Consciousness an emergent of the brain?

I arrive at it by asking someone who is conscious to test whether I am conscious while on the operating table. It is clear that time passes while I am not conscious. It would require some quite baroque explanation to cover how I could have been conscious the entire time. Perhaps we should treat each individual separately, but that smacks of solipsism.

I don't think it's baroque Paul. The fact remains that you (or in this case someone else) processes "symptoms" of a third-party-ontology
character, which they (questionably, in my view) take to be valid for the reporting of something they cannot actually discern in such an ontology (namely, what it is for YOU to be). I would say that they are really just examining phenomena in their own field of experience, derived from their own fact of being, and erroneously applying it to your own fact of being, which they are not (indeed, are never, I suspect) in a position to actually "observe"...because there is no observing it other than being it. Hope I am somewhat clear. I *do* agree that materialism will instinctively want to reply with a "But...but..." (belonging as it does outside of their normal mode of thinking) yet I'm not sure that their "buts" are as secure, philosophically, as they might like to believe.
I know what you mean, but I don't think it's true of qualia. I think you can remove aspects of a quale and still have a quale. Now, there can certainly be "the simplest qualia" from which nothing can be removed without making them non-qualia, but that means that some of the things we call qualia are reducible.

I'd really need to respond to that on a case by case basis, for what you are calling a "quale." I have used the examples of green and pain, which I think I will hold to. I don't think the likes of a "chair" can be considered in the same light, because of its linguistic-ascriptive character, and other problems that erode its parallelism to my stated examples, imo.

Also, as I've said, I think you are using a definition of irreducible that is not standard. But, as I've also said, it's a quagmire.

It doesn't seem quagmire to me. There may well be different definitions folks use for irreducible...which is why I am inclined to hold to the definitions I have used.
 
I don't think it's baroque Paul. The fact remains that you (or in this case someone else) processes "symptoms" of a third-party-ontology character, which they (questionably, in my view) take to be valid for the reporting of something they cannot actually discern in such an ontology (namely, what it is for YOU to be). I would say that they are really just examining phenomena in their own field of experience, derived from their own fact of being, and erroneously applying it to your own fact of being, which they are not (indeed, are never, I suspect) in a position to actually "observe"...because there is no observing it other than being it. Hope I am somewhat clear. I *do* agree that materialism will instinctively want to reply with a "But...but..." (belonging as it does outside of their normal mode of thinking) yet I'm not sure that their "buts" are as secure, philosophically, as they might like to believe.

I agree that I am still "being" while unconscious. But I am not conscious. This is one reason why being and consciousness are not identical. But assuming they are identical, your explanation requires not only that I am unable to discern another person's state but also that the other person is wrong in her own evaluation of her state.

If I have such difficulty discerning your state, I daresay I would not be so secure in assuming that I can discern my own state. These philosophies often assume perfection in the ability to discover truth via introspection.

~~ Paul
 
I agree that I am still "being" while unconscious. But I am not conscious. This is one reason why being and consciousness are not identical. But assuming they are identical, your explanation requires not only that I am unable to discern another person's state but also that the other person is wrong in her own evaluation of her state.

I don't think that's what I said. "Her state" is her experiential gnosis of her own condition of being, which is always conscious. I am floating the idea that you are never "unconscious" and that the notion there is such a state as "being unconscious" is always a third person projection onto a first-person-ontology situation.
 
I don't think that's what I said. "Her state" is her experiential gnosis of her own condition of being, which is always conscious. I am floating the idea that you are never "unconscious" and that the notion there is such a state as "being unconscious" is always a third person projection onto a first-person-ontology situation.
How is this the case when I realize I've been unconscious after sleep or a hit on the head? Are you suggesting that I'm making a third person projection on my first-person self?

~~ Paul
 
How is this the case when I realize I've been unconscious after sleep or a hit on the head? Are you suggesting that I'm making a third person projection on my first-person self?

~~ Paul

How do you "realize" this though?...you realize it through inference and by intellectual constructs, such as "oh there's a bump on my head and the sun's gone down" ergo "I must have been unconscious." But again, if the world's ontology is based on presence, then there cannot be any non-presence states.
 
How do you "realize" this though?...you realize it through inference and by intellectual constructs, such as "oh there's a bump on my head and the sun's gone down" ergo "I must have been unconscious." But again, if the world's ontology is based on presence, then there cannot be any non-presence states.
So the nonconscious periods are some sort of illusion? Something---not my consciousness---is fooling me into believing that I was unconscious for a period of time. It can't be that I was present but unconscious during that period, because you said that presence = consciousness.

~~ Paul
 
So the nonconscious periods are some sort of illusion? Something---not my consciousness---is fooling me into believing that I was unconscious for a period of time. It can't be that I was present but unconscious during that period, because you said that presence = consciousness.

~~ Paul

No, not an illusion. They just don't exist with respect to your instantiation of "that which it is to be." Since "that which it is to be" is all that exists, imo, then there is no such state as unconsciousness.
 
No, not an illusion. They just don't exist with respect to your instantiation of "that which it is to be." Since "that which it is to be" is all that exists, imo, then there is no such state as unconsciousness.

The applied science and data-gathering from anesthesiology have no foundation that rests on the fundamental observation of unconsciousness? You reject the assertion that a living thing can be alive, yet have biological information processing taking place for which there is no subjective awareness?

(holy siggy freud)
 
The applied science and data-gathering from anesthesiology have no foundation that rests on the fundamental observation of unconsciousness? You reject the assertion that a living thing can be alive, yet have biological information processing taking place for which there is no subjective awareness?

(holy siggy freud)

Correct. There are no independently "existing things" that do not partake of the fundament of "that which it is to be."
 
Indeed. Though if everything has consciousness, then everything is a "correlate" of consciousness. Part of the problem seems to me that they are looking for something in a third-party-ontology, which cannot be entirely contained there. It's a case of "good luck with that."
They are looking for correlates, so that seems doable from an objective point of view, no?

~~ Paul
 
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