Philosophy Now Forum

MGL: When I experience a red object there exists - in the physical world - not a platonic one - a conscious sensation of redness.

Chaz: Bullshit. Redness is not a property of the world it is a property of perception. I thought you had no idea about what qualia meant.
You seem to be wasting my time.

MGL: Of course redness is a property of perception, but is perception not part of the world? Are you suggesting reality has two realms - a dualist reality - one where physical things and properties are and one where mental things such as perception occur?




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MGL: I have absolutely no idea how you have arrived at the inference I am suffering from a Platonic fallacy. I am not talking about qualia as things in a platonic realm, but as properties of things in the physical realm.

Chaz: If that were so then you would be okay with consciousness as a property of living brain tissue, you are not.
You pretend on a metaphysical concept "consciousness itself" - whatever that is.
Do keep up!


MGL: I am OK with consciousness as a property of a living brain so I am puzzled as to why you think I wasn't. What I am questioning is your claim that consciousness is ONLY a property of a living brain.

Your reference to my expression "consciousness itself" seems to be taking it out of the context of a sentence in which the expression "itself" was used to distinguish consciousness from a conscious mind. I meant nothing more metaphysical than I would have done to make the distinction between blue and blue roof and use the word "blueness" to describe a property of the roof.

Do keep up. You will be wasting your own time otherwise.

Yes you are wasting my time.
It is you that is positing a duality. You are saying there is a thing "consciousness" itself separate form the living brain matter that generates it.

I'm not surprised your time is wasted if you simply argue against things I never claimed. Every time I attempt to clarify myself you simply seem to insist I am saying something different rather than engage with what I actually said.

I don't believe I ever said consciousness is separate from the living brain. I am rather surprised you could have inferred this given that panpsychism is claiming that conscousness in a primitive form is a property of all matter.

What I was questioning is the claim that it is living brain matter that generates consciousness and am still waiting for your explanation as to how it does this. It might be the case that the living brain generates the conscious mind, but by what means is it able to generate the conscious aspect of this mind?

Chaz:

You are only demonstrating that a conscious mind emerges from the living brain, not consciousness itself.

Your words!

MGL:

Yes these are my words, but your point in reminding me of them only suggests to me you have not grasped my own.

I am finding it very difficult to believe that you can't distinguish between the concepts "conscious" and "mind".

If someone creates a house made of ready-made red bricks one could say that they created a red brick house - or that a red brick house emerged from their building activity. I would not presume that this activity also created the red bricks.

Nor does saying this imply that the red bricks are separate from the house. They are what makes up the house.

Now perhaps at last you could please explain how a living brain can generate the conscious aspect of the mind. How does the firing of neurons or whatever generate the phenomenal sensation of redness?

It is apparent that where a human brain does not exist in a particular fashion, likewise human consciousness does not. For we cannot know of what may be 'other consciousnesses' with out human consciousness. It is only by the 'knowing' that exists of, by, or for human cns that we are capable of knowing anything. Other conciousnesses can only be known because of human consciousness.

So when you posit panpsychosis you are ignoring this basic fact of knowing and placing the condition of the ability as a privileged situation, as if the assumed consciousness (your human consciousness that is knowing) is positioned above or outside existence in a position to view itself as an object amoung other objects.

This situation is well discovered to produce sophistry. Consciousness reduced upon itself as an object of consideration produces no stabilized factor or element, no ground, by which to build truth in an actual verifiable sense. Human consciousness makes truth upon 'grounds'; consciousness upon itself produces an unstable ground which can appear to the analyzing condciousness a stable because logic functions for stability, but it only functions between hunanity upon 'common' objects verifiable to the senses apart from mere concept but in collusion with it

Your pansophistry had produced no object verifiable by a sense other than conceptualization, and so Is mere speculation, and do far as such speculation Is asserted as identifying an actual Truth, it is thus religious, dependent upon faith.

