1. Your nearest definition of consciousness "emergent properties of lower level functions" or something along those lines doesn't really cut it, either. To say that something is an emergent property of another thing, without showing the steps of that emergence is kind of like defining red as "an emergent property of the sun and a sheet of cellophane". It's HOW it emerges that's the hard question.
2. If you were pleased to hear another person's discovery that "my experience of experiencing is irrefutable", you might like to read Descartes's account from over 400 years ago in his Discourse on Method.
He veered off into some strange and tenuous territory, but the opening of that book is excellent and it uses that discovery (a.k.a. the Cogito - I think, therefore I am) as the first axiom from which to build a whole philosophical system, and it's a really interesting read.
This is the guy who invented algebraic geometry, from which we get the Cartesian plane, and the idea of ordered pairs, which is such a fundamentally useful idea that it's hard to see just how brilliant a discovery it was. He had some things to say about consciousness that have not yet been improved upon.
EDITED to say that the book I was talking about was Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, for anyone interested. He decides, "let's doubt that anything at all exists, just doubt everything - where does that take us?"
In the same Discourse on Method, Descartes makes assumptions about how the human body works and these assumptions are completely wrong. Interesting read just to see how someone perfectly logical can be completely wrong at the same time.
It was not completely wrong if he was right about some things. It's one thing to say someone broke a window and another thing to say who and how and when. He proposed an explanation which know now to be false. But the thing to be explained is still there.
Sad thing is that much of the literature in philosophy of mind will discard dualism solely on the fact that past attempts to explain dualism have failed. And more over, some have just failed to convince the opposite side, which is open for subjectivity.
Oh, for sure. Aristotle is an even better example. Doubtlessly one of the best minds on record, and yet he came up with a "completely wrong" model of the universe. Really makes you question what we are so sure about these days, and also what it means to be wrong - Aristotelian physics worked well enough to be useful for a thousand years.
1. Your nearest definition of consciousness "emergent properties of lower level functions" or something along those lines doesn't really cut it, either. To say that something is an emergent property of another thing, without showing the steps of that emergence is kind of like defining red as "an emergent property of the sun and a sheet of cellophane". It's HOW it emerges that's the hard question.
2. If you were pleased to hear another person's discovery that "my experience of experiencing is irrefutable", you might like to read Descartes's account from over 400 years ago in his Discourse on Method.
He veered off into some strange and tenuous territory, but the opening of that book is excellent and it uses that discovery (a.k.a. the Cogito - I think, therefore I am) as the first axiom from which to build a whole philosophical system, and it's a really interesting read.
This is the guy who invented algebraic geometry, from which we get the Cartesian plane, and the idea of ordered pairs, which is such a fundamentally useful idea that it's hard to see just how brilliant a discovery it was. He had some things to say about consciousness that have not yet been improved upon.
EDITED to say that the book I was talking about was Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy, for anyone interested. He decides, "let's doubt that anything at all exists, just doubt everything - where does that take us?"