How Does The Brain Create Consciousness???

Smears:

But the fact (if it is a fact) of a----->b is very crucial to the downfall of what I call: Non-experientially generated psychophysicalism (ergo: that which isn’t consciousness or subjective experience at all [if it were it would experience] being said or believed to create or give existence to the very thing that it, itself, is not in the least. That’s the fatal flaw. Experience, by nature, experiences. It can do nothing else and it does nothing else. One cannot speak of experience without speaking of experiencing. So in the end we’re all talking about experience (experiencing), or something that supposedly exists when there is no experiencing at all (and if this thing can exist when there is no experiencing at all, then it is not experience).

It does not matter that there are 100 billion neurons pumping non-tethered electrons directionally (from dendrite to axon) toward each other at fantastic rates of speed and in ways that make even neuroscientific heads swim. If the neurons and the electrons are all physical, or made up of something that isn’t subjective experience at all, then the very statement that they somehow produce subjective experience, something that they are not in the least (as neurons and electrons can exist, as they do during periods of dreamless sleep [if dreamless sleep even exists] without any consciousness or experience about), defies logic and reason.

But…we are experiences and the only thing we do is experience. That is all. Everything that we perceive is perceived because we’re standing there to perceive it, and wouldn’t be perceived (at least by oneself) if we were not there. Reality, as it actually manifests itself, is just you and what you happen to be thinking, feeling, seeing, etc. at a certain frozen moment in time. This is what Kant was preaching about (in Part Two). What would exist without persons perceiving them? What could be known with certainty (in such a way that faith or speculation is not required to believe it) to exist without someone having perceived it, or standing there to perceive it? The perceived and the perceiver are, in reality (reality that is actually experienced on a constant basis) inseparable. We simply cannot answer the question of what exists in the absence of persons without speculation and make-believe; we certainly can’t know that what we’re making up is absolutely true, despite the fact that we unwaveringly believe it, as it is something that cannot be experienced.

I charge that it makes sense that we do away with the existence-magic of trying to make experience something that requires something else in order to exist, particularly if that “something else” isn’t experience at all. It’s magical thinking, once you’ve done the mental homework, and it defies logic and reason. The existence of experience has yet to be explained (if it can be); it is mind-boggling that we invoke something that is not experience at all to reach in and pull out of itself, like the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, something that it, itself, isnt. How does the thing have, within itself, a completely different type of existence? How can it pull out this existence without this different existence having existed all along?

J.

Cinderella Candy …

A Universe essentially thinks itself into existence. It has no fundament, no stage or background, all of the relationships within any Universe (which can also be conceived as an Entity Composed of a Subject ↔ Object, an Observer ↔ External Rules of Engagement (external world), Matter self manipulating itself) can be seen as Self Referential, only a part of the Universe being related to another independent (partially ? or if independent is 0 and dependent is 1 what is 345 or -6.788 ? and all other kinds of projections and abstract extensions and so forth) part of itself, but itself essentially simply talking to itself and such. Talking to itself and creating itself, thinking itself into existence, creating itself from itself, creating self referential Information Relationships that create existence or the illusion of existence and such (hence this is why Science is 100 % wrong and will always be 100 % wrong, Science doesn’t exist, only Arbitrary, Pure Invention of the Universe inventing itself just because, for no reason at all exists, all else is making believe that there is some reference system, some absolutes and such). Just like any thought you have creates itself as a reality, just like the thought of the Instant Singularity actually creates it and makes you escape this Universe and enter a new Universe with new laws of physics, just like the thought of the Instant Singularity is the Instant Singularity itself and such (and any imagined reality is trillions of times more real than the reality you perceive with your sense organs, any imagined construction or contraption (in your mind or where ?) is a Universe that is becoming real and popping up into existence by itself, as all is a monlithic slab of pure thought creating itself and inventing itself into existence and such).

