ChapoChatGPT [any]

Are a monkey and a human equally capable of influencing their material world? Are both equally capable of examining and reflecting on their own consciousness and altering or refocusing the processes that make up their own consciousness?

Well that’s the explanatory power of emergence in my mind, that something can qualitatively change when its more basic parts reach a critical mass of complexity. Consciousness seems to possess an essence or nature that defies explanation or examination, and in my reading and talking with people they seem to either reduce it to nothing more than its parts (consciousness doesn’t exist except conceptually, everything is simply material) or ascribe some form of alienating dualism to it (consciousness exists external to the body).

And the synthesis that works for me is that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. It’s an attempt at a sort of dialectical dualism, where the consciousness exists (more than just a conceptualization or construct of material mechanisms but actually exists in reality) and can exert influence on other things that actually exist, while also springing from and being influenced by material mechanisms. Causality is complex and dialectical, not linearly one dimensional.

Why does consciousness have to come from somewhere else or be removed from the material in order to possess agency or exert influence over the material?

I’m drawing a distinction between what I think are two different concepts (I’ll use “vulgar” and “dialectical” as signifiers for them but I understand you may have different understandings of both words). I may not be communicating it very well, but you’re going to have to explain away the differences if you want to convince me that they’re both the same concept.

edit: I wrote this before your edits. fwiw I’m not approaching this as a researcher of consciousness but as a regular person, so I can’t speak for how effectively this model suits that line of work. it’s been a good fit for my understanding of myself and the world, but I’m willing to expand or change it if there’s good reasons to.

My pessimistic guesses:

Good Corporation™ swoops in and outcompetes Bad Corporation™ on the Marketplace of Ideas™.

or

We find out that the reason Bad Corporation was so bad was because it was bought by Chinese investors, and everything goes back to “normal” after they’re defeated.

Yeah that’s what I’m drawing a distinction between, people give the word “just” a lot of reductive power. Love might be made of chemicals, but those chemicals gain new characteristics when organized in specific ways, to the degree that a new referent/entity comes into existence. Love or consciousness are neither “just” concepts nor “just” the building blocks that comprise them, nor are they essences that exist in some realm alien from the material world they arise from.

In my reading mechanistic materialism connotes ignoring the dialectical nature of something, in this case consciousness. I’m claiming that consciousness arises out of simpler material forces, but as a complex entity with properties that are new and distinct from its parts, and is then able to plug back in and act upon the material.

But it’s very possible I’m using the wrong words or have a limited understanding of the concept.

How do you personally separate and define things? In my reading and talking with people, there’s a useful distinction between vulgar/mechanistic materialism (which in this context I’m using to signify the “love is just chemicals, free will doesn’t exist since we’re just reactions” concept) and an emergence model of consciousness that sees it as growing from simple material but gaining new properties that the fundamental building blocks didn’t have. One of which is being able to plug back into and influence the material dialectically, or what one might call “free will” or agency.

It’s the idea that consciousness exists as a complex object that can act upon the material, but isn’t separate or alien from the material that it arises from.

dualists and mechanistic materialists alike need to read up on emergence / emergent phenomena

complex arrangements of simple things can produce new mechanisms that are greater and more novel than their parts. consciousness is a great example of this. just because it’s currently too complex to fully define and pinpoint doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or exists separate from the body that it emerges from.

:bill-hicks:

:squirtle-jam: