THE DILEMMA OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Hmmm.

First, this is a good way of raising the question. I does provoke consideration.

Formal logic isn't my strong point, so I can't critique this from that point of view. There is one aspect, however, that needs clarification, if your analogies are going to hold. There is the carpenter, and his tools. There is an apple, which I am going to use as a tool. There is my consciousness, which I am going to use as a tool. But wait, in the last case, how do I tell myself apart from "my consciousness." Am I able to distinguish something that is me, investigating, but is not my consciousness?

Which comes to your point, of course. It's just that the analogy on getting there has a certain break. In the prior examples there is "I" and the tool. But is there an "I" distinct from something else we can call consciousness?

In the bits and pieces of philosophy (epistemology) I have, my understanding is that Kant told us (and is mostly still accepted) that we form mental images but cannot verify their relationship to the outer-world experience. Therefore they cannot be trusted, scientifically. And so anything completely inward like ethics cannot be trusted either -- Kant just assumes it, as he had to in his day. So today we trust instruments rather than our own observation, and have no foundation for our ethical-moral views.

I believe you arrive at pretty much this point. I do know that I can simply assert, I experience what I experience, indeed, I create this reality. I am what is most real. I think that's something like the viewpoint of Fichte. Rudolf Steiner feels that Fichte has not grounded his view -- it can't stand in the world, I would put it, -- and that Kant has not gotten the most fundamental epistemological phenomenon. It's not the mental image that is the first thing we can discern when we comprehend a new idea, instead there is a moment's absent-ness and only then can we examine and speak of a mental image. So what is the absent-ness? He sees that as the action of the "I" -- and sees the I essentially as the capacity of attention. By identifying the "I" in this way, he then has his first tool, which is self-establishing and self-explanatory. (It is self, I guess, in the truest sense. What is more my self than my power to direct and give attention?) From there the rest of consciousness can be explored.

But the mainstream of philosophy has gone on in different paths, I think, and I don't know 20th century thinkers enough to judge whether they stand where you do here, or not.

Nice puzzle.

To Mickey -- I don't know Hume, but maybe he just like billiards?
;-]

Boris,

I take all of this because this is what I feel needs to be concentrated on most of all:

We are trying to determine the structure and nature of a highly complex and mysterious object that is consciousness, using as our only tool an object whose properties and structure we don't know or understand. In effect it's like the blind leading the blind, using the unknown to investigate the unknown.

A highly complex and mysterious object defines us, as humans, as beings, our own consciousness because we are a mystery, in that we use only a quarter of the power our brains are capable of. If you look further, the tool we are using is ourselves. This is a paradox because essentially we are left to study ourselves. A most daunting task. We do not understand ourselves, we are our own tool. We are unknown to ourselves and that is why we are on an ever-searching path to knowledge in order to find ourselves, to understand our tools, to apply them and succeed in whatever it is we are here to accomplish. It is most definitely the blind leading the blind and in this case, we are the blind, ourselves, leading us, solitary spirit traversing this plane attempting to figure out exactly what our purpose is and why we are here. All of our thought, our actions, our failures (and I do not even believe in any failure for something is learned from every action) and successes are unknown, the entire structure of not only this plane is completely unknown, but the power within our mind and spirit is also unknown.

How could we ever be able to determine whether the knowledge about consciousness that has been gained in this way is complete, accurate or veracious?

I do believe the only way to figure out whether what we have learned or have been taught is feasible or correct is by trial and error. There is no solution to this. There is only life experience. Disregard text and everything scientists have studied. They followed the same paths as we do, leading themseleves blind down alleyways until they eventually came up with an answer that "seemed" to make sense. We do the same thing every single day in our own lives. It is akin to constantly walking in the dark. Never knowing when you will trip or fall, stumbling here and there, scraping your knee, getting back up and treading the path again and again until that one answer comes to you unbeknownst and unaware. Those are the lucky ones. The ones who find the answers to the questions they ask themselves.

How could we ever know whether using consciousness as a tool to investigate itself has not given us a limited, flawed or inaccurate view of the nature and structure of consciousness?

