Consciousness denied?

Originally Posted by Helios Panoptes
Do not be fooled (1) into believing (2) that there exists a thing denoted by 'consciousness.' (3) Consciousness is a property. Animals have consciousness, mental states have consciousness(perhaps in two different senses). I see posters speaking of consciousness as if it is the sort of thing that an apple is or that a chair is. It is not. It is like goodness or redness.

1. OK. -- assuming you were wisely directing this metaphysical advice at the reader, and not just farting words. By GOD! I just say: lets not be fooled about anything!

2. "Believe", doesn't denote anything at all -- readiness to fart sideways, maybe; certainly nothing apart from use of the word, as opposed to 'cosciousness.' However, "fooled into believing"... yep. there's something there, maybe. The word is supposed to contrast with "know", I guess. What you're left with after stupidity aha. But the Greeks got along with 'opinion' v 'knowledge'. "Belief" is nothing without the "propositional attitude" lead-in given it by Russell.

Whatever does not exist apart from the word used to communicate it

(=> 'denotation' has clear rules of use only in a syntactically reconstructed object language, where it means "undefined descriptive constant"; its use in informal contexts smacks of too much wiki woo)

has no objective reality oputside consciousness.

Consciousness obviously exists apart from what is communicated by the word (remember the bunnies) -- or else neither this, nor what you wrote could get communicated. (Consciousness is the mental processes underlying thought, which uses signs to communicate.) (Bunnies ain't got grammar -- two brained being; essence, but no soul.) You should try to use the study of philosophy to get to know yourself.

3. You fumble over the category-name to fit 'consciousness' under:

-- is a 'property' (what of? -- Macrobius wants to know)
Are you saying properties don't exist? (well, I'll bet I could find you predicating on 'property' terms, thus generalizing over predicate variables, thus assuming the existence of universals, thus contradicting yourself if you deny consciousness exists because the word stands for a "property". It's actually very easy contradict oneself in trying to think about philosophical issues. Best to start with the law of non-contradiction, move into truth tables, quantum theory, relations, then take it from there, whatever the fuck you think you "believe". That will keep you linearized until you can see through this Dennet-Dawkins reptilinalia, picked up by the snakes in academic philosophy departments who are mostly far less far along than yourself, when it comes to consciounses, if not intellect. Now that unintelligible mishmash is disappearing up the arses of undergraduates these days.

-"is an event".. I happened to be present at the U. of Wisconscin faculty colloquium at which Fred Dretske, golden-haired boy from nearby Minnesota, specifically criticized the prevailing subject-predicate ('monadic' for experienced-exemplified properties, 'n-adic' for relations) syntactical framework by defending the notion of 'event', for which he had arguments and a schema. (His grasp of formalisms was nonpareil.) But, cutting to the chase, this merely fractured the essence-body of philosophy further. Next, causation fell; then, the analytic-synthetic distinction; then, the general scheme of an Ideal Cognitive Language coming through Logical Empiricism (cf. the Minnesota School, Feigl; Bergmann, at Iowa -- Weinberg was at Madison) AS their 'positive' contribution,

fell into default ....

It was replaced by Quine's too slick and easy quantification logic, with its "open" and "closed" "sentences" -- tacitly invoking the ever present spectre of a formal domain, while systematically obfuscating its clear outlines which go back to his simplification of the way to prevent type-paradoxes in a fromal metalanguage (just stratify the 'x's and 'f's" for
(x) f(x) so that 'f' cannot be substituted for 'x'; thus neither f(f) nor ~f(f) is well formed. Easy for him to say.

But as demonstrated here in all the examples of "squared" sign" uses I have harped on in lo these many posts of mine -- from signs of signs to consciousness of consciousness to the totality of content of consciousness under (a specific order of ) sign-uses -- this doubling of S* is, in fact, not only the virtual key-note of ordinary discourse, invoked by Plato whin speaking of Justice Itself, and whereever the Bible uses the phrase "King of Kings", etc......not only the portal entered whenever ordinary conversation turns to philosophy ...it is one main formal feature of psychosemiotics (takes up where the object-language of science leaves off, now that we know how to circumscribe it). (You want to see doubles, look at Kierkegard, anywhere.)


Russell's theory of logical types must be retained as a definite, non-variable, token-specific hierarchy, I hold, in order to: 1. legitimately stratify levels of predicates over individuals in a single system, through the apriori condition of the consciousness of them as content under S*. That is the outline of my proposed psychosemiotic system: sign-use; the distinction between text and token in (every instance of) sign-use; the doubling of text x token as a unique, non-sentential conjunction, matched or 'mirrored' by the formula for S* ^ ~S* -- when a text negates its own token, as in "this is not a sentence" etc.

2. as a formal analytical propadeutic to prevent
bobblehead hasnumuss logisticisians from doing armchair metaphysics.

Quine was how the Catholics controlled Harvard. Next to him, Dershowitz is all mouth). Its not his formal moves that are wrong, it is the malformed informal metalanguage
that misleads here. His moves led to set theory, on the one hand, having eliminated actual property-predicates in langauge as names ... and Einstein's Theory of Light*,
on the other hand (=> exists only when you are saying it with him). Not that Einstein's bobbleheaded (not: hasnamuss --at first) vision of riding in on a light beam travelling through space light years away, away, away....thunk. YO! E= Mc^. .. is just his imagination. It's actually a textualized form of consciousness. But only one of a kind, which doesn't work on the token side unless you are prepared to equate consciousness and light. Is that OK with you? It's not like scents and flavors, which are contents of consciousness (unless you deny their connection by memory -- through consciousness, by 'reminder', recall -- and say "the flavor smells the scent, the scent tastes the flavor", which is absurd.)


(Each individual's private self-awareness is a space it is logically impossible for another's to be identical with
or 'set inside of'. However, its essence -totality can be wrongly completed if the person whose consciousness it is identifies with the textual content of sign-use in communication as foundation of metahysical truth.
vs the tokens, whose causal particularity bring us back to consciousness as a process). The continuity of consciousness grounded in memories retained from the time spent in mother's womb, forward, is the empirical ground of individuation latent in personal being-essence all the way through.)

Contents of consciousness may be called events -- awareness of the blue spot on the wall, over there, is an event; but consciousness itself is the process all such events have in common, qua awareness. (One doesn't
say the river is a current; currents are in the river. Similarly for content and consciouness.)

ADDED: (you can be conscious without being aware that's what its called, just as you can say "I don't believe I'm conscious" consciously. Only in the latter case you would be a nut.)
__________________
I ain't down here for your money
ain't down here for your love
I don't want your love nor money
I'm down here for your soul.
plucked from The Anonymous Air