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

[Santafe]

Yeah; wish it were possible to say something interesting.

The aspect of, or within, the field of experience, that “consciousness” and other related words are somehow “about", should be general among all of us who are made of about the same stuff.  (So, the vertebrates, the mammals, the social mammals, the hunting-social mammals; etc.)  I say that as an assertion within the network of scientific representations, in the kind of way we normally walk around that network by extrapolation, like spiders along threads in a web.  So should have many of the familiar successes; surely has all the recognized hazards.

But [consciousness]-the-term is a word in a language.  So it has formal aspects.  What is it doing as we use it?  Maybe it is putting up “an object” toward which attention can be directed.  One would glibly say “making consciousness available as an object of attention”, but I don’t want to say that.  The aspect of, or within, the field of experience is whatever it is.  When the capacity for, and use of, a language brings objects into that formal world which can be targets for attention, we don’t have any promises for how good the objects are as proxies for whatever they are meant to be proxies for.  Or even what is the nature of such “objects”, a thing that has to be made more clear, along with whatever those objects are proxies for, and whatever is the associational relation of the two.  

I am aware, while speaking, that what I would like is to go one step further than the logical positivists in characterizing formal systems as opposed to characterizing all of life.  I would like to say that, when something is really a formal system, it has been made an object in the world.  So one can mechanise it.  What Hilbert imagined maybe mathematics could be, and which we seem to be pretty sure mathematics cannot _only_ be, though it can have parts of that nature.  That means we can say things about the mechanistic relations among tokens in formal systems.  

The positivists seemed to me (in my ignorance of almost-everything historical) to have the tastes of logicians; they wanted to work out technical things.  They were willing to put to the side the questions of how that logical edifice ever “stands for” “something” in the broader field of life.  If they made an important mistake, it was to go beyond putting them to the side, to dismissing them entirely.  Their notion of “pseudo-questions” is generally apt where I can find concrete applications of it; but in dismissing what was driving people to make those unsatisfactory attempts, they threw out much of what is interesting to try to do.  

That is the more-literal landscape to which my metaphor of the spider in the web alluded.

Anyway, whatever its form, which varied among people and changed over time on into the modern era, that separation left what they were doing very limited, but within that, I feel like they made category distinctions that remain useful.  They get even more useful when one is very clear about how limited they are, and tries to put them in a Pragmatist frame.  Even better when we apply Pragmatism to itself.  This is where we try to deal, for real, with the way everything formal hangs in mid-air, as its very nature.

Back from that digression:

The things that we can’t export into machinery in the world (formal systems with the definition written in the language of the formalism), may remain actually still formal systems, but they become like a computer program that can only run on a certain kind of hardware, which is us, and as we don’t understand that hardware very well, we can’t make very good proxies of it (or know whether we have done so), leaving us unsure what formal systems can run on which hardware.  

With all those caveats and hedges in all the over-interpretations I don’t want for wording, if I were to suggest what is different about us with language from dogs that are not using this particular kind of formal layer (I strongly suspect, again said like the spider walking along the web), it is this “making consciousness an object of attention”.  

It seems to me that, if we promised to remain constantly alert to the fact that all those terms are placeholder terms in placeholder usage conventions, we could ask why it matters and what it does to “make consciousness an object of attention”, while also “inhabiting” it (or whatever word), as contrasted with mostly-just inhabiting, and letting attention do all the other things it is already also doing.

Eric




> On Jul 10, 2024, at 7:37 AM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Frank
> 
> What you laid out is an abduction,,isn't it?;  I don[t think I am doing that in either of my syllogisms.  But I am no logician;
> 
> An induction is a valid inference, although a probabilistic one, at least on Peirce's account.
> 
> David, 
> 
> If humans are conscious, I am pretty sure that animals are conscious, . 
> 
> I am just not sure that humans are conscious. 
> 
> I am not sure why the fact that your dog loves you, implies its consciousness.  George agrees with you that things like love are signs of consciousness, but he could never explain why.  
> 
> Eric,
> 
> Yes, I am pretty sure I am a worthless piece of Baconian Behaviorist Crap.  Stipulated.  Still, I like your questions.  So,  do you see any way of proceeding to develop those question in a such a way that we are roughly on the same page as we go?  If you do, I would love your help, here.  
> 
> All, 
> 
> Sorry, it is hot, here,  and I am cranky.  I resent you all sitting in your air-conditioned offices being paid huge sums of money to be cool.  I just thought it might be nice to have a conversation about consciousness in which everybody is not sitting in front of their own hut shouting.  Happy to abide by any method that isn-t like an explosion in a concept shop.  
> 
> Nick
> 
> Nick 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 5:00 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nick, That is not a valid syllogism.  
> 
> All X have Y
> x has Y
> Therefore x is an X
> 
> Is that a correct formalization of what you said?
> 
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
> 
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, 1:54 PM 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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