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rawtape -> RE: Human Consciousness - Meaningful or Meaningless? (6/21/2011 8:50:27 PM)
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ORIGINAL: juliaoceania
I left it open for a reason. This way we do not run into problems of science minded v faith minded issues. The answer can have any sort of spin on it anyone likes, and that way we all get to see other people's views without feeling like our own are tread upon. I respect people's views, and I do not have extremely strong opinions as to what it all means.
JO: Thanks for the feedback.
To answer part of your question, yes, I think we can create meaning out of nothing. I think our brains evolved primarily as efficient pattern-matching algorithms and as such are quite capable of "filling in" gaps (e.g. not being aware of blind spots, creating a narrative in response to misdirection in conjuring tricks, responding to optical illusions, etc.). In sensory deprivation experiments, this certainly allows the brain to come up with hallucinations (i.e. create meaning) out of essentially no or very little stimuli. Now, some might argue that the brain in question is not a tabula rasa, a blank state -- that even though there was no real stimuli, the brain still interpreted background noise based on past experience, and as such it wasn't creating meaning from nothing.
But that merely forces us to take one step back, to culture and social constructs. Cherry-picking from both Steven Pinker and Stanley Fish, let's look at social constructs like money, tenure, citizenship, and baseball's "balls and strikes." All of these constructs/concepts have meaning now, but at one point in our history as a species, they didn't. So yes, I think, social constructs serve as an example of where we created meaning out of nothing; not overnight, but from nothing nevertheless.
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ORIGINAL: Kirata
As I understand it, an operational definition requires a statement of one or more observable and measurable conditions that are reliably associated with what is being defined. Do you think consciousness is susceptible of an operational definition? If so, what would your operational definition be? And if not, do you really think that this must necessarily impair our ability to talk about it productively? It is, after all, something of which we all have direct knowledge and experience, even if (presumably) our degree of knowledge and experience varies.
K: I think, yes, certain forms of operational definitions can be generated, for at least facets of consciousness. Now these might be quite minimalist, and might very well describe only a fraction of what different people might mean by the term consciousness; but then, what different people might mean by the label might well vary quite a bit.
Let's, as an example, consider being "conscious" of of an object in our field of view moving either up or down. Bill Newsome, over at Stanford, has some really elegant experiments with rhesus monkeys in which he has decoded/"understood the meaning" of this phenomenon to the point where he can make the monkey "conscious of"/perceive the object moving up when it is really moving down or is stationary by stimulating the appropriate MT neurons. So, in terms of how you, JO, and others reading this thread interpret consciousness and meaning[fulness], do you consider this facet of consciousness to be meaningful?
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