Conciousness. What is it good for?

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Why make us humans have a concious experience of the world around us. Could we not be designed like robots and have NO concious experience whatsoever? Or is it something that is essential… or is it NESSECARILY essential for life. Do ‘lower’ animals have a concious experience? Do only life forms with a brain have a concious experience? Or do cells… and mabye even gasp rocks have concious experiences (albet extreamly limited) Hey mabye every bit of matter in the universe has a concious experience.

Mabye not… but im hopin for a good debate on the subject =)

2

What do you mean by conciousness?

3

i dunno… uhh “the manner in which you are aware of the world around you.”

4

Well if rocks are conscious, I sure hope I don’t get reincarnated into one…

They are the total lack of free will. Ever see a rock tell you not to step on them? Man, that would suck almost as much as being half entombed in ice, forever doomed to have your former associate gnaw on your head for all eternity b/c you betrayed him.

I would like to thinks rocks are not conscious…but I dunno, I never really asked one.

Yeah, I think consciousness is not intrinsic to matter or energy. If it did, I would feel really bad sleeping on my bed at night for the off chance it does not appreciate this. I wonder what my toilet would say if it could speak?

5

being concious does not nessicarily include anything you just said.

6

One test that scientists use to determine intelligence/consciousness is to find out if an animal can recognize itself in a mirror. We generally attribute consciousness to some higher animals but never trees or inanimate objects. Consciousness also has not been proven for plants despite books to the contrary.

7

Can you have consciousness without the ability to judge the world around you? Wouldn’t it trivialize consciousness to state that it is unbiased perception with no analysis? If that’s the case, are we conscious while asleep? What if I disconnected your brain except for the brain stem. Would you say you were conscious. You exist, probably, but I doube anyone would say you were conscious.

8

the analysis must have to work in there somewhere because we are aware of more then just the outside world, we are aware of the inside world. While im sure you agree that the brain stem is not the essential factor in conciousness i wonder what is. There must be one thing that when removed will inhibit conciousness. Is a mute deaf 3rd degree burn victum in a sensory deprevation tank concious? If not, what was it that changed that persons situation to now be not concious?

… i fear i guess when it comes down to it to answer this question we must agree what exacally a conciousness is. Not a human conciousness. Just a conciousness.

9

Would it be sufficient to say that a consciousness is aware of its own existence?

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I’d say yes, but this “existence,” by which it is known as a “self reflection,” is secondary to perceptual knowledge of an external world. In other words, when consciousness refers to itself as an “I,” it is taking a nonpositional awarness of itself as an object. But its “existence” isn’t a kind of “being” like the external world. Consciousness is not an object, it has no content, and cannot make a phenomenological appearance. In this sense it is a nothingness. Sartre liked to refer to consciousness as a “nihilation of being,” he romantically called it a “drain-hole in existence.” Whatever the case, whatever your color, I think the only solution for your question is a dualism.

I say consciousness exists, but it has no being. Can I say that? Can I say that it’s like a “gap” in existence rather than a point in the fabric?

11

I understand what you’re saying… this also plays into sort of the idea of the tertiary universe as opposed to a binary one (a concept I’m sorta getting the feel for, and starting to agree with)…

In discrete mathematics, you have a special set that is a NULL set, and it is always there, no matter what. It is always a subset of every set. As a result, even if it’s not expressed, there’s a tertiary form of being that we cannot comprehend.

One is something.
Zero is the absense of something.
NULL doesn’t not exist regardless of something. (double negative intended)

I can see what you’re saying, that consciousness exists in NULL space, not in binary space. It’s interesting…so it would be like NULL looks at something and nothing and itself, and says, “Everything is not me, because I am NULL”.

This is something I planned on using in support of Solipsism to state that existence itself is derived from the power set of NULL space (which is NOT nothing, that is Zero), and this application to the consciousness is really interesting.

It’s funny that Sartre stated this and I want to use it to support solipsism, no?

12

Thank you, Raf, that is my position precisely, although I am not familiar with modeling the concept in mathematical terms, as you have done. I do, however, understand the import with or without that kind of demonstration.

