Hello, I'll just plunge right into it: Consciousness is the activation of (a) reaction. Consciousness is the activation of reactions in the brain. These reactions come from structures and stimuli that together make for certain physical, chemical and electrical states (reactions) which produce what we have termed 'consciousness'. In this sense, part of the great neural network that make up much of our brain are the parts that make up our consciousness. When we see something f.ex. that we believe "we know" or "recognize", it is only a certain state of these reactions that are present. In that way, all our consciousness is a physical (and biological probably) phenomenon that are very present in our species in fact. So when we see a building f.ex. and we have conscious phenomena about it (f.ex. "we think that it is our mother's old house and we have good memories of living there"), then it is only matter and forces that are affected in such a way as to create certain states. Much of what may be thought of as a reaction may be not be reaction by some strict definition of the word, but may only be action. So our consciousness is a big neural network where there are many reactions of a specific kind. In this way, our whole consciousness is just made up of a big neural network and so, it has its place in reality. It is the same for an ant f.ex., even though its consciousness is probably much more limited than ours is. It is just certain physical, chemical, electrical etc. states. It would, taken far enough, make it possible to calculate and predict states of consciousness from the knowledge and understanding of the stimuli and structures that create these reactions and how these certain reactions work together. Morality is the idea of a consciousness that affects another consciousness. Morality is the idea of a consciousness that affects another consciousness somehow. Our species is very tuned to consciousness and so we have developed a lot of body parts that react to consciousness. A matter can only be relevant in the idea of morality if it happens between two consciousnesses. A consciousness (in a man f.ex.) that does not affect another consciousness is outside the idea of morality. Just as well if a consciousness is affected by something that is not a consciousness (f.ex. a stone) then it does not have a place in morality either. F.ex. if you are alone on an island and is isolated from the rest of the world, then the place of your actions in morality is dependent entirely on the effects on another consciousness. If you hurt yourself alone on an island, the place in morality of your actions is completely dependent on the affects on others. If your actions are and will be completely isolated from all other consciousnesses, then it is neither good or bad. If you help yourself under these conditions, it is netiher good or bad either. If you help another consciousness, it is generally good. (moral assumption) If you hurt another consciousness, it is generally bad. (assumption again, for the sake of argument) If you are hurt/helped or someone else is hurt/helped by something that is not a consciousness, then it is neither good or bad. As such, morality is placed to a high degree in the consciousnesses of humans because our species has developed so many and so dominant body parts for consciousness partly. Genius is conscious creation. In this way, it differs from more typical creation in the way that non-genius relies more on non-conscious action while genius relies on conscious creation from conscious reactions. In this way, genius is ever intensified and is focused on very specific points that are present in a man's consciousness (or an animal's consciousness). In this sense, all people are genius in some ways (and probably all animals as well, if only in the infinitesimal range) and all men (and animals) are non-geniuses in some ways. (Sorry for not splitting the morality part up into another post in the ethics forum, its a copy)
Agreed. It is these reactions that reality causes. For without reality there can be no consciousness. Reality is thus real. See Brain Stimulation and Conscious experience.
"Reality" signifies something "real" a priori, by virtue of its meaning. It is not trophy-hunting in the sense of trying to win its own definition. If the concept of reality was unsettled, it might only be in regard to finding the proper candidate, or working out what the proper qualifications for such should be. Aunt Mae has perceptions of an external world during a dream. She reacts to a fly by swatting it. She smells propane in the house and reacts to it by re-lighting the pilot flame on the stove oven that went out. She feels pain in her right knee and reacts to it taking some prescribed medication. A noisy meteor appears in the sky and crashes into the roof. Aunt Mae reacts to this sudden horror by waking up from the dream. "Oh my. Lots of reactions transpiring in my brain in response to data from an environment. But none of that was real, thank goodness."
Actually that's not true at all. The last thing that is "present" to us when we see something is a chemical reaction in the brain. I never experience anything like a chemical reaction in my brain. What DOES become present is the object we are seeing and its qualities--its color and shape and brightness and texture etc. This is a problem for the "consciousness is just chemical reactions" congregation. Why would a chemical reaction in the brain happen like seeing an object instead of just like a chemical reaction in the brain?
The stimuli might be coming from other parts of the brain, which would be stimulated by other functions of the body that activate during the sleep mode of the body and so on (and the sleep mode might be activated by other centers and sensitive parts of the body). Well, perhaps the "seeing" part is also just a chemical reaction and the part of the brain that pieces input together and try to make some ideation of it is as well just as the part that "makes sense" of it and gives it "meaning". Consciousness is such a dominating part of the human species that it's hard to get out of it. Likely, I'd say that it's no more different than f.ex. a crocodile which probably doesn't think very much at all and which consciousness must be much more limited than humans. Still, it'd work under the same conditions in my opinion. The human body is just very advanced in the brain section at least and its hard to to take a look at one's own consciousness from an outside perspective because so much of our species is infused with parts that generate consciousness. Nonetheless, the only look I can take at it that shows up green at its logical conclusion is that it is all made up of certain types of reactions of the building blocks of the Universe. The human consciousness is just so dominating in our species compared to f.ex. a fish or a crocodile for that matter that it is hard to see one's own relation to theirs. The human brain is just a very advanced network of neural functions and the parts that are needed for that.
