"That's all fab, but why can't that happen in the dark? Why does any of this constitute or necessitate subjective awareness. or consciousness, or the capacity to experience?" — bert1

I have often asked myself this question, albeit in a different variant: "Couldn't the human brain perform its functions even without consciousness?" and I said to myself: Orientation can also be done by an unconscious computer in an autonomous vehicle, memory, experience and learning can also be done by AI systems and a lot of other functions of the human brain like creativity, analysis, face recognition, predictions, language ... etc.

Thus, I had the idea that maybe all of the brain functions, even those which imply consciousness could be done without consciousness as well. I realize that this is a tentative and superficial conclusion that some would say is pure heresy, but this is what has been bothering me for decades.

I realize that this is a tentative and superficial conclusion that some would say is pure heresy, but this is what has been bothering me for decades. — Jacques

I've yet to hear a good argument against your conclusion. Much of the linking of brains and consciousness seems to me to be assumed on the basis of alterations in brain function altering what we experience. But why can't the alterations in a rock's functioning alter the rock's experience? I'm not quite sure why it's considered reasonable to focus on brains particularly when looking for consciousness in nature.

Much of the linking of brains and consciousness seems to me to be assumed on the basis of alterations in brain function altering what we experience. But why can't the alterations in a rock's functioning alter the rock's experience? I'm not quite sure why it's considered reasonable to focus on brains particularly when looking for consciousness in nature. — bert1

Aha, you're a panpsychist, right? My assumption was a different one: That all functions of our brain would also be possible without any personal experience.

If you think we have phenomenal consciousness, then how do you square that with physicalism? — Marchesk

I've never understood why people think there is any contradiction between believing that phenomenal consciousness is a mental, neurological, process that manifests itself as personal experience. The nervous system is at one level of organization while the mind is at another, higher level. This is analogous to how chemical processes manifest themselves as biological processes.

...if you think you can make physicalism work with phenomenal consciousness... — Marchesk

Although I don't call myself a "physicalist," I think a physicalist explanation is a good one for this situation.

And if you if you think you can make physicalism work with phenomenal consciousness, then good luck with that. — Marchesk

By the way, if you are a science fiction reader, I just read a good book - "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. In it, humans meet up with intelligent aliens who have no personal consciousness, no self-awareness. The interactions between the humans and the aliens are very interesting.

I watched a Quinn's Ideas YT video about blindsight a few months ago. Sounded interesting.

The interactions between the humans and the aliens are very interesting. — T Clark

But only to the humans, one presumes ;-)

I've never understood why people think there is any contradiction between believing that phenomenal consciousness is a mental, neurological, process that manifests itself as personal experience. — T Clark

I think it's because personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning, while the kinds of causal relationships posited by neurological sciences are physical, i.e. describable in terms of physical causes and effects.

This is from a chapter on the connection of physical causation and the discernment of meaning:

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning.

Any nuance of meaning coming from any part of the larger context can ground the because of reason. “I blushed because I saw a hint of suspicion in his eyes”. But I might not have blushed if his left hand had slightly shifted in its characteristic, reassuring way, or if a rebellious line from a novel I read in college had flashed through my mind, or if a certain painful experience in my childhood had been different. In a meaningful context, there are infinite possible ways for any detail, however remote, to be connected to, colored by, or transformed by any other detail. There is no sure way to wall off any part of the context from all the rest.

The Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher, Zenon Pylyshyn, once neatly captured the distinctiveness of the because of reason this way:

"Clearly, the objects of our fears and desires do not cause behavior in the same way that forces and energy cause behavior in the physical realm. When my desire for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow causes me to go on a search, the (nonexistent) pot of gold is not a causal property of the sort that is involved in natural laws."

The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, including such things as our desire for pots of gold or our subconscious urges toward violence. I will therefore refer interchangeably to the because of reason and the because of meaning, by both of which I refer to all the semantic relations and connotations, all the significances, that weave together and produce the coherent tapestry of a life, or of any other expression of meaning, such as a profound text — say, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or, for that matter, the text of a biological description. — Stephen L. Talbott

This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation.

