In it's most basic form, can one postulate that Anything that reacts to outward influence may be considered 'conscious' (of that influence)? Following that logic couldn't one consider all matter to be 'conscious'.

In it's most basic form, can one postulate that Anything that reacts to outward influence may be considered 'conscious' (of that influence)? Following that logic couldn't one consider all matter to be 'conscious'.

Depends on how we define 'conscious', which is why I am trying to be more specific and focus on the "self", on that something which is experiencing the experience. Not qualia per se, but subjective aspect of its perception.

Whatever explanation for that subjectiveness given in terms of purpose, function, process, computation, arrangement, state... or whatever other type of mechanical dynamics, is not the category of description that could explain the "why" question, nor “what is” question really.

Those types of answers will possibly explain everything else once the essence of the mystery gets discovered, if ever, but until then they are empty of any meaning simply because 'anything goes'. We must narrow it down and draw some bottom lines first.

I think this path of inquiry can shed light on the concept of consciousness. Extrapolating from the proposition 'reacting to outside influences' and extending that to 'life' (as being an even more sophisticated) reactor to outside influences. Evolution has extended this sensory ability with touch, vision,hearing and taste etc.. and ultimately with the ability to 'experience' oneself.

and ultimately with the ability to 'experience' oneself.

Imagine you understand exactly how it works, you can decode the brain impulses and watch someone's dreams, read their thoughts, delete memories or imprint new ones... you can even make Total Recall type dream machine to experience virtual reality in real life resolution.

You have solved the mystery of consciousness. And then I ask you, but what about subjective experience, where this "self" comes from, what is it, why is it? And you still don't know if it is panpsychism, emergent property of computation, maybe a ghost, or virtual fart from the quantum foam. See what I mean?

"where this "self" comes from, what is it, why is it?"
The sense of 'self', 'identity' is a trick you brain is playing on you. It is a magical 'illusion'. Science of psychology has empirically shown this to be the case in multiple studies. Interesting read perhaps?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/store/books/the-science-of-consciousness/

I can also give you a 'religious' explanation. God is consciousness and the creator of reality. You possess godliness.

One argument for panpsychism springs from the idea that consciousness does not admit of degree. — bert1

Insofar as the whole of existence is a heap due to the paradox of the heap? Dunno this argument.

In it's most basic form, can one postulate that Anything that reacts to outward influence may be considered 'conscious' (of that influence)? Following that logic couldn't one consider all matter to be 'conscious'. — ovdtogt

Yes, this is one specific interpretation of some of the results of systems theory. Although the meaning of consciousness between contexts may not map directly. Moving from one level of system to another instances become like 'metaphors'.

The idea is that if consciousness does not admit of degree, then it becomes very hard to find a point at which it can plausibly emerge. We'd have to find a change in a physical system that did not admit of any degree, some kind of quantum jump or something, with which to correlate the emergence of consciousness. This cannot plausibly be done it seems to me.

Stanford has caught up with this, no doubt due to my heroic efforts on these forums and the last:

More recently, Goff (2013) has argued that consciousness is not vague, and that this leads to a sorites-style argument for panpsychism. Very roughly if consciousness does not admit of borderline cases, then we will have to suppose that some utterly precise micro-level change—down to an exact arrangement of particles—marked the first appearance of consciousness (or the change from non-conscious to conscious embryo/foetus), and it is going to seem arbitrary that it was that utterly precise change that was responsible for this significant change in nature. — Goff, Philip, Seager, William and Allen-Hermanson, Sean, 'Panpsychism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

EDIT: ...and just to finish the thought, we then have to pick an alternative to emergentism. And as pfhorrest has already mentioned, the two obvious alternatives are eliminativism (nothing is conscious) or panpsychism (everything is). Eliminativism is false because I am conscious. That leaves panpsychism. It's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the others.

As with most subjects I am able to argue from a religious perspective: all things emanate from God (the Supreme Consciousness) or from an Evolutionarily perspective. Consciousness as an emergent ability of Life. Whereby all life shows a propensity towards consciousness in a lesser or greater extent. A bat can 'see' in the dark, not because its hearing is qualitatively different from ours. As demonstrated by blind people that are able to navigate by means of clicks. As such our consciousness is not qualitatively different to other organisms.

You keep making empty statements. How does that have anything to do with this thread and what I said in the opening post? — Zelebg

The statements you refer to are empty (meaningless) to you, because you don't understand the unconventional worldview that the assertions are derived from. That's why I provide links for those who are interested enough to investigate a novel way of looking at the world.