And yes, I slept through math class…in a puddle of drool. I don’t like numbers. There are too many of them and they are overwhelming. So spare me, unless you are going to give me the full course, the quaffing.

Yep, I couldn’t have said it better myself. That, dearest Raf, is the mother of all philosophy and the very paradox that keeps it in motion. It is the irony of an indubitable truth reversed on itself:

What can be certain is that I am conscious, not what it is that I am conscious of. Yet I am only conscious of other objects, so then I might doubt the existence of my consciousness instead of the world.

That’s a bitch, unfortunately. Sorta turns philosophy onto its head. One becomes the bastard child of a mating between Rationalism and Empiricism.

No, I don’t think it is funny, rare, but not humorous. Well, humorous after the astonishing fact that you comprehend the importance of Solipsism in the first place. Most people don’t understand its implications in philosophy, or don’t examine it correctly if they do. You, however, have demonstrated since you arrived an interest in the principle. If it is humorous, it is because you are of a few who are in the odd position of truely understanding this absurdity. I didn’t say unfortunate, I said absurd, because it is a useless, blatant, unavoidable fact that is neither good or bad. It is, (cough), comical.

“A philosopher should be graded by his ability to laugh”- Nietzsche

I think Freddy was on to something here.

13

It seems to me that we will sooner or later have to posit a distinction between consciousness and mind. Sartre didn’t like this sort of distinction because he wanted to say that all consciousness of something in the world is at the same time a pre-reflective consciousness of self. Thus, there could be no part of “I” that is not self-aware. There is no Freudian unconscious. Husserl hypothesized that there must be a Kantian trancendental ego that forms the basis of the I, and Sartre criticized this belief because it contradicted Husserl’s own phenomenology (the belief that all existent things can be reduced to their appearances). The trancendental ego does not appear to us, so it can’t be said to exist.

Now, I’m not a phenomenologist, so Sartre’s criticism doesn’t work on me. There are a great number of “theoretical entities” (things like black holes and alpha particles) that scientists cannot directly perceive but are nonetheless taken to be valid objects of analysis. We hypothesize that these things exist because we see their effects; or rather, we see certain phenomena, and we posit theoretical entities as the best way to explain them. So far, I cannot imagine Sartre taking issue with this, but he does deny a very real possibility that follows from it: that consciousness itself–for all we know–may rest on an unobservable foundation (what I’d like to call “mind”) that does not experience itself.

This account demonstrates that there can be a self-consciousness of consciousness. But all that is proven in the statement, “I am counting” is that I believe I am counting. Sartre doesn’t seem to consider whether this statement is right or wrong. In other words, there is no way to know whether or not consciousness is truly conscious of everything that makes up the self.

Indeed, there is evidence that entities–memories, habit mechanisms, etc.–reside within our psyche that are unaccessible to consciousness. For instance, a Psychologist recently told me a story of a woman who had a great fear of closets. This woman didn’t know of or remember any incident in her past that would have given her this phobia. However, when her therapist checked out her social services records, he found a very plausible explanation: when the woman was a child, her father had hidden in a closet, jumped out and attacked her mother with a knife–and she had witnessed the whole thing. Years later, she had fully forgotten this incident, but she still sensed some great danger around closets. Where did this sense come from? She certainly wasn’t conscious of the source (i.e. the memory), and yet the memory was certainly storedsomewhere. And whenever you begin to talk about things being stored within other things, you have entered the realm of objects, and you are moving away from the idea that all mind is a lack of being.

Now, I accept that all consciousness is, as Sartre said, “a being, the very nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.” But although consciousness may itself be a nothingness (i.e. it cannot be experienced as an object because it is pure subject), it must exist within something, and we can call that something mind. The exact relationship between “mind” and “brain” is unclear (some philosophers hold that they are virtually the same thing); but the only real dualism seems to be that between subjectivity and objectivity. Consciousness is the subjective aspect of mind, the aspect that experiences itself. But Sartre, for one, was unable to show that subjectivity is all of what constitutes the psyche.

14

Logo,

That was an excellent post and very well explained.

