*Watched a bit of David Chalmers, always good for getting my blood boiling, just what I needed to get me to try a little more writing on this. I think it’s an improvement. *
- Trying to focus.*
It’s not just about our personal relationship with the knowledge we possess.
But also appreciating that “we” actually do inhabit this reality.
That universal reality, had/has infinite potentials, still has been flowing down one particular path. Simply the fact of us being here is proof positive of that fundamental fact of our human condition.
…
Kuhn defines knowledge as though our intellect creates “reality” and that science is some sort of intellectual battle field.
Then Chalmers comes along with this “Hard Problem” of consciousness:
Explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the “easy problems” of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to discriminate, integrate information, and so forth.
It’s an intellectual contrivance that has manufactured an expectation that biology alone can’t be enough to explain the experience of being conscious and aware. A grand argument built upon an edifice of rigorous “logical” arguments - as if logic can define the parameters of physical and biological reality.
Seems to me Chalmers is trapped within a western religious hangover - at the heart of it is our age old human self-absorption and expectation that something as magnificent as we, must require a God to create. Same old message, simply cloaked in fancier work-smithing, we humans simply must be superior in god’s eye, his chosen creatures.
It illustrates how philosophers remain unable to appreciation the significance that Earth’s Evolution is what created life, and life is what created cellular awareness and then onto increasing levels of consciousness as life evolved through the eons into ever more complex and competent creatures.
Consciousness is life’s creation, it’s the result of creatures interacting with their respective environments. How many have given the factual reality of consciousness any thought? Consider there is no consciousness in the future or the past. Or?
Think about it, consciousness is all about living and the present, this moment.
If you could view the Big Bang and then Earth from an outside god’s eye view of the full span of time, Earth’s consciousness would be like a spark racing through the generations with their births and deaths of the generations, all happening right here on Earth.
Before the talking heads dismiss biology explaining consciousness, at least become acquainted with current understanding.
To me learning (and its grown up version, science) is all about accumulating evidence and understanding, punctuated by leaps in connecting dots, where new levels of appreciation (and control) for this reality we exist within emerge and come into better focus. Seems to me Kuhn added some new perspectives to consider, but didn’t negate the traditional perception of science, both apply in their time and place.
It’s Kuhn’s total self-absorption that assumed we create the outlines of reality, rather than doing it’s best to recognize what is out the there, is what I want to point a spotlight on.
Perhaps that’s the key to what I’m trying to get across.
“This reality we inhabit”
Possessing an awareness that “we” - our thoughts, the me, myself and I - our human mind and consciousness inhabits a “physical reality” that exists on the other side of some ephemeral intellectual divide between our mind, and our brain, body, its biological functions and sensory abilities, and extends out into the environments and landscapes we navigate.
——-
It starts with your body, it’s physical, it’s biological, alive, ever changing, everything you eat and drink and inhale, your body must process. Your body encapsulates the “best” most complex creature Earth’s Evolution produced, but you wouldn’t be here, if not for all the rest of it. Not just within your body, but around your body, your environments and the tribes you belong to.
Your consciousness didn’t start when you woke up this morning, nor when you were born, it started half a billion years ago when creatures first had to start perceiving the world they were born into. That trend continued with ever increasing abilities appearing within the Earth’s animal and plant kingdoms.
One must have a modicum of appreciation for that Physical Reality background before any of the rest can actually make sense. Especially the part about consciousness and hell yes the mind can be understood as a biological product of our bodies! Just need to start studying evolution and get caught up on the state of brain/mind science!
The notion of consciousness as universally fundament seems childish in the extreme to me.
Instead I appreciate consciousness as a product of living organisms inhabiting an environment. Is there any evidence to the contrary, beyond stories people tell each other?