Author : Guenter Albrecht-Buehler
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527593622
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (275 download)
Book Synopsis Consciousness without the Infinite Regress by : Guenter Albrecht-Buehler
Download or read book Consciousness without the Infinite Regress written by Guenter Albrecht-Buehler and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike other social animals, humans have evolved far too much analytical intelligence to let us naturally agree with each other’s actions. Nevertheless, in the short span of a few million years, we have become the most effectively cooperative species on the planet, and this book argues that this is owing to our consciousness. So far, consciousness has stubbornly defeated our attempts to explain it as a product of non-mental elements. The ultimate reason for this failure is that we are conscious of being conscious. As a result, all non-mental based explanations lead to endless chains of infinite regress. Therefore, this book proposes to drop the requirement of non-mental elements as explanations of consciousness for the time being, and instead base our explanations on elements that are already ‘borderline-conscious’. Be they prime (single) or compound, all qualia form with lightning speed in our mind, and are always experienced as singular, unique, and personal. They play for our mind the same role that ‘hashes’ (short, standardized, unambiguous, and unique tokens of immensely large and complex ‘originals’) play for our modern information technology. Therefore, using concepts derived from Arthur Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, Glaucoma, Hash functions (SHA-2), and the logical connective ‘XOR’ (exclusive OR), this book defines consciousness as a super-compound quale, which combines all compound qualia that are present at every moment in everyone’s mind.