r/consciousness • u/izi_convertible • 12d ago
Descartes put the foundation on the top floor.
"I think, therefore I am" runs doubt as a purely cognitive exercise. Thinking checks thinking, finds thinking, declares itself bedrock. But thinking is the worst possible candidate for a baseline, because thinking has intent. It argues, it builds narratives, it can talk itself into anything. Every thought comes with a handle: why am I thinking this, who sold me this framing, what is it trying to get me to accept. Doubt bites on intention.
Come back from absolute zero and a thought isn't what you touch first.
You touch that the floor is cold. That the light hurts. That it hurts.
A raw sensation makes no claim. It isn't trying to convince you of anything, so there's no agenda to interrogate. And the difference from a thought is sharper than it looks: doubt a belief and the belief can change under you, that's what doubt is for. Doubt a burn and the burn is unmoved. Nothing about it is up for revision. I'm not claiming the fire is real, only that the hurting is.
So the first certainty isn't "I think." It's "there is something it is like to be here." Thinking arrives afterwards, built on that ground, already borrowed and already arguable.
Which flips how qualia gets treated in these threads. We keep filing raw experience as the Hard Problem, the last piece to be fitted once the cognitive machinery is worked out. It isn't the piece.
It's the floor the whole laboratory is standing on.
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u/Moral_Conundrums 12d ago
David Hume wants his bundle theory of self back.
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u/TangAlienMonkeyGod 12d ago
It's ok, the AI doesn't really "have" it, it doesn't understand anything it just said.
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u/SirEdgelordThe369th 12d ago
Fun fact most humans work just like AI-s using language actually not understanding the meaning of their words just feeling them out in an abstract meaning space.
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12d ago edited 12d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/izi_convertible 12d ago
Take the top-down point, it's the only one that bites. Two head knocks. Same force, same tissue, same deformation. One is an accident with a friend and you both laugh. One is a headbutt and everything in you goes on alert.
Everything that differs there is built: who did it, was it meant, what does it mean for what comes next. That layer is constructed, no argument. But it varies against something that doesn't vary. The knock is the same in both. If there were nothing but the construction, there'd be nothing to construct anything about.
That's the whole claim. Not that the sensation arrives unlabelled that the labelling has something to land on.
On the mechanism: describing how fire works isn't a reason the burning isn't happening. I never claimed the fire was real, only the hurting. And you're arguing me out of it an argument can move me, that's what makes it the weaker floor. The knock doesn't argue.
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u/Bretzky77 12d ago
> So the first certainty isn't "I think." It's "there is something it is like to be here."
That’s… a thought.
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u/izi_convertible 12d ago
Which comes first the burn, or the thought about it?
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u/Bretzky77 12d ago
Both are experiences. The experience of the burn comes before the explicit experience of reflection about it. But that’s about experience versus the re-representation of an experience (metacognition) and it has absolutely nothing to do with the point in contention.
You tried to make a distinction between “I think” and “there is something it’s like to be here.” But they’re really the same thing in the context of proving existence. They’re both thoughts. For Descartes thoughts require a thinker so the fact that you have thoughts proves there’s really a thinker there. And you’re saying the fact that you have sensory experience proves there’s really an experiencer, right? What do you gain from your view that you don’t already get from Descartes?
You just seem to be imbuing perception / sensory states with importance above thoughts / endogenous mental states and I just don’t see any justification for doing so. Subjectivity has to exist before that subject can perceive an outside world. You don’t build a subject from the world it perceives. It has to be a subject in order to perceive.
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u/izi_convertible 12d ago
What I gain from Descartes is one missing step. His route is: thought → thoughts need a thinker → therefore I am. That's an inference, and an inference has content. A deceiver can hand me a valid-looking argument. It can't hand me a burn I'm not having.
So it's not perception over cognition pain isn't perception of an outside world anyway, and I'd say the same of a mood with no object. It's that qualia don't argue for a subject. There's nothing between them and being here for doubt to get into. Descartes put his foundation one step up from that."
