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I'd like to talk a bit about the mind-body problem. We all know that intuitive dualism (Cartesian-style or its variations, aka "soul") is being firmly rejected by the academia on the ground of the so called "interaction problem", that is, because "we can't imagine how the physical can interact the with non-physical". So it's materialistically assumed that the brain somehow produces the consciousness - which, honestly, sounds like a problem of equivalent complexity to me. I believe that the "Hard problem of consciousness" is about the same in essence - we can't understand how qualia arise in the system described by laws of physics and logic.

For a solid period of time, this sounded like a legit question. However, quite recently I realized there's a question which I've never really encountered (I'm no philosopher) - how can a brain know it's conscious? Maybe, this is, again, a reformulation of the same interaction problem - but it sounds a lot more concrete. We empirically observe ourselves talking about minds and qualia. So... how is this possible? It looks like a contradiction to both the Hard problem and its negation!

A potential answer that I found is that they [brains], in fact, don't know they are conscious. Indeed, we are a collection of experiences, and only them. I am a consciousness (and I assume you are). We don't know about the physical reality, we assume there is one underlying our qualia. For the sake of argument, let's discard why we need this physical reality in the first place then. When we talk about qualia, our brains actually talk about themselves and their physical interactions. When we think about the brains, - remember that this image is still a quale, - brains think about a model or representation of itself. This is an epiphenomenal dualism, of sorts, or maybe monism, but it's the only explanation I could have come up with.

So, the question is, how would you respond to "how brains are capable of knowing they're conscious"? Is there any hope for a consciousness to still negate physicalism?

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    An electrical current in a feedback loop is what is responsible for consciousness. Commented Feb 25, 2025 at 23:50
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    Its unclear why this is different from "how does the brain know anything?" Knowledge about the consciousness does not seem that different from other knowledge in this context Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 11:20
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    @keshlam Necessity is not the standard used by sciences to accept or reject a hypothesis. Utility is. And your assertion that "physical" sprits are untestable in principle is -- clearly false. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:04
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    @tkruse If knowledge requires the apprehension of awareness of a theory or a phenomenon -- IE experiencing qualia of "knowing", then per non-interactive dualism a brain cannot know anything. If knowledge is working with a functional category that can be treated as assumed true or assumed falsified, which processing systems can do without qualia, then brains can have knowledge. BUT -- under epiphenomenalist dualism, brains can never get any data from a conscious mind, so as a processing system it could never build up the evidence to infer it was associated with consciousness. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:09
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    @tkruse The problem is unique to epiphenomenalist dualism, as neither definition of knowledge could ever apply to a brain. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:10

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The mind actively models the world around it. That includes modeling itself. We call that model self-awareness. This is likely to be the same kind of theory-of-mind model that we use to understand the behavior of others, just applied to our observations of ourselves.

The details of what actually goes into that model, how abstracted it is, what parts of the brain cooperate to produce it (assuming non-dualist), and why we perceive it as we do, are all ongoing areas of research. But for me the core principle seems straightforward.

I think I'm confused that people are confused, again.

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  • It looks like basically what I said, but with regards that I tend to be a non-interactive dualist - again, the brain and the mind don't interact, it's the brain assessing itself, which corresponds to our minds asking questions about itself, no? Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 1:59
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    If you don't believe the mind is in the brain, why do you believe that the self image is in the brain? I would put that in the mind, wherever the mind happens to be. Of course, since I believe the mind is in the brain, that does put it back in the brain. if you think they're separate, they are separate, but I don't see why you are putting this one artifact on the physical side. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 2:11
  • I put self-image in both the brain and the mind; however, those self-images are different as they're written with different languages: one is physical, the other is qualia. The question of epiphenomenalism - how can the brain know about the mind - is resolved by stating that the brain can't and doesn't talk about the mind. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 2:53
  • (cont'd) The brain talks about the brain, and the mind reads it as talking about the minds. We are qualia, and so are our language. When we ask "how can the brain know about the mind", we ask how an image of the brain can think about us. The brain, in turn, asks how its model can think about itself. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 2:54
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    If that makes sense to you, so be it. I stand by my answer. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 4:39
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There is no "interaction problem". There is no theoretical objection to the contingent possibility that an event A may cause event B. Such a causation could be part of our world, whether A, B, both, or neither were spiritual or material. That a particular philosopher "cannot imagine" such a causal relation, is not an argument against any such relation. If it is presented as an argument, it is instead the well known fallacy of "argument from ignorance" (or from failure of imagination). Instead of these intuitionist approaches to answer what causal relations may exist, the appropriate evaluation method is instead empiricism.

This answer to a prior question lists four notable recent philosophers who, from varying perspectives, all deny there is an "interaction problem" (the answer is for the existence of an immaterial consciousness, but their positions cover the "interaction problem" too) https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/122897/29339

Also dualism is not "firmly rejected by academia". It is instead the 2nd most popular view in philosophy of mind in the 2020 survey: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5010

What "knowing" consists of is in dispute. If, as per interactive spiritual dualism, a brain does not have consciousness, it could still have "knowing" in the functional rather than qualia sense. Functionally, brains act based on the recognition that they have an associated consciousness and I would agree to the appropriateness of that usage here. And a brain would know this, because of its interactions with its associated consciousness.

