Persons being "wrong" regarding the source of pain: I don't see a function
in claiming that persons perceiving pain in an amputated limb are "wrong". I
might say that I don't understand what is going on there. But to say that
they are "wrong" : according to what do you tell them they are "wrong". Your
consciousness might differ, you might not be able to explain their
experience with logic currently available but, at a minimum, within their
experiencing, I don't understand how they could be "wrong".
Geoff C
From: "Frances Kelly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Consciousness Assayed
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2008 12:23:34 -0400
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.
