DavidMcC wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:If you are walking around, irritated, looking all over the house for your car keys. How many distinct visual scenes do we have in such an endeavor? Maybe a thousand. Consider what consciousness if for in the first place. You can SEE. Doesn't mean you are going to stop on every little blob and ask a question is that my set of keys. In fact stopping on every blob would take you weeks.

That's the point! We don't use consciousness for that. We can do, on occasion, but as you say its very slow. If we have to experience all the details to find something it's very inefficient. If you are looking for something move your view over areas where it might be and it may just pop out. Then you see it! There is no conscious blob matching. When that happens it isn't that your keys just jumped into view. It's that you suddenly notice them. You suddenly become aware of them. You suddenly begin experiencing seeing of keys. Searching for Lost keys aren't the best example here. Just look at any unfamiliar scene and you keep seeing new things in it.

Are you really trying to argue that doesn't happen?

You are still making attention synonymous with awareness. Not surprising, it's how this whole mess got started in the first place. What is surprising is the fervor with which good physicalists hold on to the myth.

When you are looking for your keys, the only reason that you don't have to "stop on every blob" is that your unconscious "key recognition function" is fast and accurate enough to do it "on the fly", in most cases. It is only unconscious (and therefore fast) due to what you could call "practice makes perfect".

EDIT: The "practice" being at looking for something that you can easily recognised when you see it, not necessarily your keys.

That all sounds reasonable but it's a myth and the myth has no evidence. I am so amused at how atheists start talking about their favorite unicorn when this subject comes up. Nothing personal here Dave. You are no alone. But trust me. There is an inconsistency in your thinking.

surreptitious57 wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:
You are still making attention synonymous with awareness

There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not require any response beyond a simple
recognition of the experience itself. They can be regarded as examples of attention without awareness. And
there are sense experiences that do require a response beyond simple recognition. They can be regarded as
as examples of attention with awareness. The two are therefore not always synonymous only sometimes so

It's the continuity that seems to be the biggest battle I am having here. No idea why, with a mass of biological gel for a brain, that people would think there is something computer-like and binary going on. Most amusing is that for the countless SE experiments and thought experiments and logical lines I have pursued, that the guys that believe in the unicorns will carefully avoid exactly those lines of reasoning that may threaten or change what they believe.

This is exactly like arguing with religious bleavers.

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:No it's all a candidate for attention. Global awareness. It may not be the C you are used to but that shit doesn't actually exist anyway so no loss. If I am looking at something I have access to it.

If you see something you have access, but just looking at it does not guarantee that you will see it. So what's the difference between looking at and seeing?

This is a very good example of how the ghost in the machine is still lurking deep within how we structure language and our thinking.

What makes you think that this is a valid distinction?

In ordinary usage, an unconscious thought process occurs when a person acts in some way that is clearly under the control of their brain, but that person cannot talk about what they are doing, they don’t have introspective access to that process. It seems to me that this is an operationally useful distinction, rather than a fundamental one; but it is useful, it’s not nonsense. An example of that definition is here:...

But here is the THING. Neither do you have introspective and reporting access to all of what you ARE conscious of. Why is it that no one wants to have this discussion when quite clearly no one has evidence against my claim. In order to know what it is you are not conscious of you MUST know precisely what you ARE conscious of. Try the finger thumping experiment above and se how it plays out for you.

but that person cannot talk about what they are doing,

Well put. And the beginning of how it all goes wrong. You can make the mistake of claiming an identity relationship between what I remember and what I can report all day long and I am not going to buy it without clear evidence.

kennyc wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not require any response beyond a simple
recognition of the experience itself. They can be regarded as examples of attention without awareness. And
there are sense experiences that do require a response beyond simple recognition. They can be regarded as
as examples of attention with awareness. The two are therefore not always synonymous only sometimes so

Not sure I would tie it to requiring a response but the two certainly different and certainly related to consciousness unconsciousness sensory operation. There are also responses to sensory input that are non-conscious such as heart
beat/rate and bloodpressure, breathing and knee-jerk reactions, that last one applying to a lot of what SOS says

