Consul wrote: ↑June 11th, 2021, 9:51 am
Sy Borg wrote: ↑June 8th, 2021, 10:07 pm
When it comes to the basics of consciousness or qualia, I'm consider responses that could be considered pre-emotional, eg. feeling an itch or other irritation and unthinkingly scratching it. It's a fascinating notion, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious minds. I am think the opposite in a way. That is, qualia seems to be involved in the basic sense-response dynamics of microbes, as distinct from emotional dynamics. In essence, I am not sure that a mind is needed for organisms to experience being - in a very, very, very basic way, I must stress.
When it comes to actual emotions, however, would agree that that would need a brain. Emotions are basically the bridge between body and mind, and one can't expect brainless organisms to have minds as such.
That qualia can exist in lieu of a mind to shape it. So while a microbe will not have the apparatus needed to feel, say, pain, they have aversive sense-response mechanisms, which are assumed by many not to be qualia, but I am not so sure.
One can feel things while not caring, feeling unemotional about sensations. A few months ago I had two root canal therapies while affected by some drug that took away my care. I could feel the dentist hacking away in there with pneumatic drill, bulldozer, pick axe and shovel (subjective impressions :) but I had no opinion or thoughts about it as I lolled relatively mindlessly in the chair. Of course, even this diminished human experience is exponentially more complex than the simple pulses and tingles that may be at the evolutionary root of qualia in the biosphere (wherever those limits may lie).
Local anesthetics as used by dentists can suppress the typical emotional and intellectual reactions to unpleasant or painful sensations. The question is whether you would have felt any tactile sensations in your mouth or teeth at all if there had been no cognitive access to them whatsoever, in virtue of which you were aware of them.
True. That's why, the more I think about this issue, I think we need to put humans aside. If we are to consider those without a brain, why measure against the very most cerebral species?
Consul wrote: ↑June 11th, 2021, 9:51 amThe general question is whether cognitively unaccessed or even unaccessible experiences are still experienced occurrences rather than nonexperiences. Unfortunately, the insoluble epistemic problem is that we cannot know if there are cognitively unaccessed, "brute" or "raw" experiences, since any knowledge of them would be based and dependent on actual cognitive access to them.
Well articulated. Then again, we work out models about things we cannot directly access. We predicted black holes and what they might look like. Now it's a matter of finding a structure that can mathematically be shown to generate the most raw possible sense of experience.
In terms of the thread, there's no argument that brains are required for consciousness that is of any value to us humans, given that we only accept the full and florid human experience. Certainly, just feeling one's breath and nothing else for a lifetime might seem like a guru's goal, but for most of us, that's of no interest whatsoever.
Consul wrote: ↑June 11th, 2021, 9:51 amThat an experience is there when I cognize or perceive it doesn't mean that it would still have been there if I hadn't cognized or perceived it. Berkeley's famous dictum "esse est percipi" is not true of external, physical reality; but it may well be true of internal, mental/experiential reality.
Solms claims that hydranencephalic children lacking the cerebral cortex can nonetheless enjoy feelings; but if they can, their emotions are cognitively inaccessible to them in principle owing to the absence of the cortex, where cognition and perception take place. So the big problem is:
"[H]ow do you distinguish an unaccessed state of phenomenal consciousness of which you are not aware from a nonconscious state of which you are not aware? Awareness in each case depends on access. So what is unaccessed phenomenal consciousness?"
(LeDoux, Joseph. Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. New York: Viking, 2015. p. 164)
The very concept of a brute or raw experience, i.e. one which is totally uncognized or unperceived by its subject, is of questionable coherence. Such cognitively unaccessed or even unaccessible experiences (experiential qualia) would be the psychological counterparts of Kant's undetectable and unknowable noumena.
Not long ago, wondering what came before the Big bang was considered a question of questionable coherence. Things change, especially in frontier areas of science.
Kant's noumena concept make sense because it is impossible to know everything. If you could build a computer powerful enough to calculate all things it would undergo gravitational collapse (this has been modelled mathematically). Nature's repetitive and quasi-fractal nature makes it possible to extrapolate mathematically about things that we could not otherwise model, but that's a matter of averaging and reaching estimations that will never be foolproof.
There's two possibilities: either a sense of being is emergent or it's fundamental, and the question is academic. If consciousness is fundamental, it changes nothing in terms of ethics, given that humans routinely kill all manner of highly sentient beings, sometimes each other.
"Brute or raw experience" without augmentation by brains may or may not exist, but it is worthless to us. A point for panpsychism is that "philosophical zombies" would be more effective in life than beings that experience. It seems that experience itself is the point of experience. Without it, no one cares and entropy happens unabated. Experiencing motivates. We can expect natural selection to favour motivated entities that are capable of actions that counter local entropy over unmotivated or incapable entities that are fully subject to chance.
I accept that life and consciousness are,
for all known practical means and purposes, emergent phenomena. Still, it is logical that there was a basis for these emergences in prebiotic times, that something somewhat similar in nature to life and consciousness existed. Major emergences are logically just exponential jumps in complexity, changing from something that is of the same ilk, but exponentially less complex.
Obviously these phenomena were not infused with magic by a universe-sized, silver-bearded spirit with an outstretched index finger (unless the simulation hypothesis is correct, and that giant finger was actually pressing the Enter key hehehe). Rather, life is thought to have emerged from complex sugars generated by geological activity. Equivalently, consciousness emerged from blind reflexes, basic sensations but sensing of some kind has always happened, just that "dead" matter reacting to stimuli can only offer the most basic resistance to entropy.
I don't claim to have some grand theory or special knowledge (as some have implied) but I do think that it's easy to mistake scientific silos for genuine divisions of reality, rather than efficacious and convenient chunking of complex material. Thus, I think it's worth following the chain of being from as early a point as possible rather than starting our investigations with prokaryotes, or viruses or flatworms - because that is what happened, regardless of our ideas about it. Trouble is, it's not easy. It would good to see as thorough and non-anthropomorphic investigation as this into qualia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw
but I had no opinion or thoughts about it as I lolled relatively mindlessly in the chair. Of course, even this diminished human experience is exponentially more complex than the simple pulses and tingles that may be at the evolutionary root of qualia in the biosphere (wherever those limits may lie).
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