Panpsychism and Hylozoism
(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
I was happy to see a lot of response to my BoingBoing post of a few days ago, "Everything is Alive." Let me throw a little more fuel on the fire.
[A flowering plant eats a signpost!]
There's actually two different words we can play with here. "Hylozoism" is the doctrine that everything is alive, while "Panpsychism" is the belief that everything is conscious. These are close in meaning but not quite identical, although I'm comfortable with believing both.
Panpsychism is by no means a wacky new-age concept, it's been around since the dawn of philosophy. David Skrbina's fascinating study, Panpsychism in the West, (MIT Press, 2005) maps out the whole history. Here's a link to a page of Skrbina's book where he's discussing one of my favorite panpsychic philosophers, Gustav Theodor Fechner...more about him below.
One funny line from Skrbina, quoting the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: "what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits."
In discussing hylozoism and panpsychism, we're not talking about the notion that the universe as a whole is alive and conscious. We're concerned with viewing individual object, even atoms, as being alive and conscious---although there's nothing wrong with adding on the quite reasonable belief that the universe as whole is alive as well.
Here's a short essay of mine called "Mind is a Universally Distributed Quality" which I wrote for John Brockman's annual Big Question page at his Edge site. The Big Question was, "What is your dangerous idea?"
[The Mad Professor cover art and design is by Georgia Rucker Design.]
A point discussed in Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West is that if you’re not careful, advocating panpsychism becomes simply a matter of watering down your notion of "mind" to apply to objects. But, with Skrbina, I want to claim that it’s a real sensual mind that you’re talking about in that rock, that pen, that finger, that dust mote, that hair, that napkin torn in half (two minds now). A materialist might say, hah, there’s no content to such a claim, but I feel that I demonstrated how it really would feel to talk to objects in my science-fiction story, “Panpsychism Proved” which appeared in no less august a journal than Nature magazine. And to think they dared call me mad! Oh, by the way, my story also appears in my anthology, Mad Professor. Here's a free PDF of the story ---I put it online for you just now.
[Goosie the finger-puppet is alive.]
The scientist-philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner was a fascinating guy. He liked to talk about the daylight view versus the nighttime view. In the daylight view of the world, everything is flooded with soul and life. In the nighttime view, the world is dead, dark, inhospitable, and we sentient and living beings are but tiny firefly sparks. Not too many of his books have been translated into English, but here's one of them that I found online, On Life After Death, from Google Books.
[This Big Sur tree is conscious.]
Finally, here's a quote from the philosopher William James's Pluralistic Universe online , describing Fechner's work:
For him the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious... The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.
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It's one thing to believe in (or claim to believe in) hylozoism or panpsychism. It's another to offer an argument for it; to explain why we should also believe it. And I don't see you offering an argument of any kind. So what's motivating the view?
And you are correct when you say that panpsychism is not a new concept. But just because it isn't new doesn't mean it isn't false (or untenable, unmotivated, wacky, etc). I know that Galen Strawson is one contemporary philosopher that supports panpsychism, but at least he has a theoretical motivation for accepting it. What's your motivation?
More animist than hylozoic but you could extend the concept to dust motes and stones. Rocks dance reeaally slowly.
And then, of course, there's Gaia.
All Lives, all Dances, and all is Loud
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
I throw myself to the left,
I turn myself to the right,
I act the fish,
Which darts in the water, which darts
Which twists about, which leaps–
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
The bird flies away,
It flies, flies, flies,
Goes, returns, passes,
Climbs, soars and drops.
I act the bird–
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
The fish does . . . HIP
The bird does . . . VISS
The marmot does . . . GNAN
The monkey from branch to branch,
Runs bounds and leaps,
With his wife, with his brat,
His mouth full, his tail in the air,
There goes the monkey! There goes the Monkey!
All lives, all dances, and all is loud.
traditional (Gabon Pygmy) trans. C.M. Bowra
I'm more of an animist myself. I believe (sometimes) that everything has a spirit, and that a human spirit can connect with the spirit of, say, a drum (drums have very strong spirits).
the book of nature a volume on mechanics? i guess the human body has its fine points....nice rotor and & condenser, too.
I want a fish.
A few things.