Using consciousness as a tool is flawed. We do not know whether what we think, feel, know in our minds as fact, as we believe it to be is indeed accurate. It is again, trial and error. Life and consciousness can be compared to one giant scientific experiment.

When you look at an experiment, you see that it is used to test a hypothesis regarding one variable (independent) to another (dependent). Experiments try to balance the limitations of science. It may be difficult to determine a method for measurement. One needs to be objective instead of subjective and our consciousness often times does not view the world in an objective manner.

You have caused me to read of the Hawthorne effect and in this, I found that when people are observed closely their behavior temporarily changes. This change in behavior often occurs due to change. I refer to this as an example, because there was no control group in this experiment, just as there is no control group in studying our own consciousness as a tool. We are the experiment, we are the group. Even experiments are flawed and inaccurate, proven by my example. Even in a controlled experiment, the study of conciousness to reach a hypothesis can only occur when something happens. Simple cause and effect. I can only say that even in a controlled experiment, it would be flawed. Possibly a natural experiment?

Given that we are forever trapped in our own consciousness, how could we ever determine whether consciousness is an adequate or a good enough tool?

Ahhh, the major dilemma. We cannot. We can only go on our instinct. And trust in that and what we have gained along the way to guide us to the right place and sometimes it may not seem like the right place to be, but in every action in our lives their lies a lesson and growth, whether good or bad.

Perhaps the mind is inadequate for investigating itself or other minds and so consequently we will forever be hampered in our quest to understand the mystery that is consciousness?

YES. Most definitely. A freefall skydive.

I will end with Joseph Campbell, who you must read or watch.

"A fundamental belief of Campbell's was that everything is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will eventually return. This elemental force is ultimately "unknowable" because it exists before words and knowledge.

Excellent Boris. You not only caused me to think but caused me to research and within your own consciousness, your thought here, you have raised levels of conscience.

I need to lay on the couch and let Frued Psychoanalyize me. Did I spell that right? Oh well, great article. makes you really think. I give it a 10 for it's thought provoking subject matter!!

Exactly, Boris. This is why a lot of cognitive scientists such as Stephen Pinker( as well as consciousness studies neurophilosophers like Crick, Paul and Pat Churchland, Daniel Dennett, etc.) would prefer not to explain consciousness, but instead explain it away with a functionalist approach that with dogged (and provable) 3rd person omniscient direct observation and use of the current scientific model eliminates what Pinker called in Time magazine "the mystery of awareness" one neurological coordinate of consciousness (NCC) at a time.

But that avoids what David Chalmer correctly labelled "the hard problem", which you just faced directly. We have to deal with paradoxes of self-reference, identity, higher-integral theory versus event-field , just as Patanjali did when he wrote the Sutras of yoga 2500 years ago, if we want to have a map of the mind that actually sparks into action, instead of sitting there like a mechanistic agency, module, or subroutine (the cognitivist paradigm problem.)

Forget the Turing Test, Searle's Chinese Room or Ned Block's Chinese Brain thought problems, guys, if you can't explain or reverse engineer up to the final superposition of awareness, attention and choice your neuroanatomical processes in play with the computational model, how are you gonna get hard AI? It cracks me up how you have this robot scientist saying we'll have created intelligent cyborgs by 2009--check out some of Ray Kurtzweil's claims on KurtzweilAI.net--when the humbler cognitive psychologists such as Edelman or a great neuroanatomist like Antonio Damasio show clearly why we can emulate computation, but not yet simulate Fodorian "mentalese" that precedes thought, complex mapped inferential feeling, or even nonlearned evolutionary feedback loops such as the reactive emotions. It will take years before we have a meaningful theory of consciousness, so that we can even imagine what it might look like from the outside--such as Nagel's famous essay on the mind of a bat.

