Seeing Steve's take on the importance of consciousness, as well as several different topics in this forum related to its implications, I thought I'd bring up the philosophically interesting question of the moment (or rather, past few decades) in a specific branch of philosophy: Philosophy of the Mind.
This question is: well, does consciousness even exist? If so, how does it (or does it?) interact meaningfully with the body? This is often referred to as the "mind-body problem" in philosophy, and it gives everyone in the field a heck of a time trying to assert anything - after all, we are working from within the framework of a first-person subjective experience, and there is no way of escaping it.
A good source to acquaint or refresh yourself on this material can be found at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_the_mind
(I know, generally not to be trusted - however, philosophers seem to be nerdy enough that spammers won't even tamper with
these articles.)
There are two camps: dualism and monism. Dualism holds that there is an immaterial mind that is a separate entity from the body - i.e. consciousness. Within dualism, there are sub-camps: substance and property dualism. Property dualism claims that the mind consists of emergent properties of the brain, but that the resulting matrix will not reduce back to these individual properties. Substance dualism, or interactionism, simply holds that the immaterial mind (henceforth "mind") is independent from the physical brain. A third, smaller camp, epiphenomenalism, holds that the mind or consciousness exists - but is causally impotent as far as the physical body is concerned. That is, emergent properties create the mind, but the mind has no causal effect on the body - rather, it receives effects
from the body, such as the subjective feeling of pain. (Parallelism and occasionalism can also be put under dualism, but are generally more religious arguments. If you feel the occasion to bring them into the discussion, by all means - details on them can be found in the wiki entry.)
Monism, or physicalism, or materialism, on the other hand, holds that there are only physical properties - there is only a brain, no mind. From here, we get into sub-camps like the mostly defunct (as a serious, competitive theory) behavorialism, functionalism and the like, but that's not
so important for our discussion purposes. They may arise later on.
I'd like to start the dialogue by trying to pinpoint where a theory of consciousness like Steve's or any of ours might stand, and then perhaps evaluate it from the point of view of the philosophical community at-large.
The idea of having a consciousness certainly places us in dualism territory, does it not? Many here believe in souls and an afterlife - this certainly implies an active consciousness or mind with the ability to affect the physical body. This would rule out the common property dualism standpoint, as well as epiphenomenalism, and leave us with substance dualism, the conclusion that Descartes came to, but admittedly, not one that holds up too readily in philosophical debate today.
Admittedly, I've held to epiphenomenalism myself, in light of neurobiological studies (can't find now, I assure you that I will try later) that show that a conscious decision to do something lags behind the neural firings actually beginning to do said action by something like 400 milliseconds. No matter how small the time... it's still lagging. Thus, it would seem that one's consciousness, one's first-person subjective experience is simply a happy accident of evolution, causally inefficacious on its environs.
I can't wait to see what everyone else has to say.