A part of the Universe Observing and Interacting with another part of itself, but creating all kinds of arbitrary delimitations within the set of entities it decided to compose itself of, therefore creating an infinite array of possible “Observers” and “External Realities” (like a tree is an Observer and a car tire is the External Reality, or a Star is an Observer (the Star is a modifed Mind, Man Brain type but trillions of times more complex and elaborate, with trillions of new circuits inside of itself, all of the plasma reactions, all the particles interacting between themselves are creating an experience and Mindform and Brain type and such, so far and higher and superior than anything our puny Brain can ever do…) and this letter X written right here (try to find where…) is the External Reality and such).

A Monolithic slab of relationships that exist nowhere, in no time, in no space in no background in no reference system: hence if something appears in no reference system, if something appears NoWhere than anything can appear (even though these words are a very clumsy way of expressing these ideas which are trillions of times higher and more complex and impossible for all you puny humans to comprehend, only ME the ULTRA GOD and ULTRA MIND can understand it, so I win, I am the winner and you are all the loser, I win all, there, I am the winner, all the rest of the Universe is the loser, all items have lost, I am GOD and the winner, I am the BEST, I am the ONLY forever…).

So the Universe, or the Modified Brain or the Processor Experiencing Existence (or consciousness or whatever) is not composed of anything, neither Matter or atoms or logical connections or anything at all: it is simply an arbitrary quirk that appears, relates to itself in any possible way and disappears and such, even though appearing and disappearing imply some kind of stable - absolute background (even if the background is only Logic, but logic is just another Information Relationship, any other kind of relationship and interaction and Experience set and anything at all is possible and so forth, the more far out and abstract and impossible the better, even Non Mathematical and Non Logical Worlds having trillions of properties trillions of times farther from anything we can ever imagine and such…).

Definition of Information Relationship: any sequence of symbols or blocks of text defining it can do since they all are just a one bit explanation, any complex set of bits can always be reduced to just one bit, the logical non contradiction and identity principle; therefore we must project abstractions that escape these straight jackets and prisons and abstract ever more, the more vague and impossible to understand the better: increase the mystery, mystery is fascinating, who needs logic or relationships ? who wants to understand ? Misunderstanding is all there ever will be. Misunderstanding is All in Life. The most important thing in life is to Misunderstand Everything. Misunderstanding and Ignorance is trillions of times superior to knowledge or understanding and such, Make Mistakes, Make Errors, Errors are everything, we need ever more mistakes and errors…kill Science and Kill Knowledge… create a negative Science, create ever more confusion and lies, kill the idea of being correct, kill Science…

APE

The thread title should really be called ‘How does Consciousness create the Brain???’ lol

From:

kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/americ … -show.html

APE STAR

I’m aware of the arguments for idealism, of course. But insofar as it changes anything versus the physicalist model, the physicalist model seems to have the evidential advantage, and insofar as it changes nothing, it’s completely irrelevant which model we use at all.

The fact is that through physical manipulations (which, importantly, we don’t experience at all but only infer to be happening, such as passing currents through the brain) we can give other people new experiences and give them consciousness of new things. So the theoretical objection that experience can’t arise from physical interactions can be dismissed out of hand by the physicalist, as by their own theories they can show it can.

Only_Humean:

The physicalist—unbeknownst to or willingly denied by the physicalist—can only show that experience arises from experience, which is all brains and electric currents are within the percept. All the ‘physical’ stuff that’s supposed to occur is actually only sensory experience. Thus they cannot show that experience arises from physical interactions because the entire tableau is phenomenal, or experiential, in essence.

The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, termed the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound or another physical process, the object stimulates the body’s sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction. This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus. These neural signals are transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental recreation of the distal stimulus is the percept. Perception is sometimes described as the process of constructing mental representations of distal stimuli using the information available in proximal stimuli.

An example would be a person looking at a shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person’s eye and stimulates their retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the Percept. Another example would be a telephone ringing. The ringing of the telephone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person’s auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus, and the brain’s interpretation of this as the ringing of a telephone is the percept. The different kinds of sensation such as warmth, sound, and taste are called “sensory modalities”.

-Wikipedia: Perception, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception

Thus everything the physicalist thinks is ‘physical’ and ‘not-experience’ is actually just the physicalist’s experience within the percept. The distal stimulus cannot be perceived, as it is (if it even exists) something that is distinct from and not part of the percept (they are two unrelated, distinct things: one does not exist unless and until neurons in the cerebral cortex are activated; the other does not depend upon the brain to exist and thus is not something that must be continually produced by the cortex).

