QuantumTroll wrote:Metacrock, let's take a step back. These analogies are not working. You said that the brain is like a TV receiver for the mind, and we tune in to the mind with the brain, yet when I tried to work out the implications they're apparently all wrong. What exactly am I supposed to learn from this analogy?
That consciousness may be
sui generis and that analogies to it are necessarily inadequate beyond a very limited scope.
When discussing the mind, it could be helpful to distinguish the
functional properties of the mind, such as discrimination, integration, access, etc., from the
phenomenal properties of mind, such as consciousness and conscious experiences. QT, you may be right that the brain, or at least physical processes of some sort, play a causal role in the mind's functional properties, but even these properties could be strongly emergent out of neural events the way the flock mind emerges out of lower level physical states. So that, as you say, the macro properties of mind require micro-physical states as necessary conditions, but the macro-properties are not explainable in these terms. You have causal interactionism, not a just bottom up 'brain causes mind' process.
Consciousness, imo, is an entirely different problem. No one has even a non-circular verbal definition of it, let alone a physical theory. I don't think anyone knows what, if anything, causes consciousness. With animal and human consciousness, it is closely associated and correlatable with physical states. But no one knows which properties exactly instantiate it. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists think that it is the abstract functional organization that instantiates it, not gray matter. If that's the case, then brains as brains would not cause consciousness; the abstract organization of the brain would somehow enable it, whether that organization is in meat, silicon, or whatever. I don't necessarily agree with this idea, but it's just to point out that we really don't know what consciousness is, whether it's an emergent property or a fundamental property or what it's necessary or sufficient conditions might be.