
Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002) - networked
http://consc.net/papers/nature.html
======
chronolitus
I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed
to put a finger on something that's been bothering me.

Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon,
emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What
way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to
brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable computing system.
Several conclusions are possible:

1) The brain is conscious and can accurately measure that it is conscious. ->
we should then also be able to measure this consciousness, if we figure out
how the brain does. (wouldn't we have found something already?)

2) The brain is conscious and accurately guessed it is conscious. -> problem:
why would the brain guess this, especially about something it can not measure?

3) The brain does not produce consciousness but thinks it does. -> Just as the
metaphysical zombie, being molecule for molecule identical would assert it is
conscious. (but now we're denying consciousness exists, see arguments about
eliminativism in the original post)

Any thoughts?

~~~
newuser3000
Without language there is no consciousnesses. That's it. The brain does what
it does. We think, occasionally, then imagine that we cause brain to function.

All animals are just dandy without complex language, it's not really a miracle
that we are conscious, just a different too.

~~~
CuriouslyC
Language is a learned behavior. Consciousness is a property of the learner.
Language may influence conscious experience, but it certainly doesn't create
it.

~~~
13of40
I think the development of complex language and the internal feedback
mechanism it enabled might have led to a higher level of consciousness in
humans.

~~~
CuriouslyC
It is entirely possible that language development created a self-reinforcing
feedback loop for the development of intelligence. I don't think intelligence
and consciousness are necessarily correlated though.

~~~
13of40
Unless you think a shrimp is as conscious as a person, or that a dog is
completely lacking in consciousness, you have to accept that consciousness
comes in degrees. Unless you believe consciousness is supernatural, you have
to accept that it has an organic origin. What that says to me is that humans
have evolved brain structures that give us a higher level of consciousness
than other animals, and IMO the best candidate for how that happened is we
learned how to self-reflect through things like speech and art.

~~~
CuriouslyC
I don't know that the experience of being a human is any more vivid or real
than the experience of being a shrimp. Don't conflate the ability to reason
with the quality of having an internal experience. Perhaps the shrimp lives
more truly, undistracted as it is by meaningless thoughts.

The state of consciousness is correlated with the state of matter. We don't
know more than that. We've assumed that physical reality is the ground state
and consciousness is the phenomenon, but reality could just as easily be a
dream in the mind of the universe. If consciousness can influence reality that
would seem to indicate it is either equally fundamental to, or even precedent
over material reality. The alternative, that consciousness is a passive
observer, is both depressing and unlikely.

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joe_the_user
"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation,
mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is
something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize
the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each
of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or
qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state."

...

"Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even
once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of
consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there
may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions
accompanied by experience?"

\-- I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Any information
processing system would have internal processes, ones that reflect current and
past input, "raw" and suitably modified. A sophisticated information
processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal
processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not.

I mean, all of this is important to _us_ because we are it. Any autonomous
system would be more concerned with its internal processes than random things.
So for such a thing, a brain or even a self-driving car, it's internal
processes have a unique place - inside of its memory.

" Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any
accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of
consciousness."

\-- Because each information processing system only processes its own
information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input.

Of course, I'd say that such reasoning seems plausible because humans have a
strong tendency to project our experiences on other human beings and to
imagine other people having our experiences and vice-verse. So we experience
only our input (rather tautologically) but imagine others having our
experiences, imagine others imagining us having their experiences and so-
reflexively via "mirror neurons" and such.

But beyond that I think it seems "hard" because we value these experiences so
highly. Having it all be banal and obvious seems to devalue it. And that's
about it.

~~~
themgt
Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that
they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness.

I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of
our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and
planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a
lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece of the universe developed
into beings that believe themselves to be conscious, believe they in some
sense have the power of mind-over-matter, and in fact have constructed a
globe-spanning civilization that appears to demonstrate the ability of
billions of minds to understand to some degree themselves, each other and the
universe, and to willfully bend matter to suit its purposes. aka Hofstadter's
"who pushes whom around inside this cranium?" question.

We have not come anywhere close to constructing an artificial system with
similar capabilities nor to understand how or why they arise in our own
brains. It's presumptuous in the extreme to hand-wave away this conundrum with
an "information processing" metaphor.

~~~
joe_the_user
You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it,
there must be some transcendent property.

I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness.

I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work,
should they have assumed God was behind it?

Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and
chemistry that gave rise to life even if the function of the brain is so far
beyond us. So we're certainly not confronting life as something wholly
unexplained. Some parts are still beyond us, some things we don't know yet.
But un-knowledge usually isn't evidence for any specific thing.

~~~
ableton
The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem
is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic
doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and
can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the
experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix,
and our subjective experpence could be just as real. In fact Elon musk thinks
it's a very high probability that we are in the matrix. Since our experience
of the world is not material it doesn't seem to follow that there must be a
material explanation for it.

