I think that, for many people, the notion of brain-independent consciousness is rooted in the desire to believe that consciousness survives death.
To this end, it's suggested that what we experience as everyday consciousness is merely representative of a greater truth... a bigger reality that occurs outside the brain.
The "layers of reality" is an idea that has been explored in movies like The Matrix and Inception. And, of course, it goes back much further than that...

There's Plato's allegory of shadows cast on a cave wall.

And there's Chuang Tse (around 300BC):
"Who knows when the end is reached? Death may be the beginning of life. How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know that he who dreads to die is as a child who has lost the way and cannot find his way home? How do I know that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?"

And there's author Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

What all of these ideas have in common with the theistic view of a "soul" is the unsubstantiated belief in a "something else".
But if the neuroscience model is sufficient to describe our experience of reality then these additional "layers" become superfluous.
I do like the fact that these questions are being explored in science... but until there's sufficient weight of evidence to suggest a "something else", the materialistic notion that consciousness arises in the wetware of the brain is the one that seems most parsimonious (Occam's razor) and therefore the most credible.

excellent post

Thanks, Macdoc.

Little Idiot wrote:

Sendraks wrote:Confusing your perception of what the brain is doing =/= conciousness happening outside of the brain.

Fair enough.

As your belief, or ones belief that consciousness originates in the brain =/= scientific evidence that consciousness originates in the brain

My knowledge that consciousness originates within and occurs only within the brain is well evidenced.

Indeed I there are simple experiments to verify that indeed consciousness exists in the brain and without the brain conciousness cannot be evidenced.

The notion that conciousness exists outside of the brain is pure unevidenced, airy fairy, belief.

Mike_L wrote:I think that, for many people, the notion of brain-independent consciousness is rooted in the desire to believe that consciousness survives death.
To this end, it's suggested that what we experience as everyday consciousness is merely representative of a greater truth... a bigger reality that occurs outside the brain.
The "layers of reality" is an idea that has been explored in movies like The Matrix and Inception. And, of course, it goes back much further than that...

There's Plato's allegory of shadows cast on a cave wall.

And there's Chuang Tse (around 300BC):
"Who knows when the end is reached? Death may be the beginning of life. How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know that he who dreads to die is as a child who has lost the way and cannot find his way home? How do I know that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?"

And there's author Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

What all of these ideas have in common with the theistic view of a "soul" is the unsubstantiated belief in a "something else".
But if the neuroscience model is sufficient to describe our experience of reality then these additional "layers" become superfluous.
I do like the fact that these questions are being explored in science... but until there's sufficient weight of evidence to suggest a "something else", the materialistic notion that consciousness arises in the wetware of the brain is the one that seems most parsimonious (Occam's razor) and therefore the most credible.

Good man!

Can you post this in every ongoing thread in Philosophy, please?

Non veridical perception supports idealism.

If all we had access to was an objective physical world then misrepresentation wouldn't make sense. We couldn't see something that wasn't there.

The fact that we have not immediately understood reality as explained by science by perceiving it and can have misperceptions implies that our consciousness is of mental objects.

For instance in the Müller-Lyer illusion we perceive two lines as a different length but the ruler suggests that in the external world they are the same length which means our perception can't be of the external world.

Explaining the mental in terms of the physical has been recognised as problem since he beginning of philosophy it is not a concept invented by religion. For instance Christians believe humans will be resurrected in bodily form. They advocate the resurrection of the body not of a separate soul thing.

The definition of the words material and physical is controversial and tautologous. Ideas of what is physical are subject to what the latest theory in physics is and these theories are quite abstract. So their is not a solid permanent definition of the physical to pin the label Physical on. Physics apparently says a table is mainly empty space but the naive concept of physical is solid objects. Our most disturbing perception (severe pain) is entirely mental. You don't see pain under a microscope or emanating from matter. It is private and subjective and not existant when we are unconscious

Mike_L wrote:I think that, for many people, the notion of brain-independent consciousness is rooted in the desire to believe that consciousness survives death.
To this end, it's suggested that what we experience as everyday consciousness is merely representative of a greater truth... a bigger reality that occurs outside the brain.
The "layers of reality" is an idea that has been explored in movies like The Matrix and Inception. And, of course, it goes back much further than that...

There's Plato's allegory of shadows cast on a cave wall.