First, I don’t think it is necessary for you to feel like Sartre is trying to “work on you.” You act as if there are certain kinds of truth for phenomenologists and other kinds of truth for other brands of philosophy. You know better than that.

The “modus operandi”(what the hell does that mean?) of phenomenology is to pay attention to the Cartesian primacy of first-person experience while examining, or searching rather, for basic Kantian a priori principles supplanting experience. Husserl claimed that, and I’ll quote him, “phenomenology is presuppositionless” and without theoretical bias. The results, if properly attained, are unconditionally and absolutely true." That’s just it, Logo, phenomenology is not an attempt at theory or hypotheticals. Your example of the theoretical entities is irrelevent to the nature of experience: it may be true that I am a brain in a vat, but experience is still the same. The objective is not to speculate about sources or hidden noumena(the black-holes causing the gamma rays, etc.), it is to examine the structures and describe ALL possible experience, be it a dream, a vat, a ghost in the machine, whatever. We shouldn’t even really consider consciousness to be a “knowing” thing in the first place. We should see it as an acting, willing, deciding consciousness. It isn’t classifiable as an “object” type of phenomena, as psychologism might call “mind” a quantitative network of physical bodies(neurons). It is not a “mind” because all aspects of the mind can be reduced to brain states, actual observable entities. All the unecessary hypotheticals arise when you try to delineate consciousness into “mind” and confuse the real a priori structures of experience and consciousness for the empirical structures of the physical kinds of being that are experienced.

“A description of consciousness is constantly endangered by the many metaphors and traditional philosophical theories that present an image of the mind as a mysterious container or stream(“all in your mind,” “introspect,” “stream of consciousness”). A philosophy that begins by taking these metaphors and theories seriously has based itself on presuppositions instead of pure description. Phenomenology must limit itself to reconfirmable descriptions of experience”- Solomon

You covered a lot of groud very quickly, so I’ll respond to each segment separately.

“Thus, there could be no part of “I” that is not self-aware. There is no Freudian unconscious.”

Okay, yes, I am impressed, so I’ll make you a deal, Logo. If you accept that if human beings had a consciousness, a sub-consciousness, a sub-sub-consciousness, a sub-sub-sub-consciousness and so on, and that this fact was utterly useless and made no difference whatsoever to ordinary experience, I’ll accept Freuds epiphenomenological dangling and jot that down. Do you see the point that is so obvious if it was a snake it woulda bit ya’?

Le signifie es entierement coupe du signifiant.

The thing signified is entirely cut off from the thing signifying.

Freud’s critical mistake was in his analysis of behavior tendency as being psychologically habitual instead of constantly in revision and purposely chosen. He wagered everything he had on instinct and drive and didn’t save anything for conscious “intentions.” For Freud, the human being was a bundle of autonomous nerves, yet he failed in his Project at placing consciousness as an attribute of mind, hence the dangling, and left the mind/body dualism unscathed. Sorry, Freud, no monism for you, pal. This pissed him off and late one night on a coke binge, he formulated his concept of the “id,” the “ego,” and the “libido,” and put everything on instinct as a rebuttle against the monolith power of Descartes and his cogito.

Do you have any last words, Freud, before we hang you?

“No attempt, of course, can be made to explain how it is that excitatory processes in the neurones bring consciousness along with them”-Freud

Thank you, Doctor. Please come with me.

“Husserl hypothesized that there must be a Kantian trancendental ego that forms the basis of the I, and Sartre criticized this belief because it contradicted Husserl’s own phenomenology (the belief that all existent things can be reduced to their appearances). The trancendental ego does not appear to us, so it can’t be said to exist.”

