- #36
hypnagogue
Staff Emeritus
Science Advisor
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Originally posted by Canute
That's not what I meant. I was saying that phenomenal consciousness is 'intentional', it is consciousness of something. 'What it is like to be' is a more fundamental definition, and a more fundamental state.
It's very hard to argue that phenomenal consciousness is not physically caused (the momentary nature of it anyway), but that isn;t the case for 'what it is like'.
I agree. If that is how you're defining phenomenal consciousness, then the problem of phenomenal conscious is just the 'easy' problem of consciousness-- it can be explained entirely by recourse to functional analysis of cognitive capacities.
However, the reason there is so much debate about consciousness is because there is a 'hard' problem of consciousness-- explaining how it can be that it can be 'like something' to be a certain physical system, just as you stated. I believe what we are interested with here is the 'hard' problem of consciousness. To try to solve the hard problem with recourse to solutions to the easy problem, as is sometimes a tactic for the materialist, is at bottom just a straw man argument.
It's very difficult to see how the correlation can hold if there is not interaction between brain and experience. Leibnitz argues God maintains the link, but the idea never caught on. How do you think they are correlated if they don't interact? (Btw I'm not assuming anything about which direction the causation works).
As I said, I do believe the most reasonable assumption to make is that there is a causal interaction underlying the correlation. I just wanted to point out that this is still an assumption and could be a potential flaw in our understanding (I doubt it-- but it could be the case).
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