On 9/21/2014 5:07 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 1:34 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com
<mailto:lizj...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Good point Brent and one on which I am also equivocal, which is why I have
been keen
to tease out whether people are talking about consciousness or the contents
of
consciousness, and to try to work out whether there is, in fact, any
difference. If
there isn't, consciousness becomes something like /elan vital/, a supposed
magic
extra that isn't in fact necessary in explanatory terms - all that exists
are
"bundles of sensations" (or however Hume phrased it).
But in materialism we still have a magic extra: matter itself. In the MUH math is the
magic extra. I don't know of any theory that gets rid of all "magic" assumptions.
True. But matter explains lots of other stuff. Consciousness as a pure potentiality,
distinct from any content, doesn't explain anything.
In reply to John's comment, we /don't/ know that sure that certain types of
brain
activity cause consciousness, that's a (very reasonable) hypothesis based
on the
fact the two appear to be always correlated.
We don't even know if they are strongly correlated, because we don't know what else is
conscious.
And we don't know that other people are conscious. But as JKC pointed out we do know that
things that affect our brain affect our consciousness. Quite aside from anesthesia and
concussions that make it go away (modulo your theory that we merely forget), it's affected
by whiskey and pot and salvia and LSD, and the effects are even amenable to some
explanation at the molecular level.
Is an insect swarm conscious? Is your computer? Are galaxies? The problem is that we
might be confusing empathy for consciousness. It is clear that the more an organism is
similar to us the more empathy we feel (human > monkey > cat > insect > bacteria, ...).
That's true on Bruno's definition of consciousness. But that's not the consciousness that
we are told is indubitable and which we all intuititively know we have. We attribute
consciousness to other things as we perceive their behavior to be intelligent and goal
directed; because that's how we recognize it in people: "How many fingers do you see?"
"What day is it?" "Do you know where you are?".
Brent
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