Actually it must take place before we receive sensory data, just think of a supernova millions of lightyears away. When we first see it, the whole thing is over for millions of years already.
However. What we know about things in our waking consciousness is: They are there. Whatever they are, they are. They do exist. And they are different from other things that are there too. Because if they would not exist, there would not be that sensory data, and if they were not different from other things, the data coming from these things would not be different.
That data then is indeed arranged and stuff
You are commiting the fallacy of naive realism now. That is the fallacy that the world exactly is as it appears to our senses. Such as by assuming that the supernova is out there millions of light years away. The fact you only know of any object called a supernova is only AFTER sense perception has been constructed after recieiving sensory signals from the objects out there.
It is clear that impressions are received but it is not clear what the nature of the object is from which we are reciving the signals.
We know today that what our senses show us is not what the actual thing is. As you said yourself the signals received from a supernova 4 million light years away is an event which happened 4 million light years ago but it seems to us it is happening now. The senses show us a static and flat earth with a sun orbiting it and stars adorning our skies. The truth is the earth is a spinning sphere hurtling through space at approx 70,000 mph in orbit around the sun 91 million miles away. The senses show us as a solid and physical world, but the truth is is completely random and chaotic information waves with no space or time properties. So clearly what our senses show us is unreliable.
The truth is whatever our senses show us are just effects and senses do not show us the actual causes of things.
However what we do know is
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There is some kind of interaction between the observer/consciousness and the world before perception happens
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The sensible world that we know is actually a mental construction where the interaction is received, then processed and organized. So the world we live in is not a physical space at all but a virtual space. The brain too is a part of our sensible world.
Now logic shows clearly that no interaction can take place between dissimilar substances for examples eyes cannot smell because eyes are photosensitive and only receive light, whereas ears are sensitive to particles in the air and only receive them.
The fact that consciousness and matter do indeed interact then logically shows they are not dissimilar substances but fundamentally the same substance. They are either both matter or both consciousness. I argue they are both consciousness.
It is something that we do not create.
I agree. “We” the human observers simply access waking reality. The process of construction of perception is prior to us.
I don’t think that you can refer to the mind as a substance at all, it is closer related to information and meaning. For example when you have a wooden “Q”, like in my avatar. The actual “Q” I hold in my hand is substance, but to our mind it is an information and a meaning: Q, the all powerful being, the godlike creature.
A substance is basically something which has fixed attributes. Information is also a substance because it has attributes. However, one thing you admitted which is important to underline: mind is not like a solid substance. It is just pure information and meaning. It cannot be located in any substance.
Because neurons firing in the brain is felt as an experience…? What would you want it to feel like? A titillation?
No, I don’t think you understood what I said. There are two phenomenon here which are not reducible to each other because they are qualitatively different.
1)There is neurons firing in the brain
2) There is an experience
If you say that the experience is neurons firing in the brain then you commit a logical error because to say x is y, y has to be identical to x. However neurons firing in the brain is not identical to an experience.
Let us suppose for arguments sake that I am the brain. Then who is the one that is aware of the brain? Why is it that we access the brain and manipulate it just as we can manipulate a chair or a table?
You mean like how can we see the eye if it’s the eye we see with? We can’t. But we can look into a mirror. Other than that I don’t really know what you mean. Reultant of processes in the brain? Some other theory again? Not mine, shrugs
This is a very important question because it a fundamental logical problem with brain theories of conscousness. I can see the eyes with the mirror, but what mirror does the brain use to see itself?
It is a logical impossibility. If a cause is determining an effect the effect cannot know the cause. If I design a virtual world and populate it with characters the characters will never be able to know of the real world which produces them because the real world is the cause and they are the effects. It is impossible for them to ever know of the real world.The fact that we can know the brain therefore means it cannot be the cause of our awareness but is just another object of our awareness. This is logically watertight.
I don’t know. But I know that just because I do not know something, it does not mean that it cannot be explained. For example do I not know how a banal calculator works. But it works. Maybe the mind is create somehow like an electric or magnetic field is created, similarly. But I don’t know.
And this is another fundamental logical problem with materialism. It does not explain how any material process could generate a non material process. It is logically impossible because it would mean something coming out of something in which it is not present. Like a human couple giving birth to puppies.
To say one day we could explain it is not an explanation. It is faith, the hope for explanation?
Let us look at some logic. Do things materialise out of thin air fully formed? No, they do not. They evolve into being first from a potential state then into minute quanta of energy, then into quarks, then subatomic particles, then atoms, then molecules then gasses, then liquids, then solids. Nothing contradicts this logic. Then why should mind which you say yourself is pure information and meaning come after solid? Does it not make logical sense that it would precede all solid, liquid, gas, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, quanta of energy?
It makes absolutely logical sense that a non-physical and virtual thing like mind would come before matter and not after it. This is also logically watertight.
No, why? If there would be no world, you could have as much consciousness as you wanted and wouldn’t perceive anything.
Consciousness is basically awareness and awareness will always be aware of something but that something could just be the field of consciousness and the individual conscious units are just points within the field of consciousness. Just as we may have reference of an external reality in dream but this is all taking place in the field of consciousness not in a separate world made of out physical matter.
The preerequisite condition that gives us any access to any world at all whether it be waking or dream is consciousness. At a certain level of consciousness we are in waking and at another level we are in dream. The world of perception changes exactly depending on what our level of consciousness is. That if you take psychoactive substances they simutaneously alter your level of conscousness and your external reference of reality. You will no longer see reality as others are seeing it.
