15 ms·

Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

65 points by networked 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago
Analytic philosophers love to talk of qualia, but Continentals (Phenomenologists in particular) were on to the idea of the "lifeworld" well before (late 19th century) the Analytics came up with qualia (1929). I'd love to see the two concepts compared and contrasted. If anyone knows of such a comparison, I'd love to read about it.
- fmoralesc 9y ago
  The concepts of 'qualia' and 'lifeworld' are not directly comparable. Qualia are qualitative aspects of experiences, but lifeworlds are complexes of objects associated to a 'perspective' which operates on them (and possibly constitutes them) - essentially subjective worlds. The point of contact between those ideas is this: different lifeworlds could include the same objects but have a different qualitative character. The trick is that saying that the objects in two different lifeworlds are the same might make the assumption that the objects are 'given' (then, the qualitative aspect would be extrinsic to them). But if the subject of the lifeworld actively constitutes the objects of the world the objects could be different anyway, because those qualitative aspects would be intrinsic. Imagine a meadow. An insect experiences differently than a girl who is picking flowers, and both experience it differently than a cow who pastures (I think this is Uexkull's [who introduced the notion of Lebenswelt] own example). We might assume that beyond those lifeworlds there is a real world that grounds them and includes the objects that they . But it is not clear that the objects in all those worlds are the same, because the cognition of the insect, the cow and the girl might carve the world in different ways. Btw, historically, similar ideas where explored by William James around the same time the early phenomenologists and proto-phenomenologists (like Brentano), and James' influence through pragmatism fed back into analytic philosophy. Mainstream analytic philosophers more or less abandoned the idea for a while because of the influence of behaviorism (e.g. Ryle), but I don't think it was ever entirely expurged.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    It sounds like with the lifeworld concept, the Phenomenologists were coming up with another way to talk about solipsism. Would I be mistaken in thinking about lifeworlds like that?
    - fmoralesc 9y ago
      Well, they didn't necessarily give in to solipsism. The original idea was meant to accommodate, I think, the idea that different subjects could have entirely different experiences and still share a world. Actually, I think Husserl's idea that lived worlds have 'horizons' (beyond which you can somehow anticipate something you don't see) can capture the thought that the experience of others can be somehow be part of our own, so solipsism is partially defeated. But this is just a rough thought.
pavement 9y ago
A framework for conceptual ideas is provided, but within this lengthy quantity of words, not much else is accomplished other than to admit that consiousness is safely a material reality.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  How do we know what the actual basis for all material phenomenon is?
- cscurmudgeon 9y ago
  A comment is provided criticizing the article as usual, not much else is accomplished other than unintentionally admitting that the commenter doesn't really understand the gigantic difficulty of the problem at hand.
  - pzone 9y ago
    Oh, goodness yes. Bravo.
    - overdunk 9y ago
      Wow, savage burn! Epic win!
  - pavement 9y ago
    Eh, to be clear, this anatomical identification of the various attributes of sapience( dialing in on its approximate residence within systems matter, somewhere between the quantum and newtonian realms), rings mostly of opening remarks, and not the climactic declaration of a new discovery. It's foundational writing pointing toward more to come, if it's anything.
CognacBastard 9y ago
Finally some Chalmers has graced the front-page. Aleluja!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gaetanrickter 9y ago
How about Nature and its place in Consciousness?
joe_the_user 9y ago
"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state." ... "Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" -- I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Any information processing system would have internal processes, ones that reflect current and past input, "raw" and suitably modified. A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not. I mean, all of this is important to us because we are it. Any autonomous system would be more concerned with its internal processes than random things. So for such a thing, a brain or even a self-driving car, it's internal processes have a unique place - inside of its memory. " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness." -- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input. Of course, I'd say that such reasoning seems plausible because humans have a strong tendency to project our experiences on other human beings and to imagine other people having our experiences and vice-verse. So we experience only our input (rather tautologically) but imagine others having our experiences, imagine others imagining us having their experiences and so-reflexively via "mirror neurons" and such. But beyond that I think it seems "hard" because we value these experiences so highly. Having it all be banal and obvious seems to devalue it. And that's about it.
- mcbits 9y ago
  Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits. But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.
chronolitus 9y ago
I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me. Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable computing system. Several conclusions are possible: 1) The brain is conscious and can accurately measure that it is conscious. -> we should then also be able to measure this consciousness, if we figure out how the brain does. (wouldn't we have found something already?) 2) The brain is conscious and accurately guessed it is conscious. -> problem: why would the brain guess this, especially about something it can not measure? 3) The brain does not produce consciousness but thinks it does. -> Just as the metaphysical zombie, being molecule for molecule identical would assert it is conscious. (but now we're denying consciousness exists, see arguments about eliminativism in the original post) Any thoughts?
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  > Our brain knows it is conscious. Alas, there's the rub. With sufficiently high-resolution brain scans, it should be possible to backtrace what happens when someone utters, for example, the phrase "I'm conscious", or does some meditative exercise, or something. But I'm really not sure if we could learn anything more from that than we know now. Personally I think the most logical position is panpsychism with respect to information and/or information processing. Disregarding some undiscovered physical phenomenon, this is all that happens in the brain, and I see no fundamental reason why other systems that represent or process information couldn't be conscious, as well. Which leaves us with the problem of how to define "information" in this context, of course.
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
riesnerd 9y ago
I wonder why NYU Professor of Philosophy Thomas Nagels 2012 book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False" until this point hasn't been mentioned in this thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=front...
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Because, let's be frank, Nagel's work is bad and he should feel bad. There's ongoing work in producing naturalistic explanations for both consciousness and morality, so Nagel doesn't get to use those as, "Therefore we need to throw out all our existing science for a theory of teleology that makes no actual predictions other than that Thomas Nagel's intuitions should come out one way."

