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I'm a materialist, and believe consciousness is an emergent property. The essay writer was pretty rudely dismissive of the idea, mocking it as if people who hol

I'm a materialist, and believe consciousness is an emergent property. The essay writer was pretty rudely dismissive of the idea, mocking it as if people who hold that stance think the words "emergent property" is all that needs to be said. It is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." That completely ignores that there are thousands of researchers of various stripes who are are digging into the specifics and aren't simply saying, "Aha, it is emergent and our work is done here." Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things. Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow. Reading Oliver Sacks' book, "The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" 30 years ago was an eye-opener for me. It is filled with case studies of people who have suffered some localized failure of their brain, typically due to a stroke or physical trauma, but were otherwise normal. The deficits were stunning and revealing. To give one example, there was the case of someone with Capgras Syndrome, a situation where their emotional response to the subject's parents had gone silent. In every other way the subject was normal and of typical intelligence. Although they could say logically it makes no sense, their explanation for the loss of emotional affect seeing his parents was that they had been replaced by visually perfect doppelgangers. Having a ridiculous explanation for their emotional response apparently was more "energy minimizing" in their worldview than accepting the clinical explanation. Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary. The point is, our consciousness is a jumble of heuristics we use to navigate the world. It doesn't take some mystical detached consciousness that somehow violates the laws of physics to steer or corporeal bodies to carry out the will of the consciousness.

