Is consciousness explicable by "science".

I'm not so sure about "chemistry."

BoGoWo

Very well put.
When I think of me, there are two levels: the "me" that I am thinking and that becomes an "it". And the me who thinks. But if I try to reach that "me" who thinks, it becomes immediatly an "it".

In order to "unveil" my being I must understand that I am, not only connected to the phenomenon of live, but I only am in life (or reality) interacting with it.

Val,

One of the ideas that Dennett seems to support is "the myth of the unity of the self". By differentation of "pathways" in the brain and showing how lesions in such pathways can lead to paradoxes of "consciousness" (phantom limbs, lack of recognition of familiar objects or faces etc), Dennett implies the "self" is a fragmentary phenomenon whose apparant unity is evoked according to circumstance. It is almost as though "me-the actor" is a social/legal concept on which to pin such labels as "culpability" or "intent". (This is where we can ask whether "science" can handle "intentionality" or whether the best we can hope for as interactionists is to investigate the concept of "self sustaining processes far from equilibrium"...but then does this still beg the question of "unity" of structure or process ?......)

fresco

I understand. But the myth of the unity of the self, is the myth of any unity. If my "self" is a myth, why are not the "sun", "the bridge", the city of Paris, also myths?
We can only understand things as separated entities. That means they have some kind of identity, something that remains in time. If not, all knowledge would ne impossible. Anything could be anything else. In fact, anything would be anything else.

The "self" is my identity. My identity is due to the specific conditions of my cells, my brain, my memory, my experiences ...
When someone like Dennett calls the "self" a myth, I ask: but then, your ideas, including that one, belong to whom? Is Dennett an extra-universal being, contemplating the world from the "outside" and making judgements like a god? Or, are his ideas the product of an entity with it's identity?

A zombie with occasional flashes of recognition. That is the vision Dennett has of other human beings - not himSELF of course.

I'm going to continue believing that the places I visited in this world actually exists, and nobody will convince me otherwise. LOL

Re: Is consciousness explicable by "science".


Fresco
You are certainly not shy about tackling a subject that has confounded philosophers and has caused scientists to hide behind......."Consciousness is not defineable and should be left to philosophers" Your author Dennett is even less shy in claiming he can "Explain consciousness" Below is what the most critical reviewer on Amazon.com, had to say about Dennett's work:

Lots of Words to Explain Very Few Ideas, August 18, 2002
Reviewer: Tom Gray (Fort-Coulonge, Quebec Canada) - See all my reviews
This book contains a great many words. Unfortunately, it contains only a very few ideas. This book could very well be contained in a 15 page white paper. Indeed it has. The same ideas have been published in the paper 'Time and the Observer - The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain' by the author (Dennett) and Kinsbourne. Even in that case the 15 page paper is contained in a 33 page text. To use the cliché, Dennett will not use a paragraph when several chapters will suffice

I would advise anyone who wishes to understand the ideas contained in this book to read the paper. You will not have to waste your time in plowing through hundreds of pages of superfluous explanation. The paper is anthologized in 'The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates' that was edited by Block, Flanagan and Gazeldere, which is also available from Amazon. You will get the same ideas as contained in this book plus many many more.

Another strategy would be to read one of Gerald Edelman's books which contains many fewer words in much better expositions of a great many more ideas that are much more trenchant and insightful.

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From what I am able to determine about what neuro science ACTUALLY knows about the brain functions is this: There are approximately 100 BILLION neurons comprising the brain. There are electrical and chemical actions involved when each neuron communicates with another neuron. Each neuron could possibly make contact with many other neurons at the same time. Most of the time if not always, the contact creates memory and the length of the memory depends on the strength of the contact. They SUSPECT certain other parts of the brain accomplish certain actions.
So,in "hard currency", we have synapses and memory......It is a long and presumptive jump from there to "explaining consciousness"

I believe Fransic Crick (before he died) had taken the position that everything produced in the brain was merely the result of neural activity or neural process.........what if that is ALL there is?

I do believe that science will eventually unravel the mystery of consciousness but it will be the result of a new generation of brain scan machines.........what else could possibly result in a finite explanation?

In the meantime it is entertaining to listen to you and other intellectuals use your "play" on words to theorize about theories.

rayban1

Thanks for that reference which I intend to follow up in due course.

Far be it for me to detract from your "entertainment", but you might not know that several contributors to this and similar threads are well aware of Wittgensteins warnings about "language games". What I feel is going on between several of us is a continuous dialogue about issues of consciousness which transcends the boundaries of any particular reference. I cite Dennett here (a) from a Devil's Advocate position in opposition to general "mystical" positions yet also (b)seemingly in support of aspects of the particular estoeric system of Gurdjieff (the fragmentary self). This inter-thread continuity provides our semantic field or common "usage" in the Wittgenstein sense.

Val,

The "unity problem" raises its head in Capra's discussion of "cognition" as a sub-process of "the life process". The essence of the problem seems to be related to a concept of "life" as "negative entropy", and whether such "order" could be objectively defined.

cicerone imposter,

Next time you re-visit a place and say "my god - this place has changed"....consider the meaning of "existence" and "change" ...and even "you" !