The purpose of automatic motor functions such as breathing and pulse is to perform what is necessary to keep the body alive so whether one is aware of them or not is irrelevant as long as they are functioning correctly. But the brain is aware of them because if the health of the body becomes compromised it has to either process information to reverse that or to provide the mechanism by which it can correct the malfunction itself. It would not be able to do this it was not aware of the difference between normal and abnormal breathing and pulse. Generally one is not aware of their breathing or pulse if they are normal because there is no danger to the body so the brain does not process information regarding that as it would not be necessary

zoon wrote:...here:

L M Augusto (2010) wrote:In the cases where subjects exhibit behaviours that indicate that they possess knowledge but seem both unaware of that possession and unable to verbalize it, we assume that they have unconscious, or implicit knowledge. ...... Unconscious knowledge refers to knowledge that is revealed by task performance alone, subjects being unaware that they are accessing it, whereas we speak of conscious knowledge when subjects are aware of possessing and accessing it (Schacter, 1992). A useful way of characterizing this epistemic availability in the face of conscious inaccessibility is by appealing to metaknowledge (e.g., Dienes & Perner, 2002): One can speak of unconscious knowledge when subjects lack metaknowledge concerning their own positive epistemic states, that is, states in which they possess knowledge. In other words, subjects cannot form a higher order representation about a lower order one. For instance, a subject with blindsight (see below) who, when forced to guess, correctly identifies a cross on a screen, has a lower order representation that there is a cross on the screen; however, this subject is incapable of representing this information to themselves with a higher order representation. That is, the subject cannot say, “I see a cross on the screen”; seeing the cross on the screen is not a conscious thought in this case (e.g., Rosenthal, 2005, p. 185). Returning to the availability-accessibility distinction, we can say that while the sight of a cross on a screen is available to the subject with blindsight, it is not consciously accessible to them.

In practice this is largely a social definition that depends on language (though there are grey areas); it does become more or less useless for non-human animals and for the kind of cognition that SpeedOfSound describes in his timelines. Since SpeedOfSound’s timelines for human brain activity resolutely exclude speech or social cognition, it’s probably the case that the conscious/unconscious distinction doesn’t matter for them. On the other hand, since speech and social cognition are central aspects of human behaviour, I would say that SpeedOfSound’s timelines are missing out the parts of human brain activity that are of interest in the study of consciousness.

OK the timelines describe how we could interact with non-agents like trees without needing the concepts of folk psychology, but how are we to extend this absence of folk psychology to the cases where we are dealing with folk (which is most of the time, for example, when posting here)? Is there any way for me to interact with SpeedOfSound without assuming SoS is the unitary centre of awareness which the Theory of Mind processes in my brain automatically create?

My timelines most assuredly DO NOT EXCLUDE the things you mention here. They are the inspiration for the timelines. To show that any such social cognitive and reporting acts must occurs some 200+ milliseconds after any percept. No idea how my words lead you astray on this.

surreptitious57 wrote:

GrahamH wrote:
If you are not specifically aware of a stimulus after neural processing
has taken place are you still calling that a subjective experience

At what point does subjective experience begin ?

At what point is an apple identified as a fruit? Is everything we see, to some small extent, apple?

The brain classifies patterns. This is demonstrably the case and simple models of neural networks can perform this function. It's rather like a shaped peg fitting through a like-shaped hole in a child's toy. The round peg fits the round hole. The square peg doesn;t fit the round hole. is roundness a continuum that the square peg must be a bit round and the round peg must be a bit square?

If we think of brains as information processors that assign patterns to categories, and suppose that conscious/ unconscious brain responses can be so classified by brains, then conscious is what the brain classifies as conscious and unconscious is other activity that is not so classified. The classification can be as fuzzy as you like and still mean something.

So subjective experience begins when a brain's experience classifiers respond to other brain response patterns. That's the light going on and the event being recognised as an experience. Just like any sensory detection event.

surreptitious57 wrote:Is it when the sense organ registers it or is it when it has passed through the thalamus to the specific brain region that processes it ?