But seeing isn't just a chemical reaction. Seeing really is SEEING an object. It really IS the experience of a reality outside of the brain. It explains nothing to hand wave away seeing and experience and put in its place chemical reactions. You still have not accounted for the subjective AND cognitive nature of the mind. Even if we were to trace every molecular reaction and synaptic firing in the brain, we'd still never understand how that could lead to seeing. Because seeing is a subjective experience, not an objective physical process.
If you are suggesting that consciousness ultimately reduces to causation, I agree with you. We can see it in the simpler sorts of animals. A single-celled protozoan might respond to a stimulus (light, chemical ph or whatever) by swimming towards it or by swimming away. It's obviously reacting, and in the case of the protozoan, it's possible to understand the mechanism and to see that it's kind of machine-like, a causal process. As we move up the phylogenetic tree, we see organisms like worms responding to their environments in more complex ways. But even with worms, it's still kind of machine-like, not unlike our own reflexes I guess. Insects are really alert little devils, able to make many more discriminations about their environment and able to perform a much bigger variety of actions in response to perceived conditions. My own speculation is that insects are still kind of machine-like, but now we've reached the level of humanity's most sophisticated present-day robots, complete with artificial intelligence. When we reach the level of mammals (and perhaps animals like birds and some of the former dinosaurs too), we encounter animals able to learn new tricks, able to plan future behaviors, and capable of some limited degree of creativity. I'm guessing that these animals are starting to acquire an incipient sense of their own selves as well. (It's hard to imagine an animal planning its own future behavior, without being able to imagine itself as an actor in that scene.) But it's probably still hard for them to generate more complex thoughts about themselves. And we have human beings, uniquely specialized for linguistic signaling and for adaptability in behavior, able to think in philosophical abstractions and with an exponentially greater sense of self. So much so, that some of our human philosophers insist that reality is just an illusion and that our sense of subjective self is the only ontological reality. Perhaps we should make a distinction between 'consciousness' and what we might call 'self-consciousness' or 'reflexive-consciousness'. Consciousness in the broadest sense ultimately seems to just be the ability to react to the environment, and that's seemingly reducible to causality. Self-consciousness seems to be the ability to react to one's own internal states. It's not just a cockroach's ability to process internal data that amounts to nonverbal 'Light! Eek! Run!!' It's the added human-style ability to process additional and far more complex and sophisticated information about our own internal states, such as 'I'm scared! I'm afraid of light! ... I'm aware of light! ... I'm aware of my own awareness!!' My own view is that it's still just causality that's underlying all of that, even in the human self-aware case. But there's an influential faction in the philosophy of mind who argue that our awareness of our awareness can never be explained in physicalistic terms. I disagree strongly and vehemently with that, but many people hold that view, even right here on Sciforums.
Seeing is a process. Or probably more accurately, a whole class of processes, ranging from simple photoreceptivity in the simplest organisms to the kind of complex image processing that the higher animals like ourselves can do. The thing to pay attention to are the functions that are being performed. The precise physical nature of what's performing those various functions isn't nearly as relevant. There might be a whole variety of possible kinds of photoreceptors. Subsequent processing might be neural or electronic. But if the same data processing tasks are being performed, the outcome would seem to be pretty much the same. Those are expansions of and elaborations of the basic photoreceptive process of seeing. There are new questions to answer, such as 'seeing what, exactly?' and 'what relevance does what I'm seing have for me?'. At the simple organism level, there's likely to be crude kinds of associative stuff. Light (associated with) Danger (associated with) Run! All non-verbal of course, and these kinds of organisms probably have no awareness at all that they are thinking any of these things. It's more like a light switch reacting to your physically moving a lever by turning on the ceiling light. My guess is that insects operate like this. At a more complicated level, the organism doing the seeing isn't just responding to the information that light brings about its environment any longer. It's simultaneously monitoring its own internal process while it's doing it. It's not just thinking (in a non-verbal way) "Light! Eek! Run!". It's thinking about its own previous experiences of light, about the good and bad things that happened in the light, about what reactions might be appropriate this time, and for human-like organisms like ourselves, more abstractly about our being aware of things like light, and ultimately about our own "subjectivity". By the time we get to that point, we've gone way beyond simple seeing. There's lots more going on in there than that. I think that we would. In fact, we'd know everything that can possibly be said in words and concepts about seeing. Scientifically, our knowledge would be 100% complete. Right. That's the 'explaining red to a blind man' problem. It's also Frank Jackson's 'Mary black-and-white' situation. Mary (the world's greatest scientific authority on color vision, despite being totally color-blind herself) would know every scientific fact about color vision. There wouldn't be any vital piece of the scientific explanation of color vision that's still missing from her account. But obviously there is something that's being left out. Mary can't have the experience of seeing color. My claim is that what's left out isn't a piece of the scientific explanation of the process of color vision at all. What's left out is Mary's ability to actually do it, to actually perform the functions that are involved in color vision.