In the language of psychophysicalism, the percept depends upon some function within the cerebral cortex. Until this happens, there is no percept and no consciousness throughout the process of perception antecedent to stimulation of the cortex at the end of the causal chain (given that we experience all the time unless dreamlessly asleep, taking this ontology for the sake of argument it can be said that stimulation is going on all the time, but nevertheless what we experience is not the same thing as that which purportedly sits in the external world sending signals to the cortex).

One can also take the film Inception as an example. Using the events of the film (despite the fact it is fiction, the principles depicted in the film is the central principle of the relation between consciousness and the external world—art depicting theory of life in a very interesting way) as analogy, the main characters are in a dream within a dream, while their ‘physical’, real bodies are asleep on a plane embarked toward the US. But if they did not know better, they would think (despite the strangeness of what’s going on–plus their ever-spinning totems informing them they are in a dream) that they were actually fighting armed troops on a mountaintop in the snow.

Same thing’s going on with the neuroscientist shooting electric currents through a patient’s brain granting him/her (verbally reported, as we cannot see the other person’s experiences) new and changing experience. The pertinent or common belief (for those who have graduated from Naive Realism) is that there are two layers to reality. The neuroscientist during the experiment or operation perceives what’s going on and what he/she is doing from his/her point of view, but before he/she drove to the hospital one was doing and perceiving another thing entirely. Did the hospital, the patient, and the neuromedical equipment exist while the neuroscientist was at home having cocoa and reading the paper? If they do exist, and if the physical is not experience at all (otherwise it would experience or be experienced), then whatever exists when the neuroscientist is not perceiving it is of a substance that cannot be perceived.

My central argument is that everything, to us, is phenomenal, and the percept truly does not need the distal object—regardless of whether or not the distal object is in the form of a shoe or a functioning brain—in order to exist. We cannot know that the mental comes from or is generated by the physical because everything, to us, is only mental in aspect, composed of nothing but our experience. We must have quasi-religious faith that a non-mental analog in the external world mimics what is going on in the phenomenal “Matrix” that is consciousness.

J.

Thanks PH,

Very interesting stuff. Idealism through-and-through, right? I also am an idealist. I have my own brand, and if you fancy a look, you can go to mm-theory.com/execsum/execsum.htm.

In any case, I agree fully with everything you said in your (abridged) post, except for this one thing: matter doesn’t exist. I think matter does exist–even in the sense that materialists and scientists conceptualize it–but I think it is one with the phenomenal matter of our experiences. I think matter as the materialist conceives it and matter as the idealist conceives it are two conceptions of the same thing (which actually makes it a third conception–a hybrid of the two if you will). I don’t believe in this separate stuff called “matter” that’s something different from this other separate stuff called “mind,” but rather that mind sometimes becomes matter.

Hi j

Great ELO song there. :slight_smile:

Going by my version of gib’s ‘projection theory’ [+holographic theory] and by my former debates with you, I feel we should be looking for ‘something else’ from which both the brain and consciousness are manifest continually. That is as projections of that enigmatic something and necessarily NOT projections nor any otherwise manifestations of one another, ~ the brain does not [if I may] manifest consciousness nor vice versa.

Such is my ‘skeleton theory’, you can place universal and individual mind, God the Tao or caugant [the divine infinite] in that place prior to mental and material existence.

Experience can bridge the mental and physical without effort - in a manner of speaking, because ‘it’ has its base beyond such expressed or manifest forms of reality.

So what do you think the projector is?

Consider that QM [wave particle duality etc] takes us beyond spatial locations and objects, as does qualia of mind. We could say that information is at base, yet the mind can experience without knowing. Equally we’d have to ask whence that info initially derives.

  • first thoughts, Amorphos [Q]

What the fuck was that all about?

This guy has to be another BW.

