"'Their abilities naturally led Chereionite scientists to concentrate on psychology and neurology.'" (p. 227)
What is the relationship between psychology and neurology? Apart from the fact that the latter causes the former?
All that happens in a brain is that neurons fire electrically and interact electrochemically but those processes can be fully described without ascribing consciousness to the brain. We say that an organism is conscious because we observe its behaviour, including linguistic behaviour in human beings, not because we study its neurons.
A brain contains no "black box" or mysterious area such that we do not know what is happening inside it. There is also no Cartesian centre. That would be a single point with unconscious inputs to it and unconscious outputs from it, with consciousness existing either in or beyond that point. Instead, the entire brain somehow generates consciousness.
A single neuron is not conscious just as a single water molecule is not wet. Solidity is caused by and reducible to molecular cohesion whereas consciousness is caused by but not reducible to neuronic interactions.
Consciousness does not happen in parallel with physical processes. Instead, conscious intentions, pleasures, pains etc cause bodily movements and actions. An organism, unlike an inanimate object, unconsciously repairs bodily damage if possible. Consciousness enhances this process, pulling away from a source of heat as soon as the heat becomes painful. This explains why organismic sensitivity to environmental alterations was naturally selected and therefore quantitatively increased until it was qualitatively transformed into conscious sensation. A mobile marine organism moving randomly passed a source of heat, approached the source while its energy was beneficial, then retreated when the heat became dangerous. At some stage, an organism with a central nervous system experienced what we would call "comfortably warm becoming uncomfortably hot." The first moment of consciousness. A qualitative transformation.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But an animal can move away from a painful source of heat without THINKING about heat and fire the way humans can. Animals can't analyze fire, or try to figure out how fire works.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Indeed. Two completely different levels of consciousness although some people try to deny it.
Paul.
Paul: consciousness is an emergent quality produced by the brain. But we most certainly do not fully understand how this functions yet.
it is difficult to see how we will ever fully understand it.
An objective event causes another objective event, e.g., heat boils water.
A subjective event causes another subjective event, e.g., perception of a threat causes fear.
Objective events, neuronic interactions, cause subjective events, mental processes, but there remains an irreducible qualitative difference between objective and subjective.
Paul: it's certainly a serious puzzle. Subjective -experience- is hard to pin down.
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