Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Atla]

Perhaps I don't understand anything of what you say. But the actual subject is the one who is just now writing these words. I mean that is what I mean by 'actual subject'.

There is no actual subject doing things. Fundamentally, the writing of these words is merely happening the same way that rain is happening or how the Sun or a rock is happening.

(However that doesn't mean that "we" should live our everyday lives like we weren't subjects.)

[Tamminen]

Anyway, we don't have additional options here with regard to question as to whether reality is fundamentally (only) mental, fundamentally (only) physical, both fundamentally mental and fundamentally physical, or neither fundamentally mental nor fundamentally physical, because these four are jointly exhaustive.

Of those alternatives I would choose the last one, because substance as something that has independent existence cannot be applied to matter, nor can it be applied to consciousness. If we necessarily want to speak of substance as something concrete, then substance would be a triadic structure consisting of (1) the subject, (2) consciousness of the world, and (3) the material universe. If the material universe were removed, nothing would be left, just as materialists say. If consciousness were removed, nothing would be left, just as idealists say. And finally, if the subject were removed, nothing would be left, because then there would be no one whose consciousness is in question; a general, free-floating consciousness is not possible. So reality consists of the subject's consciousness of the world, and the subject, as causa sui, is the primus motor of everything.

[Sculptor1]

But this is empirically verified every day. There is no mistake here.
I not go so far as to say that my consciousness is part of the world, though. In a literal sense all consciousness is A part of the world. And that I am A part of the world. But only in the sense that I am also a part of it.
There is no case where consciousness has been witnessed in the absence of neural matter. Consciousness is a property of neural matter in the same way hardness is a property of granite.
There is no consciousness without it.
I do not see anyone saying materialism is absurd because no one has seen pure hardness, or softness, or blueness.
Matter has properties and materialism is a recognition of that and provides the methodology to investigate it.

Materialism has transformed our world; and the car you drove in.
What have you got in its place?

The "human mind" part of consciousness is in the head, but why should consciousness fundamentally stop there? The rest of the universe for example is made of the same atoms and EM fields etc. as the human head, it's just a different configuration.

Why should, according to materialism, even be any fundamental consciousness in the head in the first place? Why isn't everything just going on "in the dark"?

Why oh why oh why?
You might as well ask why water does not work the same as blood or why can't I run my car on lemon juice.

[Consul]

I do not deny the correlations of course, but to say that the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my head does not mean that my consciousness is in my head, or that my experiences are in my head or in my brain.

Where else can your experiences be? Your consciousness is a state of your brain, which is the organ of consciousness. Consciousness (with its experiential contents) is realized by and in the brain.

"To say that consciousness literally resides within the confines of the brain is to characterize the spatial location of the phenomenon in the natural world; to determine unambiguously where we should look for the principal explanandum in the science of consciousness. … There are many who reject this view because their fundamental background assumptions are different from mine. To accept the internalist view is to deny that consciousness resides in, or is necessarily dependent on, any physical or logical relations between the brain and its surroundings (a claim defended by externalists, e.g. Dretske…; Tye…), and it is to deny that consciousness resides only at the 'personal' level of organism-environment interaction (a position defended by Dennett…and O'Regan & Noe…); it is to deny that consciousness is somehow 'projected' or 'reflected' by the brain into the ordinary physical or some ill-defined nonphysical space (cf. Velmans…; McGinn…; J. Smythies…) and to deny that consciousness somehow pervades the whole body or is literally embodied in the physical body outside the brain (Thompson…). Like other biological phenomena, say protein synthesis or postsynaptic potentials, consciousness is, according to biological realism, located within the confines of the very biological system in which it is realized; it has no supernatural powers to escape from within the depths of the brain."

(Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. pp. 10-1)

[Consul]

It's a contradiction to talk about oneness and objects/parts at the same time.

No, it's not. Ontological unity doesn't require mereological simplicity. One thing can have many parts.

[Tamminen]

Where else can your experiences be? Your consciousness is a state of your brain, which is the organ of consciousness. Consciousness (with its experiential contents) is realized by and in the brain.

Consciousness is realized by the brain as it is connected with its physical environment, this is obvious, but what is not obvious and shows a total misunderstanding of the situation, is to claim that consciousness is located in the brain. Only physical phenomena can have physical locations. As I showed by the thought experiment in my reply to Atla - and if that experiment is not misunderstood as Atla did - I, as a subject, and my consciousness, cannot meaningfully be said to have a physical location, only the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my brain of course, as my brain interacts with its environment. The subject, as manifested in each individual subject, is a reference point of all physical locations without itself being located anywhere. But one of its objects of consciousness, its body, is located somewhere in the world it is conscious of as a spatial continuum. We can say that my body is the origo of physical space, and there are as many origos as there are indivudual subjects in the world. And none of those subjects have a location in space; each of them measure space from their own origo. But of course, as their bodies have locations, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that consciousness has a spatial location. If I remember right, Descartes was one of the first philosophers to make this distinction of extensionality and non-extensionality.

