I do agree with the suggestion that consciousness has different definitions.
And I also very much agree that getting in touch with nature is a good thing. One of the greatest! It widens the sensory input. It widens the horizons. (How much of our lives are spent out of sight of the literal horizon! Where I am, right now, I can’t see one in any direction!)
However, one core element of the definition of consciousness is “awareness of self.” If you’re so zoned, you aren’t aware of your own self – and this can happen while reading, or watching a good movie – then you aren’t completely conscious. Immersive experiences of this sort, wherein one loses oneself, are consciousness-diminishing experiences, not consciousness-expanding ones.
Or…so I hold. For the persnickety, no, I can’t provide evidence.
All depends how you define “self”, I guess. If you are of the we-are-all-one school of thought, then perhaps “self” is the illusion, and that zoning out actually is part if the higher consciousness. Our world view influences everything we believe.
This is one of the advantages of the scientific method: it isn’t dependent on world-view.
(Well, okay, only at the very most fundamental level. The scientific method depends on such principles as “reality exists” and “cause and effect exist” and a few others.)
There you go. Even a statement like “reality exists” is a pretty big supposition, even in science. In fact, it’s such a huge premise that we take it for granted, as though it needs no further proof, when that may not be the case at all.
Take a dream, for example. While you’re dreaming, dream logic applies. Your dream-consciousness is aware of what is happening to you in the moment and you react accordingly. For all intents and purposes, your dream world IS your reality unless you can overcome it and realize that what you normally call reality is not here. You’ve been deceived by the very brain that you trust to inform on you what is real during your waking moments, unless you happen to be good at lucid dreaming—“waking up” inside if a dream with full consciousness and awareness that you are dreaming and then being able to control your dream world without waking up.
I believe that’s how it is with consciousness. When we are unconscious or semi-consciousness, we may be completely unaware of what’s really going on. Those who have been hypnotized often report a sort of awareness of what was happening to them but were incapable of doing anything about it except what they were instructed to do by the hypnotist. It’s a freaky thing to see, but it is certainly real.
I disagree with Trinopus that science even needs those things. I could still do science even if I knew I was in the Matrix. Indeed Biffster is right that we cannot be sure that any of this is real, yet it hasn’t stopped us working on science and tech.
It is true that if we found ourselves in a reality where the rules were frequently changing, then science wouldn’t be as useful as it is here, but that’s not the same as saying the universe must be real as a prerequisite.
It’s the kind of premise we take for granted because we must in order to make any sense of reality. If you reject premises like that, or the premise “my senses, under normal circumstances, give me good information”, then you’re stuck. There is nothing more you can say about reality, yourself, or anything beyond “I think, therefore I am”. There is no inference you can make, no judgment you can rely on, no nothing. I find the problem of hard solipsism to be the single most worthless and pointless distraction in all of modern philosophy. You can’t solve it, but basing any assumption on it means that you lose all recourse for, well, anything. We have to behave as though it were not the case. In the words of SMBC: “don’t be a premature nihilator”. Every single person adheres to a worldview that involves these basic assumptions of “my senses can be trusted” and “reality exists”. Those who claim not to are either lying or are going to die the moment natural selection rears its ugly head - after all, you can’t prove that that bridge is real, but that drop still ain’t gonna be pretty.
You make good points, Budget Player Cadet. However, I think it can fairly certainly be established that in many cases our senses can’t always be trusted. Take sight, for example. When I see a sunset, I assume that what I see when that last gleam of light dip below the horizon, it establishes the end of a day, at least in my time zone. Thing is, what I’m seeing is an afterimage; relative to me, the sun actually set 8 minutes prior to what I perceive, because that’s how long it takes the sun’s rays to reach the earth from that distance. Eight light minutes. The sun is actually further along its arc than what I see. Technically speaking, it’s actually me that’s moving, but that’s another story.