First, philosophically, I would suggest you investigate Aristotle's concept of the 'soul' and how it could relate to a world soul or universal soul. In particular, look for Joe Sachs' translation of Aristotle's 'On the Soul' and 'Metaphysics'. For the origin of this concept, see Plato's 'Parmenides' (Whitaker translation) for the origin of the Platonic 'one' which informs Aristotle's thinking, but then get its ultimate articulation in Plotinus and his 'Anneads'. Plotinus develops the concept of a universal soul (the Neo-Platonic one) that is immanent of itself and expands forming the universe and the possibility for nous/consciousness/mind in that universe. These are likely the earliest articulations of the philosophical theories you are investigating.
Finally, you may appreciate this recent talk from MIT physicist Seth Lloyd who discusses universal computation, a manner of saying that everything is alive. The abstract is as follows:
I feel as though the term "conscious" is being thrown around loosely. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, either.
If consciousness is defined as awareness, then you could argue that the big sur tree is conscious. But the result of awareness can be confused as consciousness, when it's truly an automatic response. The big sur is clearly leaning in the direction where there is more sunlight. This isn't a choice, it's an automatic response. However, the tree is obviously aware of the sunlight, so it has some level of consciousness. The tree's reaction to bend in the direction of the light is the automatic response. Conscious (aware) of light, automatic movement as a result.
My brain hurts.
Rudy, thanks for bringing the world that much closer to the 2012 consciousness shift. I'm loving your perspective!
"What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine?"
I always get really nervous when people start judging the virtues of what are supposed to be statements of fact based on how convenient their truth would be.
I'm interested to hear how you all think panpsychism relates to the materialist/cognitive science-y idea that mind and consciousness is not a quality or a "substance" that something has or does not have, but rather a function or process that is defined functionally, in relation to other functional and physical entities.
By this, I don't mean simple reductionism---I think that, in this framework, consciousness is real and needs to be explained, but it also has be understood in a way that amenable to materialism.
Not sure if its the same thing we're talking about here, but as a kid I saw nearly every object in my world as a conscious being. I'm not sure when the disconnect happened in my brain, but I remember moments where I would have intense emotional connections with otherwise insignificant inanimate objects. Not just stuffed animals or toys which are easily associated with actual living things, but objects like pencils, balloons or even food.
I remember once having a snow cone at the county fair and I squeezed too hard on the soggy paper cone and the whole snowball plopped out, falling onto the gravel walkway. I didn't cry or complain, I just remember being extremely remorseful and saddened for it. Not because I missed out on having a sugary treat, but because I felt bad for the snow cone itself... that it wouldn't get to succeed in its sole delicious purpose in life. Instead it just sat there on the ground as people shuffled around it, hopelessly melting a slow and lonely death.
I don't believe in consciousness. At the very least, I have never encountered an entity that I would apply that attribute to.
Interesting and pretty, but really what does thinking this way mean in every day life?
but I feel that I demonstrated how it really would feel to talk to objects in my science-fiction story, “Panpsychism Proved”
I feel you didn't. So now what? How is this not just some new age religion? And don't fall back on nonsense about how, since it's an old concept, recycling it doesn't make it new age. That's a weak cop out that new age religions are always making anyhow.
Unless I'm not getting what you're saying at all, it seems to contradict Fechner's beliefs (as expressed in this post, at least; I've no other experience with him).
Your assertion seems to be, in this post and the last one, that the "alive-ness" of everything is found in its atoms, which are always moving* and the "consciousness" of everything in the way that, per your example, a rock knows to fall when dropped. Or at least some mix of those. If this is right, then the alive-ness and consciousness are found in the objects' mechanical, scientific processes. Does this mean that everything is alive precisely because "nature is a volume on mechanics"?
I deny Fechner's assumption (or James' reading of it) that the world becomes dark if you believe in a bodiless Divine Creator and a soulless nature. Since this seems to be a criticism of Christianity, it is a false one - the Creator is incarnate, both in Christ and, in that it is His creation, in nature. Fechner's view is reductive - there becomes no distinguishing of anything, even of light and dark. Hierarchies are what allow for value and aesthetic judgments.
Finally, I guess I still don't see the advantage of the hylozoic view, either scientifically or philosophically. As a philosophy, it seems a sop; as science, it seems unnecessary. I enjoy looking at your posts, though, as they are extraordinarily beautiful - this one in particular perhaps the best I've seen on boingboing.
* In fact, if you were to change it to "everything is moving" I think I would agree and find it an extremely important perspectival shift.
One need not be a materialist to disagree.
