Fear of death.

i'll agree on that but awareness is tough to demonstrate

but "consciousness" behaving differently from any other known organic process, it being "special" for no other reason than it can't be measured, it knowing when to leap from it's tethers and exist infinitely, apart from matter and energy as we know them, that seems plausible to you?

awareness is an aspect of consciousness, yes. you were conflating them awhile back, and at first i thought you were wrong to do so but now i'm not so sure. consciousness disappears when you sleep, or (practically) when you put LSD into the electrochemical system it springs from. then it reappears once those reactions start firing as they normally do when you experience consciousness.

awareness seems to have a more clearly defined threshold -- if something reacts consistently in response to a stimulus, that is evidence of awareness of that stimulus.

I think it's reasonable to conflate awareness and consciousness until someone can come up with an example where awareness and consciousness are not for all practical applications synonymous.

when people suffer brain injuries and have a new version of consciousness, what happened to the old one? is it still out there somewhere? it knew to mosey on out once that spike came plowing through the skull? but it left some of the consciousness behind, right? so just parts of that old consciousness are floating around in the ether?

if something reacts consistently in response to a stimulus, that is evidence of awareness of that stimulus.

like late great said, it can be hard to demonstrate awareness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome

split brain injuries reveal multiple awarenesses competing for control of the body, but more tellingly, that these awareness mechanisms were never the synthetic whole they appeared to be in the first place.

re: locked-in syndrome, you only need one black swan to prove the existence of a black swan.

and if you flip the script on locked-in syndrome as applying to the observer, that is an argument that many more things are probably aware than what we commonly think of as aware.

I think it's reasonable to conflate awareness and consciousness until someone can come up with an example where awareness and consciousness are not for all practical applications synonymous.

sometimes i think it doesn't bode well for our species' ability to philosophise if we can't even precisely define our basic terms.

anyway i've always used them interchangeably, but i kinda like to think of them in three stages: consciousness or awareness of the world, awareness of self, and awareness of awareness. but really that doesn't help nail done exactly what it is in any of those cases to be aware or conscious.

the trouble is that we can't get outside of consciousness to describe it 'objectively'. it's the opposite parable of the blind men trying to describe the elephant - we're stuck inside the elephant.

excellent point

which ties into this:

because consciousness is *special* duh

― the late great, Friday, September 28, 2012 2:37 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's special because you can't measure it with a flashlight or a stethoscope

― the late great, Friday, September 28, 2012 2:38 AM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's special to US. there's no reason to think the universe views it as special. Can love be measured with an instrument? Can you quantify it? No, right? So it's also special and so probably continues on after death, right? My love for tacos, just chilling out in the cosmos for infinity.

Nah I actually think it is special. The reason it can't be measured objectively is because it's not an objective phenomenon. The reason we can't get outside of it is because it's not the kind of thing that can be got outside of. (But special and magical though I think it is, I don't think that's enough warrant to consider it likely or even very plausible that it continues after death, considering the evidence on the other side.)

i thought the reason it couldn't be measured was it was a verb more than a noun.
like you can't really measure running, but you can measure the distance covered within a timespan, just like you can't measure awareness, but you can show that X is aware of Y.

But wait, can't it be measured? Don't fMRI and other measures of brain activity show "consciousness"? I would say they do, but that some people are inclined to go "nope sorry, you haven't got it, there has to be more to it than that". So an essential part of its nature to them is "something that cannot be measured". Well ok, yes, I surely can't measure something that is defined as "something that cannot be measured".

it's true, some people believe in ghosts

There's a difference between experience and measurement, right? Ok maybe in the future you will be able to look into my brain and measure what I am experiencing, but that's not the same as actually experiencing it. That's what the old Mary the Neuroscientist story tries to demonstrate. You can know all there is to know about how the brain is responsible for the mind, exactly what kind of neurons wiggling in what kind of way are responsible for an experience of the colour red; but if you've never actually seen red yourself you're still missing out on something.