Granted it is extraordinarily difficult to decode the meaning of neurological activity. I think the only way that works right now is to apply a stimulus, see what response you can measure and make a simple flat map from one to the other. Clearly you can't do that for subjective events. you can't apply a subjective stimulus. The best we get is to ask a test subject about their experiences, which is very indirect.

surreptitious57 wrote:One could argue that this is academic as the time frame is so small as to be practically non existent. Rather like the time it takes for a light to go on after the switch has been activated. But while it may appear to be instantaneous from a human perspective an electrical charge still has to travel the distance between the switch and the light. And this is a particularly appropriate analogy with respect to the brain as the firing of neurons is exactly the same as an electrical charge travelling along a cable save for the fact that the paths may be multiple rather than singular and angular rather than straight

I don;t see how your analogy applies. There seems to be measurable time required to make a stimulus into a subjective experience. If the stimulus is too short we simply don't experience it.

A better analogy seems to be computational. It takes time for computations to settle on solutions, to be evaluated for salience and to be stored in working memory. Interrupt the process and nothing gets stored == no experience occurs.

surreptitious57 wrote:I think it impossible for any sense perception not to be a subjective experience since that would suggest that some are not processed by the brain.

Not so! It would be the case if consciousness == 'processed by the brain', but if it relies on the meaning of what is processed only that which means subjective experience has occurred is an experience. Everything else does not mean experience.

Why would 'processed by the brain' == subjective experience? How would that work?

surreptitious57 wrote: But if everything that is experienced has to pass through the thalamus for processing then nothing is going to be disregarded. It may be that the brain has to function as a filter in being able to distinguish between stimuli that need a response and stimuli that do not. As it cannot distinguish in advance then it has to process all information it receives from sense perception even if some or most of it does not require a response beyond simple recognition. But that would still qualify as a subjective experience regardless of whether it registered as conscious or not. Otherwise that would suggest that not all sense perception is conscious experience. Since all perception is conscious [ and subjective ] experience by definition then that cannot be so.

I disagree. It is no 'by definition' according to any definition I recognise. What definition are you using?

surreptitious57 wrote:This is why I think that consciousness is on a single spectrum. The problem with the dichotomy of conscious and unconscious is there is no clear demarcation between these two.

I think is quite possible that there is as much demarcation between the two as between apples and oranges or light and dark.

surreptitious57 wrote:If a particular sense perception for example does not register a specific response from the brain is that conscious or unconscious ?

You would have to ask the brain in question. You might need a very sophisticated map/model to read the answer.

surreptitious57 wrote: It could actually qualify as both under such a model. But since all perception is by definition conscious then logically there can be no such thing as the unconscious.

Ah, all conscious perception is conscious by definition, which is a trivial tautology, but not all responses in sensory cortices are necessarily conscious. Again, see blindsight, priming.

surreptitious57 wrote:

kennyc wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not require any response beyond a simple
recognition of the experience itself. They can be regarded as examples of attention without awareness. And
there are sense experiences that do require a response beyond simple recognition. They can be regarded as
as examples of attention with awareness. The two are therefore not always synonymous only sometimes so

Not sure I would tie it to requiring a response but the two certainly different and certainly related to consciousness unconsciousness sensory operation. There are also responses to sensory input that are non-conscious such as heart
beat/rate and bloodpressure, breathing and knee-jerk reactions, that last one applying to a lot of what SOS says

The purpose of automatic motor functions such as breathing and pulse is to perform what is necessary to keep the body alive so whether one is aware of them or not is irrelevant as long as they are functioning correctly. But the brain is aware of them because if the health of the body becomes compromised it has to either process information to reverse that or to provide the mechanism by which it can correct the malfunction itself. It would not be able to do this it was not aware of the difference between normal and abnormal breathing and pulse. Generally one is not aware of their breathing or pulse if they are normal because there is no danger to the body so the brain does not process information regarding that as it would not be necessary

That is an example of what some are calling unconscious processing. Working out what is a normal pattern, and bringing something to conscious awareness, attracting involuntary attention, when an anomaly occurs.

It is this sort of coming to mind that is at the heart of this discussion. How could it come to mind if it was already in consciousness? If not already in mind then why label it conscious experience?

It seems a major difficulty here is that we can't help thinking of complex responses as consciously driven. If you respond to a stimulus it must be because you experienced it and then consciously responded. If a roomba reached the skirting and changes direction we could say it was 'aware of the skirting' or that 'it tries to avoid collisions' but do you suppose that it has any subjective experience of what it's like to touch the skirting or what it's like to turn around?

