Can someone prove to me that consciousness exists?
As opposed to what? Eliminativism.
The proof is psychedelics.
“You”?
Anyone in here wanna attribute meaning to the patterns of electromagnetic signals issues by striking of carpal appendages of this synapsing bio-being that sits at yonder terminal, slowly oxidizing carbon?
::AHunter3 raises his own hand, answering his own question::
Yep. I’ll accept your post as a reliable indicator that you possess consciousness. I’ll wager that even if you see some appeal in perceiving yourself, reductionlstically, as the composite sum of mechanistically causal microprocesses, you don’t find it useful or even possible to occupy that mindset, and instead find it compellingly useful and necessary to act on the assumption that your sense of yourself as a conscious being has validity.
They aren’t mutually incompatible, you know. I have a lump of petrified wood on my desk. It is simultaneously a dance being performed by rapidly-interacting electrical and quarkish processes, a chunk of solid stone, a structure of plant organelles and biotic processes frozen in time, a local microparticle of our whirling multibillionyear-old galaxy, and a host of other things each of which seems to be a complete and adequate description of reality not in need of any of the others.
I post, therefore I am.
I college I studied electronic music synthesizers. I made many compositions on an ARP2600, which was the state of the art synthesizer in the early to mid-'70s. I studied it in the late '70s. I found that the voltage controlled pitch frequency slider (everything was analog in those days), when set at the low end, like 5 Hertz, produced a sequence of discrete voltage pulses with clear intervals of silence in between. As you move the slider gradually toward higher frequencies, the pulses get so close together they run together and then seem to audibly blur or smear into a single low pitch. No matter how many times I experiemented, I could never pin down the exact moment or frequency when the manyings merged into the oneness. IIRC, it was somewhere around 20-30 Hz?
So this is how I analogically understand AHunter3’s astute remark
considering how a sum of microprocesses, like discrete voltage pulses, can seem to merge into a single entity if you take the long view, take in more at a time and perceive larger, higher-level patterns-- like a melody formed of pitches each of which is made of a sequence of micropulses. (Is that a word? Can I say “micropulses”?) Actually, I notice the same effect after studying assembler language and comparing its very mechanistic routines with the perceived effects of high-level AI. AHunter3, your argument seems almost like a reverse engineering of AI theory to apply it to the human mind.
I take your main point as, yes, you can analyze consciousness out of existence reductionistically, but what good does that do, compared with treating yourself and others as conscious, sentient beings? It’s your choice how you want to look at it.
Johanna:
Ever read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstatder?
That doesn’t constitute proof.
Erek
“Proof” is an aspect of deductive reasoning. If you want “proof” you need to give me the axioms I’m allowed to work with without having to derive them first.
Without them (and perhaps also even with them, since I don’t know which ones you would give me) I cannot “prove” consciousness exists, that I exist, that 2 + 2 = 4, that you (along with this message board, this computer monitor, and the events of my life as I seem to recall them) are not a figment of my imagination or a very detailed dream I’m having, or anything else.
Si cogitas, sentis. Duh.
Si gogitas, sentis, I would think.
cogitas.
Yes, I also read another book by Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, with an article about theoretical approaches to AI in its early days. Chewy brain candy.
What chair?
If you want us to prove that something exists, you should probably give us a good definition for it. How else are we supposed to know whether we’ve found it or not?
Well ‘proofs’ have to continue from accepted premises, and I’m not sure what premises you’ll accept.
I suppose I could get an idea from your answer to this question: what is the difference between you reading this now, and you lying on the surgeon’s table with a bunch of these simple molecules sitting in your brain?
Well I don’t know what it’s like to be under that anesthetic, but I am not convinced that I am necessarily completely unconscious while under the influence of an anesthetic.
Erek
Doesn’t this response more or less answer the question in the OP? If you are not unconscious then you must be conscious, and consciousness must be real.
This is Great Debates not General Questions.
Erek
So? This is the title of your OP–
Is there such a thing as consciousness?
It seems that you have concluded that the answer is yes. Have I misunderstood?
I am seeing if anyone can prove that there is such a thing as consciousness. Yes, I do in fact believe that there is such a thing as consciousness.
Erek