kurthr 4y ago
I hold similar opinions. I find even the flaws that the latest attention based language models have to be interesting in the way they fail... by lying, making stuff up, and stating BS with certainty. Ask why they answer the way they do and it's more confident truthy sounding gibberish. That doesn't make these conscious by any measure, but it rhymes. Were only so much rational animals, but fully rationalizing ones.
- ako 4y ago
  They’re not aware when they’re failing, they just repeat the data they’ve found. These models are aware they’re lying or BSing. Rubbish in, rubbish out.
  - tsukikage 4y ago
    > These models are aware they’re lying That's a fascinating statement. Can you expand on that? Are you suggesting there is something in there that can be aware of things? What does being aware even mean?
    - ako 4y ago
      My mistake, typed too fast, should have had a not in that statement.
brudgers 4y ago
I am a radical materialist and hold that consciousness is an inherent property of material. Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise. Though for what it is worth (i.e. little, nothing, or less than either), I don’t have an issue with dualism because it is not an issue worth having, and both materialism and dualism are almost certainly incorrect owing to the inevitability of human fallibility. Ymmv, but that’s only to be expected.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
    - naasking 4y ago
      Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
      - brookst 4y ago
        Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
        4y ago
Winsaucerer 4y ago
There are intelligent and well informed materialist philosophers who understand this debate well, but are still materialist. Even though I agree with the author that some kind of idealism is our best view (in virtue of its breadth and simplicity), the rude dismissal is unwarranted. With that said, I'd like to reply further, becacuse I think you may be mixing up what we call hard problems of consciousness with easy problems of consciousness. Easy problems relate to things like correlations between the mental and the physical. The hard problems relate to things like how we would explain consciousness at all given, say, the tools the materialist has available. Your reply seems to muster evidence that relates to the easy problems but not the hard. I do not know of any kind of possible experiment researchers could be working on to address the hard problem. I assume the author did not define consciousness because the problem they refer to is well known and discussed. When we talk about consciousness with respect to the mind/body problem, we're talking about the fact that there is an inner phenomenology, or a what-it's-like to be us. This kind of consciousness can be present while asleep, because it's not about the being awake and being aware, but rather the fact there is something that it's like to be you. With that in mind, the examples you refer to with optical illusions, the man who mistook his wife as a hat, and so on, are all irrelevant to the hard question. There is absolutely no doubt that changes in the physical world can result in changes in the mental, including optical illusions -- the materialist, the dualist, and the idealist all agree on this point, and such examples will not settle the hard question. Our experiences are shaped, enormously, perhaps even as much as wholly, by our brain states. This is all part of the work of the easy problems of consciousness. None of that means or entails or suggests that the mental is an emergent property of the material, or that the material comes first. An idealist of the sort I am will say something like this: God has in mind an idea of a physical world, and based on God's idea of that world (which includes God's idea of our brain) impresses upon other minds an experience of, say, a tree with leaves blowing in the wind. If my brain is wired differently, then I will have different experiences impressed upon me by God because of that than what others might experience. Perhaps the leaves of the tree will look a different colour to me than they do to others, all because of facts about my brain states (which themselves reduce to facts about an idea in God's mind). The materialist has no way -- not even the vaguest hint of a way -- to explain the mental, the phenomenology of our consciousness. There is no explanation that can be given that says how we can go from the physical to the mental. The best that can be done are things like: deny the existence of any phenomenology/inner experiences altogether so that there's nothing to explain (or similarly -- literally identify brain states mental states and say they are the same thing), embrace some kind of non-reductive physicalism (which in my opinion amounts to a form of dualism), or hope that some clever person will come up with a better explanation one day. Idealist views do not suffer from an an analogous "hard problem of non-consciousness". The idealist can give an explanation for the physical on their view, but the physicalist cannot give an explanation of the mental.
naasking 4y ago
> ["emergent property"] is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." It is. Just like "consciousness". That's how progress works: you take something you don't understand, slice off a piece of the problem by grounding it in something you do understand (physics in this case), and then put a label on what remains to describe the reduced scope of the problem. What a silly objection.
- toxik 4y ago
  Your argument works equally well to show that neither term is just magic incantation, but actually grounded in something.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago
  Since you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid. With your stance, one might as well say that no words have meaning, all of them are just labels. Trivially true, but not germane. My objection was the author claiming that all there was was a label (no matter which label is happens to be). Instead, there are man-millenia of investigation that go beyond just lumping it under the label "emergent property." It is like complaining that "the theory of evolution" is just a bunch of words that is just a hand wave that papers over the fact that science knows nothing, when in fact evolutionary theory is incomparably most vast than that single phrase.
  - naasking 4y ago
    > Since you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid I wasn't calling your objection silly, I was calling the article's objection to the terms silly. Complex topics that aren't fully understood are given labels all the time, like the very topic of this whole debate, "consciousness". "Idealism" is also a "magic word" the author wants to wave to solve all the problems.
kkoncevicius 4y ago
> Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow. Many people understand the concept of consciousness differently and I think you and the author are talking about different "consciousness". I agree more with the author so will try to defend and say a few things. First - optical illusions or brain trauma/surgery confusing your vision and thoughts has nothing to do with consciousness. Second - nobody can prove or even check whether some other person is conscious or not, which makes investigating consciousness on any physical level a non-starter. There is nothing in physical sciences that can potentially open any paths to this investigation.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  The statements you make are pretty absolute and you offer no compelling reason to believe they are correct. You’re missing out explaining why the two things you state are true. Until there is some compelling reason to think you’re right and the person you’re replying to is wrong the other person has a much better argument going.
