Consciousness can't be explained by brain chemistry alone, one philosopher argues

[admin]

We can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we crack the philosophy, as well as the physics, of the brain.

Consciousness can't be explained by brain chemistry alone, one philosopher argues : Read more

 

[LaraK]

It's just not complicated. Your brain is recording as much of it can about what happens to you, but especially things that produce an emotional reaction. The brain summarizes and combines memories together to save space. So you don't remember everything but you remember pieces of lots of things. Emotional reactions are based on the similarity of what's happening to things that have happened in the past and whether those resulted in good or bad experiences for you.

When we do things like make choices we pick the things that we think will produce positive results for us, and we make assumptions about what will be positive and negative based on the past.

So you're just an amalgamation of all the things that happen to you. And that's not to say you're not in control of yourself at all because things that you know, even if they aren't experiences per se, will to your brain be tools that either produce positive or negative experiences.

For instance, I like to use logic because I think that logic produces good experiences for me more often than not. So even though I can't experience logic, I have experienced the tool of logic being good.

The fact that the definition of consciousness is always like an explanation of a concept just shows that people are looking to define something in simple terms that is inherently nebulous. And that's just nonsense.

 

[Orville Raposo]

What is consciousness? To answer this question we must ask the question what is outside our consciousness. Outside our consciousness is unconsciousness. To be aware of this unconsciousness is consciousness. Thus, consciousness is to be aware of the unconscious or what is in the realm of the unconscious. What is in the realm of the unconscious? Our unconscious behavior habitual thought patterns which have become second nature such as our conditionings which cause us to behave instinctively without thought, all this forms part of the unconscious realm and to be aware of this unconscious realm is to be conscious AND THIS IS CONSCIOUSNESS
Going a bit further consciousness is to be aware of what is not in our conscious realm i. e. The spirit world which can be brought into the conscious realm only through the instrumentality of faith,
Thus, through faith we can become conscious of what is not in the conscious realm which is GOD
Thus, to be conscious is to be conscious of the invisible spiritual world which is possible only when we go beyond the immediate consciousness of reason and enter the spiritual world through faith..

 

[Frankj]

But since physical behavior requires a physical cause, any associated non-physical aspect such as subjective consciousness, ie, felt experience, would be arbitrary, so any experience (or none) would yield the same objective outcome.

 

[Frankj]

Consider some form of idealism, in which the “material” world is constructed of experiences through a set of “experiential laws” analogous to physical laws. The hard problem vanishes.

 

[Don Bronkema]

What is consciousness? To answer this question we must ask the question what is outside our consciousness. Outside our consciousness is unconsciousness. To be aware of this unconsciousness is consciousness. Thus, consciousness is to be aware of the unconscious or what is in the realm of the unconscious. What is in the realm of the unconscious? Our unconscious behavior habitual thought patterns which have become second nature such as our conditionings which cause us to behave instinctively without thought, all this forms part of the unconscious realm and to be aware of this unconscious realm is to be conscious AND THIS IS CONSCIOUSNESS
Going a bit further consciousness is to be aware of what is not in our conscious realm i. e. The spirit world which can be brought into the conscious realm only through the instrumentality of faith,
Thus, through faith we can become conscious of what is not in the conscious realm which is GOD
Thus, to be conscious is to be conscious of the invisible spiritual world which is possible only when we go beyond the immediate consciousness of reason and enter the spiritual world through faith..

Consciousness is an artifact of neural operations--it has no Theo-nificance.

 

[Mario Vaneechoutte]

We can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we crack the philosophy, as well as the physics, of the brain.

Consciousness can't be explained by brain chemistry alone, one philosopher argues : Read more

From what I've understood, Philip Goff comes to the same conclusions that have been formulated previously.

Experience, Awareness and Consciousness:Suggestions for Definitions as Offered by an Evolutionary Approach - Foundations of Science

An evolutionary point of view is proposed to make more appropriate distinctions between experience, awareness and consciousness. Experience can be defined as a characteristic linked closely to specific pattern matching, a characteristic already apparent at the molecular level at least. Awareness...

link.springer.com

Mario Vaneechoutte. 2000. Experience, awareness and consciousness: suggestions for definitions as offered by an evolutionary approach. Foundations of Science 5 (4):429-456. 2000.
pdf available at (copy the link and paste it in your browser, thanks):
https://users.ugent.be/~mvaneech/Vaneechoutte. 2000. Experience, Awareness and Conciousness. Foundations of Science


So, I guess that I largely agree with the analysis of Philip Goff.

He uses the term 'panpsychism'. In my publication, I referred to

Griffin, D.R. (1997) Panexperientialist physicalism and the mind-body problem, J. Consciousness Studies 4, 248-268.
who also reached a rather similar conclusion and used similar terminology, apparently.

Using well defined, nonambiguous concepts could help much. I would summarize it as follows:
The discussion is not about the mystery of consciousness, but about the mystery of awareness.
Consciousness can be simply explained as being aware of awareness, and thus it is a form of awareness itself, made possible by language. Animals have awareness as well, but cannot reflect on their awareness, they are not conscious of it.
Awareness is a mystery that cannot be explained because awareness is an experience.
The mystery is that we do not understand what experience is. Experience is already present at the level of baryons (with experience being the interaction with bosons? Not explaining anything after all).
Since conciousness is a specific form of awareness (i.e., being aware of our awareness), consciousness is an experience, and that is why it is mysterious. Consciousness itself can easily be understood as being aware of awareness, made possible by symbolic language.

(Experience is meant here as 'having an experience' and not as 'being experienced', another problem caused by language.)
In fact, the tems 'consciousness' and 'awareness' are unambiguous when well-understood. 'Awareness' = being aware of, having an experience. 'Consciousness' comes from Latin 'cum sciere': knowing about.