What evidence? - Well, we are talking about consciousness of self, which is subjective. In that case, the best evidence, initially, is introspection. That is what I did. To replicate my evidence, you have to do the process of introspection yourself. From the subjective evidence, objective evidence follows.
As a Naturalistic Pantheist, I am leery of making a mind-body distinction. As far as you are drawing that distinction, I’m not sure what you are getting at either. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Yes there are two mediums of communication. The biological substrate gives each of us the mental tools to take in the language. Since language really takes off around age three or so, the development of consciousness seems to go hand-in-hand with the development of a sophisticated language ability.
As to non-physical answers, I don’t see that we are discussing anything non-physical. The Hard Problem of Consciouusness is a subjective reality, but it is just as physical as objective reality. What it means to be a person is part of my physical reality. I experience it. If it is not physical, what else could it be?
Welcome! Always nice to have others to discuss consciousness with.
I tend to think nearly every living thing - or at least multi cellular animals - have consciousness. There is something that it is like to be a bat or a squirrel and certainly our dogs. Probably the more familiar we become with non human animals the easier it becomes to recognize that they are conscious beings too.
The classic test for self awareness is to discretely mark the creature, let them see themselves in a mirror and see if they reach for the place where the mark was put. I’m pretty sure apes and elephants are self aware by that measure but I think there might have others too.
Hmmm… there is indeed a good deal of potential communication problems inherent in this…
First I should make it crystal clear that by divide between mind and body I am not advocating any kind of dualism (and perhaps that is why you shy away from it) – but two physical (as in the laws of nature) living organisms (though this is somewhat troublesome to many people because of multiple definitions of the word “physical,” one of which is bodily rather than mental). I am totally a physicalist with regards to the mind-body problem, though I see considerable merit in the idea of an effective dualism due to these two separate medium. [Though as a Christian I am not, of course, a physicalist with regards the parallel physical-spiritual problem. In that case, I see more of a largely epiphenomenal relationship between physical and spiritual. That is where I find reconciliation with the objective scientific evidence.]
No. Objective evidence does not follow from subjective evidence. Subjective evidence is subjective evidence and provides no reasonable expectation that others should agree with your conclusions – no different than the divide between your naturalistic pantheism and my Christianity.
I certainly see it as being entirely physical in the sense of natural. But I think it is very much more an idea of the mind than some biological difference. We are persons because we believe in persons just as we have love because we believe in such a thing. They are features of the life of the mind – and yes a part of the physical reality – even though I am a believer in a spiritual reality as well.
Well we certainly would have a difference of opinion about the spiritual realm, although, since I am contributing here as a former Christian, I have the highest respect for those I differ with, and know that I am in effect a guest here. This is not my religious home, but it is a place where I can receive intellectual and spiritual sustenance.
That being said, I certainly think differently and use different terminology for discussing mind and body. So I’ll let this difference be. It is not worth debating - it is more valuable that I try to understand your way of looking at it, learn from it, and use it to help me understand my beliefs.
I wasn’t quite saying that the objective evidence follows from the subjective. What I am getting at is that we use the subjective evidence as a set of guideposts, and that can point us to some objective evidence.
I should lay my cards on the table here, because I have given this problem some thought and have written it up in detail. I wrote a paper on the relationship between Metaphysics and Quantum Mechanics called “Hylomorphic Functions” that grew to be an unpublishable size. I got the first part published in a supplement to the International Journal of Quantum Foundations “Causally Active Metaphysical Realism”. I produced a layman’s version as my (as yet) one and only Medium Essay entitled “Hylomorphic Functions: Is Consciousness Quantized” Hylomorphic Functions: Is consciousness quantized? | by Antony Van der Mude | Science and Philosophy | Medium
Long story short, I advocate a type of panprotopsychism, a term coined by David Chalmers. Since I believe that consciousness exists in reality and not just as some sort of epiphenonmenon, I felt it incumbent on me to specify what consciousness is and where it comes about. I.e., if I think consciousness is physical, where in the physics do you find it?
I guess you could say that my theory claims that the mind (as your are discussing it) is composed of metaphysical abstract entities (metaphysics in the sense of the Australian realism of Armstrong and others) that have a physical basis in the collapse of the wave function.