  - kkoncevicius 4y ago
    Compelling reason... First thing I would say is that, I think, I know where the person is coming from. I used to have similar worldview and opinions about consciousness. What is required to see things from the other side is not an argument so much as an insight and a shift of perception. Also, I've had this discussion with people quite a few times it rarely leads to any kind of agreement. But let me try to put out the view from the other side. First, my statement about consciousness having nothing to do with optical illusions. Consciousness is not about "seeing correctly". It's about the perception itself. When I look at an apple I see red. If we played with lights I assume I can see it as green, or as a banana, or don't see it at all. Same with brain trauma. None of these affected the awareness I have of seeing something. This seeing something and being aware of what is it like to see it is consciousness, not the content. Then, going to the second thing I wrote, there is no way for me to test whether, for example, you are conscious or not. It gets cold and you reach for a jacket and put it on. I have no way of telling whether in this process you actually had the perception of what it's like to feel cold, or did your neurons simply fire at certain temperatures and activated the pathways in your brain that led to the memory (without being aware you are having a memory at the time) and a habit of putting on a jacket. This is the famous "philosophical zombie" thought experiment.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
How would you respond to someone who flips the argument and says the material world is an emergent property of being experienced (I'll refrain from using the word conscience)? By definition we can't construct an experiment that verifies the existence of matter not at least indirectly experienced, because such an experiment would contradict its own findings. If you find such materials, you're experiencing them. We take the existence of non-observed materials entirely on faith. In the manner of the new atheists we could dismiss the idea of an independent physical world. There is no proof, occam's razor, etc. I've never seen it, nobody has, it can't falsified, the unexperienced material world is nothing but unscientific superstition. We could then go on to argue that experience appears necessary for the physical world to exist, in an analogous fashion to how the book is can be argued to be more real than the meaning of the words printed in it.
- beebmam 4y ago
  I would ask them: what could I do to test your claim? And if it is unfalsifiable (which is almost certainly is) I'll disregard it as a waste of time.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    The central claim is that the claim that the existence of an un-observed material world is unverifiable. This in itself can be easily verified, and in fact, was demonstrated through a proof by contradiction. What follows is the logical conclusion from agreeing with your reasoning, that such claims are a waste of time, and we should focus on what we can verify, our experiences.
    - beebmam 4y ago
      No, it can't.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Pray tell why not? To be fair, I admit this is unabashed sophistry, the point isn't to actually argue for this viewpoint, but to illustrate by analogy the weaknesses in the materialistic view, which hinges tenuously on certain articles of faith.
bmitc 4y ago
> I'm a materialist Could you expand on this? Is it related to materialism (of the socioeconomic type)? > Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary. This reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman was convinced he was dead. Although that was from a point of narcissism rather than a brain disorder. Not trying to make light of things, as the real disorder sounds harrowing. I have looked at old pictures of myself and others before and philosophically wondered if that person existed. I can't imagine feeling like that in real time and not just as a thought exercise.
- jbotz 4y ago
  A materialist believes that everything can be explained by the interactions of matter and energy, and there is no independent "spirit" or other such thing that's separate from the material universe.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    So what the universe is expanding into doesn’t exist?
    - skissane 4y ago
      Mainstream physics doesn’t say there is anything the universe is expanding into. Rather, “expansion” is just that the distance between all objects in space grows over time, there is no claim that there is anything “outside” of space that space is “expanding into”, indeed that claim doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (“outside” is a spatial concept, so “outside of space” is somewhat of an oxymoron) (While space is expanding everywhere, we don’t observe it within galaxies, only between groups of galaxies-because within galaxies, and between nearby galaxies, the pull of gravity outweighs the expansion.)
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        So where the new space is coming from doesn’t exist?
orwin 4y ago
You're actually an illusionist if I read your thoughts accurately. It's the most sane position imho.
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  Huh, TIL you can refer to what I think about free will as "Hard incompatibilism" Thanks for your comment :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
epistemer 4y ago
I suspect people of the future will view our view of the jumble of heuristics as a type of medieval place holder for the "soul". Most people are just interchanging the word "consciousness" in place of "soul" but meaning exactly the same thing. Leaving the door open for something to persist after death while fooling themselves with more scientific sounding language for a medieval belief. One is either alive or dead. There is no such property of "aliveness". One is either conscious or unconscious. There is no such property of "consciousness". It is just such an unpalatable belief but I would think that is partially because belief in the soul is a defense against psychopathy at the level of society. I am not sure we could form such large societies without belief in the soul.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
> Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things. This is really the crux of the issue. There's consciousness as in experiencing existence in some way, there's consciousness as self-awareness and there's even consciousness as "able to think and plan." Materialism falls flat if you apply it to that first definition, because your burden of proof is through the roof. This is where people get lambasted for talking about consciousness as an emergent property - it's basically a religious/chauvinist stance hand waved with fancy words and pseudo-scientific bullshit with no actual scientific or logical foundation. Consciousness in the second and third sense are most definitely "emergent" to some degree. Nervous systems are simple in terms of basic organization and operation, but they allow for marvelously complex beings.

