Originally Posted by
RecoveringYuppy
But my point is simply that we also call that unconsciousness. So how does it explain consciousness?
Why do we need to talk now about how we can become unconscious? I thought we were asking how it could be possible to experience the effect that we call "consciousness", i.e. being intellectually aware of our surroundings etc., and having the ability to think in a useful way about that, so as to make decisions on how we act etc. ... I thought we were looking for a possible explanation for how that might be occurring, not just in humans because it clearly occurs not just in other apes but in pet cat's and dogs as well ... why do we now have to change the problem to ask also for an explanation of what it means to say we are "unconscious"?
But if by "unconscious" you are thinking of humans who are, say, in a vegetative state after major brain injury (as opposed to, say, plants that also react in a very obvious way to their surroundings, and they also do that through a fundamentally similar use of sensory cells (afaik)), then afaik all that has happened to make us "unconscious" is that the brain has stopped processing the input data from the sensory organs (sight, hearing, smell etc.) ... so why is that difficult to understand?
Incidentally, a better/clearer example than my previous off-the-cuff scenario of a human observer watching the first life-forms appear 3 billion years ago, might be just to think about the human eye and think about how we could possibly experience the sensation of what we call “vision”, such that we form a very clear and rapidly updating really accurate picture of the world around us (so clear that we can react very quickly to changes such as objects that we might collide with etc.) … how could that possibly happen? … the eye might react to light in complicated ways with different specialised cells, but that alone would not explain how we then instantly experience a very accurate “vision” of what is actually all around us … so how could that occur without some magical mystical explanation of “conscious awareness”? … I think the answer is just the same one that I already described before about that constant exchange of impulses and reactions between the input from the eyes to the brain, and back to the eyes and other organs etc., in a continuous rapidly updating cycle ..
… I'm not trying to give a total full explanation of exactly how all of that occurs and exactly why that inevitably leads to an effect that we call “consciousness”, that would probably require decades or even centuries of research on every aspect of the way our sensory system interacts with the brain. But I think it should be fairly easy to understand how it may all be occurring in that way, simply as a result of the sensory system interacting with the brain and with all the other associated organs of the body (without the need for anything mystical, and certainly without the need for, or any evidence for any supernatural ideas such as a “soul” placed into us by an intelligent God).
Anyway, that's my suggestion. And I do not think it is a big mystery, and certainly not what philosophers like to present as what they call "the hard problem of consciousness", as if to imply that science cannot explain it ... well, one thing is for sure - neither philosophy or religion is likely to adequately explain either consciousness or anything else ... but science is very likely to explain it, and in fact science clearly has already produced a very considerable understanding of such things as "consciousness".