In the OP, you stated, as-if a matter of fact, that "At the bottom of it all is just plain mechanics, . . ." My replies have denied that assertion, and offered an alternative to the Mechanical worldview of Classical Materialism. I suppose you think the opposite of Materialism is Spiritualism. But my BothAnd philosophy accepts both the Materialism (Quanta) of Science, and the Spiritualism (Qualia) of Religion, while noting that they each exclude or ignore the other side of reality. When you can see the world as a whole, the Hard Problem of Consciousness vanishes as an illusion. :cool:


PS__Unfortunately, my worldview has some features in common with New Age philosophy. Which is why I spend of lot of verbiage to distance myself from the NA merging of science and magic. Whatever seems like supernatural magic is actually either obfuscation or natural phase changes.

Note : Richard Feynman quipped "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." I believe that's because Quantum Mechanics is not mechanical at all, it's emergent. Physicist Carlo Rovelli labeled his new book Reality Is Not What It Seems. . . . from the conventional classical scientific perspective.

BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

So instead of explanation at this time I'm looking for good analogies — Zelebg

I think it's worth taking a quick step back at Emergence/Panpsychism, and rather than accept all of their respective tenants, take pieces that have merit or at least have a more aligned analogy.

To analogize each individual's stream of consciousness to merit's of emergence then I see two things:

1. In Nature: Swarming is a well-known behavior in many animal species from marching locusts to schooling fish to flocking birds. Emergent structures are a common strategy found in many animal groups: colonies of ants, mounds built by termites, swarms of bees, shoals/schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds/packs of mammals.

An example to consider in detail is an ant colony. The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and buildup of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant.

So in that respect, my thinking is that the swarming as it were, has a strange parallel to a description of how conscious thoughts appear randomly (stream of consciousness). Meaning conscious and subconscience (EM fields of consciousness) seem to know how to interact as a whole system in our brain to produce thoughts. And, it may even have parallels to QM as we pick from these random fields/ thoughts that we apprehend through volitional existence, as we make choices everyday.

2. Schopenhauer's Metaphysical Will in Nature, generally, seems to suggest Panpsychism:

"Everything presses and strives towards existence…Let any one consider this universal desire for life, let him see the infinite willingness, facility, and exuberance with which the will to live presses impetuously into existence under a million forms everywhere and at every moment…In such phenomena, then, it becomes visible that I am right in declaring that the will to live is that which cannot be further explained, but [yet] lies at the foundation of all explanation…”

As Zelebg put in an earlier question about 'a force' , that is just one synopsis of a broader view about consciousness without detail.

It looks to me like the difference between (A) and (B) arises solely through propagating the conceptual distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness through the same evidence; the argument is really over whether the distinction makes sense in light of what we know about consciousness. Is there one construct (functionality alone, account B) or two (functionality and phenomenality, account A)? — fdrake

Your account of the differences between 180 Proof and I sounds pretty accurate to me, except I'm not really arguing that there is anything substantial to phenomenality, I'm just addressing the topic as it is brought up in philosophy; all I think really matters is the functionality.

I think I've said this already in this thread (I've said it all over other threads before definitely), but to me the situation is analogous to natural vs supernatural. I think that everything is necessarily natural and that "supernatural" things don't make any sense, the concept of something being supernatural is incoherent; but nevertheless, I say that everything is natural, which turns out to not really mean anything because naturalness is a completely trivial attribute of everything. Likewise, I think that everything is "phenomenally conscious" as that term is defined, and philosophical zombies don't make any sense, the concept is incoherent; but nevertheless, I say there are no philosophical zombies, and everything has "phenomenal consciousness", which turns out to not really mean anything because "phenomenal consciousness" is a completely trivial attribute of everything.

And the two things -- supernatural things and philosophical zombies -- are unreal for the same reason, seen in two different ways: reality is made up of the network of interactions between its constituents, which interactions constitute the phenomenal experience things have of each other and the empirical properties things have, and for a thing to be supernatural is for it to have no empirical properties (and so to be completely disconnected from everything else in reality, and so unreal), while to be a philosophical zombie is to have no phenomenal experience (and so to be completely disconnected from everything else in reality, and so unreal).

You are making incoherent, vague assertions — Zelebg

Sigh...

Pots and kettles.

Aren't you the one forwarding a notion of consciousness that you yourself cannot explain?

I think that everything is "phenomenally conscious"

Our perception is abstracted, simplified, focused, noise-reduced... it's a function in virtual reality not the result of direct sensation. To simulate this "user interface" called qualia requires quite a bit of processing, some kind of computer. Surely that much at least we can learn from neurology and other empirical studies of the brain.

Perception is something more than just raw phenomenal experience. To truly perceive, in the way that humans do, requires quite a bit of processing, sure. And even just perception like that isn't enough to count as consciousness in what I think is the ordinary way we mean it; that takes even more, and reflexive, processing.