If you think consciousness is a continuum does it not extend to mechanical switches? If not , why not? I've suggested what I think are strong reasons why we should not consider a switch to be having subjective experiences.

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:If you are walking around, irritated, looking all over the house for your car keys. How many distinct visual scenes do we have in such an endeavor? Maybe a thousand. Consider what consciousness if for in the first place. You can SEE. Doesn't mean you are going to stop on every little blob and ask a question is that my set of keys. In fact stopping on every blob would take you weeks.

That's the point! We don't use consciousness for that. We can do, on occasion, but as you say its very slow. If we have to experience all the details to find something it's very inefficient. If you are looking for something move your view over areas where it might be and it may just pop out. Then you see it! There is no conscious blob matching. When that happens it isn't that your keys just jumped into view. It's that you suddenly notice them. You suddenly become aware of them. You suddenly begin experiencing seeing of keys. Searching for Lost keys aren't the best example here. Just look at any unfamiliar scene and you keep seeing new things in it.

Are you really trying to argue that doesn't happen?

You are still making attention synonymous with awareness. Not surprising, it's how this whole mess got started in the first place. What is surprising is the fervor with which good physicalists hold on to the myth.

Given that we are both using a notion of diffuse attention, not a singular strand exclusive version, just what distinction do you, or Baars, make between them? (Remember that Baars had quite a bit to say about the unconscious in GWT)

I don't care about arguing each little thing one of my heroes may have been wrong about. GW is pretty old theory and he may well be re-phrasing and re-thinking it all today. Fuster, a bigger hero, uses the unconscious mythology. (Fuster is working on the Fifth edition of his text book The Prefrontal Cortex, easier than ever to understand he says. )

Okay. Attention takes a bit of time. Like 1-300 msecs. In order to remember something even a second later it must be an object of this thalamic feedback exchange or it simply will not be recalled. SO!!! Pwease! direct your ATTENTION to this> Because of this fact you have no idea that you WERE or WERE NOT aware of those little patches of color a moment ago. You have no clue what you were experiencing when looking for your keys. There is no methodology either introspective or scientific for accessing this information. If you are experiencing billions of bits of visual information the best you will have as residue is a general feeling of seeing some complex shit. How many ways can you fail to respond to the charge that you have zero evidence?

Now I had hoped to address this with my orange part a little more carefully but things are getting away from us. There is another thing that happens to us when we are staring fixedly at a scene like my bookshelf. I think it the thing that philosophers mean when they say consciousness. Particularly the ineffable (is the origin of that unfuckable/in-F-able?).

There is a building of the persistence systems across the thalamus and several other systems as well as the base ultra-fast memory of the neuron, that constructs architectonic scenes. These are well extended in time and candidates for slightly longer term memory but they will fade too after just a few seconds. They are certainly candidates of selection of parts.

But all of this is continuous with the fleeting moments of our perception and it is simply impossible to draw a line around these gestalt unattended, unreportable, and unknowable bits.

What I like about where I am currently going with this is that it fades right into an eliminative view of momentary consciousness which has always made sense to me. There is a reason why it takes 200 msecs and it's not because it takes that long to jump across a network. It's because there is no such thing as an experience in the moment.

GrahamH wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not
require any response beyond a simple recognition of the experience itself

then why are those sense events experiences

These words are really problematic in such a discussion as this

All perception is experience in itself regardless of whether one is conscious of it or not. The alternative to it would be to suggest that only some perception qualifies as experience which cannot be so for all perception is processed by the brain which responds according to what that is. And that includes responses which are only recognition of the experience itself

Language is indeed problematic in discussions such as this as the thing being discussed [ consciousness / unconsciousness ] is not something that can be externally observed for it is an entirely internal process. And as such it is going to be subjectively interpreted as the best means of doing so is through language. Which is unfortunately an imperfect medium for such a topic

surreptitious57 wrote:

kennyc wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not require any response beyond a simple
recognition of the experience itself. They can be regarded as examples of attention without awareness. And
there are sense experiences that do require a response beyond simple recognition. They can be regarded as
as examples of attention with awareness. The two are therefore not always synonymous only sometimes so

Not sure I would tie it to requiring a response but the two certainly different and certainly related to consciousness unconsciousness sensory operation. There are also responses to sensory input that are non-conscious such as heart
beat/rate and bloodpressure, breathing and knee-jerk reactions, that last one applying to a lot of what SOS says