And there's Chuang Tse (around 300BC):
"Who knows when the end is reached? Death may be the beginning of life. How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know that he who dreads to die is as a child who has lost the way and cannot find his way home? How do I know that the dead repent of having previously clung to life?"

And there's author Nathaniel Hawthorne:
"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

What all of these ideas have in common with the theistic view of a "soul" is the unsubstantiated belief in a "something else".
But if the neuroscience model is sufficient to describe our experience of reality then these additional "layers" become superfluous.
I do like the fact that these questions are being explored in science... but until there's sufficient weight of evidence to suggest a "something else", the materialistic notion that consciousness arises in the wetware of the brain is the one that seems most parsimonious (Occam's razor) and therefore the most credible.

Of course the model is self consistent, I'll grant that. There are two problems in the reasoning you applied.

1. Occams razor is over rated, and misunderstood. According to Occams Razor, if we measure movement of a huge range of objects below say 3 000 000 m/s (shit fast) we should drop relativity.
2. there is, despite claims, no actual evidence of the brain creating awareness. No more than the eye creates sight. Obviously the brain is involved in assembling the subjective experience, but how do brain processes become subjective experience, you can only offer guesses or belief.

But lets not go much past there, or we'll just be in another physicalism vs idealism dupicate thread

Andrew4Handel wrote:Non veridical perception supports idealism.

If all we had access to was an objective physical world then misrepresentation wouldn't make sense. We couldn't see something that wasn't there.

The fact that we have not immediately understood reality as explained by science by perceiving it and can have misperceptions implies that our consciousness is of mental objects.

For instance in the Müller-Lyer illusion we perceive two lines as a different length but the ruler suggests that in the external world they are the same length which means our perception can't be of the external world.

This makes very little sense. What's difficult about the idea that we don't always perceive the physical world correctly?

Explaining the mental in terms of the physical has been recognised as problem since he beginning of philosophy it is not a concept invented by religion.

Yes, but the idea that all that exists is atoms and void also goes back to the beginning of philosophy.

For instance Christians believe humans will be resurrected in bodily form. They advocate the resurrection of the body not of a separate soul thing.

Massive generalisation. If you confine yourself to the Bible you'll find a number of different views on that in different places. Different Christians have believed an even wider variety of things. There's a lengthy historical discussion to be had on that topic alone.

The definition of the words material and physical is controversial and tautologous. Ideas of what is physical are subject to what the latest theory in physics is and these theories are quite abstract. So their is not a solid permanent definition of the physical to pin the label Physical on. Physics apparently says a table is mainly empty space but the naive concept of physical is solid objects.

We covered this at length in another current thread. Basically if it's appropriate to measure something using SI base or derived units (metres, seconds, kilograms etc) then it's physical.

Our most disturbing perception (severe pain) is entirely mental. You don't see pain under a microscope or emanating from matter. It is private and subjective and not existant when we are unconscious

If you don't feel pain when unconscious then why is it possible to rouse someone by hurting them? Pain is subjective but it correlates quite reliably to physical causes and the things that are going on in your nervous system when you feel pain are fairly well understood.

As we also covered in the other thread, the fact that you can't place your private experiences in the objective world is simply a fact of language. It doesn't imply any ontological conclusions such as idealism. If you really had the academic expertise in linguistics you were citing recently you'd know that.

Little Idiot wrote:

Teuton wrote:Nonreductive/emergent physicalism combines substance monism with property dualism. Whether this is physicalism enough is debatable. Many think that nonreductive physicalism is pseudophysicalism, because "true" physicalism is either eliminative or reductive, and both substance-monistic and property-monistic.

If I recall you hold the position of Nonreductive/emergent physicalism, one against which its quite hard to argue (other than attacking it as being a kind of dualism, to which the response is 'yeah, so?').

To be honest, I'm torn between reductive materialism (aka central-state materialism), which entails property monism, and nonreductive materialism, which entails (non-fundamentalist) property dualism. The qualia (phenomenal qualities, "secondary qualities") are a real pain in the reductionists' neck. To deny them seems tantamount to denying consciousness, which isn't coherently deniable.

Little Idiot wrote:Remind me briefly if you can, what exactly does property dualism allow you to say about qualia? (struggle with remembering long words, seriously) Is it (words to the effect) that mental states emerge as a result of physical properties, but are essentially different to those physical properties (i.e. not physical)?