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  • I'm genuinely surprised the the dualism rose to the 2nd most popular view, it's inspiring. However, even though I believe that a dualism is the best and most natural way to work in the philosophy of mind, I still heavily doubt the interactionism. Let's for the sake of argument assume that the mind is only the observer - that is, an epiphenomenon. Would my possible response, as stated in the question body, valid? Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 2:47
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    @TechPhantom In epiphenomenal dualism, qualia are not causal. There is no reason brains would ever talk about qualia, because brains would be unaware of qualia. That we DO talk about qualia, is one of the many refuting test cases for epiphenomenalism. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 3:01
  • that's exactly what I'm saying. Brains are not aware of them, like, ever. You're the mind. Your language is qualitive, not physical. When the mind says "brain talks about qualia", you actually ask about the image of the brain talking about your language. The physical brain says model of itself talking about its language. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 3:08
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    @TechPhantom If qualia do anything, even if only being talked about, you are not proposing epiphenomenalism. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 6:37
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    On the other hand, one could also argue that the interaction problem is an inherent issue in all physics from the very beginning. How does an immaterial gravitational field interact with a chunk of matter? How does a massless photon influence a material particle like an electron? Physics even does not attempt to answer these questions. Therefore, there is no justification for using this issue as a knockout argument against dualism. Commented Mar 22, 2025 at 17:34
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This question likely only makes sense to epiphenomenalism, because in most other forms of mind dualism, the mind can simply "write" data to the brain.

But even for most forms of epiphenomenalism, the brain is regarded as a data store for data that the mind would interpret with qualia. If all mind activity is a correlate of brain activity, then even qualia in the mind are a correlate of activity in the brain. Thus the brain can also store data about it's own activity that the mind interprets as activity of itself, as consciousness.

Only if an epiphenomenal mind could operate independently of a brain, there would be a question of how knowledge of such activity could exist in the brain (and e.g. be restored after a coma). But typically epiphenomenalism does not posit mind activity independent of brain correlates.

The brain then does not "know" about consciousness, but then again the brain does not "know" anything in dualism, it's the mind that knows. But the brain still contains all data that the mind needs to know.

A somewhat silly philosophical position would be that human bodies are just p-zombies walking around in this world, while minds are like souls that are attached to those p-zombies, floating around independent of neural activity. And those souls believe they steer the p-zombie, but that's just an illusion. In such a view, the brain would likely be unaware of such a soul floating around in the mental ether. But I don't think that's a philosophical view that has known proponents.

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  • In fact, my perception of dualism is that it is an attempt to postulate exactly that last scenario, where the body is essentially a p-zombie supervised by an immaterial mind or soul somehow associated with it. I don't know how else to interpret dualism. And yes, from outside it looks exactly like an attempt to retain the concept of souls. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:34
  • That perception satisfies neither the proponents of free will, nor does it explain any of the obvious meddling-with-the-brain-causes-trouble-of-the-mind (injuries, split-brain, drugs, anesthesia, aging, learning). That's why it's considered silly. It explains nothing, and serves no agenda. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:38
  • From my point of view, the latter part of that statement applies to dualism generally, and the former arises from an assertion that physical means fully predictable. The dynamic system is too complex and chaotic to be perceived as not having free will. Whether a perfect model of the creature and its environment would be deterministic or not is a valid interesting philosophical question but, as far as I can tell, has no practical implications and is untestable. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 15:52
  • @keshlam All identity theories suffer from the same acausal irrelevance problem that epiphenomenalist dualism does. In identity theories, the qualia of consciousness is an a-causal side effect of the causal neurons or functions, and as with epiphenomenalism, cannot be selected for by evolution. Popper, in The Self and Its Brain, detailed this refuting test case. He proposed an emergent interactive dualism. It is only emergent and spiritual dualism, plus idealism, that provide an explanation for the causal role of consciousness. Commented Feb 26, 2025 at 16:02
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    @keshlam -- I think we should get off tkruse's comments. Here is a chat room chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/157873/… Commented Feb 27, 2025 at 21:43
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The brain conceives its past thoughts making it aware of its various states. Philosopher like quine would straight forward reject the qualia-approach , admitting for functionalism of human behaviour which gathers all our stimuli and shares its part with environment, for him consciousness is not something we apprehend or experience or are aware of , its the byproduct of human behaviour and our mode of expression. He vehemently refuted descarte's "Cogito ergo sum" saying the very sentence "i think therefore i am" is drawn linguistically , thus language is what makes something open to the topics like consciousness which is nothing but arbitration of the language itself.

This was the extreme empiricist analysis. Moving on to the Negel's view who is sarcastically opposed to the quine, for him consciousness is what we say as first person initiation , he gave a very famous Bat example, which says it doesn't matter if we study every possible process of the brain of a bat , all his responses of senses. Still we would be left with the very first person experience of what echo formation feels like. Thus for him , none of any brain study can claim what it feels to be like a bat.

Can we seperate physicalism from consciousness? Answers are always vague and ideology oriented. All eastern Philosophy hails for the dissolution of brain and what remains is the pure consciousness but lets not dwell into it and see it empirically. You must have heard of the experiment Mary's room by frank jackson. Wherein mary knows everything about color , the density ratio and reflective nature everything but she has never seen the color , now the question is , does mary knew anything new when she saw a green color for the first time? That would smartly seperate physicalistic approach of brain from consciousness.

I would further love to elaborate on panpsychism or to be specific the "cosmopsychism" since, the essence of brain being physical is thrown out and there's no dichotomy of mind and matter here. What remains is the consciousness in some way or the other. I remembered a line of David chalmers , he says if consciousness is already present at the very deepest of the fundamental level , then there's no need for it to arise. That actually make sense empirically , if not focusing on the question of non conscious entities becoming conscious suddenly when coming in contact with brain, why not question that why is there even a result of consciousness, is it brain which makes us aware of? Or are the single cells of brains having their own qualia combining to form or shape a unified consciousness for us. The question opens many paradoxes, some philosophers like william james had tried to neutralize it but that wouldn't suffice the need.

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Brain DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING, it's dead Meat. Mind knows Consciousness through introspection, tranquility, experiences etc...

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