Any thought or opinions on the differences about how we view consciousness?
Hi Mark: I would respectfully disagree. My guess (and I have no proof, this is just a feeling from introspection) is that what you are referring to is self-awareness. That is not consciousness.
An anecdote as an example. When I was in college, I took a summer job - two actually. One was at a fast-food restaurant as a short order cook, the other at a stockroom at a department store. Both 5 day, 40 hour jobs. The cook was the night shift - 10 PM to 6 AM. The stockroom was 9 AM to 5 PM. What is left is 3 hours in the AM and 5 hours in the PM, and I’m the kind of guy who has got to have his beauty rest - all 8 hours of it. Obviously, this is not sustainable. By Friday of the second week, I knew something had to give.
Well, that Friday, I wake up at the crack of noon, upset that I’ll be late. I come out to the kitchen, and my father exclaims “Well, you’re up. I didn’t expect that.” I say “Why not? I’m late for work.” And Dad responds “But I just talked to you a couple of hours ago and you said you don’t have to go to the stockroom today. It’s a day off.”
As it turned out, Dad checked in with me at 10 when I didn’t come out. He found me sitting straight up in bed, in my clothes, eyes wide open. We had a coherent conversation, where in an admirable act of self-preservation, I lied through my teeth and told him I did not have to go to work. Dad said we talked for a few minutes and then he left the room.
I think there are some conclusions that can be drawn from this incident (and there were others in my life). 1. I was coherent enough to carry on a conversation. 2. I had enough self-awareness to know that I needed the sleep. 3. A case could be made that I had a certain level of self-awareness, enough to act like a normal human being, but I sure was not conscious.
I came away from experiences like that with the realization that self-awareness, even though it is common in all mammals is not consciousness at all. There is a whole qualitative difference between the two. I have seen enough infants to know that they obviously have self-awareness. That applies to both me and my daughter - there is nothing unique about us - but consciousness came along years after self-awareness.
I considered the possibility that this is what you meant. But I am glad to have you make this clear.
I am reminded of the way a lot of subjective things such as creative imagination and visualization play a definite role in scientific inquiry even though we demand objective evidence in the end to nail things down.
Hmmm… I have mixed feelings about this. My first instinct is to say that since I am a physicist this is right up my alley and I would take a look. However I am critic of the type of reductionism and Platonic idealism/realism I see in Whitehead and such ideas of qualia… doubtful that such directions of thinking are all that helpful.
I am more of an original. I also think it is physical (according to natural law) but I think it has to do with these two distinct but highly interdependent living organisms of body and mind. In that case consciousness is just referring to the same self-organizing living process in the medium of linguistic information. I have often used Dawkins terminology for this to call it memetic life as opposed to genetic life but have faced opposition because some have carried the analogy to genetics and the evolutionary process in the studies of cultural development a little too far with that term.
More on the problems with the word “physical”: Since one meaning of the word is bodily as opposed to mental (like in physical education and physical therapy) this can get you into all sorts of communication difficulties when you use it for things of the mind. But the other meaning is in refering to the laws of nature like in the word “physics,” and that is what we physicalists (with regards to the mind-body problem) generally mean by the word.
I am definitely taking a closer look. But… so far the talk of “atomic universals” is not helping. It just makes me want to get on a soapbox and preach a tirade against it. I am all for the power of ideas, but such reductionist thinking is not one I like so much. Just because it is useful in the study of physics doesn’t mean it is going to be useful in studying other things. Consciousness has more to do with the self-organizing process of life than the mathematical structure of space-time.
I would point out that I am taking something of a median position on this one to say that human consciousness is not qualitatively different thing than the self-awareness of animals but at most a quantitatively greater thing in a different medium.
I think you either have me mixed up with someone else or my other response to someone’s suggestion that consciousness = self awareness muddied my response. I think consciousness of the environment is an essential capacity for any animal of any size that needs to identify food and predators. But I didn’t offer a definition of consciousness … yet.
