What does this have to do with our ability to know and understand reality? I never claimed that one person experiences an accurate sensation of the universe. I don’t have to, because I have billions of others that combine to create a more accurate view.
Interoception does not require focused awareness.
We are talking about “attention”, the focused awareness of a specific thing.
I don’t dispute that our brain can process billions of data bits. It can only pay focused attention to one process at a time.
The definition in Encyclopedia Brittanica clearly spells out the official knowledge of what I am trying to convey.
I am not talking about understanding the universe. I am talking about examining one single thing in the universe.
None of those activities require much attention. You must separate that which requires attention from that which does not require attention.
Hence the term “selective attention”.
I guess you’ve strayed far from the topic then. I don’t think that covers it.
From the OP: " I know much great stuff has come out of philosophy, but I’m talking about the here and now. This search for consciousness is a most exquisite example of the profound disregard for the implications of biophysical fact.
Off topic?
If that word salad is supposed to be the topic under discussion, can someone translate this into a cogent proposition?
I believe that I have only discussed “hard biophysical facts” in relation to consciousness. What implications have I profoundly disregarded?
Okay, I’ll pass on that challenge. Maybe not the best phrase to quote. How about this,
I mention it because I’m coming to look at philosophy like so much intellectual gaming. It often seems to be more about people defending & bolstering, or attacking, each others grand ideas, to the point that learning anything relevant regarding the original topic becomes impossible.
Something I kind of agree with. Philosophy is straddled between a lot of ancient speculation, much of it pseudo-science, and often blatantly racist and classist on the one hand, and trying to make sense fresh neuro-science on the other. Rarely do I see someone simply pointing out that we know we are evolved from monkeys now, and we can see their primitive social traits mapping directly to ours.
Give me a minute to pull an example of someone who did that.
Dan Fincke spends the first half-hour leading up to it, then the question is posed almost as a joke, then he can explain life in 10 minutes. He pulls it off. He goes beyond the morality question.
I have done this, not by philosophizing but by presenting hard facts without any metaphysical invocation or social comparisons.
Here is indisputable scientific fact:
Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes
Alec MacAndrewAll great apes apart from man have 24 pairs of chromosomes. There is therefore a hypothesis that the common ancestor of all great apes had 24 pairs of chromosomes and that the fusion of two of the ancestor’s chromosomes created chromosome 2 in humans. The evidence for this hypothesis is very strong.
more…
Conclusion
The evidence that human chromosome 2 is a fusion of two of the common ancestor’s chromosomes is overwhelming.
Chromosome fusion
There can be no stronger scientific or philosophical argument against this conclusive data.
The mathematics do not lie.
Which makes it scientific fact, not philosophy
Ah…I think I get it… finally… 
I always try to look at philosophy as an inquiry into the fundamental logical axiomatic foundation on which the universe rests, and the relational values and mathematical functions that describe and codify universal logical axioms.
As to “pride and prejudice”, all institutions of higher learning are occupied by the intellectually elite, or the pretenders that claim exclusive insight into truth.
To me, philosophy picks up where facts leave off. Like origins of the universe, the line where knowledge left of used to be easier. Morality. Why we are social creatures. …
The point is there’s a difference between being able to recite a list of events, to absorbing the profundity of them.
That’s not metaphysical. If anything, it’s psychological.
Wind back the clock, brings us to the Abrahamic mindset. The utter self-centered, self-obsessive nature of it, as displayed in all three major religions, along with their societal institutions?
It’s about truly absorbing the notion of your body and everything about it being a product of Earth’s evolving biosphere? It takes more than listing mileposts. What about the notion that an organism can not be understood without understanding it’s environment. Ever really ponder the implications of that? I wonder why it isn’t reflected more in what I’ve read, it certainly helps the information make more sense, once you’ve absorbed that simple lesson.
Your multi-tasking information is plenty correct, but only within certain confines because the real world gets more complicated real fast. Levels of focus and attention while attending to multiple things.
Besides, people do multi-task, good or bad, but I’m told that’s not multi-tasking they are shifting attention, and some are more adept than others. Oh so multi-tasking is like juggling, you can get better. See the possible for getting into the weeds?
But on a more fundamental, biological level, consciousness is more that focused attention.
I’ve been trying to point out that your brain must be nonstop “multi-tasking”, I mean it keeps getting fed gazillion bits of data every second. You can chew gum and walk, etc. 
While you are paying close attention to the task at hand, your body and brain has active sentries all over, ready to assert themselves, to varying degrees - and so on, depending on the happenings. Autonomous things that can suddenly become center of focus and very conscious.
Sleep involves all sorts of levels of consciousness, awareness, depending on the environment and circumstance, we’re only at the beginning of scientifically appreciating what’s happening inside the basic outlines of sleep.
