mitchellmckain » February 27th, 2018, 3:33 am wrote:Consciousness is not a singular event but a continuing process. All that is shown is that the consciousness at a particular time is not the cause of what it is conscious of at that particular time. But this does not mean that the consciousness at this time is not the cause of what one is conscious of at a later time.
This is good, Mitch, as well as your entire post, and is close to what I've been saying. While conscious qualia, C, can't cause anything instantly, ever, much less what is already history, C' (not C) can subsequently reference this record of history as input, subconsciously, of course, when relevant C' plans continue, which then lead to the sequential C state, etc. It's not likely that the C' work reflected in C gets thrown away.
The key point remains of no 'right then and there' conscious agency/causation. C' ever only does all the causing, subconsciously, as the only 'I'. This can be upsetting, at first, until one fully realizes that it couldn't be any other way.
Sponge Bob,
Thanks for the good bubbles' vibrations. I'm redoing Rubaiyat II, but it's pretty good already.
Ridiculers/Viotrolists/Insulters,
The forum rules were made by a C' for other C' to learn from, thereby perhaps producing more informed C'. It could be in some cases that a C' is unable to learn and then gets banned by a mod C'. A deep kind of stuckness can result from C' wires that have too often fired together and thus got heavily wired into learning resistant bundles that can then only claim useless generalizations without specifies, such as "That's a lie" or "mental patient", etc.
RJG,
Yes, there will be all manner of baffling responses/insults, but that's what sometimes has to come forth, so, noting this, you can be baffled no more. It's here and also out there in the world, everywhere, everyday. Some of the automates are so far gone, that they best just be ignored rather than risk raising your aggravation toward. Compassion for their stuck condition works double, then, for your peace, it being two steps away from the 'noise'.
Edelman intro on the evolution of C/C':
How might the C′–C relationship have evolved?
I have already considered the necessary development of reentrant connections between brain regions carrying out perceptual categorization and value-category memory. Here I want briefly to speculate on the origin of the relationship of entailment between C′ and C. It is reasonable to assume that the development of the ability to carry out refined distinctions conferred by the dynamic core would have selective advantage. The core could conceivably have evolved even in species without extensive communicative abilities. I find it more attractive, however, to consider that, in animal species in which rich communication of emotional states led to enhanced fitness, it would have been advantageous to connect the ability (C′) to make refined distinctions with the communication of these distinctions. Animals so evolved would communicate efficacious C′ states in terms of C.
C, after all, is the only information available that reflects C′ states to each animal and to others. As long as C states reflect C′ states reliably, the fact that the world is causally closed and that only C′ is causal would not undermine the role of C as a vehicle of communication.
The fact that the world is causally closed has been noted by certain philosophers of mind, notably Jaegwon Kim. Following another philosopher, Donald Davidson, Kim has proposed that a C state as a psychological state is “supervenient,” or dependent on a physical state (in our terms, C′) that is causal. In early work, he has described all causal relations involving psychological events as epiphenomenal supervenient causal relations. Presumably this refers to C′ as causal since “epiphenomenal” means causally impotent. Although these notions are roughly in accord with our account, I would not designate any mental event as directly causal, for it is a relationship and cannot exert a physical force. But the neural firings in C′ can do so, for example, by activating muscles. By providing a description of how C depends on C′ in a specific neural model we can go beyond an abstract statement about the dependence of C on C′.