How To Be Conscious: Mind & Matter Revisited

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Philosophy Now
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How To Be Conscious: Mind & Matter Revisited

Post by Philosophy Now »

What exactly is consciousness? Roger Caldwell looks at the current ideas of three leading figures in philosophy of mind, as revealed in their latest books.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/54/How_To_Be_Conscious_Mind_and_Matter_Revisited
SamC
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Re: How To Be Conscious: Mind & Matter Revisited

Post by SamC »

There's some tension in how you set up the problem of consciousness. You say consciousness is private, that the consciousness each of us experiences is unique and inaccessible to other people or science. But you also say the problem is that scientific phenomena are observable and consciousness doesn't fall into that category. But if what we are all restricted to experiencing is our own private consciousness, it follows that actually consciousness is the only thing that is observable - no one really manages to observe anything else - and all the external things scientists think they are directly observing are in fact parts of their own conscious experience, e.g. visual images. If science deals in the observable, that would make consciousness the only scientifically certain thing, and everything else (from electrons to genomes to galaxies) would be mere inferences from conscious experience.
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