Atla wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 4:46 pmConsul wrote: ↑June 18th, 2019, 2:19 pm
When people undergo general anaesthesia, their consciousness is switched off and on again solely through the chemical manipulation of processes in their brains—which fact strongly suggests that consciousness results from physicochemical brain processes.
As usual you dodge the issue of qualia and talk about something else.
No, I don't, since to talk about consciousness—by which I mean
phenomenal consciousness—is to talk about qualitative subjective experience.
"I myself am hesitant to use the word 'qualia' and its singular, 'quale', because they give the impression that there are two separate phenomena, consciousness and qualia. But of course, all conscious phenomena are qualitative, subjective experiences, and hence are qualia. There are not two types of phenomena, consciousness and qualia. There is just consciousness, which is a series of qualitative states."
(Searle, John R.
The Mystery of Consciousness. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1997. pp. 9-10)
Atla wrote: ↑June 20th, 2019, 4:46 pmWe may knock out parts of the brain/mind, stop them from working, we can stop people from remembering things, we can dismantle self-reflection etc. but that in no way implies that those "unconscious" states didn't have qualia.
It's incoherent to ascribe qualia to a (phenomenally) nonconscious state, since any mental state having or containing qualia is
thereby (phenomenally) conscious.
(I use "quale" in the narrow technical sense in which it is used in the philosophy of mind and psychology, and not as a general synonym of "quality". A phenomenally nonconscious mental state can certainly have or contain qualities which aren't qualia in the narrow sense of the term.)
Note that to say that a nonconscious state cannot have or contain qualia is not to say that there cannot be any cognitively unaccessed or even unaccessible conscious states with qualia!
Also note that by "conscious state" I do not mean a mental state
of which its subject is cognitively conscious but simply a subjective experiential state consisting in the presence of mental "impressions" or "ideas" (images)!