If Consciousness is just a chemical reaction do you think we got Gypped?

Great Debates
21

Is your chemistry – your hormones, for example – a determining factor in part of the essence of your “spirit”? Are you just physically male or female or is there more to it than that?

And in another direction –

I know that changing my body/brain chemistry with medication changed my entire outlook on life and my personality. Am I my personality or is there another name for “who I am.” For that was what was changed. Some physical traits remain the same, but even that is noticeably different. (I’m half the size I used to be.)

Well, you certainly look disembodied to me! And you’ve goosed my funny bone any number of times. So you could fool me. Maybe you are just doing squinty things and my eyesight is really bad.

22

Julian Jaynes’ book was a little ‘out there’ when published, and was widely debunked by the then current dualist philosophers.

However, the rise of cognitive psychology and neuro-philosophy since have shown that many of his ideas are in fact supported by empirical science.

See:

Tor Nørretranders: The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size

Benjamin Libet: The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Freewill

Dan Wegner: The Illusion of Conscious Will

23

[QUOTE=Phlosphr]
… No one put it better in my opinion than Julian Jaynes …
[/quote]
I think the first section of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is perhaps the greatest masterpiece on its subject ever written (though the rest of it, of course – especially the claim that consciousness evolved in historical times – is awfully far-fetched, if not out and out pseudo-science). But I don’t understand something: You read Jaynes but still feel the need to ask this? Does not compute, my friend.

I’m reluctant to over-rely on Libet and his followers’ work, but at the moment the best evidence suggests that consciousness is essentially an excuse-making set of mental processes used to post-justify our non-conscious actions. We reach for the beer as a result of non-conscious activity, then our consciousness comes up with an excuse: “Hey, I was thirsty”.

Bye-bye free will! (although I’m still a compatibilist).

Personally, I think consciousness is also the essential element in creating and understanding metaphors, which seems to me to be the only way humans expand their higher-level knowledge and understanding. How else do we learn advanced concepts but by comparing and contrasting them to other concepts we already possess? But this means – and here I’m utterly convinced – that advanced language skills are mandatory for consciousness to exist. The idea of conscious animals seems nonsensical to me.

My bottom line on duality and consciousness? It’s all there in a prolific poster’s handle: Sentient Meat.

24

[QUOTE=CurtC]
We often think of ourselves as a body being piloted by a little man sitting at the controls in your brain, and that little man is really you, he’s your spirit.

But if that little man is really you, what’s in his head? Does it have a spirit in it too?
[/QUOTE]

Think of Super Mario Bros circa the year 3000.

By that time, Mario may have enough intelligence to be able to make some decisions on how to move about in his world, even though you still can override his decisions and make him go left, right, etc.

Basically, you may be able to give him general directions like “go over there”, and he’ll make all the necessary minor decisions as to how to get there.

If at some point he gains consciousness, he may ask “is there a little man sitting at the controls of my brain?”

The answer to that will be “yes”.

That is, there are cases when, even if we can’t answer the question ad infinitum, it may still be the case that one level up, there may be “a little man sitting at the controls of your brain”

25

[QUOTE=Polerius]
If at some point he gains consciousness, he may ask “is there a little man sitting at the controls of my brain?”
[/QUOTE]

And little men have lesser men, and so ad infinitum.

26

[QUOTE=ambushed]
I think the first section of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is perhaps the greatest masterpiece on its subject ever written (though the rest of it, of course – especially the claim that consciousness evolved in historical times – is awfully far-fetched, if not out and out pseudo-science). But I don’t understand something: You read Jaynes but still feel the need to ask this? Does not compute, my friend.
[/QUOTE]

Well, it’s been a long while since reading Jaynes, and even back then I thought it a slightly empty-headed read but a fun one. The opening which I quoted in the OP I thought then and still think is masterful in it’s innuendo and reach but hardly scholarly.

