How can we sort out this problem of consciousness?

Answer 1

LOL you can't. your soul is always conscious. your existence is consciousness, the reality that surrounds you is but a mere potential manifested due to your neural perception..which is composed of grey matter...neurons...electrical spikes...molecules...transmitters...atoms...electrons...nucleus...sub atomic dimensions..that will all still exist even after you die. there. problem solved, plato.

ha. and you were worried about consciousness.

Answer 2

What is the problem?

I wish I could ask David Chalmers the same, of course he would answer, the problem of understanding it.

I think understanding consciousness in not entirely necessary, it is obvious to me that I am conscious as there is a way to feels to be me. That reflection on any given state is consciousness. That's about all I think I can know about consciousness right there.

Answer 3

What's there to sort out? Consciousness is the awareness of now.

Answer 4

I usually find that large amounts of alcohol stop consciousness being a problem for me.

Answer 5

I don't have a total solution, but I can suggest some possible directions to follow.

1) One of the primary things to keep in mind is that the brain is a self-organizing system. Indeed, all living organisms are self-organizing, as is the ecosystem, and even the cosmos as a whole. This is a pretty big clue that understanding the principles of self-organization will be of prime importance if one wishes to understand consciousness. (I've discussed self-organization several times in various answers, so you might want to take a look at my profile, especially my answer to the question "How does the brain 'know' that something is a stable 'fact' in an environment?") But the notion of a self-organizing system assumes that there is a set of elements that are more or less following some sort of rules. The problem with consciousness is that we can't quite understand how purely material entities – no matter how complex and organized they might be – can really explain what it "feels like" to experience a blue sky, or why there is anything "it is like" for human to exist at all. This should motivate us to consider the possible experiential nature of the fundamental elements that compose Being. This leads us to phenomenology.

2) An understanding of phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, and the gang) is essential to understanding consciousness. Even our most abstract thoughts are essentially experiential. There is something that it FEELS LIKE to think of the number 2, and to notice that it is smaller than the number 3, and so on. ALL knowledge, no matter how logical or abstract is fundamentally qualitative, which is to say feeling-based. All knowledge is experiential, and for every experience there is something that it is like for the experiencer to be the experiencer. Thus we cannot simply ignore the FUNDAMENTAL first-personness of Being. Even if consciousness is an emergent property, it is still the case that what it emerges from must at least be understood as "proto-experiential" in some sense – which is to say that a satisfactory explanation of the nature of matter, or whatever we propose as the fundamental substrate of Being, must imply a link to mental terminology. In other words, a complete scientific explanation of existence cannot be purely objective/third-person. Subjectivity, or at least the potential for it, MUST be in some way written into the core fabric of reality, and no science or human wisdom of any sort can call itself fundamental or complete unless it accounts for this.

3) Despite all of my talk about "fundamental" elements or principles of Being, we need to consider the possibility that there may in fact be no truly "fundamental" level of Being in the sense of some basic micro-scale elements and rules from which everything else can be deductively derived. It could be that reality is essentially indeterminate in various respects, especially insofar as the roots of the phenomenal character of experience are concerned. This would mean that there is no absolute "way things are" when it comes to certain aspects of reality. Or to be more precise, it may be the case that there is no "way things are" that is independent of the experiential nature of Being. In philosophical jargon I'm suggesting that we may have to accept some degree of anti-realism at the roots of any explanation of qualia. It could also mean that we can never expect to derive macro-scale phenomena purely from micro-scale elements and events. It may be that some of what we experience as "macro-scale" (basically the tangible world in which we live) or abstract (intangible categories of experience) may turn out to be just as fundamental as micro-scale events. In other words, instead of everything depending on physical subatomic particles, it may be the case that the nature of subatomic particles actually depends in some way on the nature of our lived experiences.