65 points by networked 9y ago

Analytic philosophers love to talk of qualia, but Continentals (Phenomenologists in particular) were on to the idea of the "lifeworld" well before (late 19th century) the Analytics came up with qualia (1929). I'd love to see the two concepts compared and contrasted. If anyone knows of such a comparison, I'd love to read about it.

fmoralesc 9y ago
The concepts of 'qualia' and 'lifeworld' are not directly comparable. Qualia are qualitative aspects of experiences, but lifeworlds are complexes of objects associated to a 'perspective' which operates on them (and possibly constitutes them) - essentially subjective worlds. The point of contact between those ideas is this: different lifeworlds could include the same objects but have a different qualitative character. The trick is that saying that the objects in two different lifeworlds are the same might make the assumption that the objects are 'given' (then, the qualitative aspect would be extrinsic to them). But if the subject of the lifeworld actively constitutes the objects of the world the objects could be different anyway, because those qualitative aspects would be intrinsic. Imagine a meadow. An insect experiences differently than a girl who is picking flowers, and both experience it differently than a cow who pastures (I think this is Uexkull's [who introduced the notion of Lebenswelt] own example). We might assume that beyond those lifeworlds there is a real world that grounds them and includes the objects that they . But it is not clear that the objects in all those worlds are the same, because the cognition of the insect, the cow and the girl might carve the world in different ways. Btw, historically, similar ideas where explored by William James around the same time the early phenomenologists and proto-phenomenologists (like Brentano), and James' influence through pragmatism fed back into analytic philosophy. Mainstream analytic philosophers more or less abandoned the idea for a while because of the influence of behaviorism (e.g. Ryle), but I don't think it was ever entirely expurged.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  It sounds like with the lifeworld concept, the Phenomenologists were coming up with another way to talk about solipsism. Would I be mistaken in thinking about lifeworlds like that?
  - fmoralesc 9y ago
    Well, they didn't necessarily give in to solipsism. The original idea was meant to accommodate, I think, the idea that different subjects could have entirely different experiences and still share a world. Actually, I think Husserl's idea that lived worlds have 'horizons' (beyond which you can somehow anticipate something you don't see) can capture the thought that the experience of others can be somehow be part of our own, so solipsism is partially defeated. But this is just a rough thought.

