Some monkeys do have limited tom/SA/consciousness but when i made the comparisons lets pretend I listed a stupid species of monkey.
I am. I can see we’re gonna have to agree to differ at some level(s), but I’ll add this. The way I see it, there’s the brain and the mind, which though they “coincide” in what they do, are different things. My brain can see the computer screen, and my mind can see it. When scientists talk about what happens as I type, they’re talking about the brain side, not the mind side.
I disagreed with this: “I imagined that consciousness were waves of energy and my brain was working like a radar, picking up these signals and interfering with them.”
It makes no sense to me, consciousness as waves of energy. Sounds like new-age claptrap.
I would’ve thought from the extreme difficulty scientists and philosophers have in understanding consciousness that to say it’s an impossible job isn’t that radical.
We work the other way, and deduce from in-the-world that what we see before us is representation.
Hmm, I need to think about this latest comment.
But examples in the real world shows that assumption to be false. The lack of consciousness (aspects of it) don’t make severe autistic people better at real world tasks. And when we see more of it, its critical in important everyday tasks. Like a chimpanzee hiding a banana.
Anyway you can test for aspects of ‘EXPERIENCE’ in cleverly designed tests where creatures need to interpret minds to guess at sources of food they can’t directly see. non conscious animals without extended expiernce* fail, other animals don’t. Practical applications to consciousness.
And how do you deduce that? I doubt you even really know what precisely you are talking about when you use the word representation.
I don’t mean the bold as an insult, which I realized it may come across as. I meant it more as a philosophical challenge - DO you know what you mean by ‘mental representation’ and do you have a good reason for supposing the objects of our conscious experiences are such entities?
Go take this point up with gib; I would love to see it!
I will trust him over you, until you prove yourself the better…
You disagree with me imagining things??? Well, what can I say?
I also imagine that [b]goblins & gnomes live near the center of the Universe[/b]; does that sound like “new-age claptrap” as well?
Is the difficulty to understand such things beheld by the scientists and philosophers who work their lives to find the answers, or…
…the people who devote 5-minutes of superficial thought to cynicism & skepticism?
Imagine you and someone else looking at the same object. You see it in 3D space, he sees it in 3D space. For you, it’s part of your representation, and for him, it’s part of his representation. That’s pretty much what I’m talking about.
I read (past tense) the word “imagine” in your post as “opine”. If, as you imply, you were just imagining, and not opining, then I withdraw my criticism. But in that case you were misleading, IMO.
Sounds like an ad-hom to me…
Looking back over this thread, I’m disappointed that linking of the materialisation of consciousness to the thing-in-itself – rather than sparking a debate on that point – spawned an essentially-unnecessary digression into solipsism and attacks on the notion of the thing-in-itself in itself. I thought the idea of the-world-as-representation (as described by Kant and Schopenhauer) was broadly accepted, at least in premiss. I’m disappointed to find myself wrong on that point
wow, alot of irrational nihilism on this thread… let me perhaps offer an alternative and (hopefully) rational explanation of consciousness.
consciousness is the result of awareness. when chemicals combined to form the simplest organisms, those organisms needed to take in things from their environment and process them in order to change and survive. this is what we call consumption, and every living thing does this, because every living thing is the antithesis of entropy. in order to sustain a state of low entropy, and especially to proceed to move towards states of less entropy, living things need to consume the energy around them, and transform it into useful forms. because of this necessity, the only life forms that developed were beings which could interact successfully with their environment, sensing and perceiving what was in their immediate reality, so that they could effectively absord and transform needed external matter/energy into essential life energy for growth.
consciousness therefore is merely another name for the process of experiencing and interacting with the environment. all living beings, from a cell to a human, have consciousness, in the sense that they are able to take information from their EXTERNAL environment and process it somehow, causing changes in their INTERNAL environment. therefore consciousness is the act of AWARENESS. awareness is in fact simply another name for consciousness, one that i think is less mysterious and easier to understand. it is not hard to grasp what it means to be aware of something; awareness is simply the process of a being experiencing something which exists (as it is impossible to experience that which has no existence), through any possible form of sensation/perception. now, to speak of human consciousness.
human consciousness is far more advanced than the other known life forms. however, consciousness (awareness) is relative; a dog has an unbelievably higher awareness than a worm, but the worm has an unbelievably higher awareness than a blood cell. awareness could be defined as “higher” or “stronger”: the more QUANTITATIVE data the being is able to experience (be effected by), and the more QUALITATIVE the nature of that data is. human consciousness, under that term, is vastly different from the other animals on one way: we are aware of our internal world just as much as our external. we are able to apply our awareness to our minds/thoughts/unconscious processes, and experience the inner workings of our physical brain processes.
however this evolved, the process of applying the awareness (experiencing) to the internal thought structures of the neural brain somehow produces a feedback or looping effect: all animals which experience the world as a “singular” being (with the sense that the sum total of their being is 1 existent, rather than many existents working together) possess an awareness/consciousness which is able to (to one degree or another) experience their inner world. lesser animals experience their inner worlds through instincts, unidentifiable impulses and urges, emotional reactions, etc. humans experience their inner worlds through these same mechanisms, but also through linguistic thoughts, abstract reasoning, spacial visualization, etc. because the human mind is capable of applying a vastly greater amount of energy into the act of experiencing the inner structure of the immediate mind’s processing functions, the human being gains more direct knowledge of WHAT is going on in his mind, WHY he is acting/feeling/experiencing the world the way he is, and WHAT he can do differently.
because the human being can experience and therefore understand the CAUSAL FORCES within him which determine his actions, he therefore can choose to circumvent or alter his actions to counteract these forces, nullifying their causal power over him. this is the “mystery” of self-awareness and willpower: that the human being possesses a VOLITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, which is the product of the fact of his extremely high awareness of his inner causal mental world. the greater the amount/quality of internal causal data he can experience BEFORE he acts, the greater power he has over CHANGING and self-determining his actions as opposing to those causal forces.