I love the stuff you share, it’s all valuable, I simply don’t agree with some of the conclusions, and directions of focus, nor the excessive simplification and over generalization.
I believe I explained that the Abrahamic mindset as described in the bible was already present in early hominids, before the chromosomal mutation split humans from our common ancestor.
Today’s Chimpanzee (the cousin with 24 pr chromosomes) already displays an aggressive defensive posture to thunderstorms and worshipful behavior toward waterfalls.
The actual fight or flight behavior in response to unseen potential threats started perhaps billions of years earlier with the first brained animals.
AFAIK, proto-consciousness started with the formation of the microtubule that was able to produce action responses to external and internal influences, such as “swimming” (cilia) and “walking” (pseudopodia).
Actually the concept of “self” started with chemical evolution and natural selection of stable biochemicals able to maintain integrity under stress .
As a boy I always wondered if a rock “knew” it was a rock, because if it didn’t why should it remain a rock. IMO, the philosophical concept of “integrity” (the state of being whole and undivided) is a fundamental logical potential of the spacetime fabric.
What are Earth’s forces?
The four fundamental forces of nature
- Gravity.
- The weak force.
- Electromagnetism.
- The strong force.
These are the forces that impart integrity (durability). Human’s are as much subject to these forces as are rocks. Our bodies are evolved to deal with and take advantage of these forces .
The fundamental metaphysics (Implicate)of the universe must be translatable into natural physics (Explicate) else it is just a belief. (religion).
write4u, about that rewind. This isn’t about the facts of serious sober science.
This is about trying to figure out what it was/is that allows us human beings to so glibly be blind to clear and demonstrable facts and then to actively destroy our Earth’s biosphere, that is, our life support system.
Why are we, as a people, so intellectually and emotionally disconnected from other creatures on this Earth (no our pets don’t count) and in fact, from this planet itself, the thing that created us? No metaphysics there!
And I think I’ve dug down to the roots and it relates to our inability to explicitly recognize, let alone Appreciate, the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.
Which in turn relates to our Abrahamic cultural, religious, intellectual, emotional heritage. (yeah, yeah, sure roots into dim prehistory, however they are the one’s that created our global society, that is currently self-cannibalizing itself! )
Beyond that, this thread was a question of why I don’t hear any philosopher’s truly incorporate the fact of our evolution into their assumptions and arguments.
IMO, we evolved as an invasive predatory species. Where we dwell, the environment and its inhabitants suffer.
Perhaps there is no other reason than that “we can”.
Our problem is that our species is incredibly versatile, because of our brains.
There are plenty people who love nature and live in harmony with nature. All indigenous people lived in harmony with their environment, which was also the cause for minimal technological evolution.
An example of a perfect cooking utensil that has been refined over thousands of years is the chinese wok that is a combination of 4 pans in a single cooking pan. It requires very little heat and allows for cooking several separate dishes at the same time.
The Indian teepee is a marvel of a mobile home. Warm in the winter, cool in the summer, using the cone shape and wind vanes for air circulation. You can take it down in minutes and use its poles as a travois to carry stuff and food. A single horse can pull it effortlessly for many miles. A famous architect once called it the “perfect mobile home”.
Native fishing tribes used to throw the first catch of the season back into the river, out of respect to the river god that provided abundance of food. A perfect conservational method.
It is the individual and tribal attitude of respect and love for nature that made them live in harmony, but also depressed technological evolution.
OTOH, European nomads became adept at warfare and depletion the natural resources before moving on to “greener pastures”.
They became invasive species driven by greed and destroying the environment with their ever expanding need for luxury and sport, replacing all the indigenous peoples and their way of life.
That is why today we stand on the precipice of the human caused Holocene extinction event.
The 6th (man-made) Anthropocene extinction event. That is what happens to species that refuse to recognize the natural logical rules of maintaining symmetry and balance.
A diagram showing the ecological processes of coral reefs before and during the [Anthropocene]*
(Anthropocene - Wikipedia)
(Coral reef - Wikipedia)
Coral reefs are the forests of the ocean and just like the forest on dry land, the coral reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate, causing the extinction of thousands of shoal dwelling organisms and the larger predators that feed on them and feed us.
When Oil is exhausted in some 40 years, there will be terrible wars for possession of natural resources to maintain our wanton lifestyle.
What does any of that have to do with what I’m trying to discuss?
You’ve yet to provide an example of that. Pointing at ancient humans, that we can’t honestly relate to in any way, isn’t enough.
And we today, can’t get any closer to relating to what those indigenous people actually thought/felt, then we can relate to what “god” is thinking. So what’s the point you’re trying to make?
