What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
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What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
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Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#2Right off the bat it seemed like it was saying experts have changed their tone recently. Saying "we're further from understanding consciousness than we thought we were". It never goes on to elaborate this point.
Great book review. If I had more time, I would snap up the book immediately. The review left me wondering if the book elaborates on the above ^^^. I might make the time to read it.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#3Just blindly bought this book because I think consciousness is one of the most fascinating unexplained aspects of our universe.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#4Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl...
It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious.
Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#5Right off the bat it seemed like it was saying experts have changed their tone recently. Saying "we're further from understanding consciousness than we thought we were". It never goes on to elaborate this point. Great book review. If I had more time, I would snap up the book immediately. The review left me wondering if the book elaborates on the above ^^^. I might make the time to read it.
> Right off the bat
This might not be a deliberate reference to Nagel (as mentioned in the article) but at least it's thematically appropriate.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#6I wonder how this compares with 'The Society of the Mind'
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#7Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.)
Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousness" as "phenomenological experience" in the barest, most unqualified sense, ie, the experience of "yellow" when photons of wavelength ~580nm strike a visual sensory organ of some kind of cognitive system.
Note that the above does not automatically imply that the experience is understood or even recognized. A lot of armchair philosophers and intellectual hobbyists conflate the term "consciousness" with the notion of having some kind of mental model through which to comprehend the experience (what I call "awareness"), or an understanding of the dichotomy between self vs environment (what I call "sentience", ie, "self-awareness").
Acting through anthropocentrism, it is easy to assume that the three are inextricable, but I don't think that perspective is the way forward toward understanding of consciousness per se.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#8It's time to upgrade this folk philosophy of mind and its obsession with ever-elusive "consciousness" with theories of intelligence build on neuroscientific, cellular and developmental underpinnings.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#9Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousne…
You sound like you'd be into the idea of "qualia" if you're not already aware.
Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
#10It's time to upgrade this folk philosophy of mind and its obsession with ever-elusive "consciousness" with theories of intelligence build on neuroscientific, cellular and developmental underpinnings.
intelligence is not the target I take it. The target is self-experience/qualia