal are formed into. Does the computer tell is about the nature of silicon and metal? Well yes--somewhat. Is computation a property inherent in matter? Well yes..somewhat remotely. But more emphatically computation is a story of silicon and metal constructed into an assemblage of numerous molded parts that electically function together on a systems level.. Likewise consciousness will have to include in its explanatory narrative an analysis of matter forming structures and components that channel electricity and chemical reactions that are not themselves reducible to the mere stuff of unstructured matter. There is an emergent quality to structure and form that also gives rise to consciousness somehow. A how that seems even more elusive than before.
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