~~~
Smaug123
Ponder this: the number 15 exists but isn't material. It is an extrapolated
common property of physical systems. The number $2^789 - 53$ exists but isn't
material; and you've never seen a physical system which embodies that number,
but there could plausibly be one.

Why could your consciousness not similarly be an extrapolated property of a
physical system, without being physical itself?

~~~
placebo
That's a good question and the answer is that both the sun and the number 15
are concepts created by the mind because creating concepts has great survival
value. You are conscious of these concepts. "Consciousness" itself is also a
concept you are conscious of. We tend to confuse the map with the territory -
perhaps because believing the reality of the map makes us more real and gives
a sense of control over things - I wouldn't know. What I am convinced of is
that consciousness (and I'm not referring to the concept of it) is not a
product of the mind, but vice versa.

~~~
andrepd
The sun is a physical body that exists despite us, 15 exists only on the mind.

~~~
placebo
Perhaps investigate what physicality is beyond the awareness of it. The only
reason something objective exists is that there's a separate subject to say
so. And no, this doesn't mean that nothing existed prior to human beings, it
does mean however that the division of the world into "physical" vs "mental",
"objective" vs. "subjective", "me" vs. "not me" was created by the human mind.

------
gaetanrickter
How about Nature and its place in Consciousness?

------
pmoriarty
Analytic philosophers love to talk of qualia, but Continentals
(Phenomenologists in particular) were on to the idea of the "lifeworld" well
before (late 19th century) the Analytics came up with qualia (1929). I'd love
to see the two concepts compared and contrasted.

If anyone knows of such a comparison, I'd love to read about it.

~~~
fmoralesc
The concepts of 'qualia' and 'lifeworld' are not directly comparable. Qualia
are qualitative aspects of experiences, but lifeworlds are complexes of
objects associated to a 'perspective' which operates on them (and possibly
constitutes them) - essentially subjective worlds. The point of contact
between those ideas is this: different lifeworlds could include the same
objects but have a different qualitative character. The trick is that saying
that the objects in two different lifeworlds are the same might make the
assumption that the objects are 'given' (then, the qualitative aspect would be
extrinsic to them). But if the subject of the lifeworld actively constitutes
the objects of the world the objects could be different anyway, because those
qualitative aspects would be intrinsic.

Imagine a meadow. An insect experiences differently than a girl who is picking
flowers, and both experience it differently than a cow who pastures (I think
this is Uexkull's [who introduced the notion of Lebenswelt] own example). We
might assume that beyond those lifeworlds there is a real world that grounds
them and includes the objects that they . But it is not clear that the objects
in all those worlds are the same, because the cognition of the insect, the cow
and the girl might carve the world in different ways.

Btw, historically, similar ideas where explored by William James around the
same time the early phenomenologists and proto-phenomenologists (like
Brentano), and James' influence through pragmatism fed back into analytic
philosophy. Mainstream analytic philosophers more or less abandoned the idea
for a while because of the influence of behaviorism (e.g. Ryle), but I don't
think it was ever entirely expurged.

~~~
pmoriarty
It sounds like with the lifeworld concept, the Phenomenologists were coming up
with another way to talk about solipsism. Would I be mistaken in thinking
about lifeworlds like that?

~~~
fmoralesc
Well, they didn't necessarily give in to solipsism. The original idea was
meant to accommodate, I think, the idea that different subjects could have
entirely different experiences and still share a world. Actually, I think
Husserl's idea that lived worlds have 'horizons' (beyond which you can somehow
anticipate something you don't see) can capture the thought that the
experience of others can be somehow be part of our own, so solipsism is
partially defeated. But this is just a rough thought.

------
riesnerd
I wonder why NYU Professor of Philosophy Thomas Nagels 2012 book "Mind and
Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost
Certainly False" until this point hasn't been mentioned in this thread?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos)

[https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=front...](https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Because, let's be frank, Nagel's work is bad and he should feel bad. There's
ongoing work in producing naturalistic explanations for both consciousness and
morality, so Nagel doesn't get to use those as, "Therefore we need to throw
out all our existing science for a theory of teleology that makes no actual
predictions other than that Thomas Nagel's intuitions should come out one
way."

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pavement
A framework for conceptual ideas is provided, but within this lengthy quantity
of words, not much else is accomplished other than to admit that consiousness
is safely a material reality.

~~~
cscurmudgeon
A comment is provided criticizing the article as usual, not much else is
accomplished other than unintentionally admitting that the commenter doesn't
really understand the gigantic difficulty of the problem at hand.

~~~
pzone
Oh, goodness yes. Bravo.

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CognacBastard
Finally some Chalmers has graced the front-page. Aleluja!

