Frances to Geoff and others... The key point here for me in your statement below is the actual presence to mind of referred phantom pain that to the afflicted sufferer seems to emerge from say their medically amputated limb. This indicates to me that the individual human being can be wrong about stuff usually held indubitable, such as states of the inner self as subject matter for the human person. There are some things that the individual human being can of course be consciously sure of in regard to their own sense of pain, that for example the thing they are feeling is indeed pain, and that it is their pain they are feeling, and that it cannot be the pain of some other human being; yet they can still nonetheless be wrong about the causal source and medical origin of that felt pain. This has important consequences for the field of angloamerican pragmatist semiotics and for those semioticians who study signs as expressive indexic symptoms. The actual presence to mind of referred phantom pain shows that the human can be wrong about some stuff that it feels or senses of its own being. In other words, consciousness must clearly be prone to interpretation and even inference, which establishes it as a sign; and this makes it phenomenal and existential and experiential; and further prone to the logic of relativity, because of the association involved. This has serious ramifications for theists or at least for those in the religious community, in that there is thus no perfect state of pure consciousness that continues infinitely or independently of the individual human being that carries it, and that consciousness cannot be attributed to say the soul or ghost or spirit of the human being or their mental psyche. Once a human dies and is dead, then so also is their psyche and mind dead, including their consciousness; and so the human is also dead as a soul along with the once spirit of life they had. This stance is not necessarily to rigidly deny any kind of say "afterlife" for humans, which state may be prone to verification in the future by some empirical means, but it is rather to deny that their consciousness has any role to play in such matters. If theists are seeking to establish a warranted life after death for earthly humans who may be bad or good, then they will have to find it in other than the consciousness of the psyche. It would be useful to me if members familiar with such issues as neurology and pathology and theology could correct my raw assumptions.
Geoff partly wrote in effect... I would demur regarding the apparent assertion by Cheerskep that consciousness requires a neuronal basis. In the situation of a person who has had a limb amputated, consciousness may register rather strong experiences of pain, which seems to them as originating in the amputated limb. This is a reliable observation suggesting that there is no absolute association between neuronal events and consciousness. The registering of pain in consciousness however is likely analyzable as a neuronal event, but one occurring in the brain and not in the limb.