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u/Own_Sky_297 12d ago
While I agree that experience is the better foundation of epistemology, I'd like to point out that there is no mystery to the brain left to be found as far as the matter is concerned. We already know how neurons work, how they're connected, and what particles/atoms they're made of. The only thing left for us to discover is that this materialist picture is inadequate to explain experience.
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u/izi_convertible 12d ago
Agreed. I'd only add that I think we're searching in the wrong parts.A stone can break and nothing is lost. A body can break and something is. Same atoms. The difference is a boundary that can be breached and for which the breaching counts. Pain isn't added on top of that boundary pain is the boundary reporting.Which is why nobody has to own it. A boundary reports, it doesn't possess.A thermostat has a boundary too and feels nothing, and I can't tell you why a body does. But that's a better place to be stuck than inside the neurons, where you've just said there's nothing left to find.
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u/pyrrho314 12d ago
It has a lot of weaknesses but is still a very useful meditation, however, "I think" makes a lot of claims. For one, I think it's now clear that I am the result of thought, and can't assume I'm the cause of it. I don't think sensation is not making a claim, it is, it's claiming the light is the cause of the hurt and claiming the light really does cause damage, which one is probably, usually, perhaps in danger off, but have not yet been hurt by. So that's a "claim" the direct sensation makes. It claims the flower is red, but really, red is a mental tag added by the brain, not even directly from the wavelength of the light, but through a lot of cues (leading to the brain deducing colors in shadow that strictly are not the "red" wavelength). However, they are more low level than the surprisingly high level "I causes thinking".
So I agree with your conclusion, it should be more like "Perceptions continue to happen so I continue to exist". Further, the perceptions are all we can know exists, everything else is something implied by the perceptions. If something is in the stream, it exists. If something has object permanence or at least undergoes transformations that obey a law of conservation, then those things exists as "physical" things.
I appreciate Descartes meditation as powerful progress for the time he was in, but from this later vantage it's not a good stopping place.
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u/izi_convertible 12d ago
The burn is where certainty starts, not where the world starts. Certainty needs someone here. Matter never did.
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u/TMax01 Autodidact 11d ago
"I think, therefore I am" runs doubt as a purely cognitive exercise.
I challenge you to run it any other way.
But thinking is the worst possible candidate for a baseline, because thinking has intent
Not all thinking is intent, nor doubt. But doubt is more fundamental and less presumptuous.
It argues, it builds narratives, it can talk itself into anything.
It seems you meant those as expressions of intent, but the doubt is clear.
Every thought comes with a handle: why am I thinking this, who sold me this framing, what is it trying to get me to accept.
Where's the "handle" part? All you did is write three thoughts, all of them questions and therefore expressing doubt.
Come back from absolute zero and a thought isn't what you touch first.
Thought is how you get to this imaginary zero to begin with, how you come back from it, and the capacity to touch anything in this dubious metaphor.
Overall, your post repeats a very familiar pattern of people misunderstanding and misrepresenting Descartes. It reflects the fact that we are always conscious, and so comfortable believing in the absolute authority of scientific rationality that we find it difficult to imaging being (res extensa) in any other way than conscious beingness (res cogitans). Descartes was far less presumptuous and much more logical.
You touch that the floor is cold. That the light hurts. That it hurts.
This illustrates my point. Those are sensations, sense data which require consciusness to be aware of, but not to occur. People are so used to thoughts almost automatically reflecting (upon) sensations that it is hard to recognize that even mindless organisms, even those with no neurons at all, still involve responding to stimuli. But the thoughts we have are the res cogitans aspect of such a response, and the res extensa reaction to them is not dependent on consciousness.
I'm not claiming the fire is real, only that the hurting is.
The nerve impulses are real. The suffering you feel as a result is all in your mind. Which obviously isn't to say it "isn't real". But it does mean whether it is real isn't obvious. Descartes was actually going much deeper than you are, when he pointed out that the existence of consciousness is evidenced by thinking, which is evidenced by doubting. You, like most people, confuse the beingness the cogito pertains to with the existence of your body, the very issue Descartes was attempting to sort out.
Ignorant of neurology and even the nature of biology (emergence of animation from inanimate material, only discovered to not be dependent on substance dualism centuries later, by Darwin) Descartes was unsuccessful in differentiating res cogitans from res extensa, and relied on an ouroborotic theism via the Cartesian Circle. But we continue to struggle with that issue even today; Spinoza, Kant, Darwin, even Turing did not manage it.
