Consciousness: Pigliucci says it is real (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 17, 2019, 05:17 (1592 days ago) @ David Turell

And argues it well:

https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-neither-a-spooky-mystery-nor-an-illusory-belief...

"A lot of the confusion, as we shall see, hinges on what exactly we mean by both ‘consciousness’ and ‘illusion’. In order to usefully fix our ideas instead of meandering across a huge literature in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, consider a fascinating essay for Aeon by Keith Frankish. He begins by making a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is what produces the subjective quality of experience, what philosophers call ‘qualia’. This is what makes it possible for us (and, presumably, for a number of other animal species) to experience what it is like, for example, to see red, or taste a persimmon, or write essays on philosophy of mind.

"By contrast, access consciousness makes it possible for us to perceive things in the first place. As Frankish puts it, access consciousness is what ‘makes sensory information accessible to the rest of the mind, and thus to “you” – the person constituted by these embodied mental systems’. Before you can experience what it is like to see red, you have to be able to actually see red. Frankish agrees that access consciousness is a real thing, not an illusion, though he correctly adds that we are still very early on in our quest to understand it scientifically.

***

"But, argues Frankish, a number of philosophers would say that, even if we had a complete description of access consciousness, there would still be something fundamentally amiss from our picture of consciousness as a whole. That part – phenomenal consciousness – is what underpins what it is like to feel something or, as Thomas Nagel put it in his classic paper, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974).

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"Nowadays, thanks to our advances in both physics and biology, nobody takes substance dualism seriously anymore. The alternative is something called property dualism, which acknowledges that everything – body and mind – is made of the same basic stuff (quarks and so forth), but that this stuff somehow (notice the vagueness here) changes when things get organised into brains and special properties appear that are nowhere else to be found in the material world (my view is this alternative)

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"It is certainly true, as the illusionists maintain, that we do not have access to our own neural mechanisms. But we don’t need to, just like a computer user doesn’t need to know machine-language – and, in fact, is far better off for that. This does not at all imply that we are somehow mistaken about our thoughts and feelings. No more than I as a computer user might be mistaken about which ‘folder’ contains the ‘file’ on which I have been ‘writing’ this essay.

"This illusion talk can be triggered by what I think of as the reductionist temptation, the notion that lower levels of description – in this case, the neurobiological one – are somehow more true, or even the only true ones. The fallaciousness of this kind of thinking can be brought to light in a couple of ways. First of all, and most obviously, why stop at the neurobiological level? Why not say that neurons are themselves illusions, since they are actually made of molecules? But wait! Molecules too are illusions, as they are really made of quarks. Or strings. Or fields. Or whatever the latest from fundamental physics says.

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"When illusionists argue that what we experience as qualia are ‘nothing like’ our actual internal mental mechanisms, they are, in a sense, right. But they also seem to forget that everything we perceive about the outside world is a representation and not the thing-in-itself. Take the visual system, which as I mentioned above is one of the best-understood instances of access consciousness, and which makes phenomenal consciousness possible. Our eyes in reality perceive a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, determined by the specific environment in which we have evolved as social primates, as well as by the type of radiation that comes from the Sun and passes through the filters of Earth’s atmosphere. There is, in other words, a hell of a lot that we don’t see. At all.

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"Following John Searle, I think that consciousness is an evolved biological mechanism with adaptive value, and that treating it as an illusion is, in a big sense, denying the data that need to be explained. In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Searle writes:
What I want to insist on, ceaselessly, is that one can accept the obvious facts of physics – for example, that the world is made up entirely of physical particles in fields of force – without at the same time denying the obvious facts about our own experiences – for example, that we are all conscious and that our conscious states have quite specific irreducible phenomenological properties.

"'Irreducibility’ here is not a mystical concept, and it can be cashed out in a number of ways. I’m not sure which way Searle himself leans, but I think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon,"

Comment: It is not an illusion, and it is an emergent phenomenon, but that offers no explanation as to how a material brain can produce immaterial thoughts. Property dualism.