How does the brain create consciousness, no one knows, end of story. :slight_smile:

I’m with the no one knows crowd on this one. In the end Phenomenal, I believe that equivalent arguments exist for positions on either side of this debate. If we’re all using the same evidence, I just think that’s kinda where we’re at.

So the inquiry ends? :slight_smile: Well even with nothing tangible to go by in terms of what consciousness ‘is’, we know it must be utilising and communicating with what we do know!

Neither J nor gib and others possibly wont agree, but lets assume a few things [the beginning of logic, no]…

  1. There is a physical world, when we observe it, we don’t observe a physical phenomenon or ‘stuff’ of consciousness’ ~ not directly that is.

  2. We can assume that experience is not some manner of wave or particle and other vibrations.

  3. We can assume that having at least two parties [for now let us say the material and immaterial], information is contained and shared in both and thus is something which is transcendental to and transmigrates those parties.
    So now we have three parties communicating + an experience of that = four parties.
    Note; communicating informations are either/or experienced/not experienced, making the experience itself the said forth party.

  4. None of these parties self create or are otherwise self manifesting. We can only assume that when any one of them ‘exists’ its existence promotes or necessitates the manifestation of one or more of the other parties. 4b. OR, more likely that all parties are continually ‘present’ in some manner!?

If 4b, then we may assume a fifth party, that of the initial, the potential and the original state or statelessness of all parties. We may further assume it’s a unified essentiality as if like a pool to be drawn from.

I think we have some ways to go before the inquiry ends, no?

:wink: :smiley:

gib:

Interesting website. IMO, however, your view may come down to a type of ‘psychophysical’ phenomenalism as opposed to true Idealism. That is, you hold that the brain remains the arbiter of consciousness (or subjective experience) but eschew the notion that the brain is an altogether different existence from experience but is composed of a noumenal substance that is related to it (and as such can support the “water in the maze”—and perhaps transform from the walls of the maze into the water itself and vice versa!).

While I agree that the mind or subjective experience itself is the true nature of being my Idealism, which I believe is the type endorsed by Berkeley himself, is that there is nothing but subjective experience: that there is no ‘other’ that is not the actual experience of an actual person that is antecedent to persons and actual experiences that somehow represent and symbolize persons and experiences and must exist in order from persons (and experiences) to “come forth” or to express.

The notion that the brain (whatever that brain is composed of) and its purported relation to consciousness, outside of the brain being just the creator or “bring forth”-er of subjective experience is at the end of the day a Representationalism: the brain (or rather the cerebral cortex) and its neural number, synaptic connection (and the mobility or transitoriness of those connections), and electronic motion and variability is purported to “symbolize” (and through this symbolization, to bring forth) the mental or experiential manifestion of these neural symbols. It is the same as to say that when one writes the word: “apple” or speaks it, an actual apple suddenly pops into existence from thin air (or in the pertinent case, an apple is magically formed from letters written or the spoken word).

My view is that the brain has merely an ersatz role in the formation of experience, in the sense that it is a “false” creator that is merely an allegorical manifestion of God’s intelligence in the form of a symbolic “double entendre”: it allegorically expresses God’s intelligence by the nature of its function (its appearance is an absurd abstraction), and it is a God-instilled reductio ad absurdum that, in counter to the belief that it brings forth consciousness or experience (as opposed to experience existing independent of anything having to exist beforehand to ensure it appears), is a “trap” set for reason bent toward the relation which will reveal the incoherence of such a relation (as the brain is an aspect of the perceiver empirically, and an existence independent of the perceiver speculatively, and personal experience as it is actually experienced must either eternally exist before there were such things as brains, must be magically conjured ex nihilo from a previous and total nonexistence, or come forth as a form of transformation from something that is not personal experience but is related substantially to personal experience [hence a form of phenomenalism]).

Ultimately, it seems that the person is the fundamental nature of reality or being, as opposed to a non-person (as the brain is a non-person believed to give rise to or produce persons) that has the power to conjure, transform into, or maintain the existence of a person. Of course, the ultimate generator that persons are not the fundamental reality is the existence of perceived non-person objects, and it is these phenomenal objects that tempt speculation (or make-believe) that these objects have an existence independent of the person. My own view, in the end, is that objects have no independent existence, such that they are extended aspects of the person in the form of some type of “outward perception” that is a part of the person with no relation or origin from something beyond the individual, save another individual that either deliberately or unconsciously “grants” or “shares” one’s perception with a sub-dimensional other (if this makes sense).

