Consciousness is a Mystery to Science

SpeedOfSound · #1 by **SpeedOfSound** » Aug 25, 2011 12:20 am

The only mystery is why perfectly rational atheists can reject ideas of Man-God and yet go all religious and irrational when the subject of C comes up. They fall back on sad and tired old sayings about 'Science don't know' when it comes to a common word like consciousness and refuse to engage in any realistic attempts to corral this pig of a word into something we can make an intelligent comment on.

I'm kind of Pissed Off!

Science knows all it needs to know about C. Unfortunately many Scientists and otherwise rational individuals are still too confused to grasp this fact.

The discussion will start when serious attempts are made to get to the root of what it is we mean when we say we are conscious. It's scary stuff but anyone? Raise your hand. Anyone?

Teuton · #2 by **Teuton** » Aug 25, 2011 12:53 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Science knows all it needs to know about C. Unfortunately many Scientists and otherwise rational individuals are still too confused to grasp this fact.

You're wrong, because the so-called hard problem has not been scientifically solved yet.

"hard problem of consciousness. As I type these words, cognitive systems in my brain engage in visual and auditory information processing. This processing is accompanied by states of phenomenal consciousness, such as the auditory experience of hearing the tap-tap-tap of the keyboard and the visual experience of seeing the letters appear on the screen. How does my brain's activity generate those experiences? Why those and not others? Indeed, why is any physical event accompanied by conscious experience? The set of such problems is known as the hard problem of consciousness."

(Bayne, Tim, Axel Cleeremans, and Patrick Wilken, eds. The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 340)

See: Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (by David Chalmers)

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of 'consciousness', an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as 'phenomenal consciousness' and 'qualia' are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of 'conscious experience' or simply 'experience'."

SpeedOfSound wrote:
The discussion will start when serious attempts are made to get to the root of what it is we mean when we say we are conscious. It's scary stuff but anyone? Raise your hand. Anyone?

Something is conscious iff it experiences something, iff something appears or seems to it somehow.

felltoearth · #3 by **felltoearth** » Aug 25, 2011 1:33 am

rEvolutionist · #4 by **rEvolutionist** » Aug 25, 2011 1:50 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Science knows all it needs to know about C. Unfortunately many Scientists and otherwise rational individuals are still too confused to grasp this fact.

Glad you've got it all worked out, SOS. So how does C work?

andrewk · #5 by **andrewk** » Aug 25, 2011 2:18 am

Science doesn't 'need' to know anything about consciousness. It doesn't need to know anything about cosmic inflation either, yet many scientists are very interested in that. Consciousness is just a phenomenon. Being curious creatures, many of us would like to understand the phenomenon better, including answering questions such as:

- is there any way of detecting consciousness?
- does consciousness have any impact on the physical world or is it just an observer (epiphenomenalism)?
- does consciousness create an evolutionary advantage (presupposes a positive answer to the preceding question)
- what organisms have consciousness?
- is there any reason why consciousness exists?
- could a sufficiently sophisticated man-made device develop consciousness?

The barrier to science investigating consciousness is that we don't know how to measure or even detect it. Until these are discovered, investigations into consciousness will remain an area of speculative inquiry, much like string theory.

Teuton · #6 by **Teuton** » Aug 25, 2011 2:26 am

andrewk wrote:
The barrier to science investigating consciousness is that we don't know how to measure or even detect it. Until these are discovered, investigations into consciousness will remain an area of speculative inquiry, much like string theory.

Every self-conscious being has introspective access to the contents of its consciousness. And there is nothing more certain than the existence of consciousness.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection

andrewk · #7 by **andrewk** » Aug 25, 2011 2:27 am

Teuton wrote:As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.

What is it like to be a bat? - Thomas Nagel 1974.
Just thought I'd put this link here because it's such a frequently quoted question that I was surprised to find the original essay freely available on the internet.

surreptitious57 · #8 by **surreptitious57** » Aug 25, 2011 3:08 am

What is consciousness ?
What happens after death ?
What happens in a black hole ?
What is dark energy / dark matter ?
The four greatest scientific mysteries
A Nobel Prize awaiting whoever cracks any

SpeedOfSound · #9 by **SpeedOfSound** » Aug 25, 2011 3:36 am

Teuton wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:
Science knows all it needs to know about C. Unfortunately many Scientists and otherwise rational individuals are still too confused to grasp this fact.

You're wrong, because the so-called hard problem has not been scientifically solved yet.

Science can't solve a problem that you guys have made up in your heads. It would be like science solving the problem of god.

Teuton · **#10** by **Teuton** » Aug 25, 2011 3:57 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
Science can't solve a problem that you guys have made up in your heads. It would be like science solving the problem of god.

