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Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

nytimes.com

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Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#31

Post by breuleux »

goatlover wrote: post #9
kanzure wrote: post #3

> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the…

Because the description of brain activity does not capture the experience of being an active brain. The scientific picture of the world is odorless, tasteless, colorless, soundless, etc. It's an abstract, mathematical description. But we don't experience the world that way. There is a massive discrepancy between the two. That's consciousness.

I wouldn't say that's really a problem, because there's a perfectly fine scientific explanation of why it doesn't (couldn't) "capture" this. The experience of color or taste is triggered when information is fed to the brain through specific pathways. The pathways that are activated when we read about something are different and don't reach the same places, so any information you acquire through reading and cognition is necessarily going to be "tasteless". Because of that, we can't possibly "connect" our knowledge of the process that causes the qualia of taste to the qualia of taste, but that's just a limitation of the brain's wiring, not a fault in the model itself.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#32

Post by redial »

goatlover wrote: post #29
tokai wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have proof of any phenomenon being non-physical?

Do we have proof of any phenomenon being physical? What we have are various phenomenon that we attempt to classify. Some would like there to be one meta category we can lump everything into. That's typically called material or physical. But it could also be labelled ideal or mental, from a different categorization scheme. The problem we've had so far is that some phenomena are not easily placed into the one all-encom…

> But it could also be labelled ideal or mental, from a different categorization scheme.

Whatever label you put to the category, they are all in the same one.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#33

Post by goatlover »

kanzure wrote: post #30
jordonwii wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me what it would even mean for "consciousness to turn out to be false." The way consciousness is commonly defined (i.e. not with an analytical definition), its existence as a phenomenon can't be false - only our explanations for what it is and how it works. It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out t…

> It would be analogous to telling a physicist trying to provide an explanation for why objects fall to the ground that it might simply turn out to be false that objects fall to the ground at all. It is false. Gravity is not about "ground" nor does it require that everything fall to the ground, indeed there seem to be forces on objects stronger than the force of gravity. The ability to falsify concepts is critically…

I think you missed the point you were replying to. That objects fall to the ground is an undeniable observation. Having conscious experiences falls into the same category. For that matter, we experience objects falling to the ground. Gravity is an explanation of our experiences of falling objects. The experience comes first, then the explanation. If there was no experience of falling, there would be no explanation of gravity.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#34

Post by empath75 »

kanzure wrote: post #3

> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the…

Saying that conciousness isn't real because it's an emergent phenomenon of non-conscious processes is like saying that turbulence isn't real, because it's an emergent property of non-fluid particles. I mean sure, at the level of atoms, it's just particles interacting locally, but that doesn't mean that at certain scales, turbulence isn't a better way of looking at their group behavior.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#35

Post by RivieraKid »

nitrogen wrote: post #22
collyw wrote: post #11

"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.

All the proof you need is the existence of psychoactive chemicals, the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation, evidence from fMRI studies, and the selective personality alterations that occur in cases of localized brain damage.

All of those only imply that the physical state of the brain affects consciousness, which both camps agree on.
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