Like Berkeley, I hold that the external world is actually a Person rather than a space, and that the experiential substance making up this person itself forms internal persons with mental and sensory properties modeled from the properties of the Outer Person, and that the brain, its complexity, and its function is a reductio ad absurdum or at best a false symbol or multiplied internal fable symbolizing the true source of human consciousness, the experiential material of Homo Infinitus (“Infinite Man”).


[size=70]-Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette, John Totleben: Swamp Thing #21: The Anatomy Lesson; DC Comics, February 1984[/size]

At the end of the day, however, I agree that anything beyond ourselves and what we are doing right now (particularly in light of Kant’s scandal that if someone preached skepticism about the independent existence of objects in the external world their view cannot be defeated, only counter-believed), is, even my view of the external world, a matter of speculation and faith. I think what I have done, and continue to do, is create the simplest view in which the person is the basis of reality from the infinitesimal to the infinite, without need for a non-person device or machine–regardless of what comprises the machine—to create or transform parts of itself into a person or its experience.

J.

Not me. The brain doesn’t create consciousness. The idea of a brain existing prior to its creation of consciousness is absurd. The evolution of brain is simultaneously the evolution of mind. It is one and the same evolution. And if it’s one and the same evolution, on what basis do we promote the ontological superiority of the brain to the lowly mind?

Apologies to p_g - the OP is just too much for me to plunge into.

Amorphos:

Season’s Greetings, first off. :sunglasses:

Second…

It is. It was my muse whilst constructing the article.

God, yes. This is what I’ve been saying all along. But in my view, the brain has no importance save as either an allegorical manifestation of intelligence in the form of experiential manifestation of complexity and cause and effect, or a symbolic reductio ad absurdum that reveals, by the incoherence of the notion that brains can yield or produce experiences, that experience, particularly the person, is the fundamental nature and basis of reality.

For me, the projector is Homo Infinitus (“Infinite Man”), in a simplistic hierarchy and homogeniety in which the specific is a reverberation of the universal. I hold, again, that reality consists of nothing but persons existing within an infinite Person–and that there is no non-person machine or device (re: the brain) that produces or “pumps out” persons and experiences. Personhood, then, is the fundamental nature of reality with the perceived being an absurd (existing for no other reason than it happens to exist the way that it does) extension of the perceiver. The only alternative to this (which I believe you and most everyone else seems to/may/might hold to) is that objects (in a holistic space) precede and grant existence to persons (and their perceptions, which are held to mimic antecedent objects in personal ways). I think the argument for and against specific notions of the nature of existence boils down to these.

-response to first thoughts,

J.

Seasons greetings to you too sir. :slight_smile:

Interesting. Are you suggesting that brains [even throughout evolution] are the effect, as I’d concur. As per my last post [I hope you get to answer], the major assumptions we make are firstly in the material and using that as base. The lesser assumptions are in the observer, experience and thought [info + experience [where observation and perception etc are kinds of experience].

Any communicating back and forth between parties [again see last post] must be cyclic to some degree, such that even if there is some magnificent intellect behind it all [or if not], it responds perhaps ‘automatically’ [there would be a method and process] to the requirements of life.

I don’t think objects precede and grant existence to persons or at least to consciousness, rather I believe something of the mind precedes form and info ~ the projection.

‘Infinite man’, not so unlike ‘the divine infinite’ perhaps, then again nor is the Tao or Buddha being and nirvana ~ the experience of that. That is, I can see aspects of them all in the divine infinite, but I’d be amiss if I didn’t ask if we can see them all in the personhood and infinite ‘man‘?
On the other hand there is certainly intellect in communications, at least where they are being experienced. Where they are not then naturally that’s more computation than intellect.

For me, life and death occur at the point of intellect communicating not such a thing occurring. People historically have feared what kind of death they may get, but as I see it, it doesn’t matter if we die in our sleep or are blown to pieces.

