{"id":7455,"date":"2016-05-19T10:02:52","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T17:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7455"},"modified":"2016-05-20T10:11:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T17:11:56","slug":"consciousness-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/05\/19\/consciousness-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/16\/opinion\/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html\" target=\"_blank\">from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>Consciousness Isn\u2019t a Mystery. It\u2019s Matter.<\/h1>\n<p>by\u00a0Galen Strawson \/\u00a0<a class=\"byline-column-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/column\/the-stone?version=meter+at+44&amp;module=meter-Links&amp;pgtype=article&amp;contentId=&amp;mediaId=&amp;referrer=&amp;priority=true&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=meter-links-click\" target=\"_blank\">THE STONE<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"media-viewer-candidate\" src=\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2016\/05\/16\/opinion\/16stoneWeb\/16stoneWeb-master768.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" \/><em><span class=\"visually-hidden\">Credit\u00a0<\/span>Ullstein bild, via Getty Images\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don\u2019t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It\u2019s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness \u201cis the most mysterious aspect of our lives\u201d; philosophers \u201chave struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is \u2014 where by \u201cconsciousness\u201d I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It\u2019s the most familiar thing there is, whether it\u2019s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.<\/p>\n<p>The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman\u2019s remark about quantum theory \u2014 \u201cI think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics\u201d \u2014 seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious\u00a0<em>except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff<\/em>. This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay \u201cMind and Matter\u201d: \u201cWe know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,\u201d he wrote, \u201cexcept when these are mental events that we directly experience.\u201d In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/05\/16\/opinion\/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at NYT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New York Times Consciousness Isn\u2019t a Mystery. It\u2019s Matter. by\u00a0Galen Strawson \/\u00a0THE STONE Credit\u00a0Ullstein bild, via Getty Images\u00a0 Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don\u2019t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It\u2019s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}