Consciousness; a radically new theory. Romansh? (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, June 26, 2015, 12:58 (3437 days ago) @ David Turell

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-consciousness-believed-theory.html-Dhw: But your dualism still doesn't answer the question of what constitutes “I/me” in your sentence: “I use my consciousness, it does not use me.”
DAVID: Do you have the answer? I don't think it is an illusion, and I think the brain acts as a receiver for consciousness, beyond which I cannot go.-I don't regard consciousness or the self as an illusion, and I don't know if the brain is a producer or a receiver of consciousness. I am wrestling with the concept of identity - which is ignored by the article and by your statement “I use my consciousness”.-dhw: We do not use it and are not used by it. We ARE our memories, our emotions, our reason, our ideas and our consciousness of them.
DAVID: But that is only a portion of our consciousness. Those make us an individual person, but don't account for the constant flow of thoughts and ideas that continuous appear under our control.-Agreed. Nobody can explain consciousness, thought etc. My question is: WHAT controls or appears to control these processes? If we subscribe to materialism, we shall have to say the brain controls or appears to control the brain. A dualist will have to say that his immaterial self controls or appears to control his immaterial self. In both cases, consciousness is an unsolved mystery, but without it we can't be “us”, so we can't say “we” use it or it uses “us”. Our consciousness, along with our subconscious and other attributes, IS “us”.-dhw: As for control, if 1) the brain, and/or 2) the immaterial self are “us”, we can hardly argue that “we” (all our attributes including our consciousness) do not direct our thoughts and actions. The question then is why we direct them in the way we do. Hence the controversy over free will.
DAVID: I see the controversy over free will is not the 'why' based on our experiences, and I do not believe there is a 'why' in how we control our free will, Libet and others now shown to be wrong.-The controversy over free will is not confined to Libet's experiments! Determinists will argue that all our decisions are predetermined by a sequence of causes and effects beyond our control. You don't even have to be a materialist to subscribe to this view. The counter-argument that I am offering is that even if the causes and effects are beyond our control, the product of those sequences is our individual identity, and so the decisions are still taken by “us”. You can therefore argue either way: the decisions are “ours” (free will) because all our attributes, including our consciousness, are our own, or the decisions are not “ours” (determinism) because our attributes etc. are not of our own making.