The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer

This is my view also. The idea of the space of reasons has an eminent lineage, from Immanuel Kant to John McDowell, through Wilfrid Sellars. In the acknowledgements section of his book Rational Causation, Eric Marcus writes: 'The "space of causes," [John McDowell] taught, straddles the non-overlapping "space of reasons" and "space of laws," a metaphor that fits the central thesis of this
book.'

Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation.

The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer

:up:

I agree that many simply ignore their own situation as philosopher or scientist. They ignore their what they themselves are made of ---or rather what they perform.

Found this:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229403462.pdf
Geist refers to the normative in general. As such reference to the spiritual is a reference to the normative; correspondingly talk of normativity is talk of Hegelian Spirit... In this view, Geist arises with intersubjectivity; Geist has intersubjectivity as its ground and could not exist outside of it.
...
If we understand Geist correctly then we will understand that all human institutions, written and unwritten, all laws, all customs, all duties, all systems of meaning, all language is normative. Now if Geist is just a way of referring to the normative then it seems as if, to borrow from Pippin, we have left nature behind and are entering a world of pure thought. For on Pippin’s reading the Hegelian trajectory is away from nature and towards Spirit or Geist.... It seems to suggest that Spirit ‘transcends’ nature and such transcendence of nature seems to imply a break with nature. Of course, as is well known, Hegel sees Geist as a sublation or Aufhebung of nature. But the term sublation implies that what is sublated, nature, is preserved within that which sublates it, Geist. The term sublation never implies a breach. Thus Geist develops out of nature, whilst preserving nature, and does not leave it behind. Geist is a modification of nature.

Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation. — Pierre-Normand

:up:

Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation. — Pierre-Normand

Do you see our having reasons to do things itself being caused by neuronal activity? Because if it is then that would be "bottom up", no?

The because of reason does not refer to mere “logic” or “rational intellectuality”. Nor need it imply conscious ratiocination. It is constellated from the entire realm of possible meaning, — Stephen L. Talbott

FWIW, Brandom frames the situation as concepts themselves getting their meanings from how claims involving them are linked inferentially. The claim is semantically fundamental. [Can we ever say what it is to say what it is ? ] In either case, the semantic-inferential situation of the philosopher is made explicit as that which of course [in retrospect] is primary. Discursive selves negotiate in terms of soft principles softly established in previous negotiations.

Steve Talbott, whom I quoted, is a philosopher of biology. That section I quoted was extracted from a chapter called 'From Physical Causes to Organisms of Meaning'. Most of his writing is on the question of meaning, purpose and intentionality in the context of biology. He has a great series of essays on The New Atlantis which I recommend.

Seems interesting. He does seem to exaggerate the resistance to teleology in biology, which looks a bit crankish, though clearly he's a smart guy.

The curious thing, however, is that despite this emphatic recognition of the purposive organism, we find in textbooks of biology virtually no mention of purpose — or of the meaning and value presupposed by purpose. To refer to such “unbiological” realities is, it seems, to stumble into the unsavory company of mystics. Yet we might want to ask: if purposiveness in the life of organisms is as obvious as many in addition to Monod and Dobzhansky have admitted, why should it be impermissible for working biologists to reckon seriously with what everyone seems to know?

It’s a question we will ask. Be aware, however, that in struggling to answer it we may stir up unsettling doubts about the central biological concepts of evolution and natural selection. — Talbott

The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role.
...
Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/

I was going to mention Talbott on another thread about teleology, but it wasn’t very well formed. Talbott is no crank but of course, to challenge the mainstream is to run the risk of being so categorised, as was seen with Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. There’s an implicit consensus surrounding these questions strongly endorsing physicalism. Talbot's orientation, he says, is inspired by Goethe and Owen Barfield, among others, but he has no allegiance to Christian philosophy or intelligent design.

