Posted by John Tchoe on June 21, 19101 at 13:39:37:
In Reply to: Consciousness IS the brain? posted by Noctillucent on June 20, 19101 at 22:21:20:
:
: That’s very odd. But let’s accept your premise anyway; that consciousness IS the brain. I presume you mean this literally as I don’t know how else to understand the term ‘is’.
: Taken thusly, when I perceive of a red square, my brain is in fact a red square. When I taste sweetness, my brain is just that, sweetness. And when I feel a painful sensation, my brain is just this feeling.
<JT>I think what is ill-defined here is consciousness. We all know what the brain is, and what is not the brain. I think you hit the nail on the head below.</JT>
: Yours is obviously a very odd way of thinking about the brain, especially in that, being consciousness, it would exist only as a first-person fact.
<JT>Yes! Another person's consciousness is like a black hole, which cannot be directly perceived, only inferred by its effects.</JT>
: But if you insist on saying that consciousness IS the brain, and we do understand them to be the very same ontological fact, only having different names, it would seem we agree.
<JT>Well, obviously we cannot use the terms "brain" and "consciousness" interchangeably. If I said that consciousness IS the brain, what I was trying to get across was my opposition to the Platonic notion of concepts having existence separate and independent from physical instances. The physical location of a concept, if you will, lies within an individual brain, and the sum of a particular brain's concepts is consciousness.</JT>
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