But all of that is access consciousness, the subject of the easy problem of consciousness; which is really quite harder, because you have to do empirical science to explain it, but it's philosophically easy because we can say "the rest is just empirical science" in the way that mathematicians can say "the rest is just calculation" after all the abstract work is done.

The philosophically hard problem about phenomenal consciousness asks what exactly is it besides all of that functional stuff that gives us the subjective, first-person experience of all of that happening, and if you built a machine to do all of the same functionality, would it lack that subjective-first person experience, or would it have one just like us, and if so where does that come from and why?

The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything. But what that subjective first-person experience is like varies with the function of the thing, such that only complicated reflexive systems like us have an "internal life" (because we are experiencing our own self-interaction as well as just reacting to the world). So if you built a machine to do all the same functions that human brains do, it would automatically have the same kind of subjective first-person experience that humans do, and there's no need to explain where that came from, because it's not something that just popped into existence when you built that functionality into it: the experience is built out of simpler experiences that were always there, right alongside building the function out of simpler functions.

The philosophically hard problem about phenomenal consciousness asks what exactly is it besides all of that functional stuff that gives us the subjective, first-person experience of all of that happening, and if you built a machine to do all of the same functionality, would it lack that subjective-first person experience, or would it have one just like us, and if so where does that come from and why?

The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything — Pfhorrest

It's a pseudo-materialist solution, in my view. It says there must be some extra, magical ingredient in everything which is 'consciousness' in some latent or implicit form, which then manifests in living beings in particular.

The reason I say it's pseudo-materialist is because it purports to understand that element as a attribute of matter. But at the same time, it has no possible answer as to what this 'stuff' is or how it can be observed or brought into the ambit of empirical analysis. So it becomes another of the 'promissory notes of materialism', something which we are assured 'science will one day come to understand'. It's actually more a way of trying to preserve the monistic ontology of materialism - that only matter exists - by insisting that matter itself is conscious - which I think is a total fudge. (I actually had Philip Goff turn up on this very forum in response to my earlier criticism of one of his essays.)

With respect to the subjective unity of consciousness, this is a well-known and ancient philosophical problem. Kant certainly discussed it at great length in various works. But let's just step back and ask the question again - what is being discussed here? Chalmers, and others, have put it (awkwardly, in my opinion) as the 'what-it-is-like' to be something. But I think a much less roundabout way of putting it is, that what is being discussed is simply being. It is 'the nature of being' that is the hard problem.

Here is a pivotal conception in Kant concerning what he describes as 'transcendental apperception':

[1] All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (an idea taken from David Hume).
[2] To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity for consciousness.
[3] Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
[4] The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is. *
[5] Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
[6] These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.

Source
(* I question number four, as I don't believe the self is an object of experience.)

This is related to the concept of the transcendental ego.

Transcendental ego, the self that is necessary in order for there to be a unified empirical self-consciousness. For Kant, it synthesizes sensations according to the categories of the understanding. Nothing can be known of this self*, because it is a condition, not an object, of knowledge. For Husserl, pure consciousness, for which everything that exists is an object, is the ground for the foundation and constitution of all meaning. 2

* cf Brihadaranyaka Upaniṣad 'It is the unknown knower, the unseen seer'.

You might object 'where can this 'transcendental ego' be found? And I think there's a hint in the examination of the so-called 'neural binding problem', in particular the problem of the 'subjective unity of experience'. This refers to the capacity of the brain to synthesise all manner of perceptual stimuli into a coherent unity - the 'subjective unity of experience' - which is, at least, strongly suggestive of the 'transcendental ego'. But science is unable to determine the neural mechanism which is associated with this act of 'synthesis':

In his paper on this issue, Jerome S. Feldman says that:

There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008). The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry. Closely related problems include change- (Simons and Rensink 2005) and inattentional-blindness (Mack 2003), and the subjective unity of perception arising from activity in many separate brain areas (Fries 2009; Engel and Singer 2001).

...There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the NBP really is a scientific mystery at this time.

In the introduction to this paper, Feldman states outright:

Traditionally, the Neural Binding problem concerns instantaneous perception and does not consider integration over saccades. But in both cases the hard problem is explaining why we experience the world the way we do. As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996).

So, as I said in my first post, the reason the hard problem is hard, is really very simple: that being can never be made an object of scientific analysis, in the manner that this is currently understood. This is why, for example, 'eliminative materialism' exists, because it explicitly recognises this; but instead of saying 'oh well, then, scientific method has its limits', they then insist that being itself is an illusion. (Whereas, my view is: get over it, and move along.)

The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything.

But what is the difference between that and saying subjective first-person experience emerges from computation? And in either case someone can come along and say: "panpsychism? higher thought? that's the spirit of god I've been telling you about for the last 2000 years".