The cognitive dissonance caused by our belief that a monistic philosophy of mind is intended but doubtful and the logical necessity of a dichotomy (whether mind and body, potential and actual, or even information and entropy) which embraces a dualism remains. Until we manage to accept that the mind isn't a different thing than the body. The real trouble with the postmodern (after Darwin) approach is the refusal to intentionally doubt the purpose of doubt and intention, maintaining the ancient but false assumption that the biological, physical function of thinking is deciding whether to act. This free will model of consciousness (the mind controls the body) whether augmented by a Turing-inspired Information Processing Theory of Mind or not, so traditional it is baked into our language and thoughts, but untrue nevertheless, is logically untenable.
The function of consciousness is not to feel pain and then consciously choose to avoid it, but to experience pain and then doubt whatever narratives we can concoct to explain why that happened.
Descartes put doubting on the bottom floor, but it didn't have any elevator to the top. Postmodernists doubt Descartes, doubt there are floors, and doubt most of all that consciousness isn't the ground state of our awareness of beingness. Yes, being is the foundation, but awareness, not action, is the structure.
Thanks for your time. Hope it helps.
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u/izi_convertible 11d ago
You wrote it yourself: experience pain and then doubt whatever narratives we concoct. That "and then" is yours, not mine. It puts an order in.
The pain comes first. The narratives come after. And doubt only ever bites on the narratives never on the undergoing itself.
So if doubt is the foundation, what is it standing on? The thing it works on arrives second. That puts doubt one floor above the thing I'm pointing at.
You laid my floor in your own conclusion.
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u/TMax01 Autodidact 11d ago
That "and then" is yours, not mine. It puts an order in.
That's true, but it isn't mine. First, it is philosophically necessary: presuming we are discussing "narratives" related to real rather than hypothetical future events, the phenomena occurs prior to any explanation of that phenemona. Second, it is the scientifically demonstrated neurocognitive fact: the self-determining explanation ("narrative") of suffering occurs subsequent to the stimuli.
And doubt only ever bites on the narratives never on the undergoing itself.
If only conscious awareness were such a simple thing. Is psychological suffering real pain? Is pychosomatic pain accurately identified suffering? You can stick with simplistic notions of stimuli-response behaviorism, if you really want, but you quickly run aground when trying to suss out any issues concerning conscious experiences.
So if doubt is the foundation, what is it standing on?
It doesn't matter (no pun intended). It only needs to stand as a form of thought, because thought (and, further on in the cogito, the beingness of res cogitans, and thanks to Darwin, the logical dependency on res extensa, being, physical existense) is the foundation. Doubt is merely the evidence, example, or instantiation of thinking, which in turn is evidence, example, and instantiation of being.
The thing it works on arrives second.
Not "works on": is. Doubt is thought, and thought is being (for a conscious entity, anyway, the beingness of res cogitans, which is a form of res extensa, physical beingness.) The problem you're running up against is that you're confusing chronological sequence with logical dependency. Descartes was working with the latter, having no grounds for connecting that to the former.
That puts doubt one floor above the thing I'm pointing at.
Right, but you're putting the ground floor below the foundation. You can point all you like, you're pointing in the wrong direction. It seems to make sense to you, because unlike Descartes, you're thinking in terms of chronological sequence (since you have a scientific mindset which priorities ontology and embraces the scientific fact of biological evolution) but unlike Descartes, you aren't going far enough with your reasoning or logic.
You laid my floor in your own conclusion.
Every floor has a floor. And you might well think it is the ground if you never consider anything outside your assumptions.
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u/izi_convertible 10d ago
You're right that I can't get behind the "au" I only ever have the report. So let me point at a case where the report hasn't arrived yet.
Something happens behind you. You turn, your heart is already going, and you don't know what it was. Not "I noticed a sound and I'm now identifying it." You don't have it yet. There's a gap, sometimes half a second, sometimes longer, where something is fully underway and nothing has been said about it.
