Re: Consciousness, Mind, Matter, Meaning and Information

casey <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 30, 10:19=A0am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:


Consciousness is really just the idea that
1) you have private mental events we call thoughts
and memories,

and
2) that these private events have some attribute
which is non-physical.

It is your belief that everyone who talks about our
subjective experiences believes they are non-physical.
That is your strawman that you like to knock down.

No, it's only the people that talk about it AS IF, they had something in
them that our current computers don't already have and which "no one
understands yet". It's the people that think consciousness is somehow
magic. The fact that they think it's physical, but think it's magic
doesn't stop me from talking about their belief as being "non physical".

What is physical? It is a macro observation.

No, it's not an observation at all. It's what the universe actually is
independent of how we are anything is observing it or representing it.

When
the idea that the physical world might be made up
of small physical particles it was imagined these
particles were solid, like little marbles.

The fact that we don't have a way to fully and accurately _represent_ the
physical world doesn't stop it from being what it is. The fact that you
and and I don't understand it, doesn't stop it from being what it is. An
apple exists whether you are here to eat it and taste it. It exists as an
apple whether we think it's made of electrons or that it's the result of
some complex wave function.

But this was assuming the whole chunk of matter
must be made up of smaller chunks of matter. This
is not the case. Matter, or the physical, as you
experience it at the macro level, is an illusion.

No, it's not an illusion. We see what it _IS_. We don't see or understand
all of it, but what we do see, is real, and is not an illusion.

An illusion only exists when there is an deviation between our perception,
and reality.

When a camera takes a picture of an apple, if the pixel values are all
correct, then the camera is "seeing the truth about reality". But of some
of the pixel values don't match what they should have been because of some
defect in the sensor, then the camera is having an illusion. It "thinks"
one of the pixels is brown, when in fact, it should have been red.

The brain includes a large amount of processing to try and extract reality,
from the data it has available to it. It does the best it can to represent
the current state of the environment from the sensory data available to it.
In general, it does a very good job at that (better than any of our current
computers and robots as far as I can tell). It isn't easily fooled by
conflicting data, or broken or inaccurate sensors for example. It performs
tons of processing the extract "realty" from the sensory data by ignoring
the noise (the data which fails to accurately represent the physical
environment around it).

But there is one huge error it makes which for the most part is vitally
important to our perception. It classifies some of the data as being part
of the current state of the environment, and it classifies some of it as
not being part of current reality. This is how it tells memories, from what
is currently happening around us. It clasified "memories" as "not part of
physical reality".

It's doing it's job correctly when it does that. If it failed to do that
correctly, we would not be able to tell a memory from the real thing.

However, the side effect of this classification is that it leaves us with
the perception that that this "other data" (are memories and thoughts) must
not be part of our environment. We feel it must be exist "somewhere else".
This is all find and good, until we start to try and figure out how the
brain works, and we run head long into this classification. It leaves us
with the natural perception that this "stuff" (our thoughts and memories)
are somehow separate from physical reality (our environment).

When we learn enough to know that the brain is acting like a computer to do
all this processing, it becomes obvious to us that all this perception is
created by whatever processing the brain is doing. But what people are
left confused about, is how the brain manages to "separate" our thoughts
from physical reality - how it creates this "consciousness" which seems
disconnected from physical reality.

Well, it shouldn't be confusing to anyone that thinks about it, but yet, it
is confusing to most because they don't seem to have the power to grasp
that the processing performed by the brain, is what is creating our
perception of reality. And if the processing classifies the data as
"physical" and "non-physical" then that is how we perceive reality - as
split.

But our perception of reality is not what reality is. And once you grasp
that, consciousness stops being a mystery at any level. It's not a hard
problem. it's not even an issue big enough to be called a problem. It's
just the brain classifying thoughts as being not part of the current state
of the _external_ physical environment.

I see no meaning in the notion of the non-physical
unless maybe you mean energy existing in the form
of say light rather than as atoms.

The meaning of non-physical is that the brain classifies some sensory data
(our private thoughts) as not being part of the current physical
environment. This is why our thoughts seem to exist to us in some odd
non-physical domain. And it's why we then create a self image of
"ourselves" as being the source of those thoughts - but since the thoughts
that exist outside the current environment, we (the source of those
thoughts) must exist outside the current environment as well.

Next think you know, people made up the idea of a soul which is separate
from the body.

And you have gone around saying things like that this "non-physical" stuff
must be something "created by" the operation of the brain.

The non-physical stuff doesn't exist except as data in the very real
physical brain.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

Relevant Pages

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