Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - Is Consciousness Irreducible?

Why is consciousness so contentious? Neuroscience can increasingly explain many facets of consciousness, but what about conscious awareness itself? Some philosophers claim that although facets of consciousness—such as how we see edges or colors—can be explained, we have no possibility of explaining, in purely physical terms, the experience of consciousness.


Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American novelist and Professor of Philosophy. She has written five novels, a number of short stories and essays, and biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Her latest book is Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

#WomenInPhilosophy #Consciousness

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March is Women's History Month. In light of this month that celebrates women and their contributions to history and society, Closer To Truth is highlighting remarkable women advancing the fields of philosophy and neuro/cognitive science. See the playlist: bit.ly/3bqtwIg

[EWKification]

Consciousness is a subjective, experiential state, not a physical thing, though it is dependent on the physical brain. To try to understand consciousness as a thing is like trying to understand Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" by weighing the physical novel, analyzing the properties of ink and paper, determining how the pages are bound, and so on, but not bothering to read it.

[jamesruscheinski]

Can the other way be looked into, whether matter or physical comes about from consciousness?

[paulcunnane]

She could have just said I don't know....but you don't get grants for that I guess.

[neilcreamer]

Unfortunately, Rebecca has inferred that matter exists independent of conscious experience and now she believes that consciousness is an aspect of matter instead of understanding that matter itself is simply an idea. This is how people continue to overlook the nature of their life. It really is just experience and inference, and there's no way to get beyond that.

[caricue]

If you accept the premise that we would not know about consciousness without our experiencing it, then what other phenomenon are inaccessible to science because we do not have access to them by experience?

[williamburts]

Here's the reason why consciousness is irreducible, lets say you could determine what someone is thinking about by some brain correlation like as she said when she said " your thinking about your mother " lets say that could happen it still would not explain consciousness because consciousness Isn't the thought but is the awareness of the thought.

Your subjective reality is exclusive to you and can't be revealed objectively by any machine and that's why consciousness is irreducible. It is impossible to bottle up awareness.

[johns]

I can’t listen to any philosophers for more than a few mins. It’s so “Word Salad” sounding to me. She left my consciousness thinking “What the fuck did she just say”

[dckfg]

In the final analysis, she is still a reductionist. once she said, "it's material... I think there are other properties of matter..."

[allenmorgan]

Consciousness, matter and energy cannot be separated and they are in a constant state of flux changing from one form to another.

[werquantum]

The ultimate fundamental still needs a miracle. Will this ever not be the case?

[williamburts]

Since you can't put awareness or experience under a microscope and examine them consciousness will always remain irreducible. Only you can know you, studying your material chemical body won't reveal to you the truth of yourself because that is something purely subjectively understood and not objectively understood.

[jamesruscheinski]

Is there a way to do correlations, such as in neuron activity, mathematically? How might mathematics handle correlations, through probability and statistics, or another way? In the case that correlations could be done mathematically through probability and statistics, maybe something like quantum wave function, and possible to model on computer?

[caricue]

I recently realized that many, if not most people, see reductionism as an organizing principle of matter, rather than what it really is, an organizing principle of knowledge.

[jamesruscheinski]

A description or explanation of strong emergence might help to understand consciousness? Does time, and perhaps quantum mechanics, play a key role in strong emergence?

[jamesruscheinski]

Maybe physical matter reduces to consciousness? Consciousness the intrinsic nature or quality from which feeling and emotion comes?

[bastiaanvandenberg]

It is not unthinkable that our human mind is connected with the unified field at a very small level that means perhaps we have to see consciousness on much broader level

[CUXOB]

First person experience is only available to the creators of whatever is being experienced in first person.
So what we are has nothing to do and can't have anything to do with what we see as a physical world.
We are the initial things that really exist. And not me personally, but others like me with a bit more experience have created this universe. And we are here to learn from them, so some day we would be able to create more worlds. Pretty obvious really. And as anything in math, the amount of these concious beings is probably infinite, but they all need a universe to learn, that's why there is this learning chain of how to build a universe.

[goyonman]

forget consciousness! Is any emotion we feel redcable?

[jamesruscheinski]

Would consciousness being a more concrete form of matter be a property dualism or physicalism?