Consciousness, experiments, systems

What is consciousness?

Brain function correlates well with the "experiences", in that what we become conscious of corresponds with both physical entities and the discrete events caused within the brain.

Clearly naive realism is not true since phsyical objects by themselves do not create experiences, and idealism is not true because brains by themselves do not create experiences "of things".

However quite arbitrary causes like touching the brain and chemicals can create experiences which do not seem to correspond with either the cause.

Cause and experience are not clearly related.

That we do have a correlation under "usual" circumstances, for example when a volunteer sees a chair there is an organised pattern of predictable responses, is probably because the investigator has a similar effect in their brain. So the statement that the brain is corresponding in a orderly fashion to the stimulation, is simply a statement that the patients brain is corresponding in the same way as the investigors. Looking at the chair and then the patient, the investigator having established for themselves that there is a chair there, and then looked for correspondence in the brain of the patient, is really finding correspondence in the brain of the patient which corresponds to their own brain function. Afterall the investigator cannot see what the patient sees by definition, and only make sense of what they say because they come from the same linguistic world in which "seeing chairs" carries a certain language.

If the investigator was blind for example, no matter what instruments existed, they would not be able to make sense of "seeing a chair". It would simply be a pattern of brain activity, and associated words, which corresponded with a chair and its position before the eyes, and also certain predictive elements like being able to tell when a chair was present in a room without touching it. Factually the blind person can establish all this. But to understand from all this what having your own experience of "seeing" is like is beyond the experiment.

So these experiments in neuro-science are unable to shed light upon the nature of "personal" experience precisely because it is personal.

To do that we must go deeper into the nature of existence and personal identity it seems.

===

On the subject of systems suppose we had a 2D phase diagram of a system with 2 independent variables. That system can establish nothing greater than its own state. To model that phase diagram (without being that system) it must have more state variables than the system it is modelling. Is this true?

Also... philosophers and scientists are not looking to model the brain. They are looking to explain the brain. That means to provide a high level model of the elements of the brain.

So the suggestion then is that higher level state variables are available for systems which approximate the behaviour, which is actually produced by much more intricate lower level workings.

For example we might reduce the function f(x) = x ^ 10 to a binary description which states whether the function is high or low, since it appears to go along slowly before rising very fast through the (1,1) co-ordinate and away.

So a general theory of "scales" in theories is required to look at what might be considered a good enough explanation of th brain? afterall how good do we need to explain it before we might say we understand ourselves?

Add to this the fact that consciousness is not a low level phenomena either. We are conscious only of very high level entities, not the vast amounts of minute data available in any situation.