Want to tackle what I’m swinging at you’d have to reach for something like Kant’s Transcental Idealism which is a wonderful example of this getting lost within our mindscape, and being trapped within this Abrahamic Self-obsessiveness, that I’m referring to. I can say that because Kant had a throughly Christian mindset, as a result of his Christian upbringing, out of which his ideas blossomed.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/#AppeThinThem
1. Appearances and Things in Themselves
In the first edition (A) of the Critique of Pure Reason , published in 1781, Kant argues for a surprising set of claims about space, time, and objects:
- Space and time are merely the forms of our sensible intuition of objects. They are not beings that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves), nor are they properties of, nor relations among, such beings. (A26, A33)
- The objects we intuit in space and time are appearances, not objects that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves). This is also true of the mental states we intuit in introspection; in “inner sense” (introspective awareness of my inner states) I intuit only how I appear to myself, not how I am “in myself”. (A37–8, A42)
- We can only cognize objects that we can, in principle, intuit. Consequently, we can only cognize objects in space and time, appearances. We cannot cognize things in themselves. (A239)
- Nonetheless, we can think about things in themselves using the categories (A254).
- Things in themselves affect us, activating our sensible faculty (A190, A387).[1]
In the “Fourth Paralogism” Kant defines “transcendental idealism”:
I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances [ Erscheinungen ] the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves [ nicht als Dinge an sich selbst ansehen ], and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves [ als Dinge an sich selbst ]. (A369; the Critique is quoted from the Guyer & Wood translation (1998))
Ever since 1781, the meaning and significance of Kant’s “transcendental idealism” has been a subject of controversy. Kant’s doctrines raise numerous interpretive questions, which cluster around three sets of issues:
- (a) The nature of appearances. Are they (as Kant sometimes suggests) identical to representations, i.e., states of our minds? If so, does Kant follow Berkeley in equating bodies (objects in space) with ideas (representations)? If not, what are they, and what relation do they have to our representations of them?
- (b) The nature of things in themselves . What can we say positively about them? What does it mean that they are not in space and time? How is this claim compatible with the doctrine that we cannot know anything about them? How is the claim that they affect us compatible with that doctrine? Is Kant committed to the existence of things in themselves, or is the concept of a “thing in itself” merely the concept of a way objects might be (for all we know)?
- (c) The relation of things in themselves to appearances . Is the appearance/thing in itself distinction an ontological one between two different kinds of objects? If not, is it a distinction between two aspects of one and the same kind of object? Or perhaps an adverbial distinction between two different ways of considering the same objects?
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:75, topic:8988”]
Kant,
- (a) The nature of appearances. Are they (as Kant sometimes suggests) identical to representations, i.e., states of our minds? If so, does Kant follow Berkeley in equating bodies (objects in space) with ideas (representations)? If not, what are they, and what relation do they have to our representations of them?
Anil Seth addressed this with his term of “controlled hallucination”
- (b) The nature of things in themselves . What can we say positively about them? What does it mean that they are not in space and time? How is this claim compatible with the doctrine that we cannot know anything about them? How is the claim that they affect us compatible with that doctrine? Is Kant committed to the existence of things in themselves, or is the concept of a “thing in itself” merely the concept of a way objects might be (for all we know)?
All of science is descriptive of the “known” nature of things.
There is a counter claim from:
[Philip K. Dick] Quotable Quote
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
- (c) The relation of things in themselves to appearances . Is the appearance/thing in itself distinction an ontological one between two different kinds of objects? If not, is it a distinction between two aspects of one and the same kind of object? Or perhaps an adverbial distinction between two different ways of considering the same objects?
In short, what we believe about the universe is of no consequence to the universe, but only to ourselves. It is the subjective root of all metaphysical belief systems. Keyword: “subjective” .
- Space and time are merely the forms of our sensible intuition of objects. They are not beings that exist independently of our intuition (things in themselves), nor are they properties of, nor relations among, such beings. (A26, A33)
That sounds noble but it isn’t true. Spacetime is an object that exists independent of our intuition. It existed long before we made our entrance and it will be here long after we have exited. For all we know there has been a chronology of multiple universes.
IOW, we know a lot about our local environmental mathematics. We know very little about the wholeness.
This is typical of asking the “hard question” without even knowing how to pose it because it always from our subjective POV.
But our mindscape is of no consequence to the universe. It is only how that 3 lb grey lump of neurons imagines what the outside world looks like.
IMO, this reveals the physical nature of the universe. AFAIK there is no metaphysical thought process. That notion is a product of our physical thought process. It is actually quite ironic that we need physical dynamics to describe metaphysical dynamics.