Nevertheless, to stress the limiting factor as you have just done is to play Zeno, as any good Socratic philosopher worth his salt should. And I would reply, what we need is a new way of coordinating first person subjective account with the third person empirical base. Have you read Francisco Varela's notion of how we must learn how to self-observe (as Descartes did carefully, however erroneously, in the Meditations, and as advanced Buddhist meditators do every day) as scientists and philosophers before we can even make sense of the data we are getting from brain scans? I agree with you that the study of consciousness itself may well be impossible head on with our current methods (which is why as pre Simulationists in our "art movement " praxis, rather than rhetorically arguing impossible systems in a logico-linguistic critical project as the post-Structuralists did, we artists interrogate consciousness, and try to understand what it is before language, as Korzybski exhorted in Science and Sanity as well as his later General Theory of Semantics). But I rule nothing out, and want to test this notion of 1st person subjective phenomenological accounts that correlate with outer empirical data (vision studies, ECGs, MRIs, etc.) before I throw in the towel. My question to you to question your own paradox would be, how do you know that consciousness is what we use to study consciousness, if you haven't defined it clearly? It's like you're throwing out the activity because you think you've identified the tool.
But you haven't.

This is very thought provoking. I think it is something that little by little we learn of our conciousness, and hopefully can expand on its roll, but to know if it is enough, well, I wonder if we always strive to do our utmost best, and always searching for more knowledge and understanding, that it is enough for us at the time that we discover where our level of conciousness is.

Isn't this why artist, paint ... musicians, make music ... writers, write ... etc ...? All looking into the 'void' for understanding ... at least one perspective at a time.

Human's are insane creatures full of wonderful possibilities ... either we have the ones who don't give a drat about anything or we have the ones who over compensate for everything with the need to to know everything imaginable.

(think I'll go back to writing ... less painful ... for me!)

Boris, is this course for credit?

John Beck,

Not sure what your question means?

Boris your conscious dilema
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Have you ever watched Being John Malkevich... It's like that scene where he goes into his own mind and it's a whole bunch of Malkeviches saying Malkevich over and over to each other. Redundancy at it's finest. I think therefore I am, and I am what I think therefore I am thinking.

It's interesting to call the human brain studying itself a paradox (I first read this in Pinker's books, by the way), but as the comments indicate, the problem is really not the "thing studying itself" situation, but the human brain's limitations in understanding the universe (including itself). If it tends to misconstrue things exterior to itself, perhaps it gets even more things wrong when it's looking at its own workings. But the ultimate question, which several of the comments indicate, is: do we know anything?

Some people come to the conclusion that we don't. I concede that this is a possibility, but in that case, I hardly see the point in all this talk. :-)

I make two basic assumptions: one, that reality exists; and two, that our consciousness is able to get to know this reality at some level. By that I mean that our methods for perceiving and analyzing it are actually able to distinguish what is true (what is) with some reliability. That our score is better than random guessing.

These are assumptions, I repeat. We don't know these to be the case. I accept them on faith, because without them all further discussion is baseless.

If we accept these assumptions, the answer to that question (do we know anything) is yes, it is fairly likely that we know some things, including about how our brains work. Then that entire method including verifiability, predictions, falsifiability, etc. come into the picture.

Your point is a good one Børis (if you insist:-). But there's another important question, which certain postmodern philosophies like to ignore. Do we know more about how things in the world work, including how our bodies and our very brains work, than people did 10,000 years ago? Or in Egypt in the Old Kingdom? Europe in the middle ages?

I tend to think yes. I also tend to think people who say they're not certain (I mean reasonably certain) of this are being somewhat disingenuous. Or not serious. I don't know, really.

In any case, it's great to see stuff like this on Gather. Good job, Børis.

Back to my question, "Is this course for credit?" -- a humorous suggestion that participation in this article and comments should count toward an advanced academic degree...

The smart will learn from trial and error, the wise will learn from his/her mirrors. The smart and wise will do both.

I suspect that there are rarely two or more apples that are exactly the same coming from a same tree or other trees for that matter. Yet, the properties remain the same.

What can your tools do for you or what can you do with your tools?

Boris, again you bring up interesting and thought-provoking questions. I see your reasoning on why it is silly, even ridiculous to use another apple to discover the nature of our apple. Personally, I believe that the conscious mind is flawed, it is wrought with trickery and deviousness. One cannot rely solely on the conscious mind to understand the conscious mind. It is essential that we trust our unconcious minds to give us significant insight on our conscious minds. It is difficult to do so, because little are we conscious of the unconscious. Only through dreams, meditations, and other rare circumstances can we come into contact with the unconscious. But like all things in life, balance is essential. We need to find teh balance b/w the concious and the unconsious to fully or better understand our psyches.

