"Consciousness" pervades everything. It is the state / interaction of existence.
See
emergence.
You are the culmination of an immense array of biochemical reactions.
"Emergence" or "epiphenomena" totally is without any explanatory power. Totally superficial and naive "observation."
Please see:
Yes, consciousness pervades everything. "Emergence" is NOT an explanation, but a facile empty word play totally absent any actual explanatory power. Infact, you have just argued AGAINST your own position that consciousness is somehow "manufactured" by interacting neurons and chemicals, by stating "Consciousness Pervades Everything" If you believe that then you are what is called a "panpsychic" in philosophical terms.
WHY DOES IT "FEEL" LIKE SOMETHING TO BE A BRAIN??? ***WHAT EXACTLY*** IS DOING THE "FEELING"??? SUBJECTIVE FEELINGS ARE ***EXPERIENCED*** OR "OBSERVED"... WHAT EXACTlY IS HAVING THE EXPERIENCE OR DOING THE OBSERVING? There are no physicalist, mechanistic explanations or even theories that rigorously even theorize an answer to these very fundamental questions. They are ALL a pile of suppositions and attempts to brush these questions under the carpet or eliminate the questions by "defining them away." These attempts are logically flawed and empty of any expanatory power and are merely attempts to avoid the question.
The whole physicalist "explaining away" of consciousness as some illusory emergent "property" is naive and incorrect. In what ontological space does this "emergent" property exist in? Why should an abstract "emergent" property FEEL LIKE SOMETHING TO BE IT? WHAT EXACTLY IS OBSERVING AND EXPERIENCING THE ABSTRACT "EMERGENT" STRUCTURE???
You have no answer for this, no matter how many linguistic loop de loops you perform. There IS no answer to this.
So yes, "consciousness pervades everything". To the extent that it is an a-priori fundamental property of the substructure of the universe (like space, time and mass) that is HARNESSED like the energy of chemical reactions, or like photons are harnessed by the eyeball / brain to increase you DNA's chance of propagation.
See the large bolded sentences below in particular. Chalmers I am betting is a FAR more accomplished thinker and professor than either of us or most people in the field who are merely hard scientists dabbling in Philosophy. He is a professional in philosophy with a long and distinguished career. His thinking cannot easily be brushed under the carpet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
David John Chalmers (born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.
Background
Chalmers was born and raised in Australia, and since 2004 has been Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Centre for Consciousness, and an ARC Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. From an early age, he excelled at mathematics, eventually completing his undergraduate education at the University of Adelaide with a Bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science. He then briefly studied at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar before studying for his PhD at Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995, and his first professorship was at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and, later, Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona, sponsor of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference where he made his legendary "debut" in 1994.[1]
Chalmers's book, The Conscious Mind (1996), is widely considered (by both advocates and opponents) to be an essential work on consciousness and its relation to the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind.[2]
In the book, Chalmers argues that all forms of physicalism (whether reductive or non-reductive) that have dominated modern philosophy and science fail to account for the existence (that is, presence in reality) of consciousness itself. He proposes an alternative dualistic view he calls naturalistic dualism (but which might also be characterized by more traditional formulations such as property dualism, neutral monism, or double-aspect theory). The book was described by The Sunday Times as "one of the best science books of the year".[3]
[edit]Work
Chalmers is best known for his formulation of the notion of a hard problem of consciousness in both his book and in the paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (originally published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). He makes the distinction between "easy" problems of consciousness, such as explaining object discrimination or verbal reports,
and the single hard problem, which could be stated "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" He expressed this distinction at the first Tucson Conference in 1994. The essential difference between the (cognitive) easy problems and the (phenomenal) hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.
In support of this, Chalmers is famous for his commitment to the logical (though, importantly, not natural) possibility of philosophical zombies, although he was not the first to propose the thought experiment. These zombies, unlike the zombie of popular fiction, are complete physical duplicates of human beings, lacking only qualitative experience. Chalmers argues that since such zombies are conceivable to us, they must therefore be logically possible. Since they are logically possible, then qualia and sentience are not fully explained by physical properties alone. Instead,
Chalmers argues that consciousness is a fundamental property ontologically autonomous of any known (or even possible) physical properties, and that there may be lawlike rules which he terms "psychophysical laws" that determine which physical systems are associated with which types of qualia. However, he rejects Cartesian-style interactive dualism in which the mind has the power to alter the behavior of the brain, suggesting instead that the physical world is "causally closed" so that physical events only have physical causes, so that for example human behavior could be explained entirely in terms of the functions of the physical brain. He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Though Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries.
After the publication of Chalmers's landmark paper, more than twenty papers in response were published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. These papers (by Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, Francisco Varela, Francis Crick, and Roger Penrose, among others) were collected and published in the book Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem. John Searle fiercely critiqued Chalmers's views in The New York Review of Books.[4]
With Andy Clark Chalmers has written The Extended Mind, an article about the borders of the mind.[5]
[edit]Miscellaneous
On his web site, Chalmers has compiled a large bibliography on the philosophy of mind and related fields with close to 18000 annotated entries topically organized.
Chalmers appears in the video documentary "The Roots of the Matrix" (a reference to The Matrix) and presents a novel take on a large part of the "brain in a vat" hypothesis, maintaining that it is not, contrary to common philosophical opinion, a skeptical hypothesis.
He serves on the editorial board of the journals Philo, Consciousness and Cognition, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Psyche.
He is also noted for originating the (philosophical) zombie blues[6] and recently performed as part of the New York Consciousness Collective at the Qualia Fest held December 14, 2010 in New York [7]
[edit]Notes
^
http://consc.net/papers/five.pdf
^
http://consc.net/book/reviews.html
^ The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996), paperback edition, back cover.
^ Searle's review of The Conscious Mind 6 March 1997 (subscription required)
Chalmers' response to Searle and Searle's reply 15 May 1997 (free access)
^
http://consc.net/papers/extended.html.
^
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyS4VFh3xOU
^
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGu682Yh8UU
[edit]Bibliography
A partial list of publications by Chalmers:
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996). Oxford University Press. hardcover: ISBN 0-19-511789-1, paperback: ISBN 0-19-510553-2
Toward a Science of Consciousness III: The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates (1999). Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak and David J. Chalmers (Editors). The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-58181-7
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (2002). (Editor). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-514581-X or ISBN 0-19-514580-1
The Character of Consciousness (2010). Oxford University Press. hardcover: ISBN 0-19-531110-8, paperback: ISBN 0-19-531111-6
[edit]See also
PhilPapers
Irreducible Mind
Niall McLaren
[edit]External links
Official website
David Chalmers's bibliography
Fragments of Consciousness - Chalmers's blog.
Interview with Chalmers - in Philosophy Now.
Consciousness, an episode of Philosophy Talk, hosts Chalmers
Video Interview on BloggingHeads.tv by science writer John Horgan.
The Mystery of Consciousness on Bright SBM Production.
