wandering - 13 July 2007 06:12 PM

I am not sure if consciousness is something that has to be “explained”.

With matter, you go deeper and deeper, until you have the smallest material particle. There is no “explanation” needed for this last particle. It just is. Consciousness is like the smallest material particle that we have. It just is. There is no need to “explain” it.

What science should do is to explore the way consciousness causes physical entities to change (none has been discovered so far) and the way that physical entites cause consciousness to change \ how it creates it. The question is how two different existing things interact (or how one of them creates the other), not about explaining one in terms of the other.

If that didn’t answer I would be glad to know what is missing.

Where we disagree is that they are “two different existing things”.  We’ve just boiled all this down to the traditional argument over dualism.  I’m unmoved but I do thank you for your time, effort, and patience.

wandering - 13 July 2007 05:34 PM

narwhol : I dont think I am confusing ethics with science. My point is that if there is no mind, no consciousness, no mental states, then from an ethical point of view, there is no problem with murder.  If complexity is the only difference between live and not-live beings, I fail to see why ruining a complex system is immoral.

Where am I mixing ethics and science?

I never said that you were.  All I said was that if you’re saying that because scientiically speaking we’re no different from any other mass of particles why is murder wrong, you need to shut the science draw and start rooting through the humanities one instead - science will tell you how things work and what they’re made of and it will not lie to you, but it won’t tell you every truth there is either.  You need to switch mindsets for that.  Besides that, I said that there is a mind, there is a consciousness there are mental states and all of these things are abstract concepts, but they are as real as anything you can touch or measure on an ammeter.

wandering - 13 July 2007 06:12 PM

I am not sure if consciousness is something that has to be “explained”.

With matter, you go deeper and deeper, until you have the smallest material particle. There is no “explanation” needed for this last particle. It just is. Consciousness is like the smallest material particle that we have. It just is. There is no need to “explain” it.

What science should do is to explore the way consciousness causes physical entities to change (none has been discovered so far) and the way that physical entites cause consciousness to change \ how it creates it. The question is how two different existing things interact (or how one of them creates the other), not about explaining one in terms of the other.

If that didn’t answer I would be glad to know what is missing.

Consciousness does not cause physical entities to change; it can be instrumental in a conscious being doing that and the explanation is that the conscious being uses its hands or other body parts to change the object it wants to change - science explained that in caveman times - it you are talking about consciousness changes things in isolation then shut up you idiot it doesn’t.  As to consciousness being a particle.  Shut up you idiot it isn’t.  What next?  A whole load of consciousness particles being put together to form an object you can hold in the palm of your hand.  Listen mister, mister Reality is knocking on your door; now kindly let him in and tell miss conceptions to leave.