Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos  I'm fine with us not being located in our bodies. So where are we located? And why would you say "I don't believe anything broadcasts or transmits consciousness" when you just described precisely that with the robot analogy?
If I understand idealism correctly, everything is mindstuff. That means that what I think of as my "mind" is mindstuff, but so is what I think of as my body. What does it mean, then, to say my mind is nowhere but my experiences are located with my body?
~~ Paul |
I think it is important not to fall into the trap of expecting people groping for a new theory to have all the ends tied up.
Conventional science has more or less run with a theory of consciousness that many people feel is fundamentally wrong - not least because of the paradoxes that you get when you transfer the action to a computer (at least in a gedanken experiment). Or look at it another way, from time to time someone comes up with a new theory - 40Hz oscillations, or transient networks of neurones - and then more or less asserts that these are the seat of consciousness. The problem is that there is no way to explain (or test) such a statement - just perhaps to demonstrate a neural correlate.
A new theory simply has to start out in a tentative form. We are not founding a new religion, where a whole new set of ideas comes neatly worked out and ready to be believed!
The mental part of our brains - if it is a distinct entity - is obviously almost totally unknown to science. Asking where we are located may not even make sense because our mental components might exist outside of space-time. Trying to make people commit to answers to questions like this can descend into a cheap way to devalue their arguments - analogous to someone in a bygone era asking, "But I still want to know which slit that particular electron went through!"
For myself, I am pretty definite that the orthodox explanation for consciousness is wrong - and I feel I have powerful arguments to back that up - but extremely vague as to what should replace it.
David