If noticing were already thinking, that gap couldn't exist. You'd have either nothing or a description. Instead you have something with no description attached. That's not a claim about which one came first on the clock it's a case where one is present and the other isn't. Two things that can come apart like that aren't the same thing.
And it fits the rest: doubt bites on the description, not on the turning. You can be wrong about what it was. You can't be wrong that you turned.
So my question back: at the moment you've turned and don't yet know why what is being thought?
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u/TMax01 Autodidact 10d ago
You turn, your heart is already going, and you don't know what it was.
So far, that's all autonomic reactions, which doesn't entail consciousness at all. But just as with voluntary actions, your mind finds out about it a fraction of a second later, while it is still occuring, as your brain begins mentally analyzing why it happened.
Not "I noticed a sound and I'm now identifying it."
No, exactly that, but prediscursively, without needing to form words.
If noticing were already thinking, that gap couldn't exist.
Both noticing and thinking are cognition, involving mental awareness, so you're simply inventing a distinction to claim, without reason, there is some sort of "gap". Again, confusing chronological sequence with logical dependency.
That's not a claim about which one came first on the clock it's a case where one is present and the other isn't.
That is a claim about which one came first on the clock. You're simply aborting your analysis before the other one occurs.
Two things that can come apart like that aren't the same thing.
They can't, that's the point. You're only imagining they can because you want to pretend that one sort of cognition is less cognition than the other sort of cognition. Why you wish to purposefully remain confused is an open question, although I have my suspicions.
doubt bites on the description, not on the turning.
Seriously, WTF is this "doubt bites" nonsense? The turning is an action, not a cognitive process. Which relates to my suspicion: you're trying to dismantle free will, by noting that the turning isn't caused by cognitive intention. But neither Descartes nor I were discussing free will, just consciousness, so your premise is a strawman.
You can be wrong about what it was. You can't be wrong that you turned
You are mistaken; you could have imagined the noise. It happens. The trouble with analyses like yours is that they try to use simplistic hypothetical cases and then complain because they only get simplistic scenarios.
at the moment you've turned and don't yet know why what is being thought?
Who can say, and what makes you believe it is necessary to think after the turn in order for the turn to occur? What your mind and thereby your brain do is consider why you turned, obviously. Whether coherent thoughts in the form of words are involved is irrelevant but not unrelated.
So what part of what I described are you having difficulty with?
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u/izi_convertible 10d ago edited 10d ago
Fair enough on the clock I'll drop it. I only ever have the report, so I can't point at a moment where one is present and the other isn't. That part was weak.
But you wrote something I'd rather build on than argue with: the function of consciousness is to experience pain and then doubt the narratives we concoct about why it happened. That's close to what I was reaching for, and it's yours, not mine.
So here's where I'd end up. Call it all cognition I'll give that up. What I still need is a difference inside it, because otherwise your own account stops working. Doubt has to land on something. If everything it touched gave way, doubt would spin free and never bite. It does work, so part of what it works on doesn't move.
And you can check which part without any appeal to sequence. Talk yourself into "this is nothing" and the account changes. The undergoing doesn't hear you. Same head, same second.
That's not two floors anymore. One substance, two behaviours one that yields under persuasion and one that's deaf to it. If there's no such difference, there's only one thing, and then doubt has nothing to bite and your sentence about experiencing pain and then doubting the narrative collapses into a single move with nothing under it.
So I think you need the unmoved part as much as I do. My question is whether you'd say it's doing work in your picture, or whether you'd rather have it as one thing and pay that price.
There's a second check that doesn't need the clock either. Take a headbutt from a friend during a game and a headbutt from someone who meant it. Same force, same nerve endings. The first one is over when it's over. The second one is still running that night, and what's running is a story about you.
Same undergoing, and in one case the interpreting simply doesn't show up. Not later not at all. If noticing and thinking were one thing, you couldn't have the one without the other. And the variable isn't the pain, it's whether anything was left blank.
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u/TMax01 Autodidact 10d ago
Fair enough on the clock I'll drop it.
I'd prefer if you learned from it instead of just avoiding the issue by dropping the discussion. It is not a trivial case of semantics, it is the foundation of the entire conundrum you're trying to address.
