Günther Greindl wrote:
Hi Richard,
It says, in effect "Hey, the explanation of consciousness is that it
is caused by X" where X is something that explains absolutely nothing
about whatever consciousness is supposed to be. Moreover, the person
espousing the theory, you can bet, will not be able to state exactly
what they think "consciousness" actually is... they will just be able
to tell you that, whatever it is, their candidate explains it.
I know why you are being sceptical - my initial reactions to theories of
consciousness are usually the same, because people who propose them
usually have ulterior motives (special status of humans, dualism,
religion whatever..)
I don't think that this scientist has these motives, as he is strictly
on the physicalist side. BTW, he also writes a bit about free will, I
disagree with him on this notion as I can not see where free will could
enter a physicalist picture of reality. (But that is anther controversy ;-)
The thing is this: consciousness (the basic phenomenon of awareness)
needs explaining, and I believe science can explain it in physicalist way.
I take a very similar position, in some ways. I have actually gone so
far as to build a theory that I believe *does* address the questions of
what we mean by "consciousness", as well as the further question o what
it actually is. (I gave this as a poster presentation at the last
Tucson conference). My conclusion is a strange one that does admit that
there is a thing called consciousness - there is definitely something
that needs to be explained - but at the same time I believe it has a
kind of unique status, so the physicalist/dualist controversy becomes
finessed.
My only problem with people like the one you cite is that they often
declare that "consciousness is X" without being clear about what they
really think "consciousness" is. I agree that some of them have
ulterior motives, but I would be willing to forgive them that, if only
they would start by being clear about what the C-word actually means :-).
I am (of course!) pushing my own theory a bit here, because I believe
that what happens when you try to really pin down the concept of C is
that, in fact, the next question gets answered almost automatically.
I could just as easily say that consciousness is explained by ... hair
follicles. This Hair Follicle Theory of Consciousness would have the
same qualifications to be considered the correct theory.
Well no - because, esp. via brain lesions etc, we can fairly definitly
locate consciousness _in_ the brain (or the whole brain) - but not
_outside_ the brain.
So we just have to look _where_ in the brain this happens. We can now
endorse modular theories or comprehensive ones, but for this is not very
satisfactory: consciousness is being felt as a unity, and I can't quite
see how individual neurons firing can lead to a unified feeling: this
also goes for synchronous firing, because neuron A does not know that B
fires syncronously, so how could it make a difference at the neural
level (I hope you know what I mean, I can elaborate).
Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean: well put.
But the EM field is a "unity" - the field is caused by the summary of
_all_ neurons in the brain, and it is also _caused_ by the electric
potentials in all neurons.
Also, the EM field is perfectly physicalist and does not invoke QM
mysteries (a la Hameroff/Penrose which I find bogus and has been
quantitatively refuted by Max Tegmark)
There are some problems with simply saying that C is lcoated "in" the
brain: mostly these problems have to do with slippage of the meaning of
C from the "hard-problem" version (the problem of explaining pure
subjectivity) to the "being awake" version. That was certaily the
biggest problem at the talks I saw at the Tucson conference: many of
the neuroscentists would start their talks with high-minded references
to real consciousness (perhaps even say "hard problem" at some point),
but then it would gradually become clear that the actual content of
their talk was drifting into a discussion of where in the brain you find
correlates of the subject's sense of "awareness". In other words, they
wanted to know which bits of the brain needed to be firing if the
subject was to have explicit knowledge of events ... which is the same
as awakeness.
All the arguments for localization within the brain seem to fall back
into this mode. We could pick one of them at random, I am sure, and
analyze it carefully, and find that it either says (a) that hard-problem
consciousness is inside the brain because the author thinks so (with no
actual reason), or (b) awakeness-consciousness is located inside the
brain because the subject is only aware of things when some place is active.
The problem, I think, is that when you insist on the author of the idea
saying exactly what C is, they cannot be specific enough to get to the
point where any concept of physical localization plays a role.
There are more theories of consciousness of this sort than you can
swing a cat at. Go to the Tucson Conference in a few months' time and
you will be able to listen to at least fifty of them.
Yes I know - and most of them a pure bogus at first sight - but I do not
see how this goes for this theory.
We have four fources: gravity, weak and strong nuclear force, and em
force. I think em is the only force which is a candidate for explaining
consciousness.
If you do not want to locate consciousness in any of the forces, then what?
Of course, you can say it is an "emergent" property, but this usually
just begs the question.
I am not yet hooked to the EM-field theory. But it is the most
interesting candidate I have seen in a long time.
Speaking as an ex-physicist, I wonder if perhaps your background is in
physics? No deprecation intended, of course: I just wonder why it
would have to be associated with a force?
I really must get around to publishing my theory: it does answer your
above question. I will see what I can do to get it out there.
(I am slightly embarrassed by this theory, sometimes: I think that it
really does completely resolve the problem. But how could it be that I
have the answer to a puzzle that has plagued a thousand minds better
than mine?)
Richard Loosemore
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