Later in this essay, he makes this point:

this entire discussion of ideas and meaning in the world brings us face to face with a haunting specter we need to exorcise once for all: the specter of vitalism. The accusation of vitalism seems inevitably to arise whenever someone points to the being of the organism as a maker of meaning. This is owing to a legacy of dualism that makes it almost impossible for people today to imagine idea, meaning, and thought as anything other than ghostly epiphenomena within human skulls. So the suggestion that ideas and meaning are “out there” in the world of cells and organisms immediately provokes the assumption that one is really talking about some special sort of physical causation rather than about a content of thought intrinsic to organic phenomena. That is, ideas and meanings are taken to imply a vital force or energy or substance somehow distinct from the forces, energies, and substances referenced in our formulations of physical law. Such an entity or power would indeed be a spectral addition to the world — an addition for which no one has ever managed to identify a physical basis.

But ideas, meanings, and thoughts are not material things, and they are not forces. Nor need they be to have their place in the world. After all, when we discover ideal mathematical relationships “governing” phenomena, we do not worry about how mathematical concepts can knock billiard balls around. If we did, we would have made our equations into occult or vital causes. But instead we simply recognize that, whatever else we might say about them, physical processes exhibit a conceptual or thought-like character. And so, too: the meanings that give expression to the because of reason do not knock biomolecules around, but — like mathematical relations — are discovered in the patterns we see. The thought-relations we discover in the world, whether in the mathematical demonstrations of the physicist or the various living forms of the biologist, need to be genuinely and faithfully and reproducibly observed, but must not be turned into mystical forces.

My bolds. In a similar vein:

the mathematical relations we apprehend in the physical world are neither forces nor physical things; they are purely conceptual. Yet we can reasonably say that such relations — for example, those given by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, representing Newton’s law of universal gravitation — in some sense govern material reality. The relations tell us, within the range of their practical applicability, something about the form of physical interactions. We do not try to make an additional, vital force out of the fact that a mathematical idea, as a principle of form, is “binding” upon an actual force.

All of that seems reasonable. At one time, the law of gravity just summed up how things were attracted to things. Then it got assimilated by the more comprehensive theory of GR. As we've discussed before, it's not clear why gravity has to keep working. We can't help trusting it, so it's a theoretical point.

Frankly even vitalism, depending on the details, could work as guiding hypothesis. Popper's defense of metaphysics comes into play here.

Yes, I'm a panpsychist. I like to think I was a panpsychist before it became trendy. And I'm not one of those sell-out panpsychists who think that only basic particles are conscious. I'm a proper one who thinks rocks and plastic bags are conscious.

This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer

A careful analysis of the two principle forms of causation reveals that the necessity of "because of physical law" is reducible to a form of the necessity of "because of reason". Simply put, the laws of physics are principles of reason, and the necessity which supports them is a logical necessity, inductive and deductive reasoning.

So, Newton's first law for example, does not describe any real necessity in the physical world, it states something which we employ as necessary for our understanding of the physical world. The "necessity" here is supported by inductive reason which itself suffers from "the problem of induction". When we understand the necessity of the first law, in this way, we see that the temporal continuity described by the concept of "inertia", would not really be necessary in a truly independent (from the human mind) physical world. That this "necessity" is just made up, created by the human minds which attempt to understand the physical world, and does not obtain to a true independent necessity as demonstrated by that stated problem, is the reason why Newton said that the truth of his first law is dependent on the Will of God.

There is an even more fundamental way of looking at the two principal senses of "necessity", which reveals this reduction even better. The two senses would be "logical necessity", because of logic (this includes physical causation), and, "what is needed", or necessary for an end. The former, logical necessity, is reducible to a form of the latter, necessary as the means to an end. Logical necessity can be seen as what is necessary, or needed, as the means toward the goal of understanding. So logical necessity describes what is needed for understanding, just like food is needed for subsistence. The relation between these two senses can be understood in translations of the old Latin expression for logical necessity "must needs be".

In this way, logical necessity, along with the necessity of the laws of physics and other scientific laws which are derived from logical necessity, are subsumed under the category of necessary for the sake of a goal, needed as means to an end. This greatly simplifies one's understanding of causation and necessity, allowing these to be tools of the mind and ultimately subservient to the free will.