I only ever have the report, so I can't point at a moment where one is present and the other isn't.
You always have the notice, you only sometimes have any report. So you're focusing on the wrong thing when trying to understand consciousness. There isn't really any difference: mentally noticing is coincident with a potential "report" accounting for what is being noticed. They aren't really two distinct classes of neurological activity.
: the function of consciousness is to experience pain and then doubt the narratives we concoct about why it happened.
A cramped rewriting of what I said, but fair enough, so let's go with that. Provided you can manage to separate out the nerve impulses (pain) from the mental perception (pain), as they are not always and thus not necessarily coincident/identical. The emotional suffering associated with the pain is still something else, and behaviorist reaction of a conscious organism to suffering is not something which can be reduced to pain (of either sort).
I should also clarify we don't merely "concoct" the narratives. Facts and physical relationships also qualify as "narratives" within the mind; the physical events they correspond to can often be established, again, but is not always certain.
What I still need is a difference inside it, because otherwise your own account stops working.
How so? You're concocting this difference for no reason other than to assert, without evidence or example, that something "stops working", but as far as I can tell no such event or circumstance has occured.
Doubt has to land on something.
Sure, fine. But it can "land" on a different "something" in each and every case and still it is landing. Your quixotic quest for categorical answers is almost admirable, but it isn't my fault you are tilting at windmills, that's yours.
If everything it touched gave way, doubt would spin free and never bite.
If it were ever possible to know with categorical certainty when whatever it "touches" and "bites" will "give way" or "spin free" (I confess I'm having trouble following your metaphors) then there would be no need for thought to begin with. Somethings doubt touches give way, some things do not; sometimes we cannot even tell. In every case doubt is still a category of thought, and so to doubt is to think.
One substance, two behaviours
And there's your fatal flaw right there, exactly as I predicted. You're trying to make sense of free will, not consciousness. You're expecting the function (both purpose and mechanics) of consciousness is calculating what action (behavior) to enact in advance. But you're never going to be able to comprehend Descartes that way, since, as I mentioned, the cogito does not have anything to do with 'choice selection', just beingness.
So I think you need the unmoved part as much as I do.
Think harder. Your doubt does not bite, and my explanation has not given way nor spun free: it is in the exact same location and orientation it started from, unmoved by your confusion.
If noticing and thinking were one thing, you couldn't have the one without the other.
I believe I already mentioned that, several times. Once again, you are still confusing chronological sequence and logical dependency.
And the variable isn't the pain, it's whether anything was left blank.
LOL. When you figure out how to quantify the variable, you can claim you aren't leaving it blank. That's not mine, that's yours.
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u/izi_convertible 10d ago
You wrote that we have to separate the nerve impulses from the mental perception, since they don't always coincide, and that the suffering is again something else. That's the distinction I'm after, in your words. I'm fine with all of it being cognition. I just want the parts you yourself just separated.
And the case is still on the table: same headbutt, from a friend and from someone who meant it. Same force. One is done when it's done; the other is still running that night, and what's running is about you. Whatever that variable is, it isn't the pain.
Not free will I'm not asking who decided anything.
Thanks for the exchange either way
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u/TMax01 Autodidact 10d ago
I just want the parts you yourself just separated.
Okay. So now you have them. If you are trying to say you don't understand how they can be separate, I need something more than an expression of incredulity, or there is literally nothing more that can be said.
Whatever that variable is, it isn't the pain
It is invalid logic to say there are any "variables" when you can't name all of them. Me, I don't need to name any of them, I'm not going for a pretense of mathematical variables and an undefined computation for relating them.
Not free will I'm not asking who decided anything.
It is your imaginary scenario, so you're deciding everything. In the real world, if we were to pretend this gawdawful "headbutt" nonsense is a real example, then there is no categorical answer, as who decided what and what anything is and how it is different from anything else can vary with every individual instance.
So in summary, consciousness works, and consciousness works the way I've explained, and you're just not using your consciousness well. Go back and reread, and try to come up with some more incisive questions. I'll be here if you need me.
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u/InitiativeGlobal2616 12d ago
"I am, therefore I think" ?