I don’t see why we don’t have both consciousness [‘persons’ as you see it] and form, where as per my last post there necessitates differing parties in the equation, and a duality between the material and immaterial ~ even if transcended. This is probably the only point we disagree on beyond the semantics.

_

Amorphos:

I do suggest that brains are part of the effect, and have no independent existence from the percept, such that the machine believed to give rise to consciousness or experience is actually a part of that consciousness rather than something standing apart from it and creating it. It’s another object within the “Matrix” erroneously believed to be responsible for the “Matrix” itself.

And it is true that the major assumptions are primarily material, using it as base. But observing experience it is odd that we should believe that experience, which is nothing in the end but experiencing, should “come from” or arise or be create from something that isn’t experience or experiencing at all. It seems more transparently rational that experience simply comes from just more of itself: this does away with the baggage of deriving experience from non-experience, which is basically my beef with the world.

There is the person and its ‘deprivation chamber’ dimension or inner world of personal sensory/internal experience. In our knowledge concerning the nature of existence, we at least have that. If you stop there, you have solipsism. Placing one toe over the line of solipsism, as we all (save for solipsists) tend to do, you must consider an external world. And absent a disconnect between the external world and whatever’s there and the nature of the person and whatever it experiences, I suppose I must agree with you and say there is definitely a communication going on between them, and that this communication is cyclic. Indeed, in my theology I state the same (although tangentially).

And yes, there is an ‘automation’ even in God, with absurdism (as God, like us, is existentially absurd—existing as he does for no other reason than that is how he happens to exist) being at the base of everything and this automation in terms of substance and causality between different elements in the substance as a secondary manifestation or aspect of this ground-level absurdity. So, I suppose there is a mechanism governing God and the nature of his mind, even if this mind is infinite.

I think that if there is only a Person and persons, that the divine infinite, however it is named, is ultimately exhausted to, defined by, and necessitates personhood for existence and manifestation (with that which is perceived by the person an aspect of the person, as they are inseparable save through Berkeleyian attempt at conceptual division). Perhaps the divine infinite can be imagined as something that is not a person but that manifests in persons, but any disagreement here is nothing more than a difference of opinion in the underlying nature of reality beyond the person. It’s infinite regress.

If Person is the fundamental reality, then form exists within Person, not outside of it. But this does not necessarily encapsule each person in such a way that communication is impossible. The Infinite Man, however, can be thought of as ‘form’ and ‘material’, if the perceived is an inextricable part of the perceiver and cannot (absurdly) exist independent of the perceiver as a non-person background infinity. IMO I think there is an existential disconnect between God and man that may tempt belief in a ‘non-person outside infinity’: our experience as ourselves is centered in visual and tactile (proprioceptive) experience of a body, with a visual, etc. environment surrounding that body. I think that God may have the opposite of that, with no sensation of body, such that there is no sensation of surroundings, thus marking the perspective of an infinite mind. I think that the only ‘material’ is the stuff of this Person’s mind, which is not available for separation and analysis save only conceptually (Berkeley).

J.

You must have read up to the Basic Theory (which is impressive in itself). If you read ahead to the Advanced Theory, you’ll see how I address this issue you bring up. In the end, I do reduce the “noumenal” brain down to the mind itself, and the material brain down to sensation (like you said). I have a saying: There is not a divide between phenomena and noumena, but one between phenomena and more phenomena.

While that’s a very convoluted statement, I think get the gist. You should read this critique of Berkeleian idealism I post once here at ILP:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176310

In it, I try to argue that the problem with Berkeley’s idealism is Cartesianism. I argue that Rene Descartes’ theory of mind was a very corrupting idea that plagued the philosophy of mind–through Locke, through Berkeley, through Kant–up until Nietzsche who was the first to see through the Cartesian chimera. Notwithstanding Descartes, I really have no problem with the aforementioned philosophers, but I do think (except for Nietzsche) they were under the Cartesian spell and that corrupted their philosophies of mind. The corruption, which I argue in the post I linked to above, is the idea that mind is somehow separate from reality–that there is (as I try to argue in my website) a realm of real things that aren’t necessarily felt, and a realm of things felt that aren’t necessarily real. The problem is that this divide should never have been drawn to begin with. There is one realm of things that are necessarily felt and necessarily real.

