Immanuel Can wrote:
Quite so. So we can describe the origins of the "cake" by both ingredients and by the dynamics used to produce one. If that's the right analogy, then what is the "recipe" for consciousness? On your account, should that not be quite doable?
I thought I had done so. The recipe for consciousness is having a working brain, of the type humans have.
Me: Why aren't we satisfied with the explanation that if you have a certain sort of brain you get something we call consciousness? So the reason we have consciousness is that we have a certain kind of brain.
Quite simply because that's circular. It actually gives neither the materials nor the dynamics of the "recipe." It just says, "Well, brains are here -- so let's not trouble ourselves about when and how they moved from hydrogen and carbon atoms to full philosophical consciousness."
That's certainly no kind of explanation.
They got there by being incorporated in a brain. If you put hydrogen and oxygen together in the right way, you get water, which exhibits properties not exhibited by the two gases on their own. Is that not a sufficient explanation?
What sort of explanation about 'how they moved' to make the new thing are you looking for?
Well, we explain a pile of rocks in a road by the word "landslide." That's the sort of thing that "serves for [the] everything else" in our world around us. It's totally inadequate as a way of speaking about consciousness, though.
Well, I can tell you how brains arise in the 'facts of life' sense. I could talk about evolution, or the way organic chemistry works. Again, what sort of explanation would satisfy us?
Moreover, consciousness is unique, both in nature and value. Things like landslides employ none of it. Hydrogen and carbon, two of our building blocks, have zero of it. Yet we have tons of it, and we use it for things like philosophy, morality and science, and to guide every practical thing we do. Nothing could be more important to us, and nothing could be more urgently in need of explanation. And surely nothing is less-adequately explained by the sort of simple "explanation...that serves for everything else."
I'm not sure it is unique. Are we talking about human consciousness? Because it doesn't seem radically different to that of an ape. And an ape does not seem so different to a dog. And so on. I could also say that the consciousness of babies seems to differ from that of adults, and some humans have different types of consciousness, so that even amongst humans consciousness is not all the same. I'm not even sure that I am conscious myself, in the same way, from moment to moment; rather the nature of my consciousness varies. So what is the aspect of consciousness we are calling unique?
One reason we cannot find a simple explanation for 'consciousness' is that it is a generality, an abstraction. ( I have no problem explaining why we might have consciousness of something in particular. ) One might equally ask 'What is the explanation for 'life'? For 'being'? For 'energy'? and have the same problem.
Consciousness also has the problem that we feel we experience it subjectively. I have given the sort of reasons that we would find satisfactory when discussing those experiences we think of as objective, but because consciousness has this subjective aspect we feel that this needs its own separate explanation. And since it would be self-contradictory to form an objective explanation of the subjective, we have problems.
But I would argue that all our experiences are a combination of the subjective, i.e. the nature of the observer, and what we think of as the objective. There is always two ways of looking at any experience. e.g. 'I stub my toe on a stone'; there an event is described as if it is external. But if I then speak of 'the feeling of pain', that is to describe it subjectively, in terms of consciousness. But it would make no sense to treat those two descriptions as if they had nothing to do with each other - to insist that 'the feeling of pain' was independent of 'stubbing my toe'. But I think that is what this demand for an explanation of 'consciousness' is asking us to do.