Immanuel Can wrote
Well, yes: it's pretty much recognized by all participants in the field of Philosophy of Mind that "consciousness" and "brain" or "meat" and "mind," are distinct issues. One is clearly material, and the other is immaterial.
Material and immaterial: I don't recognize these terms outside of the contexts in which they are used. It gets to be a very sticky wicket, for to posit a material thing, one usually refers to objects, palpable, and res extensa, in the Cartesian ontology. I don't think this way at all.
What I have in mind here is the elementary form of the hypothetical deductive method which is simply the conditional: IF I take this quartz and scratch mica, THEN there will be a yielding of the mica to the quartz creating a mark, thereby showing that quartz is harder than mica. All science works like this, and the definitions of things are grounded in this IF...THEN temporal structure of thought. All knowledge, and scientific knowledge is no more than a model of everyday thinking, is anticipatory of possible outcomes. Here comes George. I know him well, but what does this mean? It means that I have expectations.
It's worse than that, I think: it's that it's only after the whole thing has already somehow "occurred" that we are in any position to look at consciousness at all. And when we do, we're at an utter loss to say how materials translated into mind by some sort of step or cause-effect path.
worse still, we ARE an emergent state, so observations of emergent properties (properties of the world) like consciousness are all observed through consciousness. This makes consciousness the only real foundation for emergence. This is exactly what existential thinking is based on.
But aside form this, cause and effect is the issue, as X causing Y says nothing of the qualitative presence of these. We "know" the measurements, the intensities, velocities and so on, but these are just quantitative matters. What something IS, is just there, the familiar color or sound. Science is not the kind of thing to tell whats of things.
That is: IF they "emerge." We don't know how they even CAN "emerge." We can't deduce from the fact that consciousness is real and present that it "emerged" from materials. We can only say, "Well, whatever it is, it's here now." But again, we have no path that assures us it "emerged" at all.
That's interesting. We are bound to the principle of sufficient cause, andit is reasonable to say emergent property X didn't simply come, ex nihilo, into existence; but, and I have long thought this a critical insight, causality does not explain emergence, any more than it can explain itself. It can set up scenarios of causal matrixes, and see THAT property X emerges, but qualitative differences are not reducible to to this at all. This is the fallacy in empirical science's claim to explain the world. It cannot explain meaning, only register THAT there is meaning. Emergence is only a causal concept.
Dropping the word "emergent," I think this would be a good suggestion. We especially ought not to use the verb tense "emerging," since it makes it sound as if we have caught the process in the middle; whereas we haven't the faintest idea of what the process would be, or even if it is a process at all.
What we can say is that consciousness is real. We couldn't say "It's real" if it were not, and there would be nobody to hear or to dispute its reality, if it were not real. So that much we can safely say. But how it got here? We have no idea.
I think if one could examine the entire human genome in precise detail, there would be a correlation between this massive mapping of genes and consciousness. But then, a correlation is not consciousness at all.
the phenomenologist's take is always there: It is consciousness that is doing the correlating. making correlation itself an emerged feature of consciousness. There is no way at all to get around this.
That's 100% assumptions, though. We don't know how consciousness "arrives," and we don't know it "emerges" from lower matter. What's worse, we attribute what's called "downward causality" to consciousness. For example, we say, "Tom chose to go to the store," by which we mean, "Tom's consciousness induced his material body to shopping." But how can something that is caused-up from the material also cause-down to the material? How can consciousness, if it's just an emergent byproduct of material causes, then turn around and be a causal factor of things and events in the material world? Which is "causing" which?
That's a profound mystery, and one raised very well by various philosophers of mind, like Jaegwon Kim.
Don't understand the problem of up or down, really: in a fully integrated causal system, no difference would be registered. If Tom choosing is an emergent property out of a causal matrix, then what would there be to to prevent causal downwardness? The whole idea of emergence is to include the supervening property with its source. If the upward holds, and this is a causally consistent (though not clearly seen how this is so) concept, then the downward should be allowed mutatis mutandis: emerging properties and the "difference" they have vis a vis that on which they supervene would have to be reconciled only unless the supervening property possesses NOTHING of its causal counterpart. this argument does rest with similarities between the two, and it I take your point,
there is nothing similar at all between descriptions of physical states and those of mental states.
Causality only reveals quantifiable changes. The qualitative changes are entirely distinct; that is, if you dismiss the scientist's observable quantitative features of a causal event, the velocity, mass, relative structural vulnerabilities, and so on, what would remain would be qualitative changes and it is these that are at issue. Showing supervenience requires this
qualitative "connection" to be examined.
One could identify qualitative properties (value experiences like anger, say) and their qualitative causal effects (experiential affairs that issue from being angry, like regret), and map these on to their physical counterparts. But this correspondence solves nothing, for what is at issue is explaining how emergence of the experiential from the physical occurs. I don't really think there is much chance in denying THAT anger is connected to physical states, and that the latter are in a causal relation with the former. the problem is that explanations (like Jaegwon Kim's, a bit of which I just read) simply cannot show how qualitative events like anger have their accounting grounded in any way with the physical. So what if anger does "emerge" out of more primordial stuff?
Finally, there is the REAL problem, again, that always comes back to haunt a discussion like this: talk like the above presupposes an existing account of the physical, but where did this come from? It is paradigmatically built up out of scientific theory (and again, Kuhn presents such a good explanation), ever waiting for the next paradigm. Apart from paradigms, there is no physicality.
Well, I think I know what you're trying to say here. I would put it this way: "The fact of the existence of a thing called 'consciousness' demands that we rethink our assumptions about what 'reality' means." Clearly it's not all materials. There is mind in there, somehow.
I go further than this. A bit. What IS material? If one starts Cartesian with it being res extensa, say I conditionally agree. But extension is an empty term. What about the physical? The material? Of course, there is nothing that can be said at all. The moment descriptions begin, paradigms are in play, that is, that which supervenes upon the material. Since material qua material is a vacuous term, explanations apart from emergences are made equally vacuous. All that can be said is about emergence is emergence.
We are in hermenuetics now.