kurthr 4y ago

I hold similar opinions. I find even the flaws that the latest attention based language models have to be interesting in the way they fail... by lying, making stuff up, and stating BS with certainty. Ask why they answer the way they do and it's more confident truthy sounding gibberish. That doesn't make these conscious by any measure, but it rhymes. Were only so much rational animals, but fully rationalizing ones.

ako 4y ago
They’re not aware when they’re failing, they just repeat the data they’ve found. These models are aware they’re lying or BSing. Rubbish in, rubbish out.
- tsukikage 4y ago
  > These models are aware they’re lying That's a fascinating statement. Can you expand on that? Are you suggesting there is something in there that can be aware of things? What does being aware even mean?
  - ako 4y ago
    My mistake, typed too fast, should have had a not in that statement.

brudgers 4y ago

I am a radical materialist and hold that consciousness is an inherent property of material. Because if if I held the belief some kinds material have consciousness and other kinds of material don’t, I would - via calling a tail a leg doesn’t give a horse five legs logic - actually be a dualist no matter how loudly I might proclaim otherwise. Though for what it is worth (i.e. little, nothing, or less than either), I don’t have an issue with dualism because it is not an issue worth having, and both materialism and dualism are almost certainly incorrect owing to the inevitability of human fallibility. Ymmv, but that’s only to be expected.

jeremyjh 4y ago
Consciousness is computation. Any substratum that can be interpreted as computation is capable of being conscious.
- brookst 4y ago
  Are calculators conscious? GPT? Or am I misinterpreting “substratum”? I’ll admit I’m not clear on what you mean by it.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Not the OP, but such systems might be conscious in some sense. Hard to say without an actual mechanistic understanding of consciousness. We can characterize a sorting algorithm by an ordering property, but we just don't know the properties of consciousness.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Fair, and of course our colloquial understanding of “consciousness” varies. But I think most of us root consciousness in something like reflection / theory of mind, and I am highly skeptical that a calculator even remotely touches on that.
      - 4y ago

Winsaucerer 4y ago

There are intelligent and well informed materialist philosophers who understand this debate well, but are still materialist. Even though I agree with the author that some kind of idealism is our best view (in virtue of its breadth and simplicity), the rude dismissal is unwarranted. With that said, I'd like to reply further, becacuse I think you may be mixing up what we call hard problems of consciousness with easy problems of consciousness. Easy problems relate to things like correlations between the mental and the physical. The hard problems relate to things like how we would explain consciousness at all given, say, the tools the materialist has available. Your reply seems to muster evidence that relates to the easy problems but not the hard. I do not know of any kind of possible experiment researchers could be working on to address the hard problem. I assume the author did not define consciousness because the problem they refer to is well known and discussed. When we talk about consciousness with respect to the mind/body problem, we're talking about the fact that there is an inner phenomenology, or a what-it's-like to be us. This kind of consciousness can be present while asleep, because it's not about the being awake and being aware, but rather the fact there is something that it's like to be you. With that in mind, the examples you refer to with optical illusions, the man who mistook his wife as a hat, and so on, are all irrelevant to the hard question. There is absolutely no doubt that changes in the physical world can result in changes in the mental, including optical illusions -- the materialist, the dualist, and the idealist all agree on this point, and such examples will not settle the hard question. Our experiences are shaped, enormously, perhaps even as much as wholly, by our brain states. This is all part of the work of the easy problems of consciousness. None of that means or entails or suggests that the mental is an emergent property of the material, or that the material comes first. An idealist of the sort I am will say something like this: God has in mind an idea of a physical world, and based on God's idea of that world (which includes God's idea of our brain) impresses upon other minds an experience of, say, a tree with leaves blowing in the wind. If my brain is wired differently, then I will have different experiences impressed upon me by God because of that than what others might experience. Perhaps the leaves of the tree will look a different colour to me than they do to others, all because of facts about my brain states (which themselves reduce to facts about an idea in God's mind). The materialist has no way -- not even the vaguest hint of a way -- to explain the mental, the phenomenology of our consciousness. There is no explanation that can be given that says how we can go from the physical to the mental. The best that can be done are things like: deny the existence of any phenomenology/inner experiences altogether so that there's nothing to explain (or similarly -- literally identify brain states mental states and say they are the same thing), embrace some kind of non-reductive physicalism (which in my opinion amounts to a form of dualism), or hope that some clever person will come up with a better explanation one day. Idealist views do not suffer from an an analogous "hard problem of non-consciousness". The idealist can give an explanation for the physical on their view, but the physicalist cannot give an explanation of the mental.

