Terry
Quote: Awareness CAN be observed, both by the person who is aware, and by anyone else who interacts with them. Try talking to someone in a coma.
That it has to be pointed out to you the difference between awareness; that which is 'observing', and behavior; that which is observed, between
observer and
observed, between
seeing as verb, and
seen as noun is an indication that you do not have a grasp of the issue at hand. Claiming that ?'awareness' is observed as animation is like saying ?'seeing' can see ?'seeing' which is utterly absurd. (dualistically speaking)
In order to observe what someone else observes you would have to "observe' from within and ?'with' someone else's sensory apparatus; look through their eyes, smell though their nose etc., and more you would have to observe the images that (apparently) miraculously appear in their brain from the incoming sense data. You would in fact ?'know' what they ?'know', and you would ?'know it' the same way they ?'know it'; you would be aware of their body functions and when they have to urinate etc, meaning they would not be autonomous individuals. (maybe you're a closeted nondualist,:wink:
Quote:Consciousness seems to require a functioning brain to exist and is impaired by brain damage.
"Consciousness seems to require a functioning brain to exist"
Yes, it
seems to.
"and is impaired by brain damage."
1. You cannot say consciousness is impaired by brain damage if it only
seems to require a brain to function.
2. If ?'consciousness' requires a brain to function it doesn't follow that if the brain is damaged then so is ?'consciousness', for in this scenario ?'consciousness' is
not the brain.
Quote:Brains build consciousness out of bioelectrical processes.
Unfounded.
Quote: What does Chalmers propose as the source or origin of his postulated conscious building blocks?
I'm not sure. I didn't provide the link to support nondualism, as I think Chalmers is more of a nondual leaning positivist; one who believes in the existence of a material world but cannot justify or find support for his beliefs, though that is speculation on my part.
It was more to demonstrate the wide ranging nature of the issue of consciousness, and the mystery that it is from a perspective that would hopefully be conducive to your (science) inclinations, whatever that may mean.
Here is some of what Chalmers says about what he refers to as the hard problem and easy problem of consciousness.
[snip]
" The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
# the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
# the integration of information by a cognitive system;
# the reportability of mental states;
# the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
# the focus of attention;
# the deliberate control of behavior;
# the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.
[/snip]
Hard problem:
[snip]
"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does."
[/snip]
[snip]
" When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.
There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says "I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene", then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says "I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced", they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.
[/snip]
He is pointing out that there appears to be something apart from experiences that has them. He is talking about the "contents" of consciousness, and asking; How do these observed contents become ?'experienced' and/or witnessed and known.
And the further question is, How can anything ?'be' observed' and experienced?
What has the ?'experience'? And where is this ?'experiencer'? What is it? We call it ?'consciousness' but what is ?'it'?
Now of course that's a material-dualist question in which it is believed that everything that comprises an observable universe is "observable". It's basis is in naïve materialism, that largely ignores consciousness.
He goes on
[snip]
" This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere."
[snip]
Do you see the beauty in this, 
" This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience."
The problem he is ?'not' addressing is, We do not experience ?'functions'.
He's asking, How does ?'experience' arise from ?'functions' ?
Continuing
.
[snip]
" To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.
[/snip]
Here he starts to address the issue, i.e. explaining ?'function' does not explain ?'experience.
The >gap< between function and experience.
As I see it the problem isn't how do we experience ?'functions',.. because we don't. The problem is, how does ?'function' become what is experienced.
And what experiences that which the functions gives rise to?
Consciousness, we say, but what is, >That<
?
And the last paragraph of this essay is:
" To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say."
The rest is here. (It is a long essay which I have not read completely...)
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html
[quote] Behavior is certainly an indicator of awareness, although not a "direct" observation. Your refusal to accept that consciousness can have qualities depends on using the word "have" in two different ways. Yes, English is an ambigous language, but changing meaning in mid-sentence is not kosher.[/quote]
We cannot say consciousness has ?'qualities' if we cannot say what it is that has those qualities? That's the prolem.
[quote] Once again, you seem to think that you can make a statement true simply by definition. Awareness can indeed be both a subject and an object at the same time. It might help if you studied QM in which a photon is both a wave and a particle.[/quote]
That consciousness cannot be observed can only be ?'know' subjectively, so how else can it be stated? That it cannot be known through a subject?-object relation is blantently obvious, expsecially to fresco, JLNobody and myself.
I think you are wrong about QM because I think you do not understand that observers are unobservable. Now I know that begs the question, but I'll leave it at that for now.(And this is not to say anything about nondualism
)
[quote] I agree. But the proto-self is unobserved and the core self is felt rather than observed. (See above response to JLN.)[/quote]
What is meant by "observed" or ?'observe' is anything observable or knowable, which includes that which is ?'felt', smelt, tasted, cognised etc.