I remember now why I never liked philosophy. One can argue endlessly about these things.

I'm very grateful for the recent advances in the neurological study of consciousness. Of course, we are still using our brains to analyze our brains, but at least we have more and more "nonbrain" tools at our disposal, like MRI and PET brain imaging, etc.

This new technology is probably the equivalent of adding extra senses with which we can analyze ourselves.

Can't one look at the product of consciousness for patterns and come to some conclusions about the process that created those patterns? Although perhaps one could argue this is more like Plato's cave than anything else. Simply shadows.

I think it isn't without purpose, however, I am really drawn to folks like Ernst Tugendhat and his _Self-consciousness and self-determination_. Or Habermas's _Theory of communicative action_. Both have really rung true for me in ways of thinking about consciousness.

To begin to understand anything, requires a base or basis of thought ... who is it that is doing the inquiry ?

What is the intention and what are the tools ??

Are "we" to base it on objectivity and use only the 5 physical (objective) senses coordinated by the brain ... or do we allow, let alone value (and if so how much?) the subjective sense(s) other than the objective 5 ?


Depending upon the answers to those questions we will have at least two different inquiries taking place here with at least two different results and most likely no agreement ...

But then, are we really seeking agreement, learning, or just exercise of the mind ?

Which brings up another question, what is the mind ? Is it self contained and objective, related directly to the brain of the physical (objective) ego self ... or is it more subjectively ephemeral and ubiquitous, an ethereal intelligence throughout the cosmos that we "tune in" to ??

So then, it seems to me that it all comes down to our priorities and those based upon how we first perceive ourselves and how that stacks-up in relationship to other(s) ...


Speaking only personally (the only best truth), I spent the bulk of my life living an ego existence primarily "selfish" ... priority being "me", that which "ruled" my physical objective being as I perceived it at the time, a rather objective OUTlook involving the world and all of the "manifested" things involved. What one would define as DUAListic speculation, as in (+/-) choices with prioritization associated more with the extremes of polarization ... white versus black, good versus bad, yes versus no ... etc etc etc ...

Of course there is little that is really "that" simple ... thus I was often lost and confused because the higher truths seemed not available to me ... that depressed me come midlife to the degree that I was ready to give up ... too many questions, not enough answers, too much confusion, not enough peace (of mind).

But having exhausted seeking satisfactions in the OUTer world and from other(s), I finally turned withIN, towards the hitherto unknown and unvalued realm of subjective mind BEYOND physicality, the POTENTIAL of the spiritual realm ... with no preconceived limits other than it be based upon truth and love, I sought nothing more and the emphasis was on truth ...


The near term results were a profound spiritual awakening KNOWN to be LOVE first, then soon realized to be also TRUTH ... and ALL SUBJECTIVE ... SPIRITUAL ... with some profound objectively physical aspects also ...


Thus did I come to find that the "former" ego self had a previously hidden (to itself) transcendent aspect, the higher Self, that I now call the Soul, the Spiritual connection to GOD ... transcending Duality (+/-) with it's disconnective Void or Gap (/) across which there is often conflict and confusion, that, replaced with the Spirit (=) of GOD as a "bridge" between realms, a Trinity of (+=-) which I now see as the Basic Equation of Truth (BET) which is cosmic and universal ... and a PARADOX !!!

Therefore, I have no more concerns about the questions raised in this article ... other than what works the best for my now spiritual mission to attempt to help others awaken also to the "Truth that will set them Free" ... (+=-)>(+/-) !

PS ... I now see "consciousness" as "subjective", more related to the "mind" and the Self ...

"Perhaps the mind is inadequate for investigating itself or other minds and so consequently we will forever be hampered in our quest to understand the mystery that is consciousness?"

Well, of course its adequate for investigating itself, just look. All that you behold, is consciousness. Investigate away.

Hello Boris,

I just wanted to say I am finally going through my currently over 6,000 pieces of gather new mail that is in my inbox on here. So with that in mind I have finally come to a piece of mail that was addressed to me in regards this article submission you have created to share with the gather community. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your piece with us here at gather. :o)

when all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Excellent food for thought

..
U wishing you laughter