However, the physicalist trend, to make the reduction in the inverted way, a way which it is impossible to make because it is incorrect, is a misunderstanding which casts all sorts of confusion onto the issue. But for anyone who has an adequate understanding of the nature of scientific laws in their relation to human thought, and the reality of the physical world, that misunderstanding ought to be obvious.

This touches upon a point I've been debating ever since joining forums - of reason understood as 'the relations of ideas'. The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. The 'because' of reasons - the 'space of reasons', it has been called - can't be explained in those terms, because it belongs to a different level of explanation. — Wayfarer

As we know from brain research, an idea is not caused by other ideas but by brain activities. These activities remain unknown to us for the majority, because only about ten percent of them are heaved into the consciousness. Let me explain: an idea cannot be a cause already because an idea is a representation, an imagination or a fiction. The sentence "I have an idea." is a symbolic narrative to which no real content corresponds. Neither is there an "I", nor can this "I" "possess" anything, such as an idea, all is just fiction.

This sentence is similar to another one, "I drag the file to the trash." Neither there is a recycle bin on the monitor, nor a file, nor is anything dragged, all just symbols. In reality, we operate the mouse and this triggers actions in the processor, on the hard disk and on the monitor. Similarly, if we say "The red knight has killed the black knight" in a computer game: it's all just symbols and representations.

That's a good book, but at one point aren't they inflicting pain on one of the aliens? When they try to test its communication abilities? Doesn't torture imply that the aliens have subjective experience?

Do you see our having reasons to do things itself being caused by neuronal activity? Because if it is then that would be "bottom up", no? — Janus

This is a good question but it seems closely related to the one you asked in the other thread about libertarian free will. Maybe it's more topical over there.

Our having reasons to do things causes things to happen in the world. Rational causation is a form of downward causation — Pierre-Normand

In my view there is only one real form of causation: physical causation. All other forms are metaphorical or attributional.

In my view there is only one real form of causation: physical causation. All other forms are metaphorical or attributional. — Jacques

You might be thinking like Jaegwon Kim, and for similar reasons (i.e. the causal closure of the physical + the causal exclusion argument + the supervenience of high-level entities and processes over the physical domain.)

The idea of panpsychism seems rather strange to me, not to mention that the truth of this idea cannot be verified or falsified.

You might be thinking like Jaegwon Kim, and for similar reasons (i.e. the causal closure of the physical + the causal exclusion argument + the supervenience of high-level entities and processes over the physical domain.) — Pierre-Normand

I don't think there are higher and lower levels of reality, instead I do believe there are only different perspectives on one and the same reality.

I don't think there are higher and lower levels of reality, instead I do believe there are only different perspectives on one and the same reality. — Jacques

I appreciate you perspective on it ;-)

I watched a Quinn's Ideas YT video about blindsight a few months ago. — Marchesk

Thanks, I'll take a look. People can argue about what consciousness is and what experience feels like, but it is hard to imagine how it works. "Blindsight" puts you in a place where you have to try to imagine what it would feel like to be intelligent but not self-aware. I found it very effective.

That's a good book, but at one point aren't they inflicting pain on one of the aliens? When they try to test its communication abilities? — RogueAI

That was a very interesting, maybe the most interesting, part of the book. You had to try to imagine what pain would be like with no sense of personal identify.

Doesn't torture imply that the aliens have subjective experience? — RogueAI

No. Yes. I don't know. I guess that's the point.

personal experience/consciousness is instrinsically dependent on judgement and the discernment of meaning — Wayfarer

I'm not sure, but I don't think this is true.

The tendency of reductionism is to conflate the two kinds of causation, physical and logical: which is what we do when we say that 'the brain' acts in a particular way, and so 'produces' thought, because of physical causation. — Wayfarer

I don't agree. I understand the distinction between types of reason described in your post, but I don't see any conflict. Meaning and thought can be seen as manifestations of mental processes, which can be seen as manifestations of biological, neurological processes. I don't see that as reductionism.