Now, of course, it has always been thus for as long as there have been humans to observe it, but nonetheless, whenever I look at the sun, I am actually seeing an illusion. So are you. For all intents and purposes, we just go with it, but it is an example if how we trust one of our senses even when it is not giving us exactly true information.
And of course the Sun is actually even further below the horizon than that, due to refraction; see
But there are many other, far more misleading, illusions that lay in wait for the observer. The Moon illusion, rainbows (everybody sees a different rainbow), sundogs, parhelia, autokinesis; there are an abundance of possible causes of error when observing the sky, and the eye cannot always be trusted.
This unreliability can be extended to all everyday observations, in anumber of different ways; our eyes only have a tiny region of full detailed resolution, the fovea, near the middle, and the rest of our field of vision is constantly constructed by our eye-brain system on the fly, like a simulation.
We can never trust the evidence of our senses, but paradoxically they are almost always the best tool we have with which to examine our environment.
A paradox indeed. And what was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? When we observe things, the behaviour of the things we observe change…or something to that effect. Seems realty might be a whole lot less “real” than what we assume it to be.
Well, “reality is a lot less real” than we perceive it to be – that’s been true since the discovery of the nucleus of the atom. That solid metal teaspoon you use to stir your coffee is an airy, light, hollow confection, 99% empty space. A cloud of steam is “more solid.”
The comforting thing about quantum weirdness is that it (usually) occurs on a scale we can’t perceive. Imagine if superposition of particles occurred at the level of, say, billiard balls! “Didja sink that five-ball?” “Yes…and no.”
Another weird effect is that consciousness seems to require a bit of time to generate. We’re always about a tenth of a second behind reality. This isn’t just the amount of time it takes for our nerves to tell our muscles to act – the familiar demonstration of dropping a dollar bill between your thumb and forefinger – but the actual functioning of consciousness itself. We can never be conscious of events happening “now,” only of events that happened around 1/10 second ago.
If you’re very studious and good at self-observation, you can sometimes even perceive this effect. Find yourself startled some day. Say, you’re reading quietly in your comfy chair, and, outside, there’s a loud, sudden bang. Neighbor kids with firecrackers. You might actually be able to perceive your body’s reaction to this – your ear registers the noise, and your shoulder muscles tense up – and only 1/10 second later do you consciously realize, “I hear a loud bang!”
(I’ve had the same effect when stubbing my toe on a chair-leg. My body is sending nerve-signals all up and down my spine, but my conscious awareness of what has happened takes a little time to come together.)
What makes a philosophical problem worthwhile or not is not simply whether it can be solved, but (to perhaps an even greater extent) also the kind of discourse it creates. A problem with a simple solution is sterile: you state it, solve it, everybody agrees on the solution and moves on. Hard problems force a continuing examination of our worldview, they can act as a constraint on philosophical systems, and spawn entirely new ways of looking at other problems. I mean, just take Descartes: without his consideration of this ‘single most worthless and pointless distraction in all of modern philosophy’, there basically wouldn’t be any modern philosophy, or at least it would likely be very different.
And even today, the problem continues to create stimulating ideas—just take David Chalmers’ recent article The Matrix as Metaphysics, which I think makes a good case that even in a brain in a vat-scenario, we can do meaningful science, meaningfully talk about an external world, and so on. There’s a reason that the evil genius, or brain in a vat, or some variation on it is found in every introductory textbook on philosophy, and that’s precisely that by presenting a limit on epistemology, it helps to set the boundaries of what can be known, what can be coherently reasoned about, etc. Without being aware of such limits, you risk ultimately talking nonsense.
I like this discussion. It is respectful and thought-provoking. I’ve often seen them go in much less friendly directions, so kudos, amigos. And a Happy Festivus to all!
Have you ever had something weighing so heavily on your mind that you just wanted nothing more than to escape from your own consciousness? To take a break for a while? I find naps help. Temporarily anyway.
Repeatedly bumping your own thread each month is very poor form. If a discussion has petered out then it has. Better by far to begin another thread with a new topic and see what happens.
I’ll lock this down and you can think about where you want to go from there.