Hell, Logo, you said it right there. It is almost as if you are arguing for it instead of against it. Do you not understand what, or why, Sartre broke from Husserl and Kant in this issue? Did you know that Sartre follwed Hegel(who is the actual father of the system that Husserl and Sartre are using) and in the end only merely flipped one simple point? Husserl, Hegel, and even Heidegger maintained that the “ego” supported human subjectivity and was a necessary Kantian category for the possibility of the experience of the “self” and the “other.” Sartre, on the other hand, refused this and claimed that the “other” was encountered and not ontologically supported and dependent on Kantian transcendental “ego,” I don’t constitute the being of the “other.” In a word, subjectivity is a contingency, not a necessity. Though Sartre is not saying that the “ego” cannot appear to us, as indeed it is “in the world.” But the appearances by which it is revealed to us, first and directly as “myself” and secondly as “his/herself,” or the “other,” can only appear as phenomena and therefore are objects, not suppositions of consciousness. I’m saying that a “me” is not a possession of consciousness, it is an encounter with a body and object in the world: I change, I grow, obviously my body, my “self” is changing ever so slightly, so the “self” that I knew fifteen years ago is quite different from the “self” I know now. Although my body has changed my conscious of it right now is no different than it was back then. Therefor there is no absolute and definite object as the “self” to be encountered in the world, it is, instead, an absolute conscious experience regardless of the change of the phenomena. What stays the same at any age is the time/space structures in which one experiences oneself as a consciousness experiencing a body somewhere and sometime, if that made any sense. “Ego,” if it is to exist, has no basis in the sense of the “self” as an absolute object given to subjectivity in each individual experience of each conscious person. Ego has no objective existence, I disagree with Hegel(Geist) and Kant(Transcendental Ego). It is an abruptness and spontaneous solipsistic event that is absolutely unecessary, in every sense of the word, and can make no appearance whatsoever.

“This account demonstrates that there can be a self-consciousness of consciousness. But all that is proven in the statement, “I am counting” is that I believe I am counting. Sartre doesn’t seem to consider whether this statement is right or wrong. In other words, there is no way to know whether or not consciousness is truly conscious of everything that makes up the self.”

Sartre’s point, my friend, is that a total inventory of the self is impossible. One cannot know “everything that makes up the self” anyway. It is you who is positing a hypothetical that there exists some noumena behind the infinite appearances of the objects in the world. The point is null.

“Does this mean that by reducing the existent to its manifestations we have succeeded in overcoming all dualisms? It seems rather that we have converted them all into a new dualism: that of finite and infinite. Yet the existent in fact can not be reduced to a finite series of manifestations since each one of them is a relation to a subject constantly changing. Let us understand indeed that our theory of the phenomenon has replaced the reality of the thing by the objectivity of the phenomenon and that it has based this on an appeal to infinity. The reality of that cup is that it is there and that it is not me.”- Sartre

“Where did this sense come from? She certainly wasn’t conscious of the source (i.e. the memory), and yet the memory was certainly storedsomewhere. And whenever you begin to talk about things being stored within other things, you have entered the realm of objects, and you are moving away from the idea that all mind is a lack of being.”

Let me ask you a few questions, Logo. Would it be possible for the woman to convince herself that she would have courage and no longer submit to the fear that she mysteriously experienced every time she walked by a closet? Of couse it would be. And then would it also be possible that while a psychological phobia might be traced to physiological states in her brain, her actual and real decision to not have fear and the resultant act of walking by the closet with ease was unaccountable to instincts, behavioral tendencies, habits, and genetic predispositions? Of course it would be. And then would it also be possible for us to make a distinction, when examining her behavior, between autonomous reactions to stimulus and actual volition? I think so. It doesn’t matter if these emotions are supported by “subconscious” memories stored away as drives beneath the surface. In the event that she walks by that closet and experiences fear, there will also be the possibility that she not succumb to that fear and react habitually and instinctually. This is the power of consciousness: it can nihilate motives and inclinations and project courses of action that are completely impotent and unecessary. She might convince herself that a Leprechaun will protect her everytime she walks by. She might convince herself that he husband won’t find her to be sexy anymore if she is seen by him as a coward. The act/intention/end ensemble is infinite, and not necessarily connected to instinctually efficacious drives.

I am not moving away from the idea that all consciousness is “lack of being.” It is precisely a lack of being if she has options to choose from when encountering the closet episode. She can choose to do this, she can choose to do that, and while actually choosing she is essentially creating herself and will be known a moment later as “she who DID this and that.” Existence is first, essence is later on. This is the suspension of consciousness, note Marshall’s signature Sartre quote. Semantics? I think not.