this explanation of consciousness views the human consciousness as a very high expression of inner-awareness (introspection) which results in the looping or circularly-reinforcing act of viewing/experiencing the causal world of the unconsciousness. this in turn allows the human being to realize what possibilities are open to him, understand these possibilities, extrapolate future likely outcomes, and then make a CHOICE about how to act. in this sense, consciousness is not myserious, nor is it unexplanable or unknowable. the mysterious quality of the conscious awareness is its ability to “feel” or experience as a single entity, despite being composed of trillions of individual neurons. this mystery is another matter, but the explanation hinges on the phenomenon of emergent behavior as it applies to active networks. perhaps thats a topic for a different thread 
hope that helps!
It probably is Blunderbuss, there’s just a small cross-section of opinion being offered due to the makeup of members in here.
I’m not sure that Blunder’s exact rendition is so popular, but dualism is surely still alive and well.
Its not that we don’t have ‘representation’ though to be honest I’m not sure what that means. Certain neural networks ‘represent’ in that when they fire I see/hear/think X.
This thread is more about dualism/some kind of epiphenomena-ilism. Boring thread really. Theres never any real evidence given for it just a reoccuring conclusion among people here.
We’re all at the centre of our own subjective universe. Let me ask you this: can you imagine the world without you in it, e.g. can you imagine watching your own funeral? The answer is no, because if you visualise the coffin being carried into the graveyard (or whatever), it’s through your eyes that you’re watching this scene. You can’t conceive of a world without you at the heart, because your world is your representation. Subject and objects.
Actually, my previous post isn’t conclusive, because you could say that you can’t see your own funeral simply because you’re dead!
A better example is colour-blindness. If the word “HELLO” was printed in green against a red rectangular background, someone colourblind would see only a monocoloured rectangle. It’s because what they see is not the display “in itself”, but their representation of it, assembled by their brain.
A much more accurate and truthful way of describing the same phenomenon is dropping the representation talk which adds nothing, and saying:
I see the book from over here, she sees the book from over here, and we’re both in the same room looking at the same book from different perspectives.
It’s not a subjective universe, it’s merely having an individual and unique on the same universe that other people have unique individual perspectives on.
Dear Blunderbuss and Cyrene,
I’m afraid the two of you can never come to a point of sympathy philosophically insofar as you, Cyrene, have never encountered existentially the great Mystery of Subjectivity; whereas you, Blunderbuss, have made the mistake of trying to teach Cyrene something only cognizable through direct experience; something unteachable. For Cyrene solipsism is a non-issue because the world he inhabits (the world he has devised, Blunderbuss might say) is fundamentally objective: a world of objects. The notion of a subjective universe is repellent to this sort of mindset, and probably inconceivable. The world as Blunderbuss conceives of it is made up not of objects but of “mindstuff”, so to speak; a universe fundamentally psychical in nature. When Cyrene sees the book on the table he sees, without any complications, the actual book, the thing-in-itself; a non-psychical substance. When Blunderbuss sees the book on the table he sees a psychical book within the context of a psychical universe: The thing-in-itself, if it exists at all, is hidden behind the phenomena. Science in general approaches the question of consciousness from Cyrene’s point of view; hence the endless physiological groundwork which, from Blunderbuss’s point of view, naively overlooks the immense mystery at hand. For Cyrene, it’s clear enough, there is no mystery: In a universe of objects, everything, even consciousness, is explained by referring to some object (neurons, microtubials, etc). For Blunderbuss the mystery’s fundamentally insoluble: A psychical universe, fortunately, though consummately mysterious, needs no explanation.
But the important question is, which view is true?
I gotta tell you, Blaise_Mary, you – at this moment in time – are proof that a person’s post count isn’t proportional to their wisdom 
(NB, if you’re reading this years from now, the count was very low today)
This is a simpler way of talking, and one that we can get away by virtue of the fact that we build our representations in the same way (apparently). But it’s not a “more truthful” way of talking. Consider colourblindness: how could you and someone colourblind agree on the colour of the book, assuming you didn’t know which of you was colourblind?
It is a more truthful way of talking. But why change the subject? We are talking about whether or not the book is there or a representation of the book is there, not about specific properties of the book. If a blind person claims the book isn’t on the table and a person with vision is looking right at it and claims it is, there’s good reason to believe that in truth the book is there rather than listen to the blind person.
Representation or adaptation?
Imagine a black and white television sitting in your living room and try to see the color of the screen. It is grey. The text books say that we see black in the absense of light, white with an intense light, and grey for the cases in between… But when the set is off we should see it at its blackest because the there is no light being projected through its electron beam… In contrast when the set is on we clearly see black.
Now one idea is, that the world has special features such as light which have a corrisponding image inside the brain, through some mirroring device such as the eye so as to produce perception of brightness. A feature of the world corresponds to a represention in the system. This is a logic of corrispondence. That sees sense organs as true filters detecting specific configurations in the organisms environment.
Now lets look at the telivision set example again.
It is evident that black is not simply represented inside the brain, to corrispond to acertain amount of light intensity. What then? One answer is that the perception of black has to do with the overall activity of the brain. In other words black cannot be studied in terms of the light falling on the retina ( since we see black at all levels of illumination.) The nervous system is constructed so that some specific comparrisons of light receptors are performed and that neural activity results from other states of neural activity and every state depends on the overall patter of the entire brain. So your overall state of mind and how it pecieves itself determines perception.
This is a logic of coherance.
Just two different ways of looking at perception and consciousness and adaptation.
spyder