Oh, I'm already aware of change. The most evident change I have seen is in China. When I visited in 1991, the Beijing International Airport used to be a shack. They now have a modern, huge, airport. In Shanghai, the land across from the Bund used to be farm land and warehouses, but now it's developed with a large t.v. tower and modern tall buildings. I really started traveling when I was in the service back in the late fifties, and have noticed little to big changes to places I have revisited. I started traveling in my early twenties, and I'm now 69; I'm getting up there. But I can tell you that my heart is still young; while in Hong Kong last February for Chinese New Years, I went out partying with the youngster and drank and danced myself silly. Threw up all over Hong Kong on our way back to the hotel, but not in the cab.

Here is what Amazon.com offers as a product description for ....."The nature of consciousness.....Philosophical debates: Seems to be a "Must read" for anyone serious about the study of "Consciousness".


Product Description:
Intended for anyone attempting to find their way through the large and confusingly interwoven philosophical literature on consciousness, this reader brings together most of the principal texts in philosophy (and a small set of related key works in neuropsychology) on consciousness through 1997, and includes some forthcoming articles. Its extensive coverage strikes a balance between seminal works of the past few decades and the leading edge of philosophical research on consciousness.

As no other anthology currently does, The Nature of Consciousness provides a substantial introduction to the field, and imposes structure on a vast and complicated literature, with sections covering stream of consciousness, theoretical issues, consciousness and representation, the function of consciousness, subjectivity and the explanatory gap, the knowledge argument, qualia, and monitoring conceptions of consciousness. Of the 49 contributions, 18 are either new or have been adapted from a previous publication.

Your Daniel Dennett is talked about as a leading light in the study of consciousness.

I think there could be something to be learned by applying the study of complexity and chaotic systems to consciousness.

The human nervous/chemical system is extraordinarily complex and I think it can only be understood using the kind of science that we apply to weather patterns or turbulence.

That is not to say that it cannot be explained and understood in a scientific way, just that a "reductionist" approach is probably not going to be useful beyond a certain point.

Rayban1,

Having scanned the index of that collection I notice that several writers are conspicuous by their absence, including Piaget, Capra, Bohm, Hammeroff, and Penrose. These writers are amongst those who have tended to try to think "outside the box" in tackling consciousness...indeed Bohm the Physicist (and sometime collaborator with Einstein) was ostracized for his esoteric concept of "implicate order".

My point is not that any such compendium fails to be comprehensive, but that the structuring of such a compendium may fail to address what several of us here consider to be the salient issues, namely:

1. What import do we give to Kants original analysis of "the transcendental unity of apperception" ?

2. How do genereral epistemological and ontological problems relate specifically to problems of consciousness ?

3. How are interactionist concepts of mutuality between observer and observed related to "consciusness studies" from the point of view of issues within quantum mechanics and cybernetics.

Using these three dimensions we might for example argue that Dennetts views ... 1. are antithetical to Kant's "unity"... 2. explore ontology but ignore epistemology .... and 3. ignore issues raised by quantum mechanics such as the status of "data".

I admit that this is a biased list, but I produce it in part to demonstrate that the level of analysis here has tended to be relatively wide and deep.

Eorl,

Capra has in fact made reference to chaos theory in his book "Web of Life". in which he discusses the "Santiago Theory of Cognition". See my comments to Val above and/or www.tcd.ie/Physics/Schrodinger/Lecture3.html
if interested.

Fresco

Your original question was: Is consciousness explicable by Science? I fully understand your "Devils advocate" position in putting forward this discussion but I personally believe you are putting yourself in the position of "pounding
sand down a rathole". In over 2000 years of philosophers pontificating and postulating about consciousness they have failed utterly in defining it or in offering any meaningful description of how the brain forms consciousness.
Since you have offered only brilliant philosophical references and nothing except Dennetts approach to neuroscience, it would appear that you may not be familiar with what other neuro scientists are contemplating in solving the problem scientifically.

The following excerpt is from a scientific essay by Crick and Koch, called .....Consciousness and Neuroscience, from the Salk Institute.

Clearing The Ground

We assume that when people talk about "consciousness," there is something to be explained. While most neuroscientists acknowledge that consciousness exists, and that at present it is something of a mystery, most of them do not attempt to study it, mainly for one of two reasons:

(1) They consider it to be a philosophical problem, and so best left to philosophers.

(2) They concede that it is a scientific problem, but think it is premature to study it now.

We have taken exactly the opposite point of view. We think that most of the philosophical aspects of the problem should, for the moment, be left on one side, and that the time to start the scientific attack is now.

We can state bluntly the major question that neuroscience must first answer: It is probable that at any moment some active neuronal processes in your head correlate with consciousness, while others do not; what is the difference between them? In particular, are the neurons involved of any particular neuronal type? What is special (if anything) about their connections? And what is special (if anything)about their way of firing? The neuronal correlates of consciousness are often referred to as the NCC. Whenever some information is represented in the NCC it is represented in consciousness.


