Zarbi - More amateur philosophy: Naturalism and Consciousness

Re: More amateur philosophy: Naturalism and Consciousness

Luke Vogel — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:55:36 GMT

No clue why my final sentence appears as it does, I am not conscious of any activity on my part to create such a phenomena. It may be a residual effect from copy/past Stanislas name, which I then deleted and typed in instead due to another existing problem with formatting.

It reads: "Finding related published studies by Stanislas is not difficult."

A quote from the comments might interest you further:

"The purely contingent connection between physical and phenomenal facts doesn't magically become explanatory once you swap tectonic plates for neural assemblies. The connection between unconscious physical events and there being "something that it is like" to be the totality of those events seems likely to always appear brute — and, therefore, mysterious. This has been characterized as an "explanatory gap" and as the "hard problem of consciousness," and it is surely both. Dehaene et al. seem to think that these conceptual problems will evaporate once the correlations between first-person report and third-person neurophysiology grow sufficiently tight. I do not agree."

Re: More amateur philosophy: Naturalism and Consciousness

Luke Vogel — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:49:49 GMT

Have you read this interesting work on consciousness?

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html

Careful reading is required, I think, and the follow up discussion is interesting as well. Finding related published studies by Stanislas is not difficult.

Re: More amateur philosophy: Naturalism and Consciousness

GBile — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:38:07 GMT

I consider myself a naturalist. So for me it is all brain-states, inhibition and excitation, chemicals doing their thing. Death will be the end. Occasional consciousness until that moment, then nothing.
After reading your blog it is tempting to agree: perception, dreaming, being conscious, being unconscious: that is what brains do. Nothing mysterious about it.
Considering that there are a lot of different brains in the animal kingdom, we could ask; what kind of brain (with its brain-states etc.) would be able to be conscious.
I have no answers, just more amateurish philosophy.