naasking 4y ago

> ["emergent property"] is "just a magic word to cover over something no one understands." It is. Just like "consciousness". That's how progress works: you take something you don't understand, slice off a piece of the problem by grounding it in something you do understand (physics in this case), and then put a label on what remains to describe the reduced scope of the problem. What a silly objection.

toxik 4y ago
Your argument works equally well to show that neither term is just magic incantation, but actually grounded in something.
tasty_freeze 4y ago
Since you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid. With your stance, one might as well say that no words have meaning, all of them are just labels. Trivially true, but not germane. My objection was the author claiming that all there was was a label (no matter which label is happens to be). Instead, there are man-millenia of investigation that go beyond just lumping it under the label "emergent property." It is like complaining that "the theory of evolution" is just a bunch of words that is just a hand wave that papers over the fact that science knows nothing, when in fact evolutionary theory is incomparably most vast than that single phrase.
- naasking 4y ago
  > Since you have decided to not just disagree but call me silly, I will return the volley. Your objection is stupid I wasn't calling your objection silly, I was calling the article's objection to the terms silly. Complex topics that aren't fully understood are given labels all the time, like the very topic of this whole debate, "consciousness". "Idealism" is also a "magic word" the author wants to wave to solve all the problems.

kkoncevicius 4y ago

> Finally, I think it is important to appreciate just what a facade our consciousness is. It is a veneer that works well most of the time, but if it is probed too deeply one discovers what a hodge-podge it really is. Optical illusions are one window into seeing that our perceptions are often pretty shallow. Many people understand the concept of consciousness differently and I think you and the author are talking about different "consciousness". I agree more with the author so will try to defend and say a few things. First - optical illusions or brain trauma/surgery confusing your vision and thoughts has nothing to do with consciousness. Second - nobody can prove or even check whether some other person is conscious or not, which makes investigating consciousness on any physical level a non-starter. There is nothing in physical sciences that can potentially open any paths to this investigation.

meheleventyone 4y ago
The statements you make are pretty absolute and you offer no compelling reason to believe they are correct. You’re missing out explaining why the two things you state are true. Until there is some compelling reason to think you’re right and the person you’re replying to is wrong the other person has a much better argument going.
- kkoncevicius 4y ago
  Compelling reason... First thing I would say is that, I think, I know where the person is coming from. I used to have similar worldview and opinions about consciousness. What is required to see things from the other side is not an argument so much as an insight and a shift of perception. Also, I've had this discussion with people quite a few times it rarely leads to any kind of agreement. But let me try to put out the view from the other side. First, my statement about consciousness having nothing to do with optical illusions. Consciousness is not about "seeing correctly". It's about the perception itself. When I look at an apple I see red. If we played with lights I assume I can see it as green, or as a banana, or don't see it at all. Same with brain trauma. None of these affected the awareness I have of seeing something. This seeing something and being aware of what is it like to see it is consciousness, not the content. Then, going to the second thing I wrote, there is no way for me to test whether, for example, you are conscious or not. It gets cold and you reach for a jacket and put it on. I have no way of telling whether in this process you actually had the perception of what it's like to feel cold, or did your neurons simply fire at certain temperatures and activated the pathways in your brain that led to the memory (without being aware you are having a memory at the time) and a habit of putting on a jacket. This is the famous "philosophical zombie" thought experiment.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

