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Consciousness is what we can know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness has intrigued and baffled philosophers. To begin, we must define and describe consciousness. What to include in a complete definition and description of consciousness?
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Andy Clark is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex.
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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
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"Hopeless fellows using their heads to look for their heads!" Lin-Chi d. 866 C.E.
You cannot look at it logically you have to intuitively think about what is consciousness you have to feel it in your emotions and that’s part of the process I believe
You cannot look at it logically you have to intuitively think about what is consciousness you have to feel it in your emotions and that’s part of the process I believe
We are supposed to be multi dimensional beings. We are in a third dimension right now I believe we are going to resend hopefully… But you have to expand your consciousness… And realize everything is alive and has consciousness to it even though we think it’s in inantimite
There is a particular kind of dolt who, having no Latin, has no idea what the word "Conscious*" * means*, and , and thus lacks the wits to ask "Whose consciousness….. Of …. *What*?
It is simply asinine to speak of consciousness in vaccuo, without identifying Whose consciousness….. Of …. *What*.
Having no idea what the word *"Conscious*" Means, and thus said dolt is paralysed by the word conscious with ness stuck on the end of it. Being pignorant dolts supposes the word consciousness hides some mystery, and all for the want of some simple schoolboy Latin
The quest(ioning), not the answer.
Folks – Andy Clark is not personally attacking your conception of mind… he is simply offering an alternative viewpoint. Philosophy is not about 'defeating' others positions it is about broadening your mind. Agree with him or don't, there's no question of winning or losing.
Let's invent a question that nobody can answer.
Then ask lots of "experts".
That will be fun.
That which recognises itself
Brilliant man…but was he really thinking about that shirt?
Everything you do is triggered. You don't scratch if you don't itch. Awareness is all about needs. No needs, no need to do anything. So yes, it has to do with the body. Every cell we are made of has awareness and communicates. They too have needs. And that's why large creatures have brains as a central control system. And your subconscious has awareness. And your consciousness lives .85 seconds in the past. Your limbic system gets sensory info first. Then, based on experience, learning etc, set against genetic predispositions it sends consciousness emotions and auto responses.
If you don't know something and get conflicting emotions, and have time to react, you can study, deliberate etc,. And if what you do works, you changed your auto response for next time. That's adaption. So consciousness is there to help the subconscious learn how to give auto responses.
He looks like the Sting
How could a person conceive of , think about or otherwise formulate any idea if he wasn’t first conscious.
The ability to choose based on information.
What created the vessels to carry consciousness
I dont think this guy's correct at all. I mean what makes me "me" and you "you"? We cant just assume anyone has a real experience but ourselfs. Its philosophy 101
Lovely conversation. And it suggests that somewhere, some tech firm is right now striving to build the optimal physical container for consciousness, and relentlessly questioning: what properties of such a container generate what types of knowledge, and why? In a million years, what might we look like?
None of them can explain it in simple language…there is so much of jargon
sometimes I think these guys discussing consciousness are philosophical zombies. They don't appear to even understand the hard problem.
The question "What is consciousness?" is actually the easiest question in the world to answer because there are no incorrect response. Everything is consciousness, and there is nothing that consciousness is not.
It is very disheartening and frustrating to see the dogma and doctrine of Behaviourism persisting into the second quarter of the 21st Century. Equating observable, complex input-output with lived experience ignores not just the personal nature of lived experience, but also the mounds of evidence for 'conscious' states which are not assosciated with any behavour either physical or mental.
Clark is 100% correct in that the type of experience a being is aware of is highly shaped by the body (resulting from genetics, evolution, enviornment, upbringing, beliefs, social connection and conditioning and countless other influences). However he is also 100% ignorant if he does not understand, or has not bothered to investigate his own awareness enough to realize, that Awareness is not thus conditioned.
Awareness is distinct from conscious experience in that it is invariant and the same in its ultimate nature for all observers… it is Awareness, pure and simple, without content. All 'Content of Consciousness' (awareness-of) is unique to the embodied, momentary physical processes which that Pure Awareness is accessing.
You can create all the 'robots ' you like, it doesn't matter in the slightest how convincingly their behaviour mimics consciousness. A perfectly inert, no input-output human mind in deep meditation or at the end of Apohatic prayer is fully Aware. There is no measureable assosciated state of activity (except perhaps deep neurological resonant states- although this is not yet certain). There is no 'sense of I' or 'what it is likeness', yet thare is Awareness. Behaviour and complexity are not correlates or causes of Awareness- of the experience of 'givenness'.
As for the 'zombie paradigm' – I am firmly convinced that if we have not already reached this stage (where an algorithm or machine model's behaviour would render it totally indistinguishable from, say, a human) then we will reach it very soon. This leads to the bizarre situation where an AI may have more 'rights as a person' than say, a cow or a rat, (or let's be honest, than people), simply because it appeals to Humanity's chauvanistic view that 'intelligence=value", or worse, the misunderstanding that complexity of output or processing is somehow the same as having an experience.
Consciousness is the self's perception independent of the self.
To actually see u need sence of touch 2 in therory if u could never interact with d world u wouldn't be able to see it effects seeing anyway all our sences come into play.