The purpose of automatic motor functions such as breathing and pulse is to perform what is necessary to keep the body alive so whether one is aware of them or not is irrelevant as long as they are functioning correctly. But the brain is aware of them because if the health of the body becomes compromised it has to either process information to reverse that or to provide the mechanism by which it can correct the malfunction itself. It would not be able to do this it was not aware of the difference between normal and abnormal breathing and pulse. Generally one is not aware of their breathing or pulse if they are normal because there is no danger to the body so the brain does not process information regarding that as it would not be necessary

All I'm saying is the brain RESPONDS to certain sensory inputs without consciousness.
They are not irrelevant in the context of this thread. They are 'unconscious thoughts.'

GrahamH wrote:It seems a major difficulty here is that we can't help thinking of complex responses as consciously driven. If you respond to a stimulus it must be because you experienced it and then consciously responded. If a roomba reached the skirting and changes direction we could say it was 'aware of the skirting' or that 'it tries to avoid collisions' but do you suppose that it has any subjective experience of what it's like to touch the skirting or what it's like to turn around?

If you think consciousness is a continuum does it not extend to mechanical switches? If not , why not? I've suggested what I think are strong reasons why we should not consider a switch to be having subjective experiences.

And thermostats!

The majority of human thought is NOT the consequence of consciousness. For me, most human thought is the hallmark of 'droneness'. A situation in which a 'receptacle' accepts how it should think and then uses its functions to parrot those thoughts.

The problem with this thread, is that it should have been named The Mythical Conscious Thought.

Consciousness eludes most people, it has to be said.

jamest wrote:The majority of human thought is NOT the consequence of consciousness. For me, most human thought is the hallmark of 'droneness'. A situation in which a 'receptacle' accepts how it should think and then uses its functions to parrot those thoughts.

The problem with this thread, is that it should have been named The Mythical Conscious Thought.

Consciousness eludes most people, it has to be said.

However, you're apparently employing some idiosyncratic and elitist definition of consciousness, whereby only you and a special few are conscious. Here we're all talking about experience, attention, how we are (or how we become) aware of stuff. That kind of thing.

I don't think anyone is going to take you up on your version here. Start a new thread, maybe.

GrahamH wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

kennyc wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
There are sense experiences which when processed by the brain do not require any response beyond a simple
recognition of the experience itself. They can be regarded as examples of attention without awareness. And
there are sense experiences that do require a response beyond simple recognition. They can be regarded as
as examples of attention with awareness. The two are therefore not always synonymous only sometimes so

Not sure I would tie it to requiring a response but the two certainly different and certainly related to consciousness unconsciousness sensory operation. There are also responses to sensory input that are non-conscious such as heart
beat/rate and bloodpressure, breathing and knee-jerk reactions, that last one applying to a lot of what SOS says

The purpose of automatic motor functions such as breathing and pulse is to perform what is necessary to keep the body alive so whether one is aware of them or not is irrelevant as long as they are functioning correctly. But the brain is aware of them because if the health of the body becomes compromised it has to either process information to reverse that or to provide the mechanism by which it can correct the malfunction itself. It would not be able to do this it was not aware of the difference between normal and abnormal breathing and pulse. Generally one is not aware of their breathing or pulse if they are normal because there is no danger to the body so the brain does not process information regarding that as it would not be necessary

That is an example of what some are calling unconscious processing. Working out what is a normal pattern
and bringing something to conscious awareness, attracting involuntary attention, when an anomaly occurs

It is this sort of coming to mind that is at the heart of this discussion. How could it come to mind
if it was already in consciousness? If not already in mind then why label it conscious experience?