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’d day it work the other way around: it’s not the brain that brings forth the mind, but the mind that brings forth the brain. The word “apple” doesn’t bring forth actual apples, but actual apple do (or can) bring forth the word “apple” (is in, an apple exists there, I see it, I utter “apple”).

You really are one for convoluted statements, aren’t you? I not even going to pretend to understand this one.

It kind of makes sense. I don’t think there is a “person” at the center of our mental world–not per se–rather, I think it’s all just experience. “Personhood,” if we can call it that, is just one of these experiences. It harbers a sense of “in-here-ness” whereas the perception of external objects, which are just another experience, harber a sense of “out-there-ness”. These are nothing more than the qualities that these experience bear. Like perceptions of red, blue, and yellow bear the quality of color-ness, pain bears the quality of bad-ness, pleasure bears the quality of good-ness, perceptions of external objects bear the quality of “out-there-ness” (or “over-there-ness” or “in-space-ness”, etc.) and the self bears the quality of “in-here-ness”. In this contrast in the ways these experiences feel–the difference between out-there-ness and in-here-ness–which makes it difficult to attribute the perception of external objects to the self–they seem to be of totally different realms.

Again, not going to pretend to understand.

I’m inclined to agree. I’m a little uncomfortable calling this basis a “person”–a “substance” is more like it–but I don’t think that matters in the end. I think the only area we might have contentions is how to properly conceptualize this substance–this “mind stuff”. I like to keep the “real” in this substance–and I like to do this without having to qualify that this stuff is real but as mental experiences–one should have no problem, in other words, saying that it is real as the thing it is experienced to be. No one experiences the perception of an apple as a “perception”–they experience it as an apple–ergo, that’s what it is.

Yes, and the best methods of predicting future experiences involve the hypothesis of some form of external substrate. The experience of seeing the moon pass behind a tree is followed repeatedly and completely reliably by the experience of the moon emerge from the other side of the tree. It is a model, as I said, a way of accounting for the experiences that we undergo. It’s by far the most common model, and it’s the model used by people who create technologies that work, so it seems to be a useful one, whether accurate or not.

We could take an idealist model for comparison - that what others take to be an external reality is the thoughts of a Greater Thinker, that we’re either part of or being fed thoughts by. Insofar as as we know nothing more about the Thinker than that it Thinks, all our scientific models are identical and we just swap out “particle” for “thought particle” or some such. Nothing changes.

Your argument seems to be that if something that is perceived at some point (the hospital) also exists when it’s not being perceived, it can’t possibly be perceived. I must have misunderstood your point, as that doesn’t seem coherent at all.

Mine would be that it seems to work just fine, and requires no more faith than in that of a Thinker. There’s something seeing to regularity and causing us surprises in our experiences, no?

gib:

Indeed. But where we disagree, I think, is the shape of the phenomena occupying the external world (that phenomena not in the form of an organism-envatted brain [a brain situated [“envatted”] within and controlling the movements and bodily processes of an animal). I (and Berkeley, others) believe it is a Person, others (commonly) hold that it is a space filled with a phenomenal substance that can somehow combine or coalesce into a conscious person in the sensory form of an organism-envatted brain. In the end, it comes down to a belief in whether or not the formation of a person is more transparently achieved by a floating substance or the internal material of an infinite person.

I’m not going to pretend to know why Descartes, and other philosophers “poisoned” by his Cartesian idea, should consider experience an “illusion” and the noumenal idea “real”. It may have simply been a way to distinguish the two (despite the errors in existential realization resulting from such distinction) for the sake of explanation of their more startling differences. It’s unfortunate, but a good way to get past Cartesianism in this sense is simply to do what you and I have done: realize that the realm of things felt, thought, seen, etc. as opposed the a realm of things that aren’t felt, etc. is just as real, or the only thing that exists. Once one personally accepts this, Cartesianism is no longer a problem.