The various subatomic particles we call "matter" exist where there is a high-probability of them existing within the quantum field. Light and matter are interchangeable because there are ways of changing probabilities in the quantum field. It's dice rolls all the way down (to the bottom turtle ;-) ).
Hey, this quantum field model might be wrong, but it's at least a model, and not one of platonic materialism. I wonder what the underlying universal model of a panpsychist and hylozoist is. Or is it a "sin" to have any sort of underlying scientific model?
On another note, "life" and "consciousness" are terms that have been created by most (all?) human cultures as a means of slicing up things into categories. The meanings of these terms are fairly clear in common usage, but the semantics of these terms are neither formal nor perfect. Is a virus "alive"? Is a tree bending towards the light "conscious"?
The answers depend entirely on your definition. Neither concept exists a priori outside of the definition of the person speaking/thinking. So, if the process of salt dissolving in water is what you would call "thinking", most people would call you mistaken. Others would say it's an interesting edge case. A couple would agree. The universe would have no opinion on the subject.
If everything has consciousness, do objects have it (to the extent that consciousness is a "thing" one could "have") to varying degrees? (And if consciousness is a thing, can consciousness itself have consciousness?)
"platonic materialism"
Oxymoron, much? Platonist metaphysics are anything but materialist. But I see where you're goin' with that.
#17 t3knomanser: Right. Scratch "platonic", keep "materialism". I was trying to sound smart. :-)
It's interesting to see the comments defending science from what is a philosophical and spiritual question. Science is a tool for understanding the material world, not a religion. Science doesn't care whether a truth is beautiful or aesthetically satisfying, but most of us humans do seem to care. At the moment you close your mind to other contexts from which to experience life, you have made a religion for yourself. The interesting thing about science (for me) is that it brims with examples clearly showing it's own limitations, e.g. Gödel's incompleteness. Gödel proves beyond any doubt that any self-consistent system complex enough to reason about itself contains an infinite number of axioms, i.e. the information content of the system is infinite. If the universe as a whole is such a system then it seems incredibly foolish to shut your mind to possible alternative contexts from which to view it. It is quite possible that the universal substance isn't mass or energy, but rather mind; we could quite easily be believing our experience into existence around us. There is no scientific way to prove otherwise, yet one counter-example is all it would take to open one's mind. I put it to you that as a skeptical scientist, one should be constantly searching for the experiential counter-example which puts science-as-religion to rest, and frees science to be a useful tool in a broader human context. In that sense, entertaining hylozic or panpsychic viewpoints and challenging your dominant belief system can be very valuable indeed.
Joel Osteen, please send me a conscious fish.
I'm hungry NOW!
At some point in time, a person has to admit that what we consider dead dumb unconscious matter (for example, a mixture of 70% water, carbon, nitrogen, iron and other elements), in a certain structure, can be conscious and aware of its position in the universe, however dimly, or deny their own consciousness.
The concept of a dead/unaware dumb universe as a much a proven myth as one created by some supernatural being.
And some bread with that, too. I'll be conscious and alive when I'm through with it.
From the essay:
Some have argued that the experience of mind results when a superposed quantum state collapses into a pure state. It's an alluring metaphor...
At some point, you need to make clear to people that you're speaking metaphorically and not scientifically.
The mind can't be entangled, not least because entanglement requires a prepared state: normal room temperature matter is decoherent. Even if your brain (and everything else) wasn't decoherent, action potentials are carried by thousands of ions. The brain's signals do not have intrinsic states--so entanglement is irrelevant.
People with backgrounds can pick out where you're speaking metaphorically, but for the general public you need--I dunno--some kind of disclaimer. Otherwise, they'll see you're a doctor and presume you're speaking literally all the time.
I'm of the opinion that quantum mechanics is a stop-gap theory, destined to give way to a fully deterministic theory
That's really central to your thesis, isn't it? You need determinism because decoherence generally kills the order needed to claim rocks are computers. The truth is, rocks aren't neat little rows of springs but a mis-mash of Stosszahl.
Anyhow, I propose you restrict your thesis from 'Rocks are alive' to 'Lodestones are alive'. The magnetic pattern formation is a much clearer example of the types of computations rocks might do. It also makes it clearer that performing computations and being self-aware are two very different things.
What if consciousness were a property the way magnetism is? Then you could argue that different physical configurations produce different qualities and quantities of consciousness. A blade of grass isn't very conscious, just like an iron bar isn't very magnetic, but the bar can be magnetized, and the elements that are in the grass can be ordered in a much more conscious way (people?)