So called involuntary responses where one reacts to a particular situation without apparently thinking about it are actually false and demonstrably so too. The reason for this is because no conscious response can be completely instinctive because that would suggest brain function to be non existent in particular situations. Which is evidently impossible for all motor responses are controlled by it and have to be processed before they can be enacted. The illusion of involuntary response arises because the time scale involved cannot be comprehended within ordinary human perception because it is so small

The problem with the dichotomy of conscious and unconscious is that there is no clear demarcation between the two even assuming for the sake of argument that the latter actually exists. We know that consciousness exists but do not know that unconsciousness does so it is not an illogical assumption to presume that everything exists on a single spectrum. But this is essentially a problem pertaining to language since there is no real dispute regarding any of the various types of experiences just how they should be classified. But having said that a spectrum of consciousness which incorporates the entire range of perception and experience and processing is more realistic given that the so called unconscious experiences have to exist in some form or other so would fall somewhere within that spectrum anyway

Matthew Shute wrote:

jamest wrote:The majority of human thought is NOT the consequence of consciousness. For me, most human thought is the hallmark of 'droneness'. A situation in which a 'receptacle' accepts how it should think and then uses its functions to parrot those thoughts.

The problem with this thread, is that it should have been named The Mythical Conscious Thought.

Consciousness eludes most people, it has to be said.

However, you're apparently employing some idiosyncratic and elitist definition of consciousness, whereby only you and a special few are conscious. Here we're all talking about experience, attention, how we are (or how we become) aware of stuff. That kind of thing.

I don't think anyone is going to take you up on your version here. Start a new thread, maybe.

Only when the parrot questions his words, does he cease to be a parrot. (Eric Cantona, probably, sometime during the 90s).

jamest wrote:The majority of human thought is NOT the consequence of consciousness. For me, most human thought is the hallmark of 'droneness'. A situation in which a 'receptacle' accepts how it should think and then uses its functions to parrot those thoughts.

The problem with this thread, is that it should have been named The Mythical Conscious Thought.

Consciousness eludes most people, it has to be said.

All's fair in love, war and philosophy apparently, just don't claim it is science!

surreptitious57 wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:

kennyc wrote:
Not sure I would tie it to requiring a response but the two certainly different and certainly related to consciousness unconsciousness sensory operation. There are also responses to sensory input that are non-conscious such as heart
beat/rate and bloodpressure, breathing and knee-jerk reactions, that last one applying to a lot of what SOS says

The purpose of automatic motor functions such as breathing and pulse is to perform what is necessary to keep the body alive so whether one is aware of them or not is irrelevant as long as they are functioning correctly. But the brain is aware of them because if the health of the body becomes compromised it has to either process information to reverse that or to provide the mechanism by which it can correct the malfunction itself. It would not be able to do this it was not aware of the difference between normal and abnormal breathing and pulse. Generally one is not aware of their breathing or pulse if they are normal because there is no danger to the body so the brain does not process information regarding that as it would not be necessary

That is an example of what some are calling unconscious processing. Working out what is a normal pattern
and bringing something to conscious awareness, attracting involuntary attention, when an anomaly occurs

It is this sort of coming to mind that is at the heart of this discussion. How could it come to mind
if it was already in consciousness? If not already in mind then why label it conscious experience?

So called involuntary responses where one reacts to a particular situation without apparently thinking about it are actually false and demonstrably so too. The reason for this is because no conscious response can be completely instinctive because that would suggest brain function to be non existent in particular situations.

Now That is a false dichotomy.

The categories are not conscious vs. Instinctive. Its experiential vs. Non-experiential. It's about whether any and all brain function is worsened in conscious experience or not.

surreptitious57 wrote:
Which is evidently impossible for all motor responses are controlled by it and have to be processed before they can be enacted.

If you are equating brain processing with conscious experiencing you should try to make a car for why that should be so. How could it be that neuronal spiking is subjective experience?

surreptitious57 wrote:
The illusion of involuntary response arises because the time scale involved cannot be comprehended within ordinary human perception because it is so small.

If it is not consciously known to you why call it subjective experience?

surreptitious57 wrote:
The problem with the dichotomy of conscious and unconscious is that there is no clear demarcation between the two even assuming for the sake of argument that the latter actually exists. We know that consciousness exists but do not know that unconsciousness does so it is not an illogical assumption to presume that everything exists on a single spectrum. But this is essentially a problem pertaining to language since there is no real dispute regarding any of the various types of experiences just how they should be classified. But having said that a spectrum of consciousness which incorporates the entire range of perception and experience and processing is more realistic given that the so called unconscious experiences have to exist in some form or other so would fall somewhere within that spectrum anyway

I have various reasons why I think 'it's a continuum' doesn't make sense. You don't seem to have answered any of those.

