Isn’t the function of consciousness just to be aware of reality? Isn’t that just what consciousness does? It would seem so if you think about the way in which consciousness enables us to experience the world–we see it, we feel it, we hear it, and on an abstract level, we think about it, understand it, gain knowledge of it, and so forth and so on. Any living animal, it seems, behaves as if they are aware of the world around them, and this we take to mean they are conscious.
But then there are other examples of how consciousness enables us to be entirely convinced and enmeshed in illusion and fantasy. If the function of consciousness is to enable our awareness of the world, why then do we come up with, and believe in, these wildly contradictory ideas we call religion–contradictory internally and compared to one another. How can one’s consciousness enable one to believe that the world is barely 6,000 years old and another’s consciousness enable that other to believe that the world is roughly 13 billion years old? How can one’s consciousness enable one to believe that evil and sin will lead one into a fiery hell that is everlasting (most Western religions), while another’s enables that other to believe that if there is a hell at all, it can only be temporary (Eastern religions), and yet a third person’s enables that third person to believe that no such thing as an afterlife exists at all, let alone a hell (these would be the atheists).
How can this phenomenon of sentience, feeling, thought, memory, and so on, whose function it is to enable our awareness of reality, get it so wrong in so many areas? What is the function of consciousness if not to enable our awareness of reality?
The function of consciousness is simply remote recognition as opposed to immediate, direct sensing. Remote recognition requires logical deduction on a subconscious level. That ability enables the ability to consider a variety of possibilities so that the higher probability can be chosen as the remotely recognized entity or event. The problem arises in that it is always a probability guess and thus always susceptible to error. The issue of sanity then comes into the game because in order to maintain the ability to deduce accurate guesses an ontology or ego must be secured and thus prior guesses left less questioned.
Compounding the simple perception error resulting from guess work and the need to maintain an ego resulting in selective blindness is cognition - the ability to deduce complex possibilities of not only what is out there but also what is required so as to rearrange what is out there to match a desired state.
At that point, the entire process is simply too complex for reliable resolution, thus the conscious mind can be easily misled. This ease in being misled then becomes a tool or weapon for social ordering and reordering wherein efforts are made to ensure that the minds of most people are easily misled. This is accomplished by a variety of psychological and medical means.
And basically, that’s the only reason it has been “wrong” for so long. Once cleaned up a bit, it all falls together into a simple process, far more reliable. Sentience is a pretty simple process. But having to discover that it is simple has taken Man a very, very long time. And since Man is still very wrapped up in manipulating Man, Man remains seriously and unnecessarily retarded.
This is one of the very few issues on which i disagree with James. But, i do not want to answer this question here.
May i take this question to the other thread, where we are already having discussion? It would be more perinent there.
That last part I didn’t quite get. Are you saying that a strong ego has the effect of “I’m right”–thus, less questioning of prior guesses (i.e. beliefs you’ve held onto for so long).
I don’t have any qualms with your overall point, James, but I still see a sharp contrast between the function of consciousness being simply to take in reality, to passively “see” it, and the function of consciousness being to invent something (thought in the case of what you’re saying) even though that which it invents may bear a faithful resemblance to something in, or an aspect of, reality. In the former case, you’re just aware of reality–simple as that–whereas in the latter, you invent a reality (which hopefully matches what’s actually out there). These seem like two very different things that consciousness is doing.
You see, in the former case, if that were the sole function of consciousness, I don’t know how it could ever be mistaken, for mistakes require invention–they require the creation of something such that it can be contrasted with fact and shown to be different from it.
As far as I’m concerned, everything has consciousness–or rather, everything experiences–even simple analogue vacuums. If all you had on the vacuum was an on/off switch (forget the advanced computerized brains of the robotic vacuums), that could be considered a sensory receptor, and you’re flicking it a stimulation. The vacuum thus turns on as a behavioral response to the sensory stimulus–as you say “[it] changes its behaviour accordingly”–much like the sensory stimulus of stubbing one’s toe on something hard elicits the behavioral response of jumping up and down shouting “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!” It’s all mechanical processes through-and-through–just like in the wiring of the vacuum cleaner, just like in your brain–so if those brain processes come along with some kind of experience, why doesn’t every mechanical process? The catch is that what counts as “awareness of reality” depends on the system and what it is wired to experience. If I’m right that the vacuum cleaner experiences something akin to a sensory stimulus when one flicks the on switch, then that sensory experience is felt as something in reality–some entity, some state, some event–but definitely as coming from a world “out there”. What that world and its contents are depends very much on the quality of the sensory stimulus–for the vacuum, this may bear absolutely no resemblance to anything we’re familiar with as being part of reality, but for it, that is reality, and its being real elicits (or justifies) the response that we perceive as spinning bristles and sucking air.
By all means, go ahead. I’m about to respond to that thread myself, so we’ll see who gets there first.
