I put someone on the table, give a little ketamine and propofol and watch their consciousness 'dissipate'. However, if I just cause a dissociative state with ketamine say, that patient appears conscious albeit with nystagmus - but is not aware of pain and doesn't form memories.
There is the concept of Primary and Secondary Consciousness or awareness; the former being aware of experiencing perceptions or emotions, the latter of being aware you are aware thereof. Ketamine maybe takes away the Primary, while maintaining the Secondary, while not retaining it?
We also have the anaesthetic gases, which we don't really know how they work. Perhaps related to receptors (5 Angstrom apart) or lipid solubility (recently supported by showing disruption in the lipid matrix) etc. The effects aren't clear here either, as you can have paradoxical excitation or post-operative delirium.
Delirium itself is weird, as awareness of Self can be maintained without general awareness at all.
Sufficed to say, something odd is going on here. It is not a simple fact of removing the material or disrupting the nerves.
I think that all of this stresses that Formal cause is even more sensitive and important than people think. The “Form” also includes form of environmental conditions such as precise oxygen/nitrogen intake ratios, where introducing foreign gases will also derail everything.
If we ascribe mental activity as secondary to the matter, then essentially we are saying the complex electro-chemical nerve activity constitutes it in some sense.
Well, the Sun is a much larger and more complex electro-chemical system - how can we then dismiss Solar Consciousness? Further, in some sense, the entire Heliosphere is, though less immediate. Taken even further, where do we end? So an Atman or ultimate Consciousness as emergent from the complex electro-chemical actions of material existence is not only not dismissable, but seems plausible, if you go this route. Even if rocks aren't readily reducible to electro-chemical activity as nerves or the Sun is, they are still electro-chemical with electron shells and the ilk. For why would we think such an Panpsychic consciousness should act on our terms or on our scale, when we can't even demonstrate consciousness in ourselves?
I really like a concept in panpsychism because I think it addresses a lot of problems well, the idea that all matter also innately contains an extra matter aspect to it.
Perhaps I got carried away with my praise of panpsychism, other parts of it lead to absurdities like in your examples. The major part that I disagree with is shown by my refusal to use the word “Mind” where they use it. From my understanding of it the argument that panpsychism uses to justify absurdities like the sun being conscious is “Well the stuff that we are made out of can also be found everywhere in the universe.”
I don’t agree with that logic. I do agree with those that say that all kinds of interpretational absurdities have arisen out of the rejection of Formal cause and teleology. Conscious beings have an incredible level of formal exactness to them. Even to the point that you have mentioned in a previous post, that even a brain in a vat is a bogus idea because you need the entire organism to function as a whole. The non-material parts of common matter could do certain tasks but being conscious wouldn’t be one of them IMO. Teleology leads to forms, and it’s teleological absurdity to have conscious suns all throughout the universe, that seems a bit like the creation of a blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic mammal species that is conscious. That wouldn’t make sense.
Afterall, Neurology has never demonstrated Consciousness, only Neural Correlates thereof - which we correlated by assuming Consciousness present in the subject when we ask them.
I definitely agree with that!
This is why Brain Death is so hard to establish, and we use a whole slew of brain stem reflexes and such to try and determine it - leading to interminable fights over 'vegetative states' (such a wonderful, almost mediaeval Scholastic term) because we simple can't know.
That’s interesting! Yeah that does make a lot of sense since we don’t have the luxury of having examples of correlating those states with coherent test subjects, since you can’t be coherent in those states.
So to be fair, I am not a panpsychist.
I should have just asked you what you think about the concept/theory that all matter also has a non-matter aspect to it, and that that non-matter aspect has various capabilities (capabilities that empiricism by definition could never be able to deduce). In the proper form it results in mind, in other forms it could result in other tasks, such as enzymes mysteriously performing a staggering amount of complicated tasks inside of cells, tasks that have no predictable empirical explanations to them from physics or chemistry.
Some people I respect go that route, like arguibly Barfield and Jung. I do think it is too easily dismissed, and the materialist emergent crowd are particularly wont to do so - when their assumptions are readily amenable to something akin to Panpsychism oddly.
Haha
However, Participation is a fundamental part of perception, as you cannot perceive something without fundamentally participating in it - as Quantum Theory also teaches. Further, we can only know something exists once we perceive it, and have no evidence that the unobserved can even exist (as we have to observe something to know of it), as well that the act of observation changes or affects the fundamental state of matter (Quantum theory again). So things that reduce to some level of Mind, like Neoplatonism or Idealism, are not dismissable either. I like to think that matter is in its current state only through the fact of its perception by God, a sort of Christ Pantokrator.
But do you think that video cameras have disproved a lot of that skepticism?
I really don't know. This matter is very much live to me. I have never seen a mind/body problem theory that does not seem fundamentally flawed to me.
That’s why I like the concept so much, I feel less confused about the mind/body problem thinking about matter in this way!
But I do think the dichotomy is not invalid - there is something material my drugs are doing, and something else affected or affecting it, in my experience. Further, I am happy to extend Aristotlean conceptions of vegetative and animal souls, but when we speak of Consciousness or Soul, mostly we mean the Rational - in our post Descartes conversations.
I’m thinking this way about both the Aristotelian rational soul and animal soul. So if our mind & body are analogous to clothes that are completely drenched, the clothes representing the materials that make up our body and the water representing non-material essence that is as one with the physical material, then it becomes easy to think about how they both affect each other.
Science is fundamentally hobbled by its base assumption of methodological naturalism though. Whether that extra-natural component is Supernatural or Epinatural if I may coin a word, either way, Science can not be expected to be able to reduce it to the natural, which is amenable to its ways. Have you ever heard of Goethean Science? The idea of Science not as observor, but mediator of reality. That we aren't dealing with Natura Naturata as passively observed sequence of cascading matter, but a Natura Naturans that actively seeks the teleological end of something.
No I never heard of that. But I do think that ignoring teleology is to treat humanity’s “Gift of perception” as if it is an illusory curse.
I don't know, but I am not sure the support beams upon which much of our science is built are not increasingly wormeaten. The fantastic flights of fancy of AI or astrophysics seems to be symptoms to me of a decidedly ossifying structure. I can't help but feel that I am looking at the decadence of something once vibrant, as Scholasticism looked to Francis Bacon maybe.
Let’s get back to science that predominantly believes in Formal and Final causes again!
Apologies for the rambling. Too many ideas that I feel I am imperfectly trying to express.
It is a gift that I really wish I had (although I think that you have it better than 95% of people), to be able to perfectly say things in the fewest words possible.