We naturalists have a real and really hard problem here.

surreptitious57 · **#11** by **surreptitious57** » Aug 25, 2011 4:08 am

Teuton wrote:
Every self-conscious being has introspective access to the contents of its consciousness. And there is nothing more certain than the existence of consciousness

But is there not a correlation between said introspection and
intelligence ? As we are the only members of the animal kingdom
that are capable of philosophising and moralising to the extinct that
we do and that this has increased over time as we became more intelligent

SpeedOfSound · **#12** by **SpeedOfSound** » Aug 25, 2011 4:09 am

surreptitious57 wrote:a. What is consciousness ?
b. What happens after death ?
c. What happens in a black hole ?
d. What is dark energy / dark matter ?
The four greatest scientific mysteries
A Nobel Prize awaiting whoever cracks any

Nobel in philosophy maybe. Or in rational thinking. None of those questions make any sense whatsoever or else they are trivial.

Well. Maybe c and d. We can always learn more about those things.

SpeedOfSound · **#13** by **SpeedOfSound** » Aug 25, 2011 4:12 am

Teuton wrote:
SpeedOfSound wrote:
Science can't solve a problem that you guys have made up in your heads. It would be like science solving the problem of god.

We naturalists have a real and really hard problem here.

Yes I know you have a problem and I feel for you. But this is not a science problem it is a problem in your religious thinking. Humans are piles of bio-goo and we are well equipped to make ontological mistakes that make sense to us about things like 'what is in my oatmeal'. But we are not well equipped to make sense of the ontological mistakes we make about our minds.

Anyway. I'm here for you. I am willing to help if you are willing to look a little deeper than is the usual around here.

SpeedOfSound · **#14** by **SpeedOfSound** » Aug 25, 2011 4:23 am

andrewk wrote:
Teuton wrote:As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.

What is it like to be a bat? - Thomas Nagel 1974.
Just thought I'd put this link here because it's such a frequently quoted question that I was surprised to find the original essay freely available on the internet.

It amazes me that some jerkwad can utter an incomplete thought like 'What it is like..' and the whole fucking world stands around and oohs and ahhs about it for 40 years. Another of my favorites is some guy who uttered the words 'Hard Problem' at a convention and now we are all inclined to capitalize it.

That's the real mystery. Human brains are machines that do a lot of 'it's like..' but the real proper use of the brain is to fill in the part about what it's like. My conscious window on life is always like something, but it is always something in particular. I never have been able to just get up and feel or sense or think nothing and come away with a 'That was like...Nothing!'.

We have a concept that is built of many little backing bits of knowledge. We are able to abstract this thing and call it Consciousness with a capital C. The more we read about it and think about it the more it becomes something concrete in our sad little meat-melons. It's poetry. Nothing more than that.

Teuton · **#15** by **Teuton** » Aug 25, 2011 4:24 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:Yes I know you have a problem and I feel for you.

Many people suffer from problem-blindness. The problem is there but they don't see it.

SpeedOfSound wrote:
But this is not a science problem it is a problem in your religious thinking.

What makes you think my thinking is religious?

epepke · **#16** by **epepke** » Aug 25, 2011 4:31 am

I won't believe that science knows everything it needs to know about consciousness until I can build one.

natselrox · **#17** by **natselrox** » Aug 25, 2011 4:46 am

rEvolutionist · **#18** by **rEvolutionist** » Aug 25, 2011 5:00 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:
surreptitious57 wrote:a. What is consciousness ?
b. What happens after death ?
c. What happens in a black hole ?
d. What is dark energy / dark matter ?
The four greatest scientific mysteries
A Nobel Prize awaiting whoever cracks any

Nobel in philosophy maybe. Or in rational thinking. None of those questions make any sense whatsoever or else they are trivial.

Science deals with making sense of observations. I observe an "I". Why can't science look into that?

chairman bill · **#19** by **chairman bill** » Aug 25, 2011 6:50 am

Could it be that the problem is with the word, consciousness? There is an assumption that people actually know what they're talking about when they use the word & say that 'we don't understand it'. I suspect a rewording, à la 'I don't understand it, therefore no one else does either' would better describe their position.

Might I suggest that there is no 'consciousness', rather there are 'consciousnesses', in that it isn't a single, identical phenomenon? Rather than organisms possessing consciousness, different kinds/levels of consciousness happen to be features of living organisms, and if we're going to try and understand consciousness, we need to be clear about what it is that we're talking about & trying to understand. Indeed, at a basic level, consciousness is really nothing more than awareness of the internal & surrounding external environment, to which an organism can respond in some way. I would suggest that consciousness is actually never any more than that, it just appears more complex because levels of awareness increase as complexity of nervous systems increase. But the basics are pretty well understood across a range of organisms.

Bribase · **#20** by **Bribase** » Aug 25, 2011 8:17 am