Again, us philosopher’s must stick together - or is it pit together - because someone’s got to be tasked with asking questions. And asking something you know is going to cause a little bite is half the battle, the other half is just in good fun.

On to duality: for some it is a silly concept, some of the scientific persuasion feel we are all just a mass of sentient meat reacting to our environment. However, to others, the concept of the mind and spirit drives them to seek and to live by a set of laws [read religion] and is that any more powerful than one’s need to call themselves a reacting mass of meat? No, in my opinion it’s not.

27

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
And little men have lesser men, and so ad infinitum.
[/QUOTE]

Do you have a dad? Yes
Did your dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
… <a couple billion years>
Did his dad have a dad? No

Just because a sequence doesn’t go all the way to infinity, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold for a few steps.

28

[QUOTE=Polerius]
Think of Super Mario Bros circa the year 3000.

By that time, Mario may have enough intelligence to be able to make some decisions on how to move about in his world, even though you still can override his decisions and make him go left, right, etc.

Basically, you may be able to give him general directions like “go over there”, and he’ll make all the necessary minor decisions as to how to get there.

If at some point he gains consciousness, he may ask “is there a little man sitting at the controls of my brain?”

The answer to that will be “yes”.

That is, there are cases when, even if we can’t answer the question ad infinitum, it may still be the case that one level up, there may be “a little man sitting at the controls of your brain”
[/QUOTE]
Ah, the ‘I am a video game character’ school of thought! Very nice. Now, is there any reason whatsoever to believe that this is what is actually occurring in the case of humans?

Personally, I prefer the ‘I am a character in a book’ theory: you think you have free will, a personal consciousness, and a future, but you don’t. Your ‘god’ is merely an author who deliberately designed your life with trials and tribulations for his own amusement; you aren’t even real to him. No blissful afterlife for you; if he even bothers to put you in a sequel it will be to subject you to an even higher level of trials, again for his own careless amusement. Bwahahahaha!

29

The explanation for consciousness that makes the most sense to me is pretty simple.

Our brains evolved as mechanisms for predicting the future. The first brains enable you to coordinate your actions to the environment. If I swim towards that speck and put my mouth around it, it will contain usable food. If I wiggle my fins in a particular way, I’ll move in this direction. If a bigger fish appears, swim away.

Now, early brains aren’t conscious. It’s enough to swim away from the big fish without realizing that the reason you should swim away from the big fish is so the big fish won’t eat you. The fish doesn’t realize that the speck is food, the fish simply reacts to the stimulus in such a way that the food goes into its mouth. And of course, such reactions can easily be mistaken, and you end up lunging for an angler fish’s lure. But eventually a fairly complex repertoire of reactions get built up and you get complex behavior as the animal reacts to the environment. Eventually it can be said that the organism has a mental model of the environment in its head, and can predict the consequences of actions. But even this is not consciousness.

Now add in sociality. A social organism reacts to other members of its species. And it develops a mental model of of how those social organisms will react. It learns who is friendly, who is aggressive, who is dominant, who is submissive, who wants to mate and who is likely to share food, who is angry and who is sad, and so on. This is getting close to consciousness. But in order to predict the behavior of other social animals, you have to take into account that they are attempting to predict YOUR behavior. And so your mental model of the environment, which includes a mental model of the internal state of other members of your species, must now contain a mental model of YOUR internal state. And this mental model of your internal state is what we call consciousness.

Which argues that the philosophical idea of a zombie…a person who behaves exactly like a regular person, except they don’t experience consciousness…is impossible, because unless you’ve got a mental model of your own internal states you can’t hehave like a normal person.

30

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
The explanation for consciousness that makes the most sense to me is pretty simple.

Our brains evolved as mechanisms for predicting the future. The first brains enable you to coordinate your actions to the environment. If I swim towards that speck and put my mouth around it, it will contain usable food. If I wiggle my fins in a particular way, I’ll move in this direction. If a bigger fish appears, swim away.