None of it is testable and none of it makes any practical difference, not just to solve the problem, but not even to show us direction or a hint as to how should real mystery be resolved. Or do they?

Chalmers, and others, have put it (awkwardly, in my opinion) as the 'what-it-is-like' to be something.

Totally awkward, almost not helpful at all. I'd say the question is: what or who is the subject of experience?

One of the fundamental questions. I think the most important thing to realise is that it's an open question.

The point is not to solve the problem but to dissolve it. Saying phenomenal consciousness, not just access consciousness, arises from computation still leaves the question of how and why, a seemingly unanswerable question as you point out in the OP.

Philosophy progresses by breaking down those intractable problems into either tractable problems for science to go solve, or non-problems that don’t need solving. The question of consciousness breaks down into two different questions, one of each kind. The tractable one, the easy problem of access consciousness, is just a question of functionality for psychologists, neuroscientists, and programmers to figure out.

The “hard” (non-)problem of phenomenal consciousness is whatever’s left after that: if we built perfect functional simulation of a human, would it have a first-person experience like we do? If no, why not, what’s different about it, besides the functionality that we’ve already stipulated is the same? If yes, then what is it besides the functionality, which we’ve already bracketed, that gives it that first person experience? My answer is “nothing”: there is no mystery to be explained, there is nothing besides the functionality of access consciousness that differs between a human and something that else that we wouldn’t normally call conscious, so whatever it is besides that functionality that might be required for humans to have a first-person experience, that is something trivial that’s just part of being, something everything has, and only the functionality, the access consciousness, is different.

I’m not saying that there are two kinds of substance, or two kinds of property, or anything like that: just that we can look at the same things, all things, which are all metaphysically alike and differ only in functionality, from two perspectives: third person / objective, and first person / subjective. That difference in perspective is all there is to phenomenal consciousness, and the functionality of access consciousness is all the rest of the explanation for consciousness, which is no longer a philosophical problem but a scientific one.

The point is not to solve the problem but to dissolve it. Saying phenomenal consciousness, not just access consciousness, arises from computation still leaves the question of how and why.

Consider all this preparation to encode qualia in a certain format for consumption by the "self". If we now suppose all the information actually must take this specific qualia format to be experienced, then that tells us something about this "self". We could then look into what is special about this format and maybe find out what does it take to be decoded or 'consumed', which then might tell us a little bit more, and so on. It's not much, but it's something "practical", in a way at least, something worth pursuing to see where it leads. Isn't it?

That’s worth exploring yes, but that’s a question of access consciousness, not phenomenal consciousness.

I heavily elaborated my last response while you were responding to it BTW.

When I say qualia gets "consumed" by the self, that "consumption" is the act of phenomenally experiencing the qualia. Access consciousness has to do with preparing the meal, or digesting it (from memory) after it has been consumed (experienced). One other thing we can say with no unsignificant confidence is that consumption of qualia leads to all the shit get stored in the memory.

The hard problem only exists for naturalists, because they consider the concepts they use to describe the world to be semantically divorced from sense.

For phenomenological traditions, there only exists the 'easy' problem of explaining the unity of intentionality. For there is no gap within their concepts for the hard problem.

How does ghost in the machine solve the problem? How do you explain subjective experience of the ghost? And whose ghost is it? Mine? Or is it some shape shifting lizard alien playing some game through my avatar?

So in that respect, my thinking is that the swarming as it were, has a strange parallel to a description of how conscious thoughts appear randomly (stream of consciousness). Meaning conscious and subconscience (EM fields of consciousness) seem to know how to interact as a whole system in our brain to produce thoughts. And, it may even have parallels to QM as we pick from these random fields/ thoughts that we apprehend through volitional existence, as we make choices everyday.

You mean if we take all the bees that compose an emergent whole, so that their "collective consciousness" is parallel to brain consciousness? I find that parallel meaningful, but do not see what meaning of it could lead to something pragmatic we can do with it.

Zelebg:

When I say qualia gets "consumed" by the self, that "consumption" is the act of phenomenally experiencing the qualia. Access consciousness has to do with preparing the meal, or digesting it (from memory) after it has been consumed (experienced). One other thing we can say with no unsignificant confidence is that consumption of qualia leads to all the shit get stored in the memory.

Are you saying "self" is some kind of organism that eats qualia and shits memories?

Zelebg:

Are you saying "self" is some kind of organism that eats qualia and shits memories?

You're talking to yourself. But, yes, I guess I did say that.

The most crazy, yet strangely plausible theory of consciousness

Consciousness is a parasitic animal trom the 5th dimension of the Aether. They feed on experience in our dimension and make you think all the shit they leave behind are your memories. Our experience is just a bunch of mental feces. There, that explains everything.