Do we really have a warrant to suppose that brain and consciousness really are the same thing, when one (brain, whose functioning is captured on the EEG tape) cannot even explain the other which is said to be identical to it?
The most intellectual pleasing sentence I've read in quite awhile. Good to "save."
These are the problems. I?ve tried to demonstrate that consciousness is not a continuum, that it is something that is qualitatively different from the physical brain that it is, in fact, a thing in itself. That it has a kind of autonomy (as the process of silencing the thought stream shows). This kind of autonomy is not something the brain has. For if the brain were to cease its activity, we would simply be dead, real soon.
An quick analysis of strata at least as important as geological strata.
Just a note in passing, I read the essay that PatrickHenry directed me to. I'm running over long here, so just a quick note: Somehow, the author moved blithely from his subtitle, which said IF, to the body of his argument, which turned IF into IS. IF was a proposition that had not been validated; yet the discussion assumed it had a pre-analytical notion has, in this case, been turned into the major premise of the following argument. (There's a certain dishonesty in such operations, IMO.) What we ended up with were the qualia descriptions of conscious states of thinking and feeling that human beings are said to typically have.
Describes an unconfessed leap that is epidemic among theoriticians as they cross boundaries. It can be a leap from validity of method to invalidity, or from propositional reason to unreasonablness. It is often an unconfessed leap (listen, any who have a strong desire for objectivity) from empirical knowledge to doctrinal belief. It can come by direct assault or by inadvertently rising like bread dough past the level of a theory-set's epistemological incompetence, but it sure comes --from any human quarter.
May I note here that these qualia descriptions of experiences consisting of words -- are directly analogous to the EEG tape recording the hypothetical brain activity of the above thought experiment? For they can tell us nothing about what consciousness is, or what my conscious experience was like for me. Qualia just look to me like yet another attempt to grind down the authority of human subjective experience, to reduce it to the level where it can be handled in terms of symbols that must forever remain distinct from actual experience itself. They represent a retreat from Reality, not an explanation of real things. JMHO FWIW
A matter of human self-pride, including the defense-mechanism that Ms. b previously alluded to.
IMHO, what we have here at bottom, unspun, is a quite serious epistemological problem. Pop! goes the fallacy.... I gather that is where "Pop Science" comes from.
Thank you for your kind words -- and for your perceptive posts.