A materialistic approach to explaining consciousness is necessary, since consciousness can be affected by physical changes to the brain, which implies that consciousness is fundamentally a physical process.
In my little thought experiment the radio itself was never physically changed, just the antenna. The antenna, another physical component, is just a sensing peripheral. But what does the radio process if its front end is dead?
Think about Helen Keller for a minute. What kinds of sensing signals did she process? Vastly different than most of us. Yet she was still able to arrive at a roughly equivalent understanding of our overall shared experience. I say roughly equivalent because I have no idea what her internal state looks, or functions, like.
I think about this often. I myself have a drive to try to electronically capture, and share, knowledge. But I play a little thought experiment in my head often... what if all your senses were cut off and you were locked in. Just you inside your head, nothing else. Forgetting important factors like if you were just born or right now in your current state... what if a dry, textual, fact were somehow delivered straight to your consciousness. Something you know nothing about, nor have ever experienced before in any setting. Let's say you've never experienced snow, you don't even know what it is. Maybe you've only ever lived in a hot desert your whole life and have never experienced freezing cold, in any form (no AC, ice, etc...). So a textual description of snow is made available to your (locked-in) consciousness. You have no idea how to process that fact into an experience. I like to think of it like IBM's Watson. It has access to a wealth of facts. But it has nearly zero experience with any of them. You can not experience that dry textual fact without previous experience. In this case precipitation and/or freezing cold. I don't even think it's about context so much. Let's say you are provided with context about precipitation and freezing cold. It still doesn't provide the experience, memory, of either. You're consciousness is missing the essential primitives necessary for understanding the experience. I guess for me it's always come back to the experience. Watson can provide information. But it can't truly communicate a shared experience with that information to another consciousness, regardless of whether or not that other consciousness has experienced those primitives or not.
More simply, think about the first Matrix movie (insert groan here). Trinity downloads how to fly a helicopter. Let's say I want to invent that type of technology. My first attempt may be to create a system where you simply attach a cell phone to your head and have a way of conveying textual facts to your eyes. Dry facts about flying a helicopter. One field test is done with someone who has zero experience with flying at all. It will likely fail to produce the intended result. Sure it may provide a liftoff. But you will not be an instant stunt flyer. So iteration number two involves simple non-interactive, non-motion graphics. Another field test is done, on a new subject with no experience. Maybe somewhat better results, but still not the intended outcome. Next iteration involves videos. Another field test, again only somewhat improved results. You can iterate all the way through a short interactive simulation. The results will be better, for sure. But until you've had actual time in the field before-hand, i.e., experience, you just don't know the experience.
Read the definition of gravity. Huh!? Drop an apple, oh!
So what would it take here? Implanted memories? Along with all the necessary primitives??? I don't have the answer.
I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.
Because causal closure is a feature of our physical theories that have immense explanatory and predictive power. This is good reason to think that anything that interacts with the physical is also physical or supervenes on the physical.
You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the perception of two colors swapped. All this is summarized in the question, "What canvas does the brain's neurons draw its images on?" I can't imagine any answer that is material.
Also, saying that physical theories lack explanatory power is not the same thing as saying there is NOTHING can offer explanatory power, or even that physical theories cannot augment any theories. But I strongly oppose the blind optimism of those believing pure physical theories will explain consciousness when it is has so far failed abysmally. That is not the same thing as saying no such physical theories exist, but that I wish more people realized just how optimistic they sound without real reason to be.
On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.
Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.
On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.
Why is it your assumption that the sensation of seeing something is anything other than simply the network of neurons in one part of your brain firing in concert in response to visual stimuli? Why is the color purple, which is a mix of blue and red, also perceived as an intermediate between blue and red if the sensation of seeing a color is not linked to it's actual, physical properties and how they interact with your visual sense organs?
Somewhere between mortal injury and decomposition, consciousness vanishes. Live humans, yet to succumb to a mortal wound, are clearly still conscious, yet a decomposed corpse is clearly not. So somewhere in between, consciousness ceases to be. We don't know yet exactly when, but I'd while say we've got it pretty narrowed down, the exact point currently a topic of debate in relation to organ donation.
This is all to say nothing of the how of consciousness, or what happens in between, but it's pretty clear there is a beginning and an end to it.
These are pretty basic observations that anyone can make. As for any presence of "consciousness" before or after these points, well, what evidence is there? None I've ever seen, just conjecture and speculation presented as fact.
> if consciousness was created by physical processes, what created the first consciousness?
Perhaps a different physical process, since we can see that a physical process is capable of creating consciousness. It seems very plausible that consciousness is simply an emergent property of complex, multi-cellular life. If so, then a better question isn't what created the first consciousness, but what created life? But that's a whole different can of worms. I'm afraid we may not be very special at all, just clusters of animated molecules that last a short while before entropy catches up to us and we revert to dust. But I understand why this scares some and they seek comfort in other explanations.
> supreme intelligence and consciousness that is behind everything
Evidence?
What makes you think that? It seems to begin at some point after conception, and end upon death. I've yet to see evidence indicating otherwise.
Just like we remember everything from before we're born? Or will we get all that back once we die as well? Why do we lose it all in the middle? What a series of empty, meaningless, unverifiable claims.
This is all just drug-fueled pseudo-spiritualism brought on by hallucinations.
Consciousness has never been disembodied as far as anybody can demonstrate.
Unless you can actually tell someone what's in the next room without ever physically being there or observing it, you're just imagining things. It would be incredibly easy to test in a double blind manner, so if it was a power that someone could actually manifest it'd be reliably demonstrated by now.