I do appreciate both of you are “on my side” - I also appreciate that both of you are very intelligent and thoughtful, and that serious challenges are the only ones worth spending time on.
Which is why I take your critique seriously and give it a lots of thought, and push back - and we’re probably not through with this discussion.
I hope.
It’s very much appreciated, since I much prefer serious critique to coddling or patronizing, which is for dogs and kids, not serious humans in an unforgiving world…
I agree with the entire summation except for your conclusion.
Do you consider Time a form of energy? AFAIK, only energy is causal to dynamical change and time is the measurement of duration of that change, i.e. Time is a passive temporal phenomenon. Time is not causal, it is an emergent accounting of duration.
Driving from Columbia, MO to Nashville yesterday I was listening to Antonio Damasio’s: “Self Comes to Mind - Constructing the Conscious Brain.”
Mind blowing book, it’s actually the second listen through and I’m painfully aware of how much I miss, I wish there were a continuing education course, it’s the only way to truly digest something like this, with an instructor going over it chapter by chapter, with a lively class discussion. But alas, doing best I can with what I have, so skimming what can off the surface for now - I do intend to get the book for when I have more time to actually sit down with it.
Running through this thread’s dialogue one thing I noticed (besides some spot on critique) is that “consciousness” comes out as a one sided affair. Consciousness as a possession. But in actuality, our consciousness is a reflection of our body’s physical processes interacting with an outside reality. Our Mind is the inside of us in action.
Brings us right back to that under appreciated truism that, ‘an organism cannot be understand without understanding its environment,’ it exists within. What is consciousness, without something to be conscious of?
Point being is that constant interaction between a “consciousness” and the Physical Reality it is embedded within (that is inside the body and outside body) needs to be taken into account when discussing ‘consciousness.’
I do remember being really fascinated by Damasio discussing the various levels of human consciousness and thinking how I needed to cull some of that and share it with W4U since we’ve be debating it and I think he’s limited by his On Off perspective, that won’t hold up to Damasio’s explication. (but that will have to wait W. )
In “Self Comes to Mind,” …, “knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings.”
That is certainly one kind of consciousness, what one might call self-consciousness. But there is also a different kind, as anyone who knows what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red can attest.
Self-consciousness is a sophisticated and perhaps uniquely human cognitive achievement.
Phenomenal consciousness by contrast — what it is like to experience — is something we share with many animals. A person who is drunk or delirious or dreaming can be excruciatingly conscious without being wakeful, self-aware or aware of his surroundings.
The term “conscious” was first introduced into academic discourse by the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth in 1678, and by 1727, John Maxwell had distinguished five senses of the term. The ambiguity has not abated.
Damasio’s distinctive contributions in “Self Comes to Mind” are an account of phenomenal consciousness, a conception of selfconsciousness and, most controversially, a claim that phenomenal consciousness is dependent on self-consciousness. …
I hope.
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