“But although consciousness may itself be a nothingness (i.e. it cannot be experienced as an object because it is pure subject), it must exist within something, and we can call that something mind.”

Why “must” it, Logo? Why not then call it a jar instead of a mind? Prove it, show it to me. Haven’t we been through this before? I know what the problem is. You don’t like the “nothingness” bit because it appears paradoxical at first glance. If it is a nothingness then it isn’t a consciousness because a consciousness is something, right? I didn’t say that and I don’t need to because I’m a solipsist. I will never attempt to show you my consciousness as I would show you “something” in the world. What is really happening is an etymological and epistemological lapse. Trying to give an empirical definition of “something” to an entity that can’t have a “thing-ness.”

15

De’Trop, that was beautiful. When i finally finish being and nothingness it will be because of you. Parenthetically, do you think Sartre’s “Existence precedes essence” truly characterizes all existentialism? Or Was it merely a neologism designed to showcase his own brand of existentialism?

16

Hey de trop. I really do want to discuss this with you. It’s just that I recently went on a trip where I made no money whatsoever and missed a week of classes. Now I’m up to my nose in Kripke, Frege, Russell, Spinoza and Modern Arab Literature. And I’m trying to get this damn play of mine produced at my college. So, Sartre will have to wait for another week or so; I don’t want to give this stuff a half-assed treatment, and there are only so many philosophers I can hold in my head at once. Good book…I-I mean post, though. You certainly don’t make it easy to bullshit.

17

noone makes anyone seek higher conciousness
these bodies and minds are robots, programmed by our cells.
conciousness is not neccessary for life!
(yet my house plants seem to know where the sun is)
just look at the religious right and g w bush
no conciousness there
your attempt to define conciousness is as pointless as defining god.
celebrate your concious abilities!
they simultaneously bond you with and raise you above the common man
congratulations!
love and respect
kasey

p.s. conciousness defines itsself without the need for words so let it do all the work for you

18

One thing about it Frighter. Consciousness is definitely good for invoking provocative threads on ILP! :evilfun: :unamused: :laughing:

19

Well, no. This idea is particular to Sartre’s ontology, which is basically shared by Heidegger, Ponty, Jaspers, and Camus to a degree.

Kierkegaard, for example, was a sort of Calvinist and claimed that man’s essence was a kind of “negative” freedom, that is, not really free but experienced as such, so that our lives are felt to be lacking in essence, but indeed it is the contrary: God’s will. While the others maintained that “freedom” was the actual real state of existence given the fact that there is no divine power to determine it.

Do I believe that it encompasses all existentialism? Absolutely, because I follow Sartre’s ontology exclusively. The idea boils down to the technical metaphysics of determinism and consciousness.

20

Alright…finally done.

Well Husserl was clearly wrong. All philosophy rests on presuppositions. Even the Cogito is a presupposition. Descartes tried to reason from a consciousness of doubting to “I think.” Well, in order to articulate “doubt” in the first place, he had to presuppose a certain grammatical structure and set of logical laws (i.e. the cogito cannot be both true and false at the same time); he had to assume that his words had meaning and that they were sufficient to communicate his thoughts. But there is a much more basic assumption here: that the doubting of which I am conscious belongs to me. There is no clear logical connection between “doubt” and “I doubt.” There is only an intuition—albeit a strong and necessary one—that I exist and that what I think are my thoughts are actually mine. Neither Sartre nor Husserl address this problem.

First of all, who’s objective? I’ve already said that I’m not a phenomenolgist, so I for one am not trying to “describe ALL possible experience.” I can’t concieve of how this would even be possible. You would have to HAVE all possible experiences in order to describe them; perhaps describe means something else here. On my definition, you can only describe your own set of experiences.