Now, early brains aren’t conscious. It’s enough to swim away from the big fish without realizing that the reason you should swim away from the big fish is so the big fish won’t eat you. The fish doesn’t realize that the speck is food, the fish simply reacts to the stimulus in such a way that the food goes into its mouth. And of course, such reactions can easily be mistaken, and you end up lunging for an angler fish’s lure. But eventually a fairly complex repertoire of reactions get built up and you get complex behavior as the animal reacts to the environment. Eventually it can be said that the organism has a mental model of the environment in its head, and can predict the consequences of actions. But even this is not consciousness.

Now add in sociality. A social organism reacts to other members of its species. And it develops a mental model of of how those social organisms will react. It learns who is friendly, who is aggressive, who is dominant, who is submissive, who wants to mate and who is likely to share food, who is angry and who is sad, and so on. This is getting close to consciousness. But in order to predict the behavior of other social animals, you have to take into account that they are attempting to predict YOUR behavior. And so your mental model of the environment, which includes a mental model of the internal state of other members of your species, must now contain a mental model of YOUR internal state. And this mental model of your internal state is what we call consciousness.

Which argues that the philosophical idea of a zombie…a person who behaves exactly like a regular person, except they don’t experience consciousness…is impossible, because unless you’ve got a mental model of your own internal states you can’t hehave like a normal person.
[/QUOTE]
In what way does the mere fact that you have to have a model of your own consciousness imply that you need to self-identify with that modeled consciousness? Also, if you are self-identifiying the self-model as the consciousness, isn’t there a problem in the fact that that decisions made by the self-modeled mind don’t actually control the body? (The actual, stimulus/response-trained mind does that, as you’ll recall.)

Also, I think that philophically, eating brains isn’t “behaving exactly like a regular person”… :stuck_out_tongue:
Personally, I think that a consciousness has to develop alongside more complicated actions, as a place to ‘store’ active plans about what you’re doing. The more complicated of plans you’re making, the more of a consciousness you need to store, track, and relate the thoughts you’re operating on.

31

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
The explanation for consciousness that makes the most sense to me is pretty simple.

Our brains evolved as mechanisms for predicting the future.
[/quote]

Well, for what it’s worth, this guy (warning: video) agrees.

32

[QUOTE=Polerius]
Do you have a dad? Yes
Did your dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
Did his dad have a dad? Yes
… <a couple billion years>
Did his dad have a dad? No

Just because a sequence doesn’t go all the way to infinity, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold for a few steps.
[/QUOTE]
With Mario, it’s flippin’ turtles all the way down.

33

[QUOTE=begbert2]
Personally, I think that a consciousness has to develop alongside more complicated actions, as a place to ‘store’ active plans about what you’re doing. The more complicated of plans you’re making, the more of a consciousness you need to store, track, and relate the thoughts you’re operating on.
[/QUOTE]

People like David Chalmers will say (in this case) that you are confusing mental functions with qualia, when they are two separate things. Then Daniel Dennett will then claim that they are in fact one and the same. I agree with Chalmers, FWIW.

34

[QUOTE=ambushed]
. . . advanced language skills are mandatory for consciousness to exist. The idea of conscious animals seems nonsensical to me.

[/QUOTE]

I’d question how advanced and what was meant by language. I agree that conceptualization and the manipulation of concepts to form hypotheticals is necessary, but I’m not sure it needs to be language. At least, not what most people think of when they use the word language.

35

[QUOTE=Yllaria]
I’d question how advanced and what was meant by language. I agree that conceptualization and the manipulation of concepts to form hypotheticals is necessary, but I’m not sure it needs to be language. At least, not what most people think of when they use the word language.
[/QUOTE]
From my point of view in which one key role of consciousness is to allow the creation and comprehension of metaphor, there can be no substitute for a rich universe of actual words, their deep symbolic content, the ability to “see” the webs of connection to other words, and the ability to apply abstraction at various high levels.

36

What if we are not really conscious but just think we are? That would throw a wrench in the works…