Unseen

Similar charges have been made against Prof. John Searle as well.

Anyway, we need to keep people’s work separate from their personal dramas. Otherwise, we’d destroy every work by Caravaggio or Picasso, Byron or Faulkner, and any number of popular musicians.

_Robert_ wrote:

Are you looking to defy the bell curve? Some people can carry rocks, others can design great structures and others can control the show. The castle was not built to trap tourists. It was built to protect the locals behind it’s walls when the hoards showed up to pillage, rape and plunder. Cathedrals were built to display the p…

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Simon Paynton wrote:

@unseen, it’s true that we’re not consciously aware of all sensory inputs. According to Michael Tomasello, “we attend to what is relevant to our goals”. If this is true, then conscious attention is on those things that are relevant to our goals. I agree with this: in experience, it’s true. Why would that be? Because conscious…

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michael17 wrote:

@Reg Is DNA not inanimate? DNA doesn’t meet the definition of life nor do cellular organelles In my opinion there is a non-baryronic presence in the cytoplasm that imbues life which predates this universe.

Huh?

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote: To me, it still seems a gratuity. Something we got but which we could function in exactly the same way without. That’s because you don’t recognise that consciousness is about both mental awareness and mental activity.  We experience the activity with our awareness along with everything else. How else do expe…

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michael17 wrote:

Awareness is an emergent property of life. Paramecium demonstrate an elemental awareness as it hunts for amoeba and the amoeba in turn defense it’s self against the attack of the paramecium. All of this occurring without a nervous system and in real time. White blood cells, in similar fashion have an elemental awareness of i…

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Having experiences is just have reactions to stimuli.

No, it’s being aware of what’s going on. I don’t like the word “stimuli” because it evokes/invokes the “stimulus-response” description, whereas experiencing is passive. The idea of actively experiencing is a kind of oxymoron. Experience is basically viewing the…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Now, when physiologists study the living brain of an ape, they have no grounds for supposing that they are dealing with a dual structure. The brain is not a tenement inhabited by a spirit or soul. The spirit or soul is but a name for the manifestations of the living brain. The leading neurologists of the world are…

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Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:

We already know that decisions happen before we are aware that we made them,

Making decisions is one thing (deciding what to do); reasoning is something else, another kind of processing that the conscious mind does.

Reasoning is just making decisions, is it not?

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

Being conscious is just the experience of being aware, and we are unaware of most of what’s going on in our mind. That is a good one line description of consciousness.

Anything you object to in my definition of “having experiences”?

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:

Assuming that view is true, consciousness is gratuitous.

That’s assuming a lot. The guy isn’t necessarily right. You are both assuming that no processing goes on in the conscious mind, which is silly. Why should consciousness be the only part of the brain where no processing goes on? We have emotional rea…

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Cale wrote:

Those bikini photos are NOT Tulsi. The girl in red is Padma Lakshmi. The tan girl… just clearly isn’t her. Come on, guys.

Let’s not get bogged down on her photos. She is the ONLY candidate who actually tells you what her views are on controversial subjects AND specializes in going into hostile interviews. Her main view is that the US…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

I think the only answer that makes sense is that we have an active unconscious mind operating underneath our conscious mind. I think that there is a concept of duality with that idea. I look at it as “one mind” with consciousness part of the mind that lets us “watch” the images we visualize and “hear” our inner voice…

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Science takes time. It’s a bit soon to be calling it “pseudoscience.”

Simon Paynton wrote:

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:

unconscious mind

This is where we find mental activity that exists below the level of conscious awareness. There is evidence of it in unconscious ego defenses, where what is being perceived is hidden from consciousness by the unconscious, and therefore the resulting behaviour is strange and…

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Simon Paynton wrote:

@unseen – I just think that your definition of consciousness is very vague and woolly.

I think that if we’re having experiences, we know what having experiences is and don’t need a detailed definition. It’s as close to a so-called “primitive concept” as you can get.

jakelafort wrote:

Unseen are you questioning whether we humans are conscious? I am taking it for granted. And since we know we share so many genes and physiology and behavior with other animals it would be a surprise if we were the only conscious animal. Is that arguing from analogy? I suppose it is. I also think it is highly probative of the…

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jakelafort wrote:

Unseen, we cant extrapolate from the organic to inorganic. I am just observing the natural world. Whenever we see intelligent animals; human animals, primates, birds etc we see variation in personality and idiosyncratic behavior. My assumption is that such animals are all conscious. In the same way when i was a kid and heard how…

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