Again and again you assert the same thing. If you feed dopamine to a dead brain/body, there would not be an increase of iota of happiness. There needs to be a cognising subject. And you have not explained, for three years now, how the material entities, defined by measurable parameters, give birth to a cognising subject.
A dead brain does not have active neurons. It is the patterns of neural firing that produce consciousness So, if there is no neural firing, there is no consciousness.
This is like complaining that if you add gasoline to a disassembled car, it won't run. Well, yeah. That doesn't mean the gas isn't crucial for the car to run.
Here's the basic issue: what does it mean to be 'conscious'? How do we test to see if someone else is conscious? Is there a way we can determine this?
From what I can tell, your basic position is that this is unknowable. My position is that it is knowable by watching the behavior.
How can you explain perception of unity by equating that with a fragmented material and process? Is there any mechanism?
Sure. The information processing *that is consciousness* produces a piece of information that says 'this is all one' even if that information is false.
The irreducible unity of apprehension, without which there will be no perception of anything at all, not even unconscious states within experience. The unity of experience cannot be reduced to some executive material faculty of the brain, as this would itself be a composite reality in need of unification by some still-more-original faculty, and so on forever. And whatever lay at the “end” of that infinite regress would have to possess an inexplicable prior understanding of the diversity of experience that it organizes. This is the problem of understanding and organising the discrete brain events to an analog narrative, and primarily the awareness of “I am” woven through all our experiences.
This seems to be massively wrong. Why does unity need to be assembled by a 'still-more-original' faculty? It is an *illusion* that is helpful for internal modeling, nothing else.
A piece of stone also carries information but it is not conscious.
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Not even close to the amount of information a brain carries. We are talking factors of billions or trillions here.
In an earlier post you stated that tight correlation and predictability (for example for ‘pain’) is equal to ‘causality’. You implied that correlation and predictability is all that is required.
I thought that it was a tacit acknowledgement that there is the knowledge gap. How material ultimates, characterised by measurable parameters like mass, charge, momentum, etc., give rise to consciousness and mental causality is unknown or unknowable. And you were therefore content with correlation between measurable brain states to qualitative experiential states from pragmatic point of view.
No, this is NOT my position. My position is that *every* causal description is, ultimately, simply a correlation between two observables and NOTHING else. So, if we can correlate between brain activities and reports of conscious states, we *have* a causal description of consciousness. That is what a causal description *is*.
But then you said “Conscious subject is the brain and the experiences are nothing but the happenings in brain”.
This is final conclusion for which there is no evidence, logic, or explanation.
No, this is the position supported by every single study of consciousness, of the brain, of how our minds work, etc.
Probably, you are confused between reductionism and eliminativism. Or you are riding two horses at same time, without clear understanding of both.
I am not committed to either. Both have some truth to them. I think that consciousness reduces to patterns of neural fire in the brain. I also think that if we correlate reports of conscious states and those patterns to a fine enough extent, that *is* a causal theory of consciousness: if this pattern happens, then this person *will* be feeling that.
Therefore, I reiterate that mental causation and consciousness are not reducible to materials and their processes, because we cannot functionally define the phenomenal mental causation and/or consciousness.
What does that even mean? If we can point to certain brain activities and correlate them in a fine enough way to reported conscious states, how is that *not* functionally defining the mental causation?
It is impossible to define the inner self awareness in terms of measurable parameters like mass, spin, charge, momentum etc etc. Ha ha. The thought makes me laugh. It is also impossible to functionally define qualitative experiences.
And what makes you so sure of this? I am claiming that we can get to the place that if we know the physical state of the brain over time we can then deduce from this what th person is feeling 'internally'.
The focus on mass, spin, charge, etc seems to be a red-herring simply because even describing how a neuron works at that level is almost impossible. And it is the patterns of neural fire that we are going to be interested in.
On the other hand, eliminitivism is absurd. My datum is ‘I exist, I see, I know, I feel...’. With that given competence I record some brain parameters and then say “I am an illusion. Brain processes that I see are real.” It is absurd. The premise behind eliminativism is that the consciousness and qualia are representational and therefore illusory. So, how can the observed brain states be objectively correct? It is also plain foolishness to say “Contents of consciousness are vague. Therefore consciousness is illusion.”
Why is it so silly to you? I am not saying consciousness as a whole is an illusion. I am saying certain *aspect* of consciousness (like the feeling of unity) are illusory. But *this* we already know. For example, nobody feels a 'hole' in their visual field. It *seems* uninterrupted and smooth. But, in fact, that is an illusion: we have a blind spot that the brain/mind 'papers over' and *interprets* as continuous.
Can anyone take Dennett seriously? He is like Trump, popular but trash.
Well, I take him very seriously. It seems to me that he has thought deeper about consciousness and its nature than most other people.
Furthermore. If the brain is ‘me’, then what stops the brain to cry out “ I will live on”, when life-consciousness ebbs away from the body?
It is the *activity* of the brain that is 'you'. When the brain dies, the chemical reactions for life stop. That means the neurons stop firing. And that means consciousness goes away.
If brain is ‘I’, then it should not lose possession over the “I” at any time. Does gold ever become non gold?
Gold is a chemical element. The brain is not. And consciousness isn't *just* the brain. It is the *patterns of activity* in the brain.
Or if the physical brain was owner of the processes that engendered the ‘I awareness’, then it would perpetuate the inner material processes to keep the ‘I’ living on.
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Why in the world would you think that? For example, when oxygen is deprived from the brain, there is about 4 minutes of energy reserve (ATP) to drive the neurons. Once that energy reserve is used up, the neurons stop firing (they have no energy to 'reset'). And that means there is no more consciousness.
it seems to me at some places you are confusing 'life' and 'consciousness'. They are very, very different things. Life is a complex collection of chemical reactions driven by, ultimately, the high reactivity of oxygen. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a process in a living brain that is the result of information processing and memory (keeping track of internal state).
