Brain Physiology, Cognition and Consciousness group: topic
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'Consciousness' not the optimal focus of inquiry
Anthony Sebastian
Friday, 17 October 2008 00:53 UTC
It seems to me that consciousness does not exist in reality except as a nominalization of a physiological activity that humans perform. The noun abstracts or reifies the physiological activity performed.
It seems to me we should focus inquiry on the physiological activity that a human living system performs in a way that gives rise to experiencing events of reality consciously. ‘Consciously’ characterizes the quality of the performance of the physiological activity, just as gracefully may characterize the quality of the performance of the physiological activity of dancing.
Updated 17 October 2008 00:54 UTC
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Replies
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Dear Anthony,
I have sympathy with your concern that consciousness should not be treated as a reified entity, type of stuff or thing. We should no more search for it as a separate stuff as we should search for happi-ness or lazi-ness. However, any attempt to explain what it is we are trying to understand inevitably ascribes ontological roles to the words we use in a way that depends on what one’s ontological view is and unless this is made explicit we can go round in circles just as much as before. The problem with saying that we perform physiological acts consciously is that this could mean that we are aware of the performing, which is obviously not right. Moreover, consciously is not truly analogous to the gracefully of dancing because it invokes a different viewpoint (first rather than third person). It is true that we say ‘he is consciously doing up his shoelace’ but ‘consciously’ is here an inferred characteristic that we may be misconceiving badly. Since the interesting task is to try and found out how we should be conceiving it, maybe we need to be careful about such talk. I am also uneasy about the idea that consciousness relates to some ‘physiological activity a human performs’. I worry partly because performing tends to imply the ill-defined notion of agency. I also worry because we have reason to believe that the any ‘activities performed consciously’ are preformed not by a human but by very small subdomains of a human.
So in once sense I am all in favour of a search for consciousness being a search for physiological processes in brains that ‘unfold in a conscious way’. I am less comfortable with the idea that these processes are something that ‘people do’, but that may well not have been implied.
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Dear Anthony and welcome here,
you wrote:“It seems to me that consciousness does not exist in reality except as a nominalization of a physiological activity that humans perform. The noun abstracts or reifies the physiological activity performed.”
I should rather say: if there is a reality, then it is our consciousness. Everything else may be unreal or deception, but consciousness cannot – unless we violate logic, experience and everything else we value as scientists – be unreal!
Through consciousness we are aware of whatsoever we are aware of. There is a great terminological, theoretical mess about consciousness. The more I look at what people think and write about it, the more mess I come across, but the basic of consciousness is a fact similar to the fact that we have a body, are alive and some day will die.
I think there are philosophers who have put consciousness on the “other” side of being. Leaving just the two to take the scene. That view is quite correct in my opinion. Without consciousness being may still be the case, but who would witness it? Who would know it?
After an acknoledgement of this kind, I think much can be considered and I think psychological consideration should happen in the first place, to clarify how we as human beings are aware of different contents and how we manage.
More understanding of this kind: how our consciousness works bears chances to change our life for the better.
Yours friendly
Hans -
Han, Ricke states:
.." I think there are philosophers who have put consciousness on the “other” side of being. Leaving just the two to take the scene. That view is quite correct in my opinion. Without consciousness being may still be the case, but who would witness it? Who would know it?"..
That is the ole strong anthropic principle, if I recall correctly, i.e. what is the point/purpose of universe’s existence if there is no awareness of it?
Reality moves a meter because it is physical/energy ergo energetic.
Abstract concepts of mind do not move a meter, because, they energyless ergo not real aka imagine.
Humans complex consciousness is real and imagined.
Hans, I would ask you to “think about it”, however, that might involve recall imagi-nation of real energetic visual, tactile, audio and olfatory events.
Universe and humans have no purpose, except as that purpose assigned to them by human conceptual reasoning faculties, which may involve complex mathematics of mind.
Rybo
Rybo
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“Out of the multitude of our sense experiences we take, mentally and arbitrarily, certain repeatedly occurring complexes of sense impression […] we attribute to them a meaning — the meaning of the bodily object. Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind. On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.”
- Einstein -
ALL sensory experience is filtered by the neurology and the filtering methodology imposes all meanings in the form of abstractions covering the generic categories of wholeness, partness, static relatedness (sharing of space) and dynamic relatedness (sharing of time). Composite forms follow.
Brain oscillations reflect mediation dynamics and accompany the sensation of consciousness and so equate consciousness with mediation (and that includes the presence/development of language given some depth in self-referencing of the neurology)
Libet´s work shows the presence of awareness when learning a new habit/instinct (and so an accompanying delay in behaviour) and the disappearance of that awareness (and delay) once the learning is completed.
Synaesthesia shows the confusion of senses when adapting to context but the maintaining of the sense of whole/part etc despite the confusion – where such sense comes out of the neurology filtering.
The overall bias in the neurology is to self-referencing the differentiate/integrate dichotomy where a dimension of categories is formed. Isomorphic to these is the dimension of linguistic categories derived from self-referencing the noun/verb dichotomy.
Nominalisation/denominalisation is a property of these dichotomies and brings out the object/relationship dynamic manifest in the neurology. When the dichotomies are self-referenced the dimension of categories derived reflects all of the POSSIBLE meanings attributable to ANY concept – consciousness included.
Thus we can focus on a spectrum of states all covering ¨consciousness" but none being such, all being parts of such. Thus consciousness is IMPLIED and we get closer to an explicit identification the more self-referencing we do to derive distinctions used to communicate, to mediate, and so ´be’ conscious. (when mediation stops, so does consciousness and we fall back on instincts/habits and so autopilot)
Chris.
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