Definitions of consciousness vary but I think the basic idea is being in a wakeful state and aware of one’s environment, with at least enough self awareness to know which way one may need to move in response to conditions in the environment. I agree with philosopher John Searle who emphasizes that consciousness is a biological process, like digestion or respiration except that it is very much harder to explain how the brain produces what we all experience consciously first hand.
I think your experience points out some of the challenges for an adequate account of consciousness. I also have had experiences of responding purposefully to circumstances while seemingly not entirely conscious. I think that is why some will argue there is no free will. But the fact that in unusual circumstances our organisms are capable of exercising will without our conscious participation, does not mean we never act purposely based on our conscious deliberation.
For anyone interested this Brain Pickings blog (if that’s what you’d call it) does a fair job of making John Searle’s ideas on the subject more accessible.
I think most creatures are in a “wakeful” state and aware of their environment, but I think true consciousness of the type that I awaken to in the morning is more than that. I have this kind of inchoate feeling about consciousness that makes me feel that metaphor is the way to express it. The metaphor about consciousness as opposed to self-awareness of that of a nuclear pile. I once worked as a Reactor Plant Technician at the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant. I remember vividly my feelings as the plant achieved criticality - you could hear it happen with the clicks of the radiation counter.
To me, basic self-awareness is kind of like taking in perceptions from the environment which then generate thoughts inside the self-aware brain. They are subcritical - the thoughts just dissipate in the state of dreamless sleep. But true human gold-plated consciousness is at a qualitatively greater level. The moment of criticality happens quickly. Its not there, then suddenly it is. And to me, when I wake up in the morning and become conscious, my self-awareness has achieved criticality. And I become conscious.
May the pot call the kettle black? “True consciousness”, like “higher consciousness” and “altered states of consciousness”, would probably be called woo woo by some. But I have my own crack-pot ideas about how consciousness gives rise to and supports God belief. Worse, depending on the audience, I think what it is is something real and important. The only thing in the way of Christianity working for me is I don’t think what gives rise to God belief is anything like a person. Oh, and there is no room in my WV for a historical resurrection or an afterlife.
That doesn’t make Christians wrong or deluded in my book. I think it is important to have some kind of relationship to whatever you call it and for all I know the Christian mythos might provide a very effective linkage to that which I think grounds the world we know and what we take to be our selves. There are certainly many Christians here who strike me as being every bit as wise and tuned in as anyone else I know. So I think it can be an entirely adequate WV, as yours may be too. Who knows? Certainly if I’d been brought up in Christianity and it were working for me as well it does for them, I wouldn’t be looking to switch.
what do you think about free will, Mark? judging by the latest research in neuroscience, things are not so simple. there are doubts whether we are generally held accountable for our actions
I just finally finished responding to the thread for discussing the interview Jim did with Bill Newsome and life is rather busy here on the home front so I probably won’t be able to respond right away to the free will question. But given what I think about our relationship to consciousness you can probably imagine I don’t think there is an easy answer except to say there is something wrong with the premises inherent to the question.
Ah… That sheds some light on vandermude’s objections which I could not understand.
I have a more fundamental objection to equating free will with conscious deliberation. While I would agree that we more often than not act on habit and do not count such things as free will, I would not go so far as to say that nothing from the unconscious mind can be considered free will. This is one of my objections to use of the delayed awareness of choices experimental results to say there is no free will.
Since your question doesn’t even make any sense to me, the best I can do is add some further explanation.
In other words, I think even the unconscious mind can make deliberations and choices. And just because it isn’t conscious doesn’t mean that it isn’t free will. The operation of the human mind is very complicated and we are aware of only a very small portion of it. Even when we do make conscious deliberations and choices, I am certain there are more things going on in the unconscious mind than in the conscious mind.
I wonder if you’re assuming that the base state for human beings is 1) reaching a decision followed by 2) carrying out the result?
We become so expert at doing many things that we just do them with no lengthy deliberation necessary. Focused attention is a limited resource but the bandwidth of consciousness goes much further than that and will often carry out the intentions you don’t yet realize you have consciously.
Well in that case, … excuse me while I take a black marker and blot out Jeremiah 17:9 in my Bible. “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?"
Wait’ll I share your silly proposal with the hypnotherapists all over the world. They’re really going to get a laugh out of it.
