Cheerskep concludes: > > In sum, it's arguable that in two millennia -- right up > to today -- we have > made almost no conclusive progress on these core questions > in philosophy of > mind.
The inperial we relies on the proposition that one person's notion must conform to another person's notion or there will be muddling. Why is the receptive notion need to be in place in order to receive the proposed notion? Cannot one notion evoke the other? Is that consciousness? Do we not propose notions to ourselves and thus "converse" with ourselves just as we do with others? This conversing is the mutual shaping or creating of notions. If there can be consciousness outside the functioning brain, how is it manifested? A dead brain has no consciousness, or, if it does, then consciousness exists independently of the brain. Cheerskep seems to be arguing for that when he alludes to cases where pain, for instance, is sometimes independent of a physical source, apparently. I don't think anyone has shown that thoughts or consciousness can occur without a brain (the bodily object) producing them (as distinct from mechanical devices that imitate actual brains and their functions). Damasio, at least, is not a philosopher but a neurologist. His propositions are based on clinical evidence, not philosophical speculation. It's true that no one can say what consciousness is independently of biology and physiology. Is consciousness merely biology in action or is it something independent, even if produced by biology? If we knew, we might conclude that life is not worth living because if consciouness is merely biology in action, our "selfhood" is a fiction, a lie, a delusion; if consciousness is produced by biology but independent of it (like the chick from the egg) then why would anyone bother with the travails of life and avoid pure unembodied consciousness? Maybe consciousness is the quest for it: the more we employ it the more we have it. In other words, we create consciousness by living and employing it in evoking or creating "notions" through conversing with ourselves and with others. (There is a large hunk of involuntary consciousness that prevails without our direct control or awareness -- like maintaining a heart beat, for instance). I think I disagree with Cheerskep's insistence that one person's pre-existing notion must be matched by another person's very, very similar notion before there can be communication. I prefer to think that we are always shaping and reshaping our "notions" in self-conversation, as it were, and in communicating with others we inspire them to create similar notions, even those that they did not have previously. So, notions are consciousness in action, I mean biology in action, pretending to be independent of it for the sake of inventing selfhood. WC
