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Single Idea 9286

[filed under theme 15. Nature of Minds / B. Features of Minds / 1. Consciousness / e. Cause of consciousness ]

Full Idea

Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and not a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, is best explained by their relations to one another, the relations being experiences.

Gist of Idea

Consciousness is not a stuff, but is explained by the relations between experiences

Source

William James (Does Consciousness Exist? [1904], §3)

Book Ref

James,William: 'Selected Writings of William James', ed/tr. Bird,Graham [Everyman 1995], p.110

A Reaction

This view has suddenly caught people's interest. It might be better than the higher/lower relationship, which seems to leave the basic problem untouched. Does a whole network of relations between experiences gradually 'add up' to consciousness?

The 18 ideas with the same theme [what causes minds to be conscious]:

23665 Consciousness is the power of mind to know itself, and minds are grounded in powers [Reid]
20118 Only our conscious thought is verbal, and this shows the origin of consciousness [Nietzsche]
9286 Consciousness is not a stuff, but is explained by the relations between experiences [James]
7394 Conscious events can only be explained in terms of unconscious events [Dennett]
7890 Maybe a creature is conscious if its mental states represent things in a distinct way [Papineau]
4921 Quantum states in microtubules could bind brain activity to produce consciousness [Penrose]
3141 Is consciousness 40Hz oscillations in layers 5 and 6 of the visual cortex? [Rey]
4092 The core of the consciousness problem is the case of Mary, zombies, and the Hard Question [Crane]
2386 Hard Problem: why brains experience things [Chalmers]
2416 What turns awareness into consciousness? [Chalmers]
2423 Going down the scale, where would consciousness vanish? [Chalmers]
4916 There is enormous evidence that consciousness arises in the frontal lobes of the brain [Carter,R]
4930 Consciousness arises from high speed interactions between clusters of neurons [Edelman/Tononi]
9312 Consciousness is reductively explained either by how it represents, or how it is represented [Kriegel/Williford]
9313 Experiences can be represented consciously or unconsciously, so representation won't explain consciousness [Kriegel/Williford]
9315 Red tomato experiences are conscious if the state represents the tomato and itself [Kriegel/Williford]
9316 How is self-representation possible, does it produce a regress, and is experience like that? [Kriegel/Williford]
23516 Maybe a system is conscious if the whole generates more information than its parts [Seth]