I think you can detect it but measuring implies a scalar aspect to awareness that doesn't seem right. you can measure numerical limits to things you can simultaneously be aware of and stuff like that.

ok but how do you feel about the measuring/detecting vs. experiencing distinction? i think you were one of the people upthread who had difficulty seeing why this is a problem, and i really want to figure out why!

it's not a problem in the sense that the observable world around you is essentially a black box anyway, so if you say that another human being is conscious, you're doing so on the basis of measurement/detection, so why not extend the same courtesy/suspicion to any other candidate for consciousness, including and especially oneself?

because i have a priviliged perspective on my own consciousness.

given how people routinely overestimate their perceptual and attentive abilities, wouldn't you give this perspective a bit less credence to compensate?

i feel like there's a whole bunch of concepts being smooshed together here. knowledge of one's own consciousness (infallible). knowledge of one's conscious abilities (e.g extent of visual field, colour discrimination etc) (of varying fallibility). knowledge of the nature of one's consciousness (if you have this you win philosophy).

does consciousness seem so much more mysterious than any other biological activity? really simple organisms have evolved to live in a world that's constituted by, say, light and whatever serves as sustenance for them, and they respond and act accordingly, in ways that we can pretty well understand. thinking through the very low-level basis for this is obv p difficult, but then it doesn't seem like a huge qualitative leap to say that when this is massively multiplied into a system that is embedded in its environment in as complex as the human body is then we're going to get some weird epiphenomena as a result.

look upthread for all that discussion. in short consciousness is qualitatively way way weirder than any other biological phenomenon.

imo

knowledge of one's own consciousness (infallible)
this seems particularly fallible with regards to memory -- at any given instant you can totally forget where you are where you're going etc, what you were thinking, just total brain fart.

but if at any point i think i am conscious i can't be wrong.

to some extent at every point you think "you are conscious" you're going to be wrong because there will be some aspect of consciousness not covered by that thought going on.

I think about the most accurate self-reportage one could ever say is, "I'm awake right now, mostly, sort of. Now I'm hungry"

i don't really see this assertion that consciousness is way weirder than other biological phenomena? even with really simple animals you have what appears to be some kind of unified system acting within a bigger environment in a way that can't really be explained in brute physical terms - biology's working on a different plane than physics and our modes of understanding how things function on those planes are kinda analytically irreconcilable. getting from that kind of apparently unified system to the apparently unified system that is consciousness (both unified systems that, for as unified and stable as they seem, are always on the brink of being blown to pieces) seems like a huge leap but in a specific direction, rather into some new territory entirely.

xxp isn't that a bit like saying "calling a tree green will always be wrong because there will be some aspect of the tree that isn't green?" ok consciousness is a complex multifacted phenomenon that we can't even propery describe but i don't see what's wrong in using a loose, general term for the whole thing in that way.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

what I mean is if people were accurate at apprehending their internal
mental states then a lot of therapists would be out of a job.

Basically if you think you're conscious at any given moment, a second opinion couldn't hurt.

it would be a bit of a hammer blow to find out one wasn't.

"sorry you're a robot didn't you know"

^ robotist

i think the really fundamental characteristics of consciousness would hold for me as much if i were a leech as they do now as a human! that which seems specifically human, or human in a hugely amplified way compared to everything else, it doesn't seem hard (well, HARD, but not implausible) to extrapolate how that would emerge from a hugely complicated and dense form of a biological system.

i think the really fundamental characteristics of consciousness would hold for me as much if i were a leech as they do now as a human!

i agree.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

― Autumnal the faun (ledge), Friday, September 28, 2012 6:33 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This strikes me as being not correct. Time is pretty subjective! We can make clocks run more slowly just by putting them on airplanes!

so how does this all apply to horse_ebooks

xp different usage of subjective i daresay. clocks don't experience anything.

Does a leech have an afterlife?

xp well now you're question-begging.

Merdeyeux you're saying that we're a complicated organism so our consciousness is more complex, though not functioning differently than the varying degrees found elsewhere in biological life?
I don't know if you saw my supercomputer scenario I presented that touches on the same point. If it is advanced enough to cross the line into arguably being conscious, is it not still a computer that that consciousness is tethered to only when it is operating?

Granny thanks for explaining everything much clearer than I suspect I have this whole time.

xxp what question? how? maybe clocks have experience? yeah ok but not according to science.

If i've learned one thing it's that getting across the precise nature of what it is about consciousness that is left unexplained by science to someone who doesn't share the intuition is remarkably difficult. If I say "subjective" you bring up clocks, although that just seems like a standard physical phenomenon to me - if I turn up the gas on my cooker the pan gets hotter, is that subjective? If I say "inaccessible" you would talk about brain scans etc. Maybe "phenomenal" captures it best. Science doesn't explain the "what it is like" aspect of consciousness.

Maybe though you're disproportionately valuing it because you personally experience it.

consciousness is subjective, private, phenomenal. nothing else in biology or any other science is like that.

Even if this is true, why does that mean it operates according to different rules? It's hard to pin down, hard to measure, different from all other natural phenomena...so it must be different in virtually every way from everything else? Why? For any phenomenon that is unique in one respect, can we assume it is unique in any other respect without evidence?