I prefer to read David Bohm over Kant. Bohm was a metaphysical physicist and was able to look at the question not only from philosophical ignorance but also from physical knowledge, the "hard facts"as Max Tegmark calls them.
Only the mathematics of the universe reveal its inherently logical foundations. All other considerations are “wishful thinking” from hubris.
I like Bohm’s concept that all things have inherent relational values (the Implicate order) that may become expressed as manifest reality (the Explicate Order)
IOW, the metaphysical forces are a result of mathematical processes.
Input → Function → Output
It cannot start in a more complicated manner than this ultimate process of Cause ↔ Effect
There is no “irreducible complexity” .
That is an illogical concept, a product of the human mind. It is the basis for religious beliefs of a greater more complex creative agency and instead of turtles all the way down, of which we have a lot of knowledge, we end up with dragons all the way up into infinity, of which have no knowledge at all.
… and not a thought for Earth herself.
Confronting Science Contrarians: Earth Centrism = Geocentrism. Seriously ?
As a matter of fact, Geocentrism is the opposite of Earth Centrism,
in that Geocentrism is purely a mental construct whereas Earth Centrism is simply acknowledging the central role Earth and Evolution had in creating us .Do you deny that “Earth provides the fundamental touchstone of physical reality for humans”?
Earth Centrism says nothing about Earth’s origins, or being born out of star dust, or the cosmic circumstance that made Earth possible! It doesn’t need to because it’s not about that.
It’s about our human perceptions
and our personal relationship (or lack thereof) with this biosphere that created us and supplies all we have, including our life support systems!It certainly doesn’t say Earth is the center of the universe.
It says Earth is the center of human existence.
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Please explain that riddle. The thing isn’t in space and time? It’s words upon words, pure mind game unrelated to physical reality.
We are woven into space and time, and all that is around us is likewise woven into that space and time. Then we have this brain, and the creature reflecting upon itself, along with the world it witnesses, learning to muse ever deeper and deeper and tell ever more elaborate stories.
Still, its thoughts are most certainly captive within the space and time of that particular moment, that’s always moving forward, every bit as much as the building or sand castle the body just built for its inhabitant, or any other “thing in itself”.
{yes I think of my intellect, my consciousness, (the running story teller and interrogator inside of me), as something distinct from my body. Good thing too, for my body has taken much better care of me, then I have of it, to my boundless gratitude.}
I don’t know why you insist there is a conflict between our perspectives.
I agree with you, but for some obscure reason you do not agree with me. Why is that?
Perhaps I am just a little more pragmatic about things. I see everything as being an evolutionary product of the very beginning. Without stardust there would be no earth , without earth there would be no humans.
You hold the earth in high esteem, so do I. But what about oxygen, one of the first elements created after the BB.
Without oxygen there would still be prokaryotic life, but it would be cyanobacteria and it is cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen that made Eukaryotic life possible . We owe our existence to a poisonous algae.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanobacteriaCyanobacteria are the first organisms known to have produced oxygen. By producing and releasing oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, cyanobacteria are thought to have converted the early oxygen-poor, reducing atmosphere into an oxidizing one, causing the Great Oxidation Event and the “rusting of the Earth”,[[14]]
(Cyanobacteria - Wikipedia) which dramatically changed the composition of the Earth’s life forms and led to the near-extinction of anaerobic organisms.[15]
But it is almost a certainty that we are not the only life form in the universe. If an ordinary planet like earth can spawn the incredible variety of life we know has existed, does exist, and will exist in the future (even if we don’t), there is no compelling reason to assume exclusivity.
If Robert Hazen places high odds for life on other planets , I listen to his reasons why. And his reasons make sense to me. There you have it…
Then we have this brain, and the creature reflecting upon itself, along with the world it witnesses, learning to muse ever deeper and deeper and tell ever more elaborate stories.
Such as ? Is science not deep enough for you, or do you want fairy tales like gods . Philosophy attemps to address the fundamentals of spacetime . For that it needs science else we’d be forever stuck with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and those guys spun some great tales about the universe and they were not always right.
Are you ready to discover your college program?
Philosophy is complicated stuff. It’s the search for meaning, for greater understanding, for answers to the questions surrounding our existence, our purpose, and the universe itself. So obviously, attempting to sum it up in a few pithy blurbs is a fool’s errand. Well, consider us your fool, because that’s exactly what we’ve set out to do.
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/major-philosopher-ideas/
I think this idea/hypothesis has had just as profound of an impact on our thinking as evolution/deep time. We’re still arguing against creation theories because it’s hard for people to face the fact that reality might be beyond our grasp. Or just that we aren’t a central character in the story.
Even those who accept it, don’t see a path from what we’ve discovered in the last few hundred years to any basis for mortality or ethics.