Consul wrote: ↑June 12th, 2021, 11:19 amThe 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.[/quote]
Sy Borg wrote: ↑June 11th, 2021, 8:00 pm
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.
Consul wrote: ↑June 12th, 2021, 11:19 amThat there can be cognition or perception without phenomenal consciousness is not in question, but can there be phenomenal consciousness which isn't an object of inner cognition or perception? Again, the seemingly insoluble epistemological and methodological problem is that any possible evidence for cognition- or perception-transcendent and -independent phenomenal consciousness depends on acts of inner cognition or perception.
However, there are people such as Ned Block who believe that "Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access" and present experimental results to that effect: https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/fac ... erflow.pdf
Other philosophers and scientists deny that those experiments have successfully demonstrated that Block is right.
Still, once you are looking at human consciousness, you are already quite a long way from the source. It's akin to being on the ISS, trying to observe honey badgers on the Earth.
Consul wrote: ↑June 12th, 2021, 11:19 amSy Borg wrote: ↑June 11th, 2021, 8:00 pmThere'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
According to panpsychism, experiential properties are among the fundamental natural properties, so experience is a brute fact of nature—end of story. I reject panpsychism. I also reject ontological emergentism (with its mutually irreducible layers or levels of being). My position—compositional/constitutional materialism (mereological physicalism)—is a version of reductive materialism.
During the course of biological evolution a transition or transformation took place from preconscious/preexperiential physiological sensitivity to psychological/phenomenological sentience.
"If we want to understand consciousness and its basis, we should study its source—neural activity at its most rudimentary level, and then track the phenomenon, step by step, through to its more advanced manifestations, ultimately to us humans. So the approach would be the same as the one we have taken in addressing the problem of abiogenesis—start simple. A fascinating scientific journey awaits us."
(Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. p. 178)
We can start even earlier with primitive non-neuronal stimulus-response mechanisms as we find them in bacteria, but it is a long evolutionary way from there to phenomenally conscious minds as we find them in brained animals. The true history of mind and consciousness doesn't precede the evolution of animal nervous systems.
Yes, we need to track back from the neuron:
Neurons evolved from primitive cells that are capable of sensitivity (irritability) and contractility (exercising force by changing shape) as drawn by Parker in 1919 ( Figure 4Aa) (also see Meech & Mackie 2007). The initial differentiation of these cells into true neurons or muscle cells precedes the further differentiation of nerve cells into sensory neurons (in communication relation to the external world) or motor neurons (in direct communication with muscles or glands) ( Figure 4Ab). The final stage occurs with the development of interneurons (establishing contacts between sensory and motor neurons) ( Figure 4Ac). The latter represent the vast majority of neurons in the brain and ganglia.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neuron
I would, as discussed, look back into microbial sensory organelles. Yes, it's a long way from the extreme complexity of human brains and minds. Many claim that consciousness is indivisible, like a river is indivisible, but consciousness is composed of interconnected reflexes in roughly the same way as water is composed of connected molecules.
One might argue that a water molecule does not have the properties of water; that a molecule is not "wet", just as reflexes don't have self-awareness. That's emergence, where a connected group develops qualities that its individuals do not, eg. Humanity builds skyscrapers and space stations, which individual humans cannot.
So, while there are clear differences between reflexes and consciousness, there are fundamental similarities. There is nothing in nature closer to consciousness than reflexes. I do not believe in "biological machines" exist, that sensing is actually
felt by relatively tiny and subtle life forms in much the same way as Brownian motion is unimportant to beings of our size but significant to microbes.
This is, of course, only an idea because I'm no more capable of imagining what such a state would feel like than anyone else (from my lofty perch in the "Consciousness ISS"). Still, what seems insignificant to the very large can be critical for the very small. So, if organisms are sensing and responding to their environment to obtain food and to avoid threats, then they would seem to be experiencing some simple sense of being alive, just that the mechanisms behind it are still to be explored.
Or panpsychism might be correct, that consciousness exists in ever greater subtlety and simplicity, the further down one drills. Or materialism might be correct and the situation is closer to the conceptions you prefer. It would be nice if research was not so much about human brains but, if I am the one paying for research grants, I'd also wanting projects that make a difference in medicine rather than blue skies work.