It is very difficult for me to believe that you have grasped my point when you consistently insist I am claiming something that I continually insist I never have.

The theory of panpsychism may be wrong and may not work, but nothing you have posted seems remotely relevant to countering the argument for it other than than the fact they are simply contradictions based on an unargued assumption that it is the brain which produces consciousness - the very assumption that panpsychism questions.


The problem is: how is the mind - given that it is the product of the living brain - conscious? Just saying that the brain creates this property of consciousness is not a very satisfactory explanation, given how radically different the property of consciousness is from the properties of the brain. Panpsychism simply offers the suggestion that the brain does not create consciousness because it is already a fundamental property of reality - like mass and electic charge etc. All the brain does is merge the primitive conscious attributes of its active consituents into a more complex whole we call the conscious mind. Of course this will be difficult to explain itself, but it is far more tractable that trying to explain how the firings of neurons can produce the conscious sensation of redness.

To criticise the suggestion that consciousness is already a property of matter by claiming it just defers the problem is like claiming the property of mass and the law of gravity are not solving the problem of why things seem to be attracted to each other, but just deferring the problem elsewhere.

As it is very difficult to discuss a subject where it can't even be agreed what one party is claiming I for once agree with you that there is very little to be gained from continuing. As you quite rightly said: I think we are done here.

So you are arguing for argument's sake,
Or you are trying to validity your pantheism. Your saying the equivalent of life cannot be reduced to a part- but how do we explain life itself.

Chaz: You ask me how can living matter have this property and think that a solution is to say that all matter has this property. So I ask how does all matter have this property and you just say er - duh it s just a property of matter!

MGL:

When I ask how can living matter have this property of consciousness, I was asking how this property can be derived\emerge from or is reducable to living matter. To ask the same question of some property that is suggested as an ultimate property of reality, like mass or electric charge is utterly meaningless. The whole reason of suggesting that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is precisely because it does not seem to possible to reduce it to other fundamental properties of reality. To ask this question and then be surprised that no satisfactory answer can be given betrays a profound misunderstanding of the point being made.

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Chaz: The point is that all examples we have of consciousness are only found in living matter, so it is obviously of no use looking for it where it does not exist... The fact that the brain produces consciousness is far from being unargued, IT IS EVIDENT.


MGL:

As far as I can see from you comments the argument that consciousness is only found in living matter is based on the following points:

1) It is impossible to directly observe the conscious properties of any object other than our own
2) We should only infer that such properties are present in other objects where we can observe correlation between our conscious experiences with external behaviour that we can observe.

I agree that given just these two points there is no reason to infer or believe that consciousness is present anywhere else in the universe other than living brains.
However, neither of these principles rules out the possibility that consciousness is present elsewhere. It is just that they give us no reason to think it is.


What does give us a reason to consider that consciousness is more ubiquitous is when we consider the question of how consciousness relates to the physical world. Your suggestion is that brain states generate consciousnes, but when we consider how this is done we have to overcome the problem that nothing in the physcial properties of brain states would seem to suggest they could generate the property of phenomenal consciousness. If neuron firings cannot produce the sensation of redness, then the only alternative other than magic seems to be that the sensation of redness is a form of a more fundamental property of reality which is already present in the components of the neuron firing process.

If you don't want me to indulge your proclivity for wasting your own time, can I suggest you defend the case for the non-reductionist brute emergence of consciousness from the living brain, rather than just claim it is evident and far from unargued without offering the evidence or the argument. Please bear in mind when you explain how consciousness emerges from brain states it is an explanation that would demonstrate how the one phenomenom necessarily follows from the fundamental properties of the latter.

We are on a Merry-go-round.

I am simply arguing for a case that is evident. You are arguing for a case that is not evidnent.
We definitely are done here.

It could be poignant to consider what is happening in a 3inch cube of granite as opposed to what is occurring in a 3inch cube of (living) brain.

My point exactly.