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No, it is just that I can see from behind the gate that the path ahead is just a trompe l'oeil. There cannot be a hard problem of how sensations arise from matter if matter is defined as that which gives rise to sensations. It is interesting to read an ordinary dictionary. Physical stuff is...

I would say there is nothing simpler than consciousness. It is just what it is like to be on the left hand side of a physics equation. But there is certainly something different about the way to find out its rules of correspondence with dynamics from the dynamics of bile. Perhaps we have to...

That has not been my experience. The success I have had has been because I insisted on asking the most fundamental questions relevant to the problem!

No Mike Hausser has no interest in consciousness, that is the point. He is at the forefront of cell-level analysis of how neurons compute. We actually know a huge amount about how neurons interact and thanks to people like Mike, the fine detail biophysics. But the people doing the research...

I think I might have held this view in my forties. I cannot really remember. You are expressing the view of people like Christof Koch, at least until recently, and the Patricia and Paul Churchland, I think. The problem is that neuroscientists are completely stuck precisely because they have not...

I am just saying that forming a thought is physical interaction, but that we do not know which physical interactions correspond to which thoughts. I am not suggesting a new primordial force like David Chalmers. That is a category mistake - effectively looking for thoughts on the right hand side...

OK, but if that is your view of consciousness it does not relate to the topic of this thread introduced by boolybooly, which was 'the body mind duality at a philosphical level'. If all you mean is brain function then I quite agree that it is nothing special in comparison to insulin production...

The psychology of this is probably quite complex. One can reasonably presume (in the way that psychologists tend to) that subconscious factors, transference, peer pressure and that other word I can never remember are deeply involved. It may not be so much hierarchy as conflicted emotions...

Origin late 17th century: apparently a variant of dialect knub ‘protuberance’, from Middle Low German knubbe, knobbe ‘knob’.

This is the nub. (Whatever a nub is.)

Well if it brought back bath salts there must be life on Mars.

You don't need to look for rocks. Everything is action, so the universe rocks. :cookie::eek::cookie:

No it isn't you. It's them.

Yes, I pretty much agree with all that. I had an interesting conversation not long ago with Vittorio Gallese, who was one of the people who identified 'mirror neurons'. Gale's view has changed since in the sense of coming to think that 'mirroring' is a much more general property of...

Correct. My mother is in that situation. Except that rather than taking gibberish in the sense of incoherence she talks in the most wonderful irrelevant riddles and fantasies. She does not recognise anyone much but she puts each of us into a confabulated role. I don't see her as any less...

I don't really follow how consciousness in a child could be the result of applying 'mentalist schemes'? Even I have never applied a mentalist scheme as far as I know! I think I know what you mean but why deny that of owls? The owl that tore out the eye of the great naturalist photography Eric...

It is not intended to explain anything. It just does away with the need to explain why human subjects should have experiences and rock subjects might not. Experience is the one thing we know exists. I cannot see what it would mean to 'explain' its presence, although I think it is interesting to...

So this is where it matters which event in the brain is a conscious X of a sort that is connected up to our discussions in a way that its content is discussed. This all gets very complicated but then neurobiology is complicated. Put another way, consciousness is absolutely the exception rather...

OK, so there are lots of layers to this that need teasing out for a detailed analysis. Chalmers's definition of consciousness says nothing about the richness or qualities or self-reference of 'there being something that it is like'. Descartes required more than that but Descartes's view on this...

Actually Minsky does not attribute any consciousness or point of view to any of the members of his 'society'. The title is 'Society of Mind' singular. Minsky seemed to think that experience somehow emerges singly from the totality but never says anything about why or how. We certainly have...