sodium

I think we have to be careful about these conceptual differences. Luke Skywalker knows about two individuals, his father, and Darth Vader. These are conceptually quite different. Nevertheless, they may refer to the same thing (you have to watch Return of the Jedi to find out). Conceptual difference is no argument for a difference in reality.

jon1

"Conceptual difference is no argument for a difference in reality."

Point taken. I was merely saying that to demonstrate why the question of "why does consciousness accompany brain processes?" is asked.

contracycle

John Page wrote:
Ah, I see. My answer to this is that we are still surprised, and that sometimes we come to speculative conclusions as to the nature of the world with little or no direct evidence, and verify them later with direct evidence. A good example of the former would be the way the mercury puzzled our medieavl forbears - a material with the apparent properties of two hitherto archetypal formations, metals and liquids. An example of the latter would be the theory of cometary impacts on planetary bodies, which we derived from secondary evidence and were only able to actually verify when we saw the Shoemaker -Levy impacts. Nonetheless, cometary impacts passed into accepted science well before direct evidence was obtained.

It seems to me, therefore, that if we only following an internal model, we would not expect to encounter new things that invalidated our prior model, nor encounter things which we had predicted from only secondary evidence (unless we are subtley imposing our expectations on the world in some manner). If it were true that we were only following an internal model, technical progress would be impossible.

Sure, well, I think of "concreteness" these days in much the same way as time and space, in that it depends on the relationship between the observer and the observed. I know that I am not a solid object in certain scales, but a molecular cloud. I know that a belly flop hurts more than a bomb drop because I am changing my density and surface area. I know that water is 'non-concrete' over 0 degrees c (mostly) and 'concrete' below that.

Concreteness, as a mental model, is a useful metaphor for a wide range of experiential inputs and as a description of certain sets of interactions between 'objects'. But I don't think that materialism therfore requires that 'objects' be concrete, even if much materialism operated from that assumption prior to the developement of, say, the quantum and chaos theories.

eh

Indeed, it would seem to indicate nothing until contrasted with idealism. Theists and other idealistics often believe that there is something more fundemental than spacetime, usually a mind. They also believe that a mind can exist without space or time. Materialism would have it the other way around, where spacetime is fundemental which consciousness is contingent upon to exist.

You would have to be more precise. A sensation is the collective processes in the brain that work together to percieve data from a signal. In that case, all sensations are located in the brain and so are contingent upon spacetime. Of course, we don't yet fully understand how this works.

John Page

It seems to me that while consciousness is a "brain feature", sensations are transmitted along the nervous system.

Apparently, pointed out by some erudite poster, our guts have their own nervous system that operates fairly autonomously. Ouf course our brain can come to know about it through other nerves. Here's a link to an article. Hope it doesn't make your stomach churn.

Cheers, John

ComestibleVenom

Fascinating article John. Wittgenstein believed that it was a big mistake to think that understanding was soley a thing that occurs in the brain, and I believe there is much to that.

For instance, old people often rely on a stable configuration of their environment to remember where various common items are. Thus, their understanding of how to go about fixing a broken drawer is partly stored by the fact that the screwdriver is stored in the righthand side of the tool cabinet.

In a similar sense, our body is a part of our cognition. Not only in it's direct attachment to the nervous system but, for instance, we observe that hand gestures can improve the performance of certain tasks.

eh

Yep, I should have put more stress on the perception of those sensations, which does occur in the brain. After all, with no brain you've just got a bunch of signals that can't be interpreted.

John Page

I'd agree with "conscious perception".

Cheers, John