Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. — jkop

Fairly likely, at least.

Moreover, conscious states such as visual experiences have a hierarchical structure in the sense that the experience is not solely a biological phenomenon. It is also causally constrained by the behavior of light, and influenced by the observer's psychology, sociology, language and culture. All of these can be described, but none of them is a complete description of the experience. However, the lack of a single complete description is hardly a problem. — jkop

The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer". What possible physicalist justification can there be for this, much less an explanation? "Experience" is another imported word. Sure, we can describe a subjective experience, but how do we explain its existence, or why it exists in the way it does and not in another? That's the hard problem.

I know it’s difficult not to associate agency with consciousness...
— Joshs

‘Whereas Barad dilutes the theoretical distinction between mind and matter as well as the distinction between animate and inanimate, the contention here is that it is ethically and politically vital to hold on to a notion of subjectivity understood in terms of the capacity for experience’ - from a critique of Barad’s agential realism.

↪Tom Storm Barad’s ‘agential realism’. Streetlight mentioned it also. As a form of materialism, it is obliged to deny the ontological distinction between animate and inanimate, per the above — Wayfarer

What I’m calling practice theory isn’t restricted to Barad’s work. It includes the projects of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, phenomenology , hermeneutics, poststructuralists like Foucault and Deleuze, as well as enactivists like Evan Thompson. The issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. Instead of viewing subjectivity as an inner , ineffable content, he views it as the derivative product of distributed neural networks. Subjectivity is a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes.

he issue for Thompson isn’t whether the animate and the inanimate are ontologically distinct, but how to understand subjectivity in terms of autonomous processes of self-organization in living systems. — Joshs

But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist.

But he still differentiates living from non-living right at the outset. 'The living order is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of structure in the physical order.' I can't see how what you're advocating is not reductionist — Wayfarer

Reduction to what? Causal determinism? That’s not what one is left with in Barad’s model , any more than it forms the basis of Thompson’s model of consciousness. And Thompson may not be so far apart from Barad as you might think when it comes to the distinction between the physical and the experiential.

He writes:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

Now I don't think we're anywhere near a synthesis of consciousness from unconscious compounds, but if seems fairly clear that consciousness is a biological phenomenon. — jkop

If we could build a working brain our of inorganic parts that was functionally equivalent to a working organic brain, wouldn't the non-biological brain be conscious?

I'll see your Thompson, and raise you one Pattee:

I have made the case over many years that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature.

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.

I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world. — Howard Pattee

With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism.

With respect to the Evan Thompson quote, the way I interpret that is in line with phenomenology - it aims to avoid dualistic categorisation by avoiding reduction to purely physical or purely mental. part of 'healing the split' caused by mind-body dualism. But I don't think that supports any form of materialism — Wayfarer

What writers like Thompson, Barad and Deleuze mean by ‘material’ is quite different than the way it is meant in causal reductionism. Materiality has to do with discursive practices , and discourse isn't limited to linguistic practices. Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. For Thompson, material interactions between cognizing agent and environment are about the concrete ways that each defines the other through patterns of exchanges.

Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.

Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object. — Howard Pattee

If we compare Pattee’s take on the autonomy of self against its world (‘epistemic cut’) with Thompson’s concept of embodied autonomy as ‘operational closure’, a number of differences emerge. For one thing , Pattee’s distinction between interpreter and interpreted , between cognizer and environment, doesn’t seem to see this relation as reciprocally causal such that the Umwelt is not only defined by the cognizer , but through exchanges between interpreter and world both are continually redefined. This doesn’t lend itself to any neatly defined epsitemic cut on the order of a statistical boundary like a Markov blanket.

Enactivists assert a strong notion of world-involvement,
i.e., processes in the environment play more than informational roles in the consti­tution and actualization of life and mind . To enact a world of significance is to engage in actual acts, which are material events with spreading consequences that are both world-changing and agent-changing. Environmental and biological/cognitive processes are mutually enabled and mutually constituted. They interpenetrate at all scales and they co­ordinate across scales.

