Human Consciousness: a subjective issue (Humans)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 12, 2015, 19:52 (3267 days ago) @ David Turell

A new essay explores the issue of the subjectiveness of consciousness and why that matters in any research or theory:-https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem-"First coined in 1995 by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, this ‘hard problem' of consciousness highlights the distinction between registering and actually feeling a phenomenon. Such feelings are what philosophers refer to as qualia: roughly speaking, the properties by which we classify experiences according to ‘what they are like'. In 2008, the French thinker Michel Bitbol nicely parsed the distinction between feeling and registering by pointing to the difference between the subjective statement ‘I feel hot', and the objective assertion that ‘The temperature of this room is higher than the boiling point of alcohol' - a statement that is amenable to test by thermometer. -***-"But perhaps most surprisingly, just when the ‘stream of consciousness' was entering our lexicon, physicists began to realise that consciousness might after all be critical to their own descriptions of the world. With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. At the subatomic level, reality appeared to be a subjective flow in which objects sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. Which facet is manifest depends on how the human observer is looking at the situation.-"Such a view appalled many physicists, who fought desperately to find a way out, and for much of the 20th century it still seemed possible to imagine that, somehow, subjectivity could be squeezed out of the frame, leaving a purely objective description of the world. Albert Einstein was in this camp, but his position hasn't panned out. Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality'. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.-***-"There are parallel moves in neuroscience to determine the ‘neural correlates of consciousness' (NCC) - the neurological signatures of awareness. Originally developed in the 1990s by the American neuroscientist Christof Koch and the British Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the NCC project has been making massive strides; tools such as fMRI and optogenetics are now enabling us to see what neurons are doing when we think certain thoughts. Moreover, projects such as the BRAIN initiative in the US and the European Union's Human Brain Project are mapping what parts of the brain are active while people experience a vast range of emotions and mental experiences.-"This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience? Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained'. In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.-"Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I'm on his side. What's at stake here is far more than the issue of whether your experience of blue is the same as mine, because subjectivity also has a moral dimension, as Descartes and the medievals understood. -***-"Neurological and informatic models of subjectivity will no doubt have their uses and values, as did mechanistic models of the world before them. Yet, like their mechanistic forebears, these theories are grounded in an insistence that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon whose explanation resides in something prior. Chalmers wants to insist, along with Descartes and Locke before him, on the primacy of subjective experience or, as the philosopher Bitbol puts it, ‘that consciousness is existentially primary'. Rather than being something that can be ‘described by us in the third person as if we were separated from it', Bitbol argues that consciousness ‘is what we dwell in and what we live through in the first person'."-Comment: All consistent with Nagel's book, 'What is it like to be a cat'. Consciousness is subjective and immaterial. Please note the issue of consciousness and quantum research.