The objective realm is publicly accessible and detectable whereas each person's subjectivity is private. Objectively, a human being is an organism with a central nervous system and a brain. Question: Need I add "and a brain" or is the brain just the necessary coordinating organ for the central nervous system?
Since our bodies detect and sense their environments, I think that it is safe to say that objectively discernible organisms are subjectively conscious. Some say that consciousness resides not in an organism but in an objectively existent immaterial mind or soul. But surely an invisible and undetectable object is self-contradictory? I suggest that the mind or soul is a hypostatization/reification/objectivization of private subjectivity.
The objective aspect of a human being is his body. Intersubjectively, we converse with him as a person. Holistically, body and person comprise a single psychophysical organism. That is sufficient to account for our subjective and objective experience of human beings.
6 comments:
It would be more accurate to say that the brain -gives rise- to consciousness rather that it -constitutes- consciousness.
Personalities are essentially patterns of interacting information - memories, obviously, and other types of information as well. The nerve tissue is the substrate which carries the information and enables the interactive process.
Information is material in the sense that it must be embodied in something; however information is not the thing in which it is embodied. The information in this group of words starts in my brain, is transformed into electronic impulses, and is sent out along electronic communications media. But the -information- is not any of the things that contain or transmit it.
And the information is conscious when it starts in your brain and arrives in our brains but not when it is electronic impulses or written words.
paul: just so
Gentlemen:
And I believe these personalities survive bodily death. And not just from revelation: philosophers like Plato also reasoned their way to belief in the immortality of the soul.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: there's no reason they couldn't. OTOH, there's no evidence they do at present.
I believe that disembodied consciousness is logically possible but no more than that although alleged evidence from Spiritualism needs to be considered.
I hope soon to read THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS by John Searle which will be illuminating. I have referred to Searle before.
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