[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

[Santafe]

You think you are taking baby steps from a clean (un-prejudicial) start.

I think you are massively prejudicing the frame in a way that may not go anywhere.  (Or maybe it does; I can’t say.  It just seems like the one everybody has been adopting forever, re-asserted one more time.)

You treat the “how we know it when we see it” as a sine qua non for ascribing a meaning to a term; making it a proper “it" (a behaviorist thing to say, said in all innocence as if this were not massively prejudicial; just the “facts” ma’am, says Mr. Bacon).

But there are other frames, and some of them may be even blanker.  Or also prejudiced, but in other terms, and blanker from the angle in which the behaviorist style of speaking is not blank.  (Or am I wrong to think that?)

We can ask:
Why are we using this word?  Where did it come from?  Why does it “take” with us as we develop as participants in our language?  And in our language-scaffolded “theory of mind” development?  What are we doing with it when we use it?  What are we doing with ourselves or with each other through the use of it?  The one thing in that list that I did _not_ do is ask “what does this word _mean_?”; that to me would have been the prejudice that would let a gorilla walk among us and not be seen.

I think Pieter’s reply yesterday — something along the lines of “not having a route to ever know if your cat (or another person, for that matter) is conscious or aware” — is probably a good starting point.  It’s good both because it says let’s take this “ `knowing' this-or-that about somebody else” off the table as a prop, and ask whether systematic investigation remains possible, and also because it exposes the way that all of our “knowing” hangs in mid-air, and the sooner we reckon with that as its nature, the better we can talk about it.

All that will only be of any worth, of course, if it leads to a way of using these terms that goes somewhere….

Eric



> On Jul 10, 2024, at 4:54 AM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> While I find all the  ancillary considerations raised on the original thread extremely interesting,  I would like to reopen the discussion of Conscious as a Mystery and ask that those that join it stay close to the question of what consciousness is and how we know it when we see it.  Baby Steps.  
> 
> Where were we?   I think I was asking Jochen, and perhaps Peitr and anybody else who thought that animals were not conscious (i.e., not aware of their own awareness)  what basis they had in experience for thinking that..  One offering for such an experience is the absence of language in animals.  Because my cat cannot  describe his experience in words, he cannot be  conscious.  This requires the following syllogism:
> 
> Nothing that does not employ a language (or two?) is conscious.
> Animals (with ;the possible exception of signing apes) do not employ languages.
> Ergo, Animals are not conscious.  
> 
> But I was trying to find out the basis for the first premise.  How do we know that there are no non-linguistic beings that are not conscious.  I hope we could rule out the answer,"because they are non-linguistic",  both in its strictly  tautological or merely circular form.  
> 
> There is a closely related syllogism which we also need to explore:
> 
> All language using beings are conscious.
> George Peter Tremblay IV is a language-using being. 
> George Peter Tremblay IV is conscious.  
> 
> Both are valid syllogisms.  But where do the premises come from.
> 
> Nick
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