An ego is formed by the incentive to not challenge the supporting substructure of a hope. If by some chain of evidence, I can conclude that I am a great person, there is an inherent incentive to not challenge or question such evidence = “ego”. Science and the other religions do that very thing. If you do not accept the premises or foundational thoughts, you are not allowed into their priesthood/institutions/universities.
Everything works by a process … everything. You asked why consciousness can be so easily wrong. So I explained the process that consciousness is. I explained a bit about how it brings reality into awareness, so that you could see why the errors arise.
But you already know that mistakes are made, so you already know that it isn’t a simple case of merely “reality come into my parlor”. It is a very complex process that merely seems simple to you because it was already designed and functioning, much like your phone network might seem so simple to you. The “devil” (the mistakes) are in the details.
Anything that has the ability to recognize things FROM A DISTANCE, has a degree of consciousness. But that vacuum cleaner is merely sensing with fingers and immediately responding to touch. A conscious entity builds an internal map or picture of the outside world from which it operates. That internal map is literally all that your conscious mind ever “sees”. You never actually directly see anything. You are always only seeing (visualizing) an internal picture drawn for you by your sub and un-conscious mind. In a way, that internal map IS your consciousness.
Gib, I would argue that if that is your definition of consciousness then consciousness never gets it wrong.
For example:
Say I am looking at the robot vacuum cleaner and it is busily bumping into things and changing its cleaning course.
It is heading towards the backdoor but I hear a knock on the front door. My instant reaction is to look to the front door for a split second.
When my eyes gaze back on the vacuum cleaner it is now moving away the backdoor.
I falsely conclude that the vacuum cleaner must have a software problem.
This is what we do… we constantly fill in the blanks as our consciousness is always darting from one place to another.
This is not the consciousness that is getting it wrong (sensory errors coupled with predictive algorithms that use very limited data).
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That is how a nation becomes “conscious”. The Senate knows nothing that didn’t come through whispers from others. Senators never directly see anything, yet they form the consciousness of a nation (the House being the “subconscious” and population largely unconscious).
Ah, so ego prevents us from questioning the status quo–the desire to get that pay raise, to get that A on your term paper, to be elected into Congress–essentially things that would make you great.
And for that I am grateful. But I’m lead to conclude that the function of consciousness is not to be aware of reality–not directly–but to construct a model of reality that hopefully maps onto it relatively well. Even at the level of raw sensation, this seems true. When you look at an object, there are two things present, one of which you can make disappear by closing your eyes. When you do that, you notice something goes away–but it’s not the object itself (at least our brains aren’t wired to think that way), it’s what we come to call the perception of the object. Thus, in order to be conscious of the object, even at the sensory level, the brain has to invent something–a perception–that, if everything is working properly, serves as a faithful representation of the actual object we take to be out there.
Of course, we get things wrong because this faithfulness isn’t always guaranteed.
Right, like I said above.
Well, it’s still wrong in that, despite what you think (that there is a software malfunction in the robot), the robot really only bounced off the door.
But you’re right, my theory of consciousness does imply that we never get it wrong–errors are replaced by relativism in my theory. If an objectivist says you got it wrong, a subjectivist says you got it right relative to your perception.
I don’t know if this is for the reasons you think though–I only gave you a little bit of my theory, and that little bit doesn’t imply consciousness can’t get it wrong.
Not sure what your theory is. Sounds something like this.
We developed an internal generic image in our mind of an object.
We know an external object to be true if info coming in from sense perceptions matches this internal generic image. Sounds like consciousness in your case is simply a comparison machine that verifies what is internal with what is internal. If what is verified is found to be true then no further examination is performed. If what is verified is found to be false then further examination occurs until greater knowledge is obtained such that what is observed is verified to be true or the internal generic image is altered to produce a match and thus what is verified becomes true. A false object can never be created within the mind.
Not sure, but that is the impression I get so far.
The “ego” is the effort to balance social concerns with personal concerns. And that balance is almost always detrimental to attempt. Society cannot be saved until society is forsaken and forgotten.
Consciousness is ancillary to the will to power. All energy is perpetually striving to grow, to expand itself. This is even noticeable in the inorganic, e.g., gravitation, gravity. To put it tersely, consciousness is a tool, a tool meant to be conducive to the fundamental telos of existence. It doesn’t always work out that way, but teleologically, that’s what it’s about.
Bit of a tangent, but existence precedes function, or at least can or does.
Consciousness is.
Also it would seem like there is an implicit Darwinianism somewhere underneath the OP. IOW that everything that is had adaptive value - or at least everything related to life. But this need not be the case. Even a pure Darwinist can consider features of life forms to have simply NOT killed off whatever life form developed it. It is a myth that Evolutionary Theory asserts that every feature must be useful/beneficial.
Or, to jump again: What is the function of a star?
What is the function of time?
We modernists are very big on function and to our detriment when we are purists.
