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See also these site-pages :
(accessible via the menu by clicking on the down arrow)
Feel free to send comments to: Air1@nyu.edu (note: I am no longer affiliated with nyu)
You may also enjoy videos of my General Relativity lectures given to NYU's SPS
On this site:
Some conundrums & epiphanies,
as well as a proposed survey and a neurophysiological experiment.
use physicalist not materialist
plausible vs possible, not sure that it can be measured
even m's wouild agree that if existed a property or phenomenon which cuold be known to exis on tis own and they didnt posses it then they would deny it existed, and v.v.
how they talk about it may be an indicator of whether they posses it
assumption that awareness correlates to sophistication brain structure
diff between someone says it doesnt exist vs someone says it is mystery i think i might be able to solve
Various philosophers and scientists deny the existence of a "hard problem of consciousness”, and claim that the mind is physical or is an 'epiphenomenon of the material' - for example that it is a software of the brain's hardware.
Conundrum: How can it be that a person with a Mind does not know it exists?
Solution: it is my conjecture that an intelligent philosophically-trained person will find the materialist position plausible only if they do not themselves possess consciousness, or if they have some form of consciousness but lack "self-awareness".
Of course the mindless philosopher can reply that our conviction of the existence of something that cannot be proved to exist is due to faulty wiring in our brain rather than due to an additional property ('mind') associated to ours. And they will not comprehend what is meant in this context by "self-awareness", but will claim they do, and offer the verbal statement "I am self-aware" as if it is a proof.
However all this again means that they are simply missing the point, since a conscious being who is self-aware knows of the truth of the existence of their consciousness more fundamentally than they can know the validity or truth of anything else (for example: more than logic, reasoning, and science, as well as the existence of an external universe and of the materialist raising the objection) and also understands that the ability to state "I am aware" and to think that declaration makes sense is not what is being discussed.
A lack of awareness would be a simple reason why intelligent materialists cannot understand idealists, and why they think that our inability to understand them is symmetrical, whereas it is more like the inability of a blind person to understand 'color', which is assymmetrical. I feel comfortable in proposing their lack of consciousness as a reasonable conclusion since their position is otherwise incomprehensible.
Conundrum: How can it be that not all biological humans share such a fundamnetal trait?:
Solution: Given that Mind is not physical, there is a problem of explaining the emergence of mind via purely-materialistic evolutionary processes (as pointed out by Eccles), and so it is certainly not necessary from the evolutionary perspective, or from any scientific (materialist) perspective, to assume that all biological humans have minds just because some do. And it is understandable that those who do not possess Mind are sceptical about it, indeed don't even understand what those who possess Mind are talking about, and think that they can disprove the existence of that which is uniquely self-evidently-existent. And indignantly deny the possibility of anything being self-evidently existent.
A conundrum: If Mind is unphysical, can there be any measureable distinctive feature of Mindless humans?
Potential soultion: The absence would manifest as a difference between how brains think about mind when they are or are not associated to minds (or to minds which are "self-aware" or not).
The mindless among philosophers and scientists would probably tend to be hard-core materialists. Likely they would be incapable of understanding why conscious humans state as a fact that consciousness exists, how it can be that rational educated people can claim that it requires no proof, and indeed why awareness is considered to be more fundamental than any other phenomenon, incluing all that can be described by science.
An impassable gulf separates those with and without minds. Ordinary people do not philosophize, and so their lack of understanding of the mind-body problem is not an indication of their lack of a mind. However anyone who is conscious and intelligent enough to read advanced philosophical treatises will have intuitively and directly known that mind is qualitatively different than matter, and that the 'mind-body problem' is not resolvable by the mechanisms proposed by materialist philosophers; therefore, I would propose that if an intelligent reader of philosophy, a thinker, does not understand this, it is an indication that they are perhaps of the ‘mindless’.
The mindless trivialize Descartes' position and epigram, and in my opinion this is possible among philosophers only if they do not posess mind (or awareness of their mind).
