JeffreyW wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 1:39 am
There is nothing in
[my] experience to suggest there is as there is nothing to suggest that consciousness exists without a living brain. I once underwent general anesthetic and had no consciousness of anything during that time.
[My] observations support the understanding that consciousness only exists within living brains. I have no valid reason to assume anything beyond that.
Two things here:
1) There is an implicit assumption that "consciousness", whatever it is, must be a local phenomena existing within 'things'. I see no reason for that assumption beyond our naive perception of a physical brain, which in your own view is a spatiotemporal symbol for a deeper Reality (or whatever you call what is potentially deeper beyond space-time). There are plenty of reasons against it. Just in terms of modern science, we know that all natural phenomena are ever-evolving processes with no clear boundaries, including (and especially) living organisms. And obviously there are plenty of invisible processes involved in the visible phenomena. So if we say "consciousness" is the sole exception, that is an added and unwarranted assumption.
2) We really need to test our loyalty to the method of carefully reasoning through experience without adding assumptions. What we know is that
our own experience does not suggest consciousness is possible without a living brain (reflected by my bolded substitutions in your comment), and that's not necessarily true of every person on the planet, just you and I. The last sentence was fine as it is.
I think you referenced earlier that Heidegger was deeply appreciative of
Mythos and
Logos. If there is anything beyond doubt when it comes to these ancient testimonies, it's that whoever wrote them experienced the world much differently than we do. So already there is a clear example of experiences which we could factor in as a data point beyond our own limited experiences in the 20th-21st centuries. There are also the experiences of deep sleep and, as you mention, states such as general asethesia. We don't remember having any, except for one -
duration. If there was no experience of duration, it would be as if we immediately regained conscious experience as soon as we go to sleep or get put under. We also have continuity of Being through those states. As Bergson wrote - "
There is at least one reality which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own person in its flowing through time, the self which endures. With no other thing can we sympathize intellectually, or if you like, spiritually. But one thing is sure: we sympathize with ourselves."
The other data point we cannot arbitarily leave out is that of those who claim to have gained higher cognitive faculties in some way or another and perceived beyond the threshold of spatiotemporal intellectual cognition. We know we are always evolving and that our personal cognition is always evolving, from infancy to adulthood. In my view, based on many data points from many different fields of inquiry, which I think is supported by Heidegger, it's pretty clear that the cognition of collective humanity has always been evolving as well. If we were to assume our current cognitive capacity is the only one (which is no different than what Kant assumed), then that is like starting observing the growth of natural phenomena at one moment, ceasing observation at a few moments later, and concluding what we happened to observe in those few moments was the totality of that phenomena.
I hope it's clear I am not asking anyone to simply assume there is consciousness without a brain, but to remain open to the possibility, perhaps even the probability, that there is IF we continue observing and reasoning through experience, without arbitrarily leaving out any data points. Again, if we demote our thinking activity to a secondary role
from the outset, we will treat what we arrive through logical reasoning as a mere accretion to the phenomena which we can never really trust in. But that treatment is only warranted under metaphysical dualism. If we are not assuming dualism from the outset, then it becomes clear our cognition acts like a sense-organ perceiving shared intuitions and imaginations and concepts more broadly which belong to the natural phenomena just as much as their properties of colors, shapes, sizes, etc. By remembering that, we are
not assuming those properties reflect exactly the underlying 'thing-in-itself', but that they are legitimate sense-perceptions of our experience which need to be factored in.