Well, this means that the mind would never be satisfied with a false image (if it knew it to be false), but obviously if is capable of detecting mismatches at all, false images must be possible at least at the beginning of the process.
(And you should know that people can go their entire lives convinced of some belief yet be utterly wrong.)
Although I generally agree with your description, this isn’t really my theory. This is something I think even a layperson, with a mainstream understanding of consciousness, could agree with.
My theory of consciousness (which you can read more of by clicking the link “my thoughts” in my sig below) is a theory of substance–an attempt to combine the material with the mental in one kind of “stuff”–there is only one substance, I say, and mind and matter are two different instances of it. I define this substance as the synthesis of three things: 1) quality, 2) being, and 3) meaning. Everything we experience has all three. It’s 2)–being–that connects perception with reality–mind with matter–and I call this “projection”–that is, I say that the object one perceives is the projection of the perception of the object. The perception and the perceived are one and the same.
It’s basically idealism except with significant differences from the Berkeleyan kind.
The aspect of being that resides in all experience is what makes the issue of mistakes a bit troublesome–but it’s easy to reconcile. Yes, you can come up with a theory about what’s really out there, and because that theory, being mental, contains its own being, it will project as the “truth”. How then can it ever be mistaken? Well, here, mistaken simply means it doesn’t match with other experiences (empirical, for example). If we have a theory that inside a box is a cat, and we hear a bark, the tendency is to yeild our cat theory to the bark we just heard. This means that the “truth” which our theory was until that point becomes merely an idea–we now say “I believed it was a cat, but that’s not the truth”. The idea of the cat still remains in the mind as a memory of what you once believed, but it is only an idea at this point, not a full on belief. It is still a mental experience, of course, and therefore it too has being and thus projects. But it’s because of a change in quality (the first aspect of all experience)–that is, a transformation from truth to mere idea–that the quality of what it projects as also changes: it now projects as something in your head (ideas are real just as much as truths, but they are real as mental entities). Calling this idea a mistake is no problem, for ideas, in order to exist in our heads, don’t need to match reality (or our empirical experiences), and so when we say it is mistaken, we are simply saying there is a mismatch between it and our other experiences.
The cynic in me tends to agree with you.
Please elaborate on that. In what way is gravity an example of energy striving to grow or expand itself?
I disagree that consciousness overall is a tool, but maybe you mean human consciousness–consciousness as we find it, with the particular structure, qualities, functions, etc., in human minds–for that, I can entertain, is something the greater universe, drive by the Nietaschean will, strove to create. But that universe, with that will, also is an example of consciousness (this time, consciousness in general).
Tell me, Erik, as a Nietzschean, do you agree with Schopenhauerian Will? That everything is shot through with a will. That is quite close to what I believe, but I prefer the concept of consciousness over that of will, for that, to me, gives more substance to the idea of a ground for being, whereas will seems to speak more about a force or a drive. The two are obviously compatible, and I’m not sure there can be the one without the other, but I think consciousness is more fundamental.
Moreno!
Haven’t seen you in these parts for a while. Been taking a break?
You detected correctly. There are some Darwinian undertones in the OP. A couple things though (for and against). First, the against:
AGAINST: Darwinians don’t really believe that everything has to be serving some kind of survival function, they just think that things that don’t are far and few between–they know about the appendix, for example–so they tend to be suspicious of any notion about some feature serving no purpose. The argument is: if we had to lug around some extension of our bodies, or deal with some mental or behavioral tendency, that served absolutely no purpose, we’d be at a disadvantage to those who don’t have to lug it around or deal with it. We’d have to expend energy and resources to keep those features alive, to keep them going, and that means less energy and resources for other things that actually do help us survive. It’s the being disadvantages compared to others that makes these traits disappear in the long run–being disadvantaged means being more likely to lose in the competition of survival–not getting enough food, for example, because your competition got it first–and therefore these purposeless features tend to be weeded out and the probability of their hanging around goes down.
FOR: I agree that at the end of the day, consciousness just is, but what I’m questioning is: what is consciousness? This is how I’m using the term “function”. A function is what something does. Darwinians take it one step further and assert that there is supposed to be a proper function of this or that feature. What I’m asking is not what is consciousness supposed to be doing, but simply: what is it doing? Is it enabling a kind of pure, unadulterated, unfiltered, undistorted, direct awareness of reality, or is it inventing things possessed of the quality of seeming-real? As you can see, both these functions of consciousness translate easily into what consciousness is (to return to your point about existence preceding function). Either consciousness is pure, unadulterated awareness of reality, or consciousness is the invention of real-seeming experiences.
I guess when looking into consciousness, it seems more of an open-ended question that has many different answers, when asking if there’s a “fixed” function. Thus, I think that consciousness should not be made reduced into a function, as there are many different functions that consciousness does (thinking, memory, cognition, emotions, imagination). “Anything goes” is pretty much the answer to this question.
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