Gentlemen,
I am also interested in both the nature of consciousness and the nature
of knowledge regarding what appear to be entirely subjective phenonomena
(arising from the fact of consciousness?).
The last time I attended a Cognitive Neuroscience conference (6 years
ago?) I was impressed with how far things had come with regard to
correlating brain imaging and *reported* subjective experiences. I
realize that sometimes more data and even higher quality data doesn't
necessarily improve a model qualitatively, but I have been hoping that
there would be some conceptual breakthroughs from this work.
Unfortunately, as the popular media and the population in general (which
is chicken, which is egg?) have taken a stronger interest in science (or
has come to fetishize the artifacts of science?) there is a lot more
"noise" to sort through to find signal. The number of articles or even
entire issues of magazines and the number of books on the topic has
risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, but I rarely see what
looks like new insight into the nature of consciousness.
I'm hoping someone here with more direct experience or more patience
with the literature (BTW, the "hard literature" on the topic is
generally too opaque for me, so I'm lost in a middle-ground limbo
between the popular accounts and the actual work-product of scientists)
knows of new insights or new twists on the old models to share.
Does anyone have a short list of recent publications which reframe the
question in a new way?
- Steve
Hi Nick,
One of the problems in discussing consciousness is that it seems very hard to break it down into simpler concepts. There are what might be
called "high-level" words such as "inner life", "awareness", "apprehension", which suggest
consciousness but only to someone who already ha a sense of what consciousness is. Whereas low level words, which refer to things that can
be readily measured do not seem adequate to get at the real meaning of consciousness. So we are left with metaphors. When I use words such
as "access" and "inner life" they suggest a container but they are not necessarily used to denote an actual container
but to describe a situation which has some of the properties of a container.
However, there does seem to be a real container that describes the information I have access to. I
get raw information from my body. This is not to say that my consciousness is located in my body,
but that what I know about the outside world starts with how my body senses the outside world.
These senses are then processed or contemplated somehow and this results in what I think I know
about the world. There is no way that "I can see exactly what you see" because what you
see comes from your body and what I see comes from my body. If we literally mean "see"
then what you see is what enters your eyes and what I see is what enters my eyes. You might tell me
about what you see, but that is not the same as seeing what you see because what you have seen has
been processed by you then reformulated in terms of speech, which is then processed by me. Even if
we witnessed the same event, we would have slightly different viewpoints, and our eyes are
different, and, in any case, we wou!
ld start interpreting the incoming rays of light as soon as they started to
enter our respective eyes.
You also gave examples in which I might infer what you saw. This seems to
presuppose I have a theory of what Nick is all about or some means of making
inferences. (I don't have a well-articulated theory of Nick, but I do arrive at
conclusions about what to make of you. I'm not certain how I do this, but I am
certain that I do it all the time, quite effortlessly and almost
automatically.) At any rate this drawing of inferences does not seem to be
seeing exactly what you see, but a way (not necessarily very accurate) of
getting a rough approximation of what you saw.
--John
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