pavement 9y ago

A framework for conceptual ideas is provided, but within this lengthy quantity of words, not much else is accomplished other than to admit that consiousness is safely a material reality.

bamboozled 9y ago
How do we know what the actual basis for all material phenomenon is?
cscurmudgeon 9y ago
A comment is provided criticizing the article as usual, not much else is accomplished other than unintentionally admitting that the commenter doesn't really understand the gigantic difficulty of the problem at hand.
- pzone 9y ago
  Oh, goodness yes. Bravo.
  - overdunk 9y ago
    Wow, savage burn! Epic win!
- pavement 9y ago
  Eh, to be clear, this anatomical identification of the various attributes of sapience( dialing in on its approximate residence within systems matter, somewhere between the quantum and newtonian realms), rings mostly of opening remarks, and not the climactic declaration of a new discovery. It's foundational writing pointing toward more to come, if it's anything.

CognacBastard 9y ago

Finally some Chalmers has graced the front-page. Aleluja!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gaetanrickter 9y ago

How about Nature and its place in Consciousness?

joe_the_user 9y ago

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state." ... "Here, the task is not to explain behavioral and cognitive functions: even once one has an explanation of all the relevant functions in the vicinity of consciousness — discrimination, integration, access, report, control — there may still remain a further question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" -- I'm not getting why this is suppose to be "hard". Any information processing system would have internal processes, ones that reflect current and past input, "raw" and suitably modified. A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not. I mean, all of this is important to us because we are it. Any autonomous system would be more concerned with its internal processes than random things. So for such a thing, a brain or even a self-driving car, it's internal processes have a unique place - inside of its memory. " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness." -- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input. Of course, I'd say that such reasoning seems plausible because humans have a strong tendency to project our experiences on other human beings and to imagine other people having our experiences and vice-verse. So we experience only our input (rather tautologically) but imagine others having our experiences, imagine others imagining us having their experiences and so-reflexively via "mirror neurons" and such. But beyond that I think it seems "hard" because we value these experiences so highly. Having it all be banal and obvious seems to devalue it. And that's about it.

mcbits 9y ago
Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits. But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.

chronolitus 9y ago

I've always been more on the materialist side. Reading this, I finally managed to put a finger on something that's been bothering me. Our brain knows it is conscious. If consciousness is an immaterial phenomenon, emerging from those processes, how can the brain know it is conscious? What way could a brain possibly have to measure consciousness? When I refer to brain, i mean the physical, scientifically measurable computing system. Several conclusions are possible: 1) The brain is conscious and can accurately measure that it is conscious. -> we should then also be able to measure this consciousness, if we figure out how the brain does. (wouldn't we have found something already?) 2) The brain is conscious and accurately guessed it is conscious. -> problem: why would the brain guess this, especially about something it can not measure? 3) The brain does not produce consciousness but thinks it does. -> Just as the metaphysical zombie, being molecule for molecule identical would assert it is conscious. (but now we're denying consciousness exists, see arguments about eliminativism in the original post) Any thoughts?

kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
> Our brain knows it is conscious. Alas, there's the rub. With sufficiently high-resolution brain scans, it should be possible to backtrace what happens when someone utters, for example, the phrase "I'm conscious", or does some meditative exercise, or something. But I'm really not sure if we could learn anything more from that than we know now. Personally I think the most logical position is panpsychism with respect to information and/or information processing. Disregarding some undiscovered physical phenomenon, this is all that happens in the brain, and I see no fundamental reason why other systems that represent or process information couldn't be conscious, as well. Which leaves us with the problem of how to define "information" in this context, of course.
FeepingCreature 9y ago
Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago

riesnerd 9y ago

I wonder why NYU Professor of Philosophy Thomas Nagels 2012 book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False" until this point hasn't been mentioned in this thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=front...

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Because, let's be frank, Nagel's work is bad and he should feel bad. There's ongoing work in producing naturalistic explanations for both consciousness and morality, so Nagel doesn't get to use those as, "Therefore we need to throw out all our existing science for a theory of teleology that makes no actual predictions other than that Thomas Nagel's intuitions should come out one way."