It’s often said that since no one can communicate to others about what it is to die after they’ve experienced it, that we can’t know what will happen to our consciousness after death. My idea is that I’ve looked at consciousness as the sixth sense, and came to something that I think is simple, yet really profound.
Each sense has a physical referent. Sight - Eyes | Smell - Nose | Taste - Tongue ect. I looked into the past and saw that when someone loses their eyes, they lose their sight. When someone loses their ears, they lose their hearing. So the physical body governs our capacity to pick up a spectrum of life, and if a required part dies, the intangible sense goes with it. Having said that, Consciousness - Brain. When we die, our brain dies. Our brain governs our consciousness, so the intangible sense follows the path of all other senses, and goes away and isn’t accessible to the host body.
If you don’t understand what the relevance of this is… I’m using the past knowledge to make a reasonable (to me) prediction of the future.
The term for this is “Functionalism” right? Mind states (consciousness) are functions of brain states like sight is a function of the eye. This can either mean that for every brain state there is a corresponding mind state (“Identity Theory”) or it might mean that mind states emerge from complexity of brain states as emergent rather than representational phenomena.
A functional theory like this would be contra to theories which insist that consciousness cannot be wholly reduced to brain states.
For instance, a counterexample to your brand of functionalism would be the classic zombie argument. You can prove that brains respond to stimuli in both zombies and humans, this is proof of a brain state. However, in order to prove there are mind states (consciousness) you would need to prove that there is a subjective experience that accompanies the stimulated response.
So, even if all consciousness could be explained by states of brain (like all sight can be explained by states of the eye), then you still would not be able to explain the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Why is there an accompanying subjective experience (i.e. a robot conditioned to recoil from fire vs. “I am experiencing a burning pain!”)
I think there is a more interesting question which creates a problem for eyes and brains. Sight has a physical referent in eyes, but also in what-is-seen. Sight without what-is-seen does not make any sense at all. Likewise consciousness has its physical referent in the brain, but also in being-in-the-world. Consciousness without a world does not make any sense at all. This is the beginnings of a critique of Cartesian dualism.
Have you read my essay on the human principles? just curious.
“Your last thought is an eternal one.” when you die nothing happens you get stuck for eternity on the last memory you concentrated on. The best would be to die a peaceful death.
When it comes to the sixth sense, it is not really anything new. just so that you knew.
Theres actually some pretty obscure research and theorizing in the works on the sixth sense being Proprioception.
Basically its the sense that keeps track of were all our body parts are.
I know my explanation is vague, heres a better one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
Yes, proprioception is a well established “inner sense”, as is the “vestibular” sense (balance). There may also be a third inner sense, I forget. An additional outer sense has to do with pheremone reception (also nasal, but not olfactory). Questions surrounding sonar capacities in humans have arisen due to the abilities of certain blind persons.
As to the issue of zombie reactions to stimuli, perhaps the critical difference has to do with the fact that zombies’ previously integrated and temporally developed “common sense” (consciousness) was interrupted, never to return (at least until we develop sufficiently effective zombie rehabilitation programs, whence they might be able to reintegrate a consciousness over time (?))…
There might also need to be made a clarification between basic consciousness and that of self-consciousness (the experience of I)… the latter being, in my current opinion, the recursion of the former onto itself, and as such, an epiphenomenon of common sense (but no less real for all that… just more explicitly temporal).
just so that you knew.