The conclusion following from Descartes ideas is generally insufficiently carefully presented: not as commonly presented "I think thereore I am" but rather "My awareness [or: self-awareness] is itself proof of its existence" or "only awareness needs no proof that it exists" .
This is his main point I believe, as opposed to the somewhat related statement "the notion of my own existence is internally-generated as opposed to sensory impressions which are responses to external data".
For example anything else can be considered not to exists and ony be an 'illusion', but to an awareness the existence of an illusion is a proof of the existence of the awareness experiencing the illusory entity (not of course the existence of the illusory entity itself) so those with minds understand that awarenss CANNOT be dismissed as "an illusion". The existence of a physical universe can be an illusion, the notion that we are not brains in jars can be dismissed as an illusion etc, but the existence of the awareness itself cannot be dismissed.
Mind knows itself to exist and so the existence of mind requires no proof, but the mindless cannot accept this of course.
An Exception to Cartesian dualism: Though it may sound paradoxical, I consider correct both materialists who deny the reality of conscious awareness and Descartes who knew it does exist. I believe they are simply both reporting on the realities of their own existence, one without mind, the other with. So the Cartesian tells me “I think Descartes was right, therefore (ie this itself is sufficient indication that) I am self-aware” and what the materialist effectively tells me is: “I think materialism is correct therefore (ie this itself is sufficient indication that) I am un-aware”.
Conundrum: Given the Cartesian dualistic disconnect between mind and body, a person without awareness will act and speak in the same way as one with awareness.This presents the dilemma of how to detect awareness. My proposal is to utilize an aspect of awareness - indeed of self-awareness (basically a form of introspection). Since anyone who is aware will understand the Cartesian proposal, anyone who insists on materialism may well be unaware. If an aware being can feel their awareness and remark on it, then this is itself an effect of the Mind on the realm of the body! However, if Cartesian dualism insists that the effect of consciousness is not possible in the realm of body, the very utterance of the phrase “I am aware” cannot be due to Mind! If it is nevertheless due to the existence of the mind of the one speaking; interestingly, this is itself a weakening of the Cartesian dualism for the case of self-reference.
Conundrum: As it is impossible to devise an experiment which can detect consciousness, it would be impossible to detect its absence, and so one cannot prove that this or that person is or is not conscious.
Resolution: There can however perhaps be a physical effect involved, even if the naturalistic aspects of evolution are not by themselves the mechanism bringing consciousness into being.
How did awareness arise in an otherwise-material universe? If evolution can proceed without the existence of mind, there is no guarantee that mind would arise in all genetically-identical beings, ie not all humans need be aware simply because some are. And so it is not unreasonable for the mindful to suppose that if there are some humans who are not mindful, among them are those highly-intelligent philosophers who disbelieve in the existence of mind.
Perhaps mind requires a specific physical substrate (perhaps in the brain) which evolved for some other rreason, where the lack of this substrate in some humans can explain why they remained mindless (ie mind is perhaps an emergent quality which can only exist in brains sufficiently-wired genetically). Perhaps there is some correlation with different evolutionary lines – we know that not all humans have the same genetic pool since some possess Neanderthal genes etc; perhaps there are other differences explained via genetic variations.
However the existence of a physical substrate would require physical explanation – for example perhaps it conferred advantage, via some ability, but then one would wish to scientifically identify this ability.
Proposal for a neurobiology experiment: The speculations above presents the possibility that there is some difference between the structures of the brains of convinced materialists compared to the brains of those convinced of the primacy of mind, or of the real difficulty of the mind body problem.
Perhaps it might even be so that when thinking deeply about this issue some part of the brain would 'light up' more in one type of brain than in another, thus enabling detection of the physiological substrate. However of course no such discovery would on its own would provide an understanding of consciousness itself, nor of how and why it emerged.