Philosophers have had little reason to ponder the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness following the unsurprising discovery that it's the result of having a brain, or something close to one. Animals at the cytogenic level of monkeys are conscious. Even cockroaches and beetles and slugs exhibit the telltale signs of consciousness. Plants may be conscious, but certainly not as conscious as monkeys, slugs, or cockroaches. They simply lack the sensorial impressions normally associated with consciousness as we know it.
There is some debate over whether consciousness is in the lobes, but it is generally thought of by legitimate scientists in fairly straightforward terms. Consciousness is far from ubiquitous. When the brain, or proto-brain, dies, consciousness is certain to follow suit. We see it happen all the time. Snap your fingers in a dead man's face, and the bastard doesn't flinch. He doesn't even care. And neither do rocks, buildings, automobiles, pantsuits, developmental disabilities, invisible leprechauns, Terri Schiavo, dictionaries, refrigerators, Scrabble boards, polygraphs, computer viruses, plastic action figures, shampoo, feather dusters, caramelized onions, atoms, planets, temples, pimples, crankshafts, Egg McMuffins, one act plays, kaleidoscopes, farts, darts, or hand grenades.
But more to the point, a plant's tendency to climb up, down, or all around is immeasurably weak evidence of consciousness. And no one is arguing that a plant isn't alive, but in order to believe that plants are conscious, you would have to fundamentally alter the meaning of the word, and doing so would deprive it of all meaning. "The lilies of the field toil not, neither do they spin."
I don't feel like I have a use for either hylozoism nor panpsychism. I believe that both of them can only have ethical ramifications, and I would prefer to keep those considerations simple by including only those beings capable of expressing preference.
I believe that both of these ideas will never leave the realm of semantics, so it's useless to argue about them. The world is no less wondrous to me without seeing everything as alive and conscious.
Philosophers have had little reason to ponder the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness following the unsurprising discovery that it's the result of having a brain
To the contrary, some of us believe that having a brain is the result of having consciousness.
Also, the idea of proving panpsychism by some technology that allows telepathy makes me angry. It just seems so stupid to me.
The workings of the human mind is not some mystical thing that arises out of nothing. The brain is a very ordered structure and interfacing it has to respect that structure. Telepathy may be possible in the near future but it's not going to let you just connect into anything.
When I eat mushrooms I enjoy a sense of empathy with everything around me, but I don't project my understanding of consciousness onto everything. I am different from a rock. The possibility of universal computation is not in a rock until a human makes a universal computer out of it.
Define "alive", please.
(Of course, it's the fact that that's a tricky one that makes this an interesting discussion.)
I suspect that you are not being entirely literal -- "I talk to the trees, that's why they put me away..."
But that's fine by me. It seems to me that it's fine not to be rational, so long as you are aware you are doing it and can stop doing it when it becomes dangerous (for example, trying to persuade a piano not to fall on you.)
This may be my only chance to do this one and actually have it be in context:
Q: What's green, has six legs, and would kill you if it fell out of a tree onto you?
A: A snooker table.
30+ comments, and no mention of Tao???
Again with the definitions!
Rudy is a bit like Humpty Dumpty: when he uses a big word, it means whatever he wants it to mean, nothing more, nothing less.
I think, on one hand, if you just WANT TO BELIVE that "everything is alive and concious", then you should just call it a fate or a religon and be done with it. Don't make the same mistake that the creationists made and confuse it all with science. It spoils both your faith and your science in the long run. If it's science, it should be falsifiable.
On the other hand, if your long term goal is to properly DEFINE "life", or "conciousness", then "consisting of atoms" or "with the theoretical potential to become a machine capable of performing computations if I shove it far enough up the 4th dimension" are pretty useless definitons in my opinion, and liable to put you on the wrong track alltogeather.
Lets face it: conciousness is a human word for a human concern. You examinate conciousness by examinating your humanity in all its complexeties, not by simplyfing yourself by pretending that you're just a vessel for computation.
Anyway, I don't see how any of this is a "dangerous idea".
Rudy is inarguebly right - everything IS concious, by his definition. But the bottom line is that his definition simply isn't my definition.
@25
What if consciousness were a property the way magnetism is?
Well, I think it's getting closer. In lodestones, the normally random magnetic fields of iron all line up. To make a lodestone, you put iron into a fire (or hit it with lightning), and that gives atoms enough energy to shake themselves out of their random arrangement and into aligned domains.
