Cheerskep says: Many professional > "thinkers", as well as laymen, > continue to feel that the "stuff" of > consciousness -- our thoughts and > feelings -- > though it may be correlated in time with the physical > world, is not identical > with it. A "feeling", they would say, is not > "material".
To posit that a feeling is not identical with the material world is to assume that there are two separate things, such as the Is of materiality and the IS of mentality. But what if we remove the physical aspects of feeling, the nerves, vascular, and neural activities? Answer: The result is that the associated feelings vanish. One replies, yes, but what of phantom limbs, etc? Answer: This can be attributed to neural pathway memories and areas of the brain "responsible for" the sensations of the missing part. They are usually "adopted by adjacent brain areas or otherwise assimilated. Then one replies, ok, but isn't this simply cause and effect and can't a cause be separate from the effect? Answewr: Yes, and no. There a looping sort of activity between brain and nerves so that each feeds the other in time -- as the brain sends signals based on previous experiences to the nerves so do the nerves send their signals to the brain in a continual monitoring flow. Apparently sensation is not just mental stuff -- etherial Cartesian sould-stuff -- but is directly and explicitly a body-brain thing, not a mind-body thing. The problem comes down to brain-body workings vs. mind-body workings. If we restrict ourselves to a brain-body view then there can't be a causal relationship and no separate IS, one for body, one for brain. This view leads to the impossibility of consciousness. (Scientists love to say it "ain't there".) But if we insist on a mind-body view then we are dealing with consciousness on the one hand and brain-body on the other. In this case we are assuming, or forced to assume, that some supra-brain "manager" is consciousness but we can't yet identify what it "IS" (that's the etherial IS). Maybe this is where we get to Husserl's Transcendental Phenomnenology by which we imaginatively form a material self (like that "manager" constituent I just referred to) that is consciousness. Then we have an "as-if" IS (an etherial IS being imagined as a material IS). The problem we are left with is simply this: Even if we can assert two types of IS (imitating a Catesian mind-body split), we need to "lie" to ourselves in doing so because we need to treat our consciousness as if it were a real thing. Thus, I need to pretend that my consciousness is "myself managing my body-brain" in order to manifest consciousness. Maybe that's why in everyday life we don't bother to distinguish between the two IS conditions, and are satisfied to simply say the mental IS and the object IS are one and the same, when they are not, except when we're conscious. Ugh, What a mess! Not even Husserl, very difficult for me, was clear on this. What becomes really interesting is the possibility that we can imagine that of which we are NOT conscious, like a disembodied soul, (can we?)or that part of our brain that monitors some crucial bodily functions. Thus consciousness can imagine its own unconsciousness. Or is that just another level of transcendental phenomenology looking upon an imaginatively embodied consciousness, ad infinitum? So that's one reason I rely on the catch-all term, belief. Belief does ot require reason or proofs but stands in for consciousness as the etherial IS, the IS that forms the other IS by pretending to like it. Philosophers to the rescue, please. WC