Now, I am interested in explanation first and foremost. There is no way to come up with a system that does not rest on assumptions, so the best philosophy can do is provide a method for reaching an explanation of the world and of human experience that sufficiently accounts for the phenomena we observe, the thoughts we think, etc. And in order to do that, you have to posit theoretical entities from time to time. Things such as thoughts and memories are unobservable; we might be able to locate the part of the brain that generates these things, but we have never been able to observe “a memory,” and we probably never will. And it is unreasonable to think that a memory ceases to be when we are not conscious of it. So it seems to me that there are still entities associated with the mind that are unaccessible to both self-reflection and scientific observation.

Well I’m not trying to defend Freud, and I’m not going to posit an infinite regress. My claim is much more modest: simply that there must be something related to “mind” that does not qualify as an observable part of the brain and simultaneously cannot be called “consciousness.”

A Sartrean criticizing drug use? Hmmm…that’s new.

Well which is it? You seem to echo Sartre’s own lack of clarity here. The present-tense I cannot appear to us; that is the aspect of Sartre that I was paraphrasing (and only paraphrasing…not arguing for). The past ego can, I suppose, appear to us in a way, but it is confused to think that there is continuity between the past ego and the present. In other words, “I was” is not the same as “I am”–and the problem is not simply with changing tenses. If the I in the “I was” truly belongs to the realm of the in-itself, as Sartre says, then there is no connection between past ego and the present. They are two wholly different beings, so to use “I” in both cases is misleading. Once again, there is no logical connection between a descriptive claim about an object (“I was”) and a posessive claim such as, “the past in which I was is my past.” This is an assumption, not a “pure description.”

Well, first, I never posited the existence of a “noumena.” I’m agnostic about that. If you’re referring to theorectical entities, that’s not the same thing as a noumena.

Where Sartre was going with the cigarette example (as you know) was to show that there was in fact a “non-positional consciousness of self” within every consciousness of an object. I mean that’s pretty clear in that part of Being and Nothingness. The infinite-finite dualism pertained specifically to objects; Sartre certainly thought that all consciousness was self-consciousness, so insofar as self stands for “for-itself”, he did think that everything about the self could be known. Now I suppose the self is, in another sense, actually two beings–that there is a mind-body dualism and that “self” could also include “body.” But my argument is that even within consciousness itself, there might not be full self-consciousness. That “I am counting” is automatically correct is, once again, an assumption.

I’ve never claimed that consciousness is something; in fact I believe I said just the opposite. Consciousness must depend on something (i.e. the brain), it must inhere in something (and if you want to call that something a jar that’s fine; I’d rather call it a mind–or even just a brain). But consciousness is pure subject, so to treat it as an object leads to all sorts of problems (like, you have to end up saying that things are what they are not–which really tends to piss other philosophers off). Here’s thing De’trop: we can’t actually talk coherently about subjects of consciousness. We can’t analyze them, we can’t philosophize about them; I would even go so far as to say we can’t know much of anything about them. WE CAN ONLY BE THEM, and that’s all that can really be coherently said. Subjectivity is a reference point, not a being, and that’s where I fundamentally disagree with Sartre. To say “consciousness is a being such that…” is already asking for trouble. One can say, “the human is a being such that” or “the brain is an organ such that”; and, I contend, one can talk about the mind as a theoretical entity. But consciousness itself can only be an attribute of the physical self; it cannot be experienced because it is a precondition of experience. It is pure first-person-ness. But we can only capture in language that which we experience, and we can only philosophize about that which is captured in language.

We can articulate an idea of brain and mind, and we can talk about consciousness as a thing insofar as we can observe its effects and hypothesize about how it is possible (i.e. through the study of the brain and of psychology). But we cannot actually experience it because we ARE it. For one to say, “I think” or, “I am picking up cigarettes” already adds a sense of objectivity to a purely subjective entity. To say, “Joe is picking up cigarettes” is to use a subject that can, in its turn, be used as an object. “I” is the same thing. Language does not allow for us to NOT use it as an object, so what Sartre is trying to do really must be beyond the linguistic limits of philosophy. It’s more like mysticism. I have a soft spot for mystics, and that’s why I like Sartre so much. But I find him inadequate in terms of building a coherent philosophical system.