SpeedOfSound wrote:

zoon wrote:

SpeedOfSound wrote:

GrahamH wrote:

If you see something you have access, but just looking at it does not guarantee that you will see it. So what's the difference between looking at and seeing?

This is a very good example of how the ghost in the machine is still lurking deep within how we structure language and our thinking.

What makes you think that this is a valid distinction?

In ordinary usage, an unconscious thought process occurs when a person acts in some way that is clearly under the control of their brain, but that person cannot talk about what they are doing, they don’t have introspective access to that process. It seems to me that this is an operationally useful distinction, rather than a fundamental one; but it is useful, it’s not nonsense. An example of that definition is here:...

But here is the THING. Neither do you have introspective and reporting access to all of what you ARE conscious of. Why is it that no one wants to have this discussion when quite clearly no one has evidence against my claim. In order to know what it is you are not conscious of you MUST know precisely what you ARE conscious of. Try the finger thumping experiment above and se how it plays out for you.

but that person cannot talk about what they are doing,

Well put. And the beginning of how it all goes wrong. You can make the mistake of claiming an identity relationship between what I remember and what I can report all day long and I am not going to buy it without clear evidence.

I'm not claiming an identity relationship; on the contrary, I'm saying that it's sometimes useful to distinguish between things which I can report on, and things which I cannot report on but still remember in the sense that I act on them, as in priming? The word "unconscious" is useful in the latter case? - are you saying that you prefer the term "implicit memory" or something?

GrahamH wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:
The problem with the dichotomy of conscious and unconscious is that there is no clear demarcation between the two even assuming for the sake of argument that the latter actually exists. We know that consciousness exists but do not know that unconsciousness does so it is not an illogical assumption to presume that everything exists on a single spectrum. But this is essentially a problem pertaining to language since there is no real dispute regarding any of the various types of experiences just how they should be classified. But having said that a spectrum of consciousness which incorporates the entire range of perception and experience and processing is more realistic given that the so called unconscious experiences have to exist in some form or other so would fall somewhere within that spectrum anyway

I have various reasons why I think it's a continuum doesn't make sense. You don't seem to have answered any of those

With the possible exception of a coma state the brain will be functioning for all of the lifespan of the host body it is in. That means that it is in a continuous state of processing sense perception and evaluating what if any is the required response to that. Given this and also that it has to process a multiplicity of sense perceptions simultaneously and that consciousness is itself on a spectrum even if you think that unconsciousness also exists it is next to impossible to specify which experiences are conscious and which are not. The so called unconscious experiences still have to be processed by the brain just like all responses to sense perceptions have to be regardless of whether the host is aware of them or not

You mentioned a switch as an analogy. This is misleading as it is a binary system that has only two functions : on and off. But the brain is not like that because it is organic not mechanical and is therefore a more complex operating system. Switches do not actually experience consciousness anyway so the analogy fails in that respect too. A far better one would be a computer but even that would not be entirely accurate as it is merely a more advanced version of a switch in as much as it has superior functioning capability but cannot perform tasks independently. Unlike human beings which can as they are not programmed like that. The brain is plastic so evolves over time unlike individual mechanical or electrical systems which do not. You also mentioned apples and oranges which are of course organic but have no multiplicity of function and cannot be programmed like a computer so that analogy is not particularly relevant either

You say that you do not believe there is a single spectrum of consciousness so where specifically then is the divide between conciousness and unconsciousness ? If you cannot answer that simple question then your argument is invalid from that point on. I reference consciousness as all brain activity that is a specific response to sense perception regardless of whether the host is aware of it or not. Non awareness does not mean it has not happened but that the brain has no reason to inform the host because it would be superfluous to requirement. I am therefore not employing a definition of consciousness as some thing that the host is aware of but something that the brain is aware of and which are therefore not the same thing

The thalamus is responsible for regulating consciousness and as it is a specific region of the brain it logically follows that the brain itself ultimately regulates it and this includes everywhere on the spectrum including what you label as unconsciousness But in doing so you then have to specify where the actual divide is between the two as I have already stated. Which may be somewhat hard to do given that the brain does not go on and off like the switch of your false analogy. A far better one would be a dimmer which increases or reduces in intensity but never actually goes off until the very end