Robin,
If I may just have a stab at your problem:
If someone says that "consciousness is an illusion", then they don't necessarily mean that consciousness doesn't exist. They could also mean that consciousness isn't what it
seems. The illusion might be in our perception of
the nature of consciousness.
Most people have a strong feeling that their mind, their consciousness, or 'self', is some
incorporeal entity, which they imagine to exist separate from the brain, yet somehow connected to it, and in control of it. We also have a hard time imagining not to exist as such after we die. We must somehow persist, is the feeling.
I think
that is what the illusion is about. It might be that this feeling of incorporeality is some sort of by-product of being conscious. If someone were to ask a conscious being: "What is it like to be conscious?", they might answer: "Well, it's like being incorporeal". It's what it
feels like to be conscious, you might say.
In fact, it's one of the few questions you can actually answer when asked what it's like to have a certain experience. When asked: "What is it like to smell the sea?", I think a lot of people would be lost for words to express this experience to someone else. But when asked about the experience of being conscious, the above might be a very adequate response, one which would convey the feeling remarkably well.
There is still the problem of how this feeling arises, of course. Well, how about the following scenario: The brain is full of representations of things in its environment. It might have a respresentation of an apple, for instance. This might take the form of a convolution of interacting electrochemical states, distributed over different parts of the brain. Some parts might represent the greenness of the apple, others its roundness, yet others perhaps the anticipation of its taste. And there might be a part responsible for integrating these states into a coherent representation on a higher level of abstraction - of the apple as a whole.
Now, the apple is really out there. The brain can look at it and map its representation of the apple to the physical thing itself, saying to itself: "This image of an apple is about that particular apple out there." The difficulty arises when the brain tries to map a representation of its
own processes onto a real object, because
there is no real object out there. A process is not an apple you can hold in your hand. It's something that happens, not something that
is. But the brain may be so used to mapping that it tries nevertheless. Maybe what happens is that the brain recursively maps the representation of its own processess onto
the very representation itself, thereby promoting the representation to object status. But the new object has no real world properties, such as a proper location the brain can pinpoint, or being made of stuff the brain can look at. And perhaps
that is what creates this feeling of incorporeality.
As I said, it's just a stab, nothing more.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 01-05-2005 05:07 AM
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins
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