There is a non-pc aspect to 'the hard problem of consciousness', and that is that there is no point in dialogue - some people are aware (self-aware) and some are not, and there is no way for the two to "be on the same page" in their discussion. This is the reason some philosophers and brain-scientists and AI-people need to spend hours explaining to those with minds "why mind is illusion" and the others, with minds, feel frustrated that these "counter-arguments" however linguistically and logically sophhisticated, are completely irrelevant.
(This is the "frustrating problem of consciousness": that there is no useful way of discussing it with someone on the other side.)
The uninverse is perverse. Only by removing consciousness from 'natural' phenomena was successful predictive physics born, and science and perhaps philosophy are meant to be predicated on a shared knowledge, established objective measureable truths, but the most fundamental truth (the existence of awareness) is impossible to prove - and this unprovability would have been an interesting fact, except that not all know of this truth, and since this basic fact of the unprovability of the most fundamental fact is unprovable, it too cannot be part of science.
See also these site-pages :
(accessible via the menu by clicking on the down arrow)
And see below my ideas as mentioned in Wikipedia and Webster's online dictionary (unfortunately removed from there some years ago).
Thanks!
Dr Avi Rabinowitz
Warning: Consumer fairness, truth in advertising: if you are searching for critiques of "Mindless Materialism" in the sense of "consumerism" or "material life style" this is the wrong page! And if you are a shopper and seek the self indulgence and hedonism of "holiday sales" and "special discounts", good luck! If you are interested in Idealism, and have read Carnap, Russel, Kant, Hume, Berkeley etc, or perhaps popular books with "Mind" in the title such as "The Mind's I" or "Godel Escher Bach", "Infinity and the Mind" , works of Church; also: Searle, Damasio, Chalmers etc; then perhaps this is for you.
My ideas as mentioned in Wikipedia and Webster's online dictionary, in bold below (later removed from both by moderators).
From Wikipedia (2008?)
''Access consciousness'' (A-consciousness) is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we [[perception|perceive]], information about what we perceive is often access conscious; when we [[introspection|introspect]], information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we [[memory|remember]], information about the past (e.g., something that we [[learning|learned]]) is often access conscious; and so on. Chalmers thinks that access consciousness is less mysterious than phenomenal consciousness, so that it is held to pose one of the ''easy problems'' of consciousness. Dennett denies that there is a "hard problem", asserting that the totality of consciousness can be understood in terms of impact on behavior, as studied through [[heterophenomenology]]. There have been numerous approaches to the processes that act on conscious experience from instant to instant. Philosophers who have explored this problem include [[Gerald Edelman]], [[Edmund Husserl]] and [[Daniel Dennett]]. [[Daniel Dennett]] (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgements and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem."
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http://www.websters-online-dictionary.com/definition/consciousness
Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem." Chalmers, on the other hand, makes a strong case for the hard problem, and shows that all of Dennett's supposed explanatory processes merely address aspects of the easy problem, albeit disguised in obfuscating verbiage. Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one. The possibility has indeed been proposed that those denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem," do so since they do not possess this faculty[13].
Daniel Dennett (1988) suggests that what people think of as phenomenal consciousness, such as qualia, are judgments and consequent behaviour. He extends this analysis (Dennett, 1996) by arguing that phenomenal consciousness can be explained in terms of access consciousness, denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem." Chalmers, on the other hand, makes a strong case for the hard problem, and shows that all of Dennett's supposed explanatory processes merely address aspects of the easy problem, albeit disguised in obfuscating verbiage.
Eccles and others have pointed out the difficulty of explaining the evolution of qualia, or of 'minds' which experience them, given that all the processes governing evolution are physical and so have no direct access to them. There is no guarantee that all people have minds, nor any way to verify whether one does or does not possess one. The possibility has indeed been proposed that those denying the existence of qualia, hence denying the existence of a "hard problem," do so since they do not possess this faculty[13].
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13 Avi Rabinowitz [WAS: http://www.pages.nyu.edu/~air1/scirelig.htm NEW: https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/avi-rabinowitz/home/mindless-materialists Mindless Materialists: A Controversial Proposition]