Historicity and the co-constitution of organism and environment are internally related in the enactive approach. Concerns about the conservation of organization are mostly linked to the self-production requirement of autopoiesis (the regen­eration of the conditions that continuously give rise to the operationally closed network of processes making up the organism). Concerns about barriers, bound­aries, and in general about an organism’s relation to its environment are mostly linked to the condition of self-distinction in the definition of autopoiesis. From an enactive perspective, self-distinction and self-production are dialectically re­lated, that is, they are mutually dependent, though distinct, mo­ments of autopoiesis. You cannot have one set of processes and not the other as long as the organism lives, yet the processes are not the same. All processes subserving self-distinction are themselves products of self-production

And the fact that it turned out inorganic and organic compounds are not fundamentally different is not evidence that the same answer will apply to the HPoC. — Patterner

Right, conscious states are different from unconscious states, but are they fundamentally different?

A series of biochemical reactions release the energy in nutrients, and ion channels generate electrical signals that pulsate across cell membranes, connect synapses, and fire through neural networks etc. Even if we'd be able to map the entire brain process that is constitutive for, say, a visual experience, it does not include what is seen, e.g. a bird. It makes no sense to look for a neurological version of a bird in the brain when the object of the experience is flying in the sky.

Also, what it feels like to have that visual experience is not necessarily a part of the visual experience. Neurons release dopamine, for instance, which may cause an overlapping or separate experience, but the cause for the release of dopamine can be fixed by expectations, or social pressure to feel a certain way when seeing the bird. The cause of the feeling is then only partly to be found in biochemistry and partly in psychology or sociology or culture. Hence a seeming inability to explain what it feels like in terms of biochemistry.

The problem isn't the lack of a complete description. Rather, it's how we can even talk about all this without importing (as you do) the term "observer". — J

Ok, please explain to me why we can't talk about all this without using the word 'observer'?

Sure, we can describe a subjective experience, but how do we explain its existence, or why it exists in the way it does and not in another? That's the hard problem. — J

For example, a feeling of being drunk (its existence and why it exists the way it does) is uncontroversially explained by the effects that alcohol has on our cognitive functions. One might add descriptions of situations, ambience and memories of previous experiences, expectations etc. to further articulate what it feels like.

In order to make that into a hard problem of consciousness (afaik), we'd have to define the feeling as something that is detached from being drunk, as something that accompanies it. By detaching the feeling from the drunken state, while assuming that the two must still be related somehow, we seem to create the very problem that we are pretending to solve. But the feeling is not necessarily related to the experience. It might be a function of interest of the body to receive awards, e.g. dopamine released by neurons at work whenever the experience satisfies or disappoints. Just a speculation.

If we could build a working brain our of inorganic parts that was functionally equivalent to a working organic brain, wouldn't the non-biological brain be conscious? — RogueAI

I read recently about an artificial model of the brain of a fruit fly. It is supposedly a complete model, but I don't know if or how it works.

If we can manufacture artificial fruit flies, then it seems at least possible to manufacture larger or more complex organisms. But it might be improbable considering the overwhelming complexity of organisms. To simulate a collection of selected functions seems much easier, but a simulation of being conscious is not conscious.

Materiality is discursive in the sense that it consists of reciprocal acts of affecting and being affected that form normative systems. — Joshs

But to me that requires the existence of the kind of agency that only begins to appear with organic life (by no means only conscious agency.) That is the reason I'm open to biosemiosis but not to pansemiosis. The first refers to the process of semiosis (the production and interpretation of signs) specifically within biological systems. It focuses on how living organisms generate, interpret, and respond to signs and signals in their environment—such as how cells communicate or how animals process sensory information - Pattee's area of expertise. The second extends the idea of semiosis beyond biological systems, suggesting that semiosis is a universal feature of reality, occurring at all levels of existence, including inanimate matter. In this view, the entire cosmos can be understood as engaging in some form of sign interpretation or meaning-making, not just living organisms. That doesn't register for me.