Consciousness (or "feelings") is a strange term in that on the one hand, it's quite rather hazy and hard to define. On the the other hand, one can argue that it's the singe thing that we can have the most confidence in being real ("cogito, ergo sum" and all that). I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it's best to treat consciousness as…
Consciousness (or "feelings") is a strange term in that on the one hand, it's quite rather hazy and hard to define. On the the other hand, one can argue that it's the singe thing that we can have the most confidence in being real ("cogito, ergo sum" and all that). I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it's best to treat consciousness as kind of an "atom" in our definition of the world, where it's impossible to define it in terms of other things.
Even if it there's some primitive ontological feature of the universe that maps onto "consciousness", defeating attempts at reduction, that feature behaves and interacts with other features of the universe. Actually sitting down and trying to concretely operationalize those interactions, in my experience at least, has mostly ended up dissolving the "consciousness"-labeled node in my conceptual graph.
In terms of meta-discourse, I think that that "cogito, ergo sum" mostly functions as an appeal to intuition. Sure, I too have one or more Cartesian processes in my mind making assertions like, "I exist", "I am", etc, but it's an entirely different thing to try mapping those cognitive assertions onto other features of the world.
From a pure logical perspective, *cogito, ergo sum* kind of looks like it's begging the question. Expanded out a bit, "There is an I object that performs an action called 'thinking'; therefore, the I object exists."
Perhaps more interestingly, however, is that if you treat *cogito, ergo sum* as a process instead of an epistemic assertion, it turns into something more like "I think, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore ..." ad infinitum. In other words, it behaves somewhat like a tight recursive loop, which is why it begs the question when rendered as a logical statement.
If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused, I think there's still a lot of room to ask about the phenomenology surrounding the Cartesian belief/intuition itself. Wildly speculating, if you think of the brain as a dynamical system with lots of feedback loops, it's not *entirely* surprising that you might end up in regimes where small degenerate feedback loops arise.
> If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused
Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands. 😅
Here's how I'd put it: If I were to say that rocks exist, few would criticize that statement as epistemically confused. But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to it? What does it _really_ mean for rock to exist? Maybe we should just do away with that confused concept and talk about something else.
But I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor. *All* of language is a chicken-and-egg tangle of words defined in terms of other words, with things only real grounding being the statistical patterns of how we see words being used. From that perspective, I feel like "consciousness" should be the concept with the *strongest* support, since we all experience it all the time, you know it's real even if you're living in a simulation and I'm fake, and all that.
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.
Consciousness (or "feelings") is a strange term in that on the one hand, it's quite rather hazy and hard to define. On the the other hand, one can argue that it's the singe thing that we can have the most confidence in being real ("cogito, ergo sum" and all that). I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it's best to treat consciousness as kind of an "atom" in our definition of the world, where it's impossible to define it in terms of other things.
Panemotionalism is a good word!
Even if it there's some primitive ontological feature of the universe that maps onto "consciousness", defeating attempts at reduction, that feature behaves and interacts with other features of the universe. Actually sitting down and trying to concretely operationalize those interactions, in my experience at least, has mostly ended up dissolving the "consciousness"-labeled node in my conceptual graph.
In terms of meta-discourse, I think that that "cogito, ergo sum" mostly functions as an appeal to intuition. Sure, I too have one or more Cartesian processes in my mind making assertions like, "I exist", "I am", etc, but it's an entirely different thing to try mapping those cognitive assertions onto other features of the world.
From a pure logical perspective, *cogito, ergo sum* kind of looks like it's begging the question. Expanded out a bit, "There is an I object that performs an action called 'thinking'; therefore, the I object exists."
Perhaps more interestingly, however, is that if you treat *cogito, ergo sum* as a process instead of an epistemic assertion, it turns into something more like "I think, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore ..." ad infinitum. In other words, it behaves somewhat like a tight recursive loop, which is why it begs the question when rendered as a logical statement.
If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused, I think there's still a lot of room to ask about the phenomenology surrounding the Cartesian belief/intuition itself. Wildly speculating, if you think of the brain as a dynamical system with lots of feedback loops, it's not *entirely* surprising that you might end up in regimes where small degenerate feedback loops arise.
> If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused
Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands. 😅
Here's how I'd put it: If I were to say that rocks exist, few would criticize that statement as epistemically confused. But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to it? What does it _really_ mean for rock to exist? Maybe we should just do away with that confused concept and talk about something else.
But I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor. *All* of language is a chicken-and-egg tangle of words defined in terms of other words, with things only real grounding being the statistical patterns of how we see words being used. From that perspective, I feel like "consciousness" should be the concept with the *strongest* support, since we all experience it all the time, you know it's real even if you're living in a simulation and I'm fake, and all that.
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.