So, if someone asks where you live, you may say: 10 km west of Paris. But the philosophically correct answer would be: nowhere, but there is a town called Paris 10 km east of my body.

[Atla]

It's a contradiction to talk about oneness and objects/parts at the same time.

No, it's not. Ontological unity doesn't require mereological simplicity. One thing can have many parts.

Ontologically it's not possible to be both one and have actual parts. That's just a thinking error projected on the world.

[Atla]

The "human mind" part of consciousness is in the head, but why should consciousness fundamentally stop there? The rest of the universe for example is made of the same atoms and EM fields etc. as the human head, it's just a different configuration.

Why should, according to materialism, even be any fundamental consciousness in the head in the first place? Why isn't everything just going on "in the dark"?

Why oh why oh why?
You might as well ask why water does not work the same as blood or why can't I run my car on lemon juice.

In other words you either don't know, or you don't even understand what the problem of consciousness is.

[Consul]

Ontological unity doesn't require mereological simplicity. One thing can have many parts.

Ontologically it's not possible to be both one and have actual parts. That's just a thinking error projected on the world.

No, it's not. Oneness doesn't require partlessness. Each book on my shelf has many pages as (actual) parts, but each book is one book. A whole has (actual) parts, but it is one thing.

[Atla]

As I showed by the thought experiment in my reply to Atla - and if that experiment is not misunderstood as Atla did - I, as a subject, and my consciousness, cannot meaningfully be said to have a physical location, only the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my brain of course, as my brain interacts with its environment.

I think I understood your example of circular reasoning quite well.

You first assume that the consciousness and the physical are two things, and therefore only the physical has physical locations.
And since only the physical has physical locations, we can conclude that the consciousness doesn't, that it's a subject without location.

[Atla]

Ontologically it's not possible to be both one and have actual parts. That's just a thinking error projected on the world.

No, it's not. Oneness doesn't require partlessness. Each book on my shelf has many pages as (actual) parts, but each book is one book. A whole has (actual) parts, but it is one thing.

So you really don't even realize that pages aren't actual parts, we just pretend that they are, it's a way of thinking? And that we just pretend that a "thing" like a book is an actual part of the universe?

[Consul]

Consciousness is realized by the brain as it is connected with its physical environment, this is obvious, but what is not obvious and shows a total misunderstanding of the situation, is to claim that consciousness is located in the brain. Only physical phenomena can have physical locations. As I showed by the thought experiment in my reply to Atla - and if that experiment is not misunderstood as Atla did - I, as a subject, and my consciousness, cannot meaningfully be said to have a physical location, only the physiological correlate of my consciousness is in my brain of course, as my brain interacts with its environment. The subject, as manifested in each individual subject, is a reference point of all physical locations without itself being located anywhere. But one of its objects of consciousness, its body, is located somewhere in the world it is conscious of as a spatial continuum. We can say that my body is the origo of physical space, and there are as many origos as there are indivudual subjects in the world. And none of those subjects have a location in space; each of them measure space from their own origo. But of course, as their bodies have locations, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that consciousness has a spatial location. If I remember right, Descartes was one of the first philosophers to make this distinction of extensionality and non-extensionality.
So, if someone asks where you live, you may say: 10 km west of Paris. But the philosophically correct answer would be: nowhere, but there is a town called Paris 10 km east of my body.

You mention Descartes, and you actually sound like a Cartesian substance dualist, who regards souls not only as spatially unextended but also as spatially unlocated. Of course, if consciousness is a property or state of a spatially unlocated soul, it is spatially unlocated too. Are you really a Cartesian substance dualist?

[Sculptor1]

Why oh why oh why?
You might as well ask why water does not work the same as blood or why can't I run my car on lemon juice.

In other words you either don't know, or you don't even understand what the problem of consciousness is.

Can you explain why water won't run my car? Despite it being made of two highly inflamable elements?
Now compare the amazing complexity of the human brain.

[Sculptor1]

Why oh why oh why?
You might as well ask why water does not work the same as blood or why can't I run my car on lemon juice.

In other words you either don't know, or you don't even understand what the problem of consciousness is.

There is no problem to consciousness. It is a property of neural matter. And great strides have been made is describing how this all works, replacing the naive dualism of the past.
What's the problem?

[Atla]

Can you explain why water won't run my car? Despite it being made of two highly inflamable elements?
Now compare the amazing complexity of the human brain.

There is no problem to consciousness. It is a property of neural matter. And great strides have been made is describing how this all works, replacing the naive dualism of the past.
What's the problem?

This is THE problem of consciousness: surely you must realize that you are having direct experiences like red, or yellow, or the feeling of pain, or sound and so on.

The question is, why are there experiences? Why isn't matter just happening 'in a silent, dark nothingness', without any such experiences?