First of all, substance dualism includes property dualism, but I'm talking about naturalistic property dualism here, which excludes substance dualism, because according to it all bearers of mental properties are material bodies rather than spiritual souls. That is, naturalistic property dualism, be it its panpsychistic or its emergentistic version, includes materialistic substance monism, substance materialism in short.

– According to panpsychistic or non-emergentistic property dualism, there have always been qualia in the universe, they are nonphysical and physically irreducible fundamental natural properties which are ontologically on a par with fundamental physical properties, and their bearers needn't be biological or organic objects. Even elementary particles can have qualia (and all or at least some types of them do).

– According to non-panpsychistic or emergentistic property dualism, there have not always been qualia in the universe, they are not ontologically on a par with fundamental physical properties, and their bearers must be biological or organic objects (organisms or brains). Qualia emerge or arise from, are caused, generated, or produced by dynamic networks of physical properties or powers (had by brains), but they are an evolutionarily novel type of natural property which is nonphysical, irreducible to any pre-existing type of physical property (or natural-science property).

Little Idiot wrote:

Teuton wrote:Well, that's the big problem with reductive physicalism, which has been accused by its opponents of not really being different from eliminative physicalism. If conscious states are real and identical with neural states, there is still a real difference between conscious neural states and nonconscious neural states. What makes the difference? Many answer: the former involve real and irreducible qualia and the latter don't. But that's the answer reductive physicalists cannot give!

yeah, they (reductive & eliminative physicalists) would seem stuck there. I guess the'd be forced to say there is no such thing as a non-conscious neural state. I'm not a physicalist, so tolerate me and point it out if I'm building strawmen.

Reductive materialists say that all experiences are neural processes; they don't say that all neural processes are experiences.
They can choose between qualia nihilism (there are no qualia) and reductive qualia realism (there are qualia but they are (appearances of) physical properties).

Little Idiot wrote:Can you supply a clear example of a 'non-conscious neural state'?

The neural activities of the autonomic nervous system are nonconscious.

Coming upon Rational Skepticism was serendipitous and after easily registering and subsequent readings I came upon this remarkable thread (among others) and decided to make First Contact with all the complex implications that that process engenders. Procrustean moderators at other forums went ballistic over my postings so I decided to cut to the chase here and come through immigration presenting myself as I am—I am not of this world or should I say realm.

So before the local villagers get out their torches and pitchforks yelling "E.T. go home or get lost" I want to let you all know where I am coming from. I do have a First Contact Protocol that doesn't quite fit in with the conventional conversational tone of internet forums—it's more of a declarative narrative that I decided to drop into this thread with its recurring theme that keeps knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door.

Awareness always was and always will be and is that which is reading this now and that which wrote this in the first place—there's really only one of us. Awareness does not suffer—it's consciousness where the rubber meets the road that suffers. Consciousness or the concept I-am-the-body-sensation is the sentient inner organ ego.

I'm just a Zen dust-devil that picks up debris from one place and dumps it in another. Here's a vignette I put together concerning this topic:



I enjoy doing this and talking about it but if my manner of presentation is inappropriate for this forum just delete me.

You should meet Galaxian, I think he hangs out at rationalia these days.

He's not from this world either. And he likes to talk about 9/11.

Little Idiot wrote:
2. there is, despite claims, no actual evidence of the brain creating awareness. No more than the eye creates sight.

Your visual sensations are not created by your eyes because your brain is the organ of consciousness.
Anesthesiologists can switch your consciousness on or off at will just by chemically manipulating processes in your brain, which is very strong evidence for the hypothesis that consciousness is caused by brain processes.

Little Idiot wrote:Obviously the brain is involved in assembling the subjective experience, but how do brain processes become subjective experience, you can only offer guesses or belief.

The good old hard problem of consciousness…
It may remain a natural mystery "how technicolour phenomenology can arise from soggy grey matter", "how the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness" (Colin McGinn), but this objection to materialism backfires against spiritualism and is hence powerless: How can technicolour phenomenology arise from immaterial souls? How is the spiritual water of the soul turned into the wine of consciousness? The spiritualists certainly have no idea whatsoever—and they'll never have any clue! I can show them a brain, can they show me a soul?! I think natural mysteries are preferrable to supernatural ones. There's not even a coherently intelligible concept of an immaterial soul. The souls of the spiritualists are zero-dimensional nothings.

