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Consciousness
Sep. 8th, 2011 04:41 pmIt fascinates me. It is the life that is lived. It is the life that a mind-ful robot could have and a mind-less plant could not. And while aspects of consciousness can be explained as the processes of modelling our surroundings and making our decisions, the central aspect, the qualia, cannot be explained so simply. To explain our qualia is aplty called the hard problem of consciousness.
Now some explain the hard problem away, denying that qualia exist or have any significance, or declaring that qualia emerge, somehow, from mind-less interactions among mind-less matter.
Our qualia are our awareness of awareness. To deny our qualia is to deny our first observation of observation, and uproot everything we have based on observation. To deny our qualia is to have our modern world-view eat the discoveries which mothered that world-view.
Now my suspicion is that qualia are fundamental. In other words, I suspect that one or another form of philosophical idealism is true, though I do not commit myself to any one form.
For years I'd supposed each consciousness was complete-in-itself, aware of its physical surrounding, but not created by those surroundings nor vulnerable to destruction by those surroundings. An old idea.
But now, for the past several months, I have been thinking it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that our consciousness emerges from the interactions of other conscious beings. That it emerges from the rudimentary consciousnesses of the cells of our body, and that these emerge from more fundamental consciousnesses. In the end, basic particles may have some minimal awareness. Like Leibnizian monads, but without his other assumptions. Now with most interactions, these still-hypothetical minimal awarenesses would cancel each other out, and would have no effect at human scales. So a stone has no mind of its own. But with some few arrangements, these would allow something more to emerge. So a human being does have a mind of her own. And these arrangements are adaptive for many living creatures. But these arrangements are fragile, and death is real.
Now some explain the hard problem away, denying that qualia exist or have any significance, or declaring that qualia emerge, somehow, from mind-less interactions among mind-less matter.
Our qualia are our awareness of awareness. To deny our qualia is to deny our first observation of observation, and uproot everything we have based on observation. To deny our qualia is to have our modern world-view eat the discoveries which mothered that world-view.
Now my suspicion is that qualia are fundamental. In other words, I suspect that one or another form of philosophical idealism is true, though I do not commit myself to any one form.
For years I'd supposed each consciousness was complete-in-itself, aware of its physical surrounding, but not created by those surroundings nor vulnerable to destruction by those surroundings. An old idea.
But now, for the past several months, I have been thinking it is also possible, and perhaps more likely, that our consciousness emerges from the interactions of other conscious beings. That it emerges from the rudimentary consciousnesses of the cells of our body, and that these emerge from more fundamental consciousnesses. In the end, basic particles may have some minimal awareness. Like Leibnizian monads, but without his other assumptions. Now with most interactions, these still-hypothetical minimal awarenesses would cancel each other out, and would have no effect at human scales. So a stone has no mind of its own. But with some few arrangements, these would allow something more to emerge. So a human being does have a mind of her own. And these arrangements are adaptive for many living creatures. But these arrangements are fragile, and death is real.