How would you respond to someone who flips the argument and says the material world is an emergent property of being experienced (I'll refrain from using the word conscience)? By definition we can't construct an experiment that verifies the existence of matter not at least indirectly experienced, because such an experiment would contradict its own findings. If you find such materials, you're experiencing them. We take the existence of non-observed materials entirely on faith. In the manner of the new atheists we could dismiss the idea of an independent physical world. There is no proof, occam's razor, etc. I've never seen it, nobody has, it can't falsified, the unexperienced material world is nothing but unscientific superstition. We could then go on to argue that experience appears necessary for the physical world to exist, in an analogous fashion to how the book is can be argued to be more real than the meaning of the words printed in it.

beebmam 4y ago
I would ask them: what could I do to test your claim? And if it is unfalsifiable (which is almost certainly is) I'll disregard it as a waste of time.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  The central claim is that the claim that the existence of an un-observed material world is unverifiable. This in itself can be easily verified, and in fact, was demonstrated through a proof by contradiction. What follows is the logical conclusion from agreeing with your reasoning, that such claims are a waste of time, and we should focus on what we can verify, our experiences.
  - beebmam 4y ago
    No, it can't.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Pray tell why not? To be fair, I admit this is unabashed sophistry, the point isn't to actually argue for this viewpoint, but to illustrate by analogy the weaknesses in the materialistic view, which hinges tenuously on certain articles of faith.

bmitc 4y ago

> I'm a materialist Could you expand on this? Is it related to materialism (of the socioeconomic type)? > Sometimes Capgras Syndrom turns inward and is called Cotard's syndrome, where the subject believes they are dead despite all evidence to the contrary. This reminds me of the South Park episode where Cartman was convinced he was dead. Although that was from a point of narcissism rather than a brain disorder. Not trying to make light of things, as the real disorder sounds harrowing. I have looked at old pictures of myself and others before and philosophically wondered if that person existed. I can't imagine feeling like that in real time and not just as a thought exercise.

jbotz 4y ago
A materialist believes that everything can be explained by the interactions of matter and energy, and there is no independent "spirit" or other such thing that's separate from the material universe.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  So what the universe is expanding into doesn’t exist?
  - skissane 4y ago
    Mainstream physics doesn’t say there is anything the universe is expanding into. Rather, “expansion” is just that the distance between all objects in space grows over time, there is no claim that there is anything “outside” of space that space is “expanding into”, indeed that claim doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (“outside” is a spatial concept, so “outside of space” is somewhat of an oxymoron) (While space is expanding everywhere, we don’t observe it within galaxies, only between groups of galaxies-because within galaxies, and between nearby galaxies, the pull of gravity outweighs the expansion.)
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      So where the new space is coming from doesn’t exist?

orwin 4y ago

You're actually an illusionist if I read your thoughts accurately. It's the most sane position imho.

Dudeman112 4y ago
Huh, TIL you can refer to what I think about free will as "Hard incompatibilism" Thanks for your comment :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

epistemer 4y ago

I suspect people of the future will view our view of the jumble of heuristics as a type of medieval place holder for the "soul". Most people are just interchanging the word "consciousness" in place of "soul" but meaning exactly the same thing. Leaving the door open for something to persist after death while fooling themselves with more scientific sounding language for a medieval belief. One is either alive or dead. There is no such property of "aliveness". One is either conscious or unconscious. There is no such property of "consciousness". It is just such an unpalatable belief but I would think that is partially because belief in the soul is a defense against psychopathy at the level of society. I am not sure we could form such large societies without belief in the soul.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

> Another problem with the essay is that the term "consciousness" needs to be defined before discussing it, as different people take that word to mean different things. This is really the crux of the issue. There's consciousness as in experiencing existence in some way, there's consciousness as self-awareness and there's even consciousness as "able to think and plan." Materialism falls flat if you apply it to that first definition, because your burden of proof is through the roof. This is where people get lambasted for talking about consciousness as an emergent property - it's basically a religious/chauvinist stance hand waved with fancy words and pseudo-scientific bullshit with no actual scientific or logical foundation. Consciousness in the second and third sense are most definitely "emergent" to some degree. Nervous systems are simple in terms of basic organization and operation, but they allow for marvelously complex beings.