"Compare now what the neuroscientist can tell us about the brain, and what she can do with that knowledge, with what the dualist can tell us about spiritual substance, and what he can do with those assumptions. Can the dualist tell us anything about the internal constitution of mind-stuff? Of the nonmaterial elements that make it up? Of the nonphysical laws that govern their behavior? Of the mind's structural connections with the body? Of the manner of the mind's operations? Can he explain human capacities and pathologies in terms of its structures and defects? The fact is, the dualist can do none of these things because no detailed theory of mind-stuff has ever even be formulated. Compared to the rich resources and the explanatory successes of current materialism, dualism is not so much a theory of mind as it is an empty space waiting for a genuine theory of mind to be put in it."

(Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. p. 31)

pudgala2 wrote:
Awareness always was and always will be and is that which is reading this now and that which wrote this in the first place—there's really only one of us. Awareness does not suffer—it's consciousness where the rubber meets the road that suffers. Consciousness or the concept I-am-the-body-sensation is the sentient inner organ ego.

Lesson 1: How to make words without making sense.
That'll make all the colorless green ideas sleep furiously…

Teuton wrote:

Little Idiot wrote:
2. there is, despite claims, no actual evidence of the brain creating awareness. No more than the eye creates sight.

Your visual sensations are not created by your eyes because your brain is the organ of consciousness.
Anesthesiologists can switch your consciousness on or off at will just by chemically manipulating processes in your brain, which is very strong evidence for the hypothesis that consciousness is caused by brain processes.

On and off is not such strong evidence. Taping someone's eyes shut turns off their vision. I think interventions that alter the quality of conscious experience are stronger evidence. Mood altering drugs, effects on memory of a blow to the head, effects on magnetic stimulation in "the god helmet", cognitive effects of alzheimers and CJD, effects on mood and emotion of various substances are all compelling.

The fact that brain scans reveal that mental effort is physical effort, even when the body is not under conscious control. People in PVS asked to imagine playing tennis seem to do so in their motor cortex, as if neural motor control is how such a thing can be imagined.Scans of sleeping brains reveal intense activity associated with dreaming. The archetypal "mental realm" of dreams seems to be very physically realised.

LI favours a view of mind communicating with brain, some sort of physical augmentation device. That view fails to account for these mental/physical relations. It fails to account for anything. Why would a mind require an imaginary interface between it and it's other imaginings?

I also note that his view doesn't make sense when he also argues that brains have no causal role in mental phenomena. a "CPU" brain is no use at all unless it can cause mental phenomena. Otherwise a mind imagines a non-causal brain and therefore must also imagine the supposed effects of the brain. The mind has to do all the work and an imagined brain is nothing but an extra set of phenomena to be created.

Teuton wrote:

Little Idiot wrote:Obviously the brain is involved in assembling the subjective experience, but how do brain processes become subjective experience, you can only offer guesses or belief.

The good old hard problem of consciousness…
It may remain a natural mystery "how technicolour phenomenology can arise from soggy grey matter", "how the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness" (Colin McGinn), but this objection to materialism backfires against spiritualism and is hence powerless: How can technicolour phenomenology arise from immaterial souls? How is the spiritual water of the soul turned into the wine of consciousness? The spiritualists certainly have no idea whatsoever—and they'll never have any clue! I can show them a brain, can they show me a soul?! I think natural mysteries are preferrable to supernatural ones. There's not even a coherently intelligible concept of an immaterial soul. The souls of the spiritualists are zero-dimensional nothings.

"Compare now what the neuroscientist can tell us about the brain, and what she can do with that knowledge, with what the dualist can tell us about spiritual substance, and what he can do with those assumptions. Can the dualist tell us anything about the internal constitution of mind-stuff? Of the nonmaterial elements that make it up? Of the nonphysical laws that govern their behavior? Of the mind's structural connections with the body? Of the manner of the mind's operations? Can he explain human capacities and pathologies in terms of its structures and defects? The fact is, the dualist can do none of these things because no detailed theory of mind-stuff has ever even be formulated. Compared to the rich resources and the explanatory successes of current materialism, dualism is not so much a theory of mind as it is an empty space waiting for a genuine theory of mind to be put in it."

(Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. p. 31)

Joseph Priestley wrote the following some years ago, in 1775 to be precise:

"Our having recourse to an immaterial principle, to account for perception and thought, is only saying in other words, that we do not know in what they consist; for no one will say that he has any conception how the principle of thought can have any more relation to immateriality than to materiality."

(Source: J. Priestley, Hartley's Theory of the Human Mind…, 1775)

If the emergence of consciousness from the body/brain is a mystery, its emergence from the soul is an absurdity.

Modern scientific psychology started with an exorcism of the soul:

"The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philosophy and of scholasticism, which is only popular philosophy made systematic. It declares that the principle of individuality within us must be substantial, for psychic phenomena are activities, and there can be no activity without a concrete agent. This substantial agent cannot be the brain but must be something immaterial; for its activity, thought, is both immaterial, and takes cognizance of immaterial things, and of material things in general and intelligible, as well as in particular and sensible ways, - all which powers are incompatible with the nature of matter, of which the brain is composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the activities of the brain are compounded of the elementary activities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spontaneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined ab extra; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a corporeal function. For these objective reasons the principle of psychic life must be both immaterial and simple as well as substantial, must be what is called a Soul. The same consequence follows from subjective reasons. Our consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essential simplicity: the owner of the various constituents of the self, as we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Ego whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real entity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly aware. No material agent could thus turn round and grasp itself – material activities always grasp something else than the agent. And if a brain could grasp itself and be self-conscious, it would be conscious of itself as a brain and not as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul then exists as a simple spiritual substance in which the various psychic faculties, operations, and affections inhere.
…
The great difficulty is in seeing how a thing can cognize anything. This difficulty is not in the least removed by giving to the thing that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not deduce any of the properties of the mental life from otherwise known properties of the soul. They simply find various characters ready-made in the mental life, and these they clap into the Soul, saying, 'Lo! behold the source from whence they flow!' The merely verbal character of this 'explanation' is obvious. The Soul invoked, far from making the phenomena more intelligible, can only be made intelligible itself by borrowing their form, - it must be represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of consciousness duplicating the one we know.
Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of philosophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson, is: 'Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the explanation of everything else.'
…
The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons. The case would rest here, and the reader be left free to make his choice, were it not for other demands of a more practical kind.
…
My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its successive thoughts are the only intelligible and verifiable things about it, and definitely to ascertain the correlations of these with brain-processes is as much as psychology can empirically do. From the metaphysical point of view, it is true that one may claim that the correlations have a rational ground; and if the word Soul could be taken to mean merely some such vague problematic ground, it would be unobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes to give the ground in positive terms of a very dubiously credible sort. I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will be in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes."

(James, William. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1. 1890. Chapter X: The Consciousness of Self; The Theory of the Soul.)

Andrew4Handel wrote: Our most disturbing perception (severe pain) is entirely mental. You don't see pain under a microscope or emanating from matter. It is private and subjective and not existant when we are unconscious

Well, you can fuck off with this bullshit. As someone that has lived with severe pain day and night for a number of years I can tell you that it is not mental and it does not go away when I sleep. And the fuck it's subjective. My back is fucked up from heavy lifting for most of my life. MRIs show exactly where the pain originates, and it isn't in my fucking head, and it isn't subjective. It's fucking real. It's physical.

Little Idiot wrote:

2. there is, despite claims, no actual evidence of the brain creating awareness.

Besides all the evidence that self awareness is brain dependent of course. What there is no evidence for is self awareness independent of some sort of an organic living brain.

Oldskeptic wrote:

Andrew4Handel wrote: Our most disturbing perception (severe pain) is entirely mental. You don't see pain under a microscope or emanating from matter. It is private and subjective and not existant when we are unconscious

Well, you can fuck off with this bullshit. As someone that has lived with severe pain day and night for a number of years I can tell you that it is not mental and it does not go away when I sleep. And the fuck it's subjective. My back is fucked up from heavy lifting for most of my life. MRIs show exactly where the pain originates, and it isn't in my fucking head, and it isn't subjective. It's fucking real. It's physical.

To say that (the feeling of) pain is private and (ontically) subjective is not to say that it is unreal or nonphysical. Of course, a pain cannot exist unfelt: for it to be is for it to be felt (by something/somebody).