In other words, the atoms in iron will spontaneously order themselves, because each atom's neighbor is compelling it to line up.
It is precisely this process of lining up that Rucker is calling 'computation'. He then goes through a series of metaphors:
1) The brain is also doing computation. That is, the brain is a digital machine--and because all digital computations can be done by an appropriately chosen computer, the brain is like a lodestone.
2) (and this is crucial) Doing computation is the same as being alive. BB readers have made the extra leap that doing computation is the same as being conscious.
3) If all computers can be reduced to universal computers, that means that some form of communication between computers is possible.
4) (and past here he loses me) The laws of physics are deterministic, so that your little boxes are all white or black and not grey. Some aspects of QM, like magnetic spin, are suited to cellular autonoma. Others, like position, are simply not.
5) All the other laws of physics can also be reduced to a digital machine. All analog things can be discretized--all equations are separable--all systems are closed. Even in the classical world, there are plenty of things that can't be discretized.
6) The usual mumbo jumbo about entangled quantum states. Rucker assumes that quantum behavior persists in the classical regime, and applies the physics of intrinsic states in single particles to big things like rocks.
I think there's a very, very interesting point to be made here: that autonoma (and some physical systems) spontaneously order themselves. That, under natural selection, the class of spontaneous order might be restricted in a way that leads to life. And that, merely the possibility of this leads to a new view of what life is.
"Philosophers have had little reason to ponder the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness following the unsurprising discovery that it's the result of having a brain"
What about those who are conscious and are found not to have a brain?
Ah, but why ponder such minor inconsistencies? Everything is already proven and wrapped up in a tiny little bow for so many people.
An argument can be made that panpsychism as a universal mind, or at least, as minds shared by a group of objects that individually seem inert or mindless can be almost impossible to identify.
We are made of ordinary carbon, oxigen, phosphorus and many other kinds of atoms, combined in specific ways to form molecules, which form structures, which form cells, which form tissues, organs, and finally ourselves. At which moment does conciousness appears on the mix? If I take myself as a test subject... is a carbon atom in my brain "conscious"?
Now, all the atoms that form my brain, taken together, are definitely conscious, they are, after all, me. But if I look at any of them individually, it would be I think, imposible to identify consciousness in any of them.
In the same way, identifying consciousness in things that we normally consider inanimate might be equally difficult.
Rudy, are you an electric monk? ;) jk
I would like to ask your opinion of "What the Bleep? Down the Rabbit Hole" It's an interesting experimental DVD. Though I find its philosophy (and yours, to be honest) somewhat opaque, I am always intrigued to hear a different perspective.
Myself is reportedly difficult, humourless, aspergoid, literal, boring -- so I envy your joie de vivre and wonder!
Ok, I'll admit it, Rudy, you've gone and hooked my attention with this one. I just wandered over to Amazon and picked up a copy of "The Lifebox, the Seashell & the Soul"...
Do chairs with no one sitting in them have an empty feeling? I went outside to contemplate this and a bird vissed right on my head.
Tao is sometimes called the watercourse way.
John Todd, the great ecological designer, once told me that sometimes he feels that human beings developed simply as a method to move water from one place to another, seeing as we are mostly H2O.
I had a bit of déjà-vu from that image. I saw that plant last week and thought to myself, I really need to snap a picture. You didn't identify the location, so I went back and checked, and it was the same plant. That little linear stain near the crosswalk cinches the deal.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64315439@N00/3558390456/
And no, I don't think the signpost is alive.
Does this mean I'm going to have to talk to my food as I eat it ? Is a vegetable or hunk of meat going to be talking to me or merely spying on me . Oh my God every dead thing is going to be a zombie !!!Vegetable zombies , ground-beef zombies , chair zombies , rug zombies , sidewalk zombies the list just goes on and on . Oh please the singularity is not going to happen by 2012 , we don't even have **** voicemail that can talk to you and make some sense and it's suppose to . Right now the only computer on the other end of a phone can converse with you is a person . Give it a little more then three years .
Thanks!
Actually I found Fechner's collected works (German) at project Gutenberg:
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/index.php?id=19&autorid=161&autor_vorname=+Gustav+Theodor&autor_nachname=Fechner&cHash=b31bbae2c6
I read "Panpsychism Proved," interested by the claim that you described how it would feel to talk to objects. What I got was: No, the mind she’d linked to was inhuman: dense, taciturn, crystalline, serene, beautiful—
A list of adjectives.
