The Alice Illusion

[hiyymer]

apophenia, do you acknowledge or discount sensory input as being fundamental to the brain's ability to function in its environment?

Do you mean in the sense that we are what we are because we have evolved to survive relative to a specific environment, or specific kinds of environments (we are the most adaptable of creatures).

[hiyymer]

being interested in how the mind works, we are immediately drawn to spinning elaborate metaphysical and physicalist dross to explain and concretize the phenomena, when we not only don't have good evidence for specific mechanisms at this high level, we don't even have a good idea of the "what" that it is we're trying to explain.

One thing I picked up reading Damasio's latest was a passage where he talks about single celled organisms, and the observation that such a life form has rather complex behaviors to maintain homeostasis in the face of a changing environment, yet it has no brain and certainly no consciousness. It has what could be described as a persistent "willfulness" to stay alive. In fact it is difficult to think of the organism and its "willfulness" without assigning it agency (a decider and willer as the source of the willfulness), even though it is clearly just a mechanism where the "willfulness" arises from the intentionality of its own particular life form. It seems like some want to assign the cell "consciousness" as well as something innate in living matter, but that may just be a confusion and the only mystery is why the life form exists as the intentional thing that it is at all. Life itself is a profound mystery, but it seems to me that as a physicalist you can start quite safely from the outside and say that in the big picture we are no different than a single-celled organism except that the mechanism of life intentionality is far more complex and adaptive. There is "will" but no "will-er". The "will-er" MUST be part of the "consciousness" part of the mechanism of the particular form; a brain-created representation of an unfathomable never-to-be-understood process. I don't think this is making dross out of the problem.