They speak of neuronal processes which correlate with consciousness and others that do not and the difference between the two..........and this brings me to my favorite puzzle.......what triggers the transition between sleep and waking (consciousness or unconsciousness)

The Problem of Qualia

What is it that puzzles philosophers? Broadly speaking, it is qualia --the blueness of blue, the painfulness of pain, and so on. This is also the layman's major puzzle. How can you possibly explain the vivid visual scene you see before you in terms of the firing of neurons? The argument that you cannot explain consciousness by the action of the parts of the brain goes back at least as far as Leibniz (1686; see the translation 1965). But compare an analogous assertion: that you cannot explain the "livingness" of living things (such as bacteria, for example) by the action of "dead" molecules. This assertion sounds extremely hollow now, for any number of reasons. Scientists understand the enormous power of Natural Selection. They know the chemical nature of genes and that inheritance is particulate, not blending. They understand the great subtlety, sophistication and variety of protein molecules, the elaborate nature of the control mechanisms that turn genes on and off, and the complicated way that proteins interact with, and modify, other proteins. It is entirely possible that the very elaborate nature of neurons and their interactions, far more elaborate than most people imagine, is misleading us, in a similar way, about consciousness.

Some philosophers (Searle, 1984; Dennett, 1996) are rather fond of this analogy between "livingness" and "consciousness," and so are we; but, as Chalmers (1995) has emphasized, an analogy is only an analogy. He has given philosophical reasons why he thinks it is wrong. Neuroscientists know only a few of the basics of neuroscience, such as the nature of the action potential and the chemical nature of most synapses. Most important, there is not a comprehensive, overall theory of the activities of the brain. To be shown to be correct, the analogy must be filled out by many experimental details and powerful general ideas. Much of these are still lacking.

This problem of qualia is what Chalmers (1995) calls "The Hard Problem": a full account of the manner in which subjective experience arises from cerebral processes. As we see it, the hard problem can be broken down into several questions, of which the first is the major problem: How do we experience anything at all? What leads to a particular conscious experience (such as the blueness of blue)? What is the function of conscious experience? Why are some aspects of subjective experience impossible to convey to other people (in other words, why are they private)?


I hope I don't appear argumentative because I only have the desire to present another point of view. I want to emphasize something that is stated above: <Neuroscientists know only a few of the basics of neuroscience, such as the nature of the action potential and the chemical nature of most synapses>. They know so little for certain but I have confidence they will piece it together.

Doesn't Terri Schiavo tell us something about conscieousness?

I wish she would. That would clear up any ambiguity!

rayban,

Thanks for that well presented overview.

It may just be the case that in all of the above the Hegelian "synthesis" issue has been missed....namely that "reality " lies at the interface between "inner" and "outer" such that neither of the latter are a priori. Such a position is implied by the neuroscientist Hammeroff and the mathematician Penrose who argue along the lines that "quantum consciousness" simultaneously determines both internal and external states. Penrose also argues that Godels Theoerem applied to conventional physical systems excludes reductionists such as Dennett from "explaining" consciousness.

A second Hegelian viewpoint is proposed by Capra (et al) from a holistic (ecological) position on "knowledge". He argues that focus of attention on brain states (at whatever level.... synapse....neural network etc) is misguided, and that an anthropocentric preoccupation with "control elements" precludes our appreciation of "cognition" as (merely) one level of operation in the totality of self organising (autpoietic) structure. Note that this is not an argument about analogy*,and it is one answer to Chalmers question about "functionality of consciousness" namely "the urge to control"(.... naming and categorizing etc). It may be that the references to "life" above cover this position but the index to the compendium implies not.

Whether such positions constitute "sand down the rathole" or whether they resolve the mutual existence of "sand" and "hole" remains to be seen.

(* Capra appeals to the mathematics of the continuity of embedded structure as in fractal geometry as his model)

fresco

In his book "Descartes Error", proposes the perspective that words or other symbols are based in images (representations topographically organized). In his words "I don't see no anatomical way of introducing sensorial information in the association cortex, without using first the initial sensorial cortex". In an evolutionary perspective, he sees the mind as an answer to the need of an adequation in our interaction with the world. That means that neural events are essential to "make us think" but are not the content of our thoughts.
As you see, relies all the thinking process to sensorial experience - not very far from Hume and even Kant, as he assumes himself.
is not a philosopher. He is the director of the department of neurology research in Iowa University and in Salk Institute, California.
He accepts the self - without the "self", experience is impossible - not in the sense of a "cartesian theatre" as he says, but as the unity of brain/body in its interaction with external stimulations.

fresco

sorry for this double reply, but I forgot to mention the name of Damásio.

Val,

Topographical organisation is certainly cited by Piaget as a possible a priori for mental phenomena in the Kantian sense) and Hubel and Wiesel are the seminal source of evidence for neural correlates of external topological data. However, your reference seems to use the term "information" as if it were distinct from selectivity of the observer,
and the problem as I see it is how to resolve dynamics of the "exchange" process rather than the unidirectional flow of "something" through a dedicated chain of receptors.

I am currently scanning "Philosophy of Information" via Google for a discussion of the exchange process.