Now, why do you suppose that a boulder would use the same notion of adjectives that we do? Why would it even segment its thoughts into discrete-enough units that they could be separated into individual words?
To believe in panpsychism--the idea that all objects have minds--you first have to believe in a particular idea of what a mind is. The story, "Panpsychism Proved," assumes an idea of "mind" that can be readily described using adjectives. That's rather restrictive when you think about it; it's one thing to solve calculus problems in your head, and another thing to "be a calculating sort of person". If all that the character in "Panpsychism Proved" can get from that connection with another mind (in the shape of a boulder) is a list of adjectives, then, well, that's actually kind of boring.
So, "Panpsychism Proved" does not really show what it would be like to talk to objects. Your main character isn't talking to the boulder, she's just observing it and describing it in the ways that adjectives permit.
We're back to stage zero: I don't know what you mean when you say that everything has a mind; I don't know what you think a "mind" is or does. You say it's a universally distributed quality? Okay... so is gravity. That's not a very informative statement.
You have a "sense that there's something numinous about my inner experience"? That's a good sense to have. It sounds like an emotion to me; if it were an idea, of the sort that can be asserted and then tested, then maybe we could discuss whether trees and signposts have it. Clearly you think it's an idea, though, so I invite you to make some falsifiable assertions. If that Big Sur tree were not conscious, how would it be different?
DrScience:
Standard functionalism about qualia takes qualia to be functional states--from environmental inputs to behavioral outputs in interaction with other mental states. It is reductionist; it's a token-token physicalist view. I think that it would have trouble countenancing panpsychism (e.g. individuating qualia) because a whole bunch of stuff just sits there and exhibits no behavior.
Galen Strawson has been defending panpsychism as of late and has a book out on it in the last couple years. He's the son of PF Strawson, and like his father was, is a very able philosopher.
"Philosophers have had little reason to ponder the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness following the unsurprising discovery that it's the result of having a brain"
Almost no philosopher believes it is the result (or necessarily the result) of having a brain; multiple realizability (and it's a short leap to functionalism from there) is very plausible.
@ Antinous:
"... some of us believe that having a brain is the result of having consciousness."
Yes, I know, and you're flat wrong. Moreover, it is the consensus view among neurphysiologists that human consciousness results from the brain, and not the other way around. Ergo, you are not conscious before or after you are alive. Neural, computational, and cognitive mechanisms allow you to see, hear, taste, smell, feel, and reason. As far as consciousness goes, understanding why is the Holy Grail. Others may seek the Grail elsewhere, but they will come up empty handed every time.
With all due respect, nothing that people believe surprises me anymore. We've seen people who believe in astral projection, ghosts, leprechauns, red-skinned man-goats, and God. Your brain gives you consciousness. The least you can do is acknowledge that the evidence proving that fact is insurmountable.
@ urshrew:
"What about those who are conscious and are found not to have a brain?"
The article you linked to posits several reasons, most of which do not contradict my assertion. For starters, the kid has a brain, albeit an abnormal one. So, your thesis itself is inadequate. Read a little further, and your case becomes infinitely weaker. If you can even understand what you're reading, that is.
@ Marchhare:
"Almost no philosopher believes it is the result (or necessarily the result) of having a brain"
I never said they did. In fact, what I said was that, since the discovery of consciousness' origins, by legitimate scientists, philosophers have had "no reason to ponder [...] consciousness." I stand by my sound reasoning. Why work at probing a question that has already been sufficiently answered?
Human beings are conscious because of their brains. You have every right to disbelieve that conclusion, but you're sadly mistaken. I choose to believe the evidence presented to me by countless studies in clinical neuroscience, because the results are far more convincing than whimsical gestures from babbling philosophasterers.
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.
takeshi
Great use of appeal to authority, and obnoxious dickery, without answering how it is a mixture of supposedly unconscious material (carbon, water, nitrogen, etc) is very much conscious.
Yes, I know, and you're flat wrong.
No, you're wrong. Wrong, evil and bad. Well, now that's settled....
The least you can do is acknowledge that the evidence proving that fact is insurmountable.
Every crackpot pseudo-scientist in history has said exactly the same thing. Just because we're still blind to things, doesn't mean they don't exist. That attitude is the bane of good science.