My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem?…
No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.
Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
31–40 of 191 posts
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#32It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#33This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…
I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_
In my view, the two dynamics are incredibly intertwined. The sensation is largely made up of and intertwined with an understanding of what the sensation _means_. I'll try to give an example: Think of a complex modern art painting. It's much more difficult to perceive the colors used in the painting, as the boundaries between different parts and components of the painting are far less meaningful or distinguishable, co…
Nearly. This is why the main thrust of meditation is about becoming aware of ever-subtler processes, both on- and off-cushion. When there's enough awareness to distinguish between the arising of bare perception and the associations it triggers (for example), it becomes clear why we identified consciousness with association, and why it doesn't quite capture what we were originally curious about. Something interesting remains. As more and more functions (modeling, associating, remembering, attending, etc.) get distilled away, you'd think the mystery gets smaller and smaller. But experientially speaking, I think it only gets bigger.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#35This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…
No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu. When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most l…
For a forum of smart people, dumb things get posted a lot.
Making up new words is an organic feature of an individuals development. No one is under an obligation to do as you wish.
Go work on it if it means that much to you. Stop expecting everyone else to get it done for you.
> When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most likely have occurred to 17th century philosophers
You don't even know? Pretty bold assertion then. One would think the genius that is so willing to explain how everyone else is screwing it up would be better acquainted with the situation than "could" and "most likely"
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#36This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#37This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…
No new words are needed. What you need is that people stop conjuring new words to explain the same things over and over again, using and re-using words under different meanings without ever bothering to either listen or read their predecessors properly, which only leads to feelings of ineffectualness and a strange sensation of déjà vu. When authors in the philosophy of mind stops rehashing ideas that could and most l…
Our bodies are largely autonomous with cells communicating via a variety of methods either pumping in/out chemicals to the cell itself or the immune system placing protein markers for other parts of the body (immune cells) to deal with bearing in mind that every cell in the body has a complete copy of the DNA.
One thing I have learnt about the body, is there is alot of redundancy built in for it's survival, every cell has a complete copy of the DNA which can be altered leading to cells not functioning properly, and there are a variety of means in which the consciousness can be alerted to problems which need addressing like hormone's or nerve messages.
Simply dropping 500Mg of niacin (the non flush variety) on an empty stomach demonstrates how quickly the prostaglandlins can be stimulated into action in many different parts of the body, not just the skin but internal organs like the lungs & liver. How aware you your consciousness is about these changes and effects is perhaps also an indicator of your consciousness, just like some people are more aware of their food cravings.
When considering food craving's & how pregnant women can suddenly start craving things like coal when they perhaps have never eaten it before also indicates some sort of memory that may have been passed on by their parents, or maybe there is some other subconscious mechanism which perhaps through the nose enables the body to identify a substance which contains chemicals which the body needs.
The fact our taste and enjoyment of food and drink is altered simply by light also indicates our consciousness is easily swayed over the logic or remembered/imagined experience.
Ultimately its hard to define what consciousness is exactly because when considering the blood brain barrier and how hard it is for some chemicals to reach the brain but not other's, is our consciousness largely just a collection of learned experiences where nature has utilised cholesterol into a storage medium and consciousness itself is just a memory of chemical & electrical responses in a variety of cells which certain feedback mechanisms like nerves, immune system cells and hormones the brain is able to remember and influence its behaviour as a result?
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#38My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem?…
No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#39This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think
#40This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…
Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human".
On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such?
For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked.
Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.