I will say that (IMO) I think Berkeley, in his conclusion that human mind is supplied by an infinite Spirit and his critique of “unperceived matter” reveals that he considers the realm of felt things to be real, and that any seeming acceptance or implication of Cartesianism in his writing may be tongue in cheek.

Copy that. However, I think that the brain is really not a player in the formation and existence of consciousness and experience, as it may be a part of the percept with no external analog, regardless of whether this analog is believed to be phenomenal or non-phenomenal.

To simplify: the brain is no more important to the existence of consciousness or subjective experience than a shoe. It only “seems” to be significant because it is, for no reason at all, a symbolic manifestation of God’s intelligence, with such intelligence symbolized by a complex machine within an animal performing endless examples of input/output relation and cause and effect. This is all. Philosophically, the presence of the phenomenal brain functions as a reductio ad absurdum when accompanied by the absurd belief that it creates or generates consciousness. When one applies deliberate reason to how it does this, one discovers the reductio ad absurdum. Once discovered, one has the choice to accept or willfully deny it [the reductio ad absurdum].

But it seems that experience cannot reasonably exist without an experiencer. If we are willing to go so far as to say that the external world is comprised of experience, it seems odd, if not inconceivable (given our nature in which experience and the experiencer are inseparable) that experience and the experiencer should come apart just because it is the external world. I hold that the “inseparate-ness” holds even in the external world, such that there is no experience without a subject of experience, and no perception without a perceiver. Thus personhood may be the fundamental nature of reality through and through. Only if one is willing to state that the external world is not experiential, not phenomenal, can substance alone reasonably reign as the inhabitant of this world.

As stated above, the nature of our existence holds a clue to the nature of the external world, if our nature is derived from that world. We are an experience that experiences, and the experiencer is never separate from that which is experienced (that is to say that we are always present with our experiences and they exist in the form of how they present themselves to the experiencer or perceiver). It is odd, in escape from the logical disconnect of tying experience with that which isn’t experience at all, to then try to separate experience from an experiencer, as this seems logically and metaphysically impossible.

Phenomenalists and some Idealists do well to invoke a homogeneity between man and the universe by dropping the non-phenomenal and embracing completely phenomenal world, but in order to avoid the hypothesis that personhood extends through every level of reality, they attempt to propose the existence of external experience without an experiencer. I think this cannot work, or at least is so inconceivable (as the attempt to conceive of it invariably leaves oneself as the experiencer trying to imagine experience without an experiencer!) that we have no good reason to believe it exists.

Interesting input and summation of philosophy, btw.

J.

Only_Humean:

Indeed. The only alternative is Solipsism. Absent this, present and future experience involves some input from an external substrate. It is the substantial (“what type of substance is it?”) and essential (“what is it, in essence?”) nature of this substrate, as well as what form it takes, that is the bone of contention and that is anyone’s guess (as you point out).

But the model, despite the fact that it has a “practical” application that is repetitive and predictable, carries a logical contradiction on further reflection. I suppose there is no harm in allowing the error to continue if one wishes to hold onto it, as this is simply freedom of belief and opinion. But the fact is that that technologies that work and that are useful are empirically only experiential, existing only in the form of an experience and that which it experiences. When the experiencer and that which it experiences is entailed to be derived from or find their origin in something that isn’t experience at all (as experience is nothing but experiencing, and requires something that experiences to experience it), a logical disconnect (and probably a metaphysical and logical impossibility) arises.

If the hospital is composed of something that is not experience at all, then there it has nothing to do with the existence of a person’s experience or perception of a hospital. One cannot perceive that which is not composed of one’s perception of it, as the material making up that which is “perceived” is something that is not perceiving itself (if it supposedly exists when no perceiver in the universe is perceiving it, the instant induction is that it is not made up of someone’s perception of it, as this would require the presence of a perceiver having that type of perception). In the absence of a perceiver, there is no perception going on, thus anything that exists in this space has nothing, essentially and substantially, to do with a person and its perceptions. Thus it is truly imperceptible.

True, but there would be an incoherence if that thing was something essentially and substantially distinct from an experiencer and experience itself.

J.