Bill Wiltrack wrote:Consciousness; self-consciousness may have nothing directly to do with our brain functioning; our processing.Self-consciousness might just come based upon unrelated or as yet undetectable reality that we might necessarily be blind to.
This duality of "appearances" and an "antecedent ground" for them is older than the hills, though. Before the positivism and analytic schools and the 20th century dominance of metaphysical naturalism, this was arguably THE core current moving philosophy along. Wittgenstein= "Why do I wish to call our present activity philosophy, when we also call Plato's activity philosophy? Perhaps because of a certain analogy between them, or perhaps because of the continuous development of the subject. Or the new activity may take the place of the old because it removes mental discomforts the old was supposed to."
But even in the old school, a natural explanation for "self-consciousness" [the brain] should be expected just as one is to be found for almost anything. That is - in the sensible / intellectual world dichotomy - the very result of the physical counterparts of unconditioned things being being brought into relational co-existence with each other is that they thus become causes for each other. An interdependence [as opposed to the idea of "things in themselves"] which is key to the overall character of such a conditioned reality.
IOW, in the Eleatic / Platonic descended tradition: The sensible / physical world is subsumed or assimilated under [supersensible, metaphysical, transcendent, noumenal, etc] requirements that make the former possible. That there is a natural explanation for any observed circumstance is actually unremarkable and non-threatening to belief in the former, since it falls out of the very setup of the view. This is why later adherents (like Berkeley and Leibniz) could champion science without conflict to their choice of an intellectual realm (minds, monads, etc). But as Kant clarified, this intelligible ground isn't really of much use to its phenomenal offspring apart from providing a non-contingent basis for morality and hopes of "freedom, immortality, etc" (after death or in-between whatever embodied manifestations as something natural).
Philosophical or metaphysical naturalism, OTOH, is an approach that flip-flops that ancient tradition and treats the spatiotemporal world itself as if it is its own conditions for making it possible. [As an alternative, there's also the positivism context for naturalism that instead dismisses metaphysics altogether as a futile enterprise.] Even in philosophical naturalism, one can apparently still offer a brand of generic subjectivity, as Thomas W. Clark and others have done in the past. But that's just submitting basic attributes for a conscious agent that accordingly outrun or survive any particular instantiation of such. Identifying those general conditions to be the fundamental "you" means that you thereby [in some sense] continue as other occurrences of consciousness. I.e., this common subject [the form or template underlying / overarching the specific ones] is "distributed".
Thomas W. Clark wrote:But since we've ruled out nothingness or non-experience as the fate of subjectivity what, then, are plausible answers to such questions? The first one we can dispense with fairly readily. The "me" characterized by personality and memory simply ends. No longer will experience occur in the context of such personality and memory. The second question ("What's next?") is a little trickier, because, unless we suppose that my death is coincident with the end of the entire universe, we can't responsibly answer "nothing." Nothing is precisely what can't happen next. What happens next must be something, and part of that something consists in various sorts of consciousness. In the very ordinary sense that other centers of awareness exist and come into being, experience continues after my death. This is the something (along with many other things) which follows the end of my particular set of experiences.
