Dimebag wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2019 4:16 am
bahman wrote: ↑Fri Nov 08, 2019 3:48 pm
That doesn't make any sense to me: How something which is byprodcut of matter movement could itself give a task to matter? In materialism the process of motion of matter is blind. There is no experience when something is moving.
How do you view consciousness? Is it an epiphenomenal byproduct of the mind? If that’s the case, of course you view consciousness existing at the END of a causal chain, not as part OF the causal chain of human awareness and action selection. You thereby specify that consciousness has no function, and is then a useless byproduct, which of course is ridiculous. It obviously serves a purpose, otherwise we wouldn’t have it.
You also imagine that consciousness is something apart from the operation of the brain, and so have removed its potency and usefulness. Let us observe. When you are not paying attention to something, your potential for behaviour acting on that thing in question is limited, likely to some specific prelearned task, which no longer requires awareness to achieve a desired result. This is because the sensory and motor pathways have become that systematised that all possible outcomes have been accounted for, nothing unexpected will happen when performing that task, and so attention directs your awareness to more pertinent tasks, like daydreaming about what to have for lunch, or thinking about how consciousness works, or worrying about some meaningless silly thing which contains a higher degree of uncertainty.
There is still a low level of attention paid to the task being performed, monitoring the task, and flagging anything abnormal which will then direct the attention towards the anomaly, for further inspection. If I am, for instance, wiping the dishes, not paying attention, simply following set routines of wiping motions with the dishcloth to remove excess moisture from the dishes, and all of a sudden, something unexpected enters this lower level of perceptual monitoring, then this will direct my attention, my focus of vision, onto the anomaly in question, a piece of food which hasn’t been cleaned yet, and so the awareness determines that there is someone responsible for this anomaly, the dishwasher, and they must be notified of the issue, and so a novel verbal utterance is instantiated which will resolve the issue.
The awareness is basically the space in which issues are resolved and delegations to other sensory motor areas are tasked, based on previous understandings of routine and rules. If no existing rule or routine exists based on the detected anomaly, awareness then needs to recruit further abstract problem solving centres, and liaises with the various areas required for action, like a director or middle man.
So the system consists of:
Perceptual sensory modalities, operating with minimal attention, flagging issues where necessary as they interact with prelearned behaviour patterns, guiding those actions and providing sensory feedback to allow the motor areas to perform the correct actions. This involves an experiential consciousness, but which does not engage with awareness and so short term memory of these perceptions is very minimal, unless awareness is directed towards such an anomaly.
These lower level perceptions still produce a phenomenal consciousness, as this acts as the trigger or flag for which awareness is directed via attention mechanisms, which themselves exist outside of awareness, they simply pass information back and forth between the senses, awareness, and the motor cortex.
Awareness is a system or layer which exists on top of these lower perceptual and attentional layers, which serves as a space to assemble complex actions which aren’t part of existing learned behaviours. This system directs behaviours and, as those behaviours are repeated, stronger connections are formed between the systems in question, and learning occurs, which removes the need for awareness’ resources to be used to monitor those behaviours.
