How is Natural selection a mechanism?

I have said this elsewhere..I have not heard an explanation for example, of why biochemical activity at neuronal synapses would lead to a private subjective severe pain sensation. Or why any physical activity should lead to an observer, subjectivity and sensation. Hopefully you can see the difference between someone examining my body and brain when I report pain and myself having the actual experience directly.

Water has several properties that can can be described as emergent such as it's ability to to be a solid, liquid or gas. Properties of larger more complex chemical interactions are emergent and these can be utilised if they are available.For example I can stand on thick ice to cross a river when it is frozen. But unless water has the possibility to turn to ice I could not walk on a river.There is a possible scenario where it was impossible for eyes to exist because the chemical and physical properties didn't exist. Other properties or events needed for life include distance from the sun, atmosphere, planck's constant and so on.I don't see how evolution explains the biochemical emergence of properties as in why these properties (like say consciousness) exist in the first place.I assume a positive mutation has to create the component parts of eyes and their light filtering abilities and this is a biochemical process. It is a pretty banal fact that a faulty eye will not aid survival like a faulty engine in a car.

No it's not.For a start digestion is not private and subjective like conscious states only directly accessible to the subjects.Consciousness could interact with the brain without being identical with it. It clearly is not identical with it. Are you under the illusion conscious states are identical with brain states? (My brain states are never of neurons firing or neurotransmitters unless I am reading a text book)I have already differentiated between consciousness and the contents of consciousness.I am fully consciousness at night lying on my bed in the dark awaiting sleep and feeling the soft duvet and my breathing. I am not more conscious when I am out on a sunny day seeing crowds of people. Regions of the brain allow us to access more contents for our consciousness but there is a basic state of being fully awake. You can be fully alert and awake with limited conscious content such as no visual content, sound etc.There is an explanatory gap between brain states and conscious states. I don't see how natural selection sheds any light on this.

I cited that case (and there are various others) because it undermines neural correlations. The brain is different than the digestive system when you are claiming that specific brain regions are correlated with specific conscious states or cognitive abilities.The brain is quite homogenous but not completely. If everything (as has been been posited by some theorists) could simply be performed anywhere in the brain then that makes neural correlation even less explanatory.To make the brain coincide somehow with conscious states it has to share at least some features of the mental state. (For example retinotopic mapping to preserve spatial details of signals from the Optic nerve)

I was referring to its neurons. But your picture enhances my point that losing 90% of the brain and functioning normal is problematic for localisation and correlation claims.It was Taq who was claiming it was similar to losing intestine. I was granting him that the brain may have some flexibility due to reusing neurons elsewhere after brain damage.

This is naive. I mentioned earlier vegetative states and other states where the presence of consciousness is unknown. You seem to be trying to describe consciousness as it appears to an observer observing someone else's behaviour but as I have said it is private and subjectivity.You will never have the same access to my pain as I do.I know from long experience of mental illness how wrong, misinformed and skeptical people are about other peoples mental states. There are even physical illness cases that have faced the same skepticism because they couldn't find an immediate physical correlation.Whether or not I -appear- conscious to you is irrelevant. Dualism could be true easily and consciousness leave the body and enter another body or realm.If part of your computer breaks down you can save stuff on a disk and use another computer. I am not advocating this model personally but your position begs the question and assumes that consciousness is somehow identical with the brain.Even scientists and other theorists have discussed uploading consciousness to a computer especially with transhumanism.What feature of consciousness are you picturing that can only exist in one brain at one time?Edited by AndrewPD, : Aesthetics

I can give two examples here of the fundamental privacy of consciousness here. Apologies if this becomes a long post.If you are not from the UK you may not have heard of Harold Shipman but he is considered our most prolific serial killer who is thought to have killed hundreds of mainly old ladies by overdoses.However his wife always stuck by him declaring his innocence until he died from suicide in prison.So Prudence Shipman went to bed every night next to a mass murderer but she had no access to this information hidden in his mind. He must have had hundreds if not thousands of memories relating to the killings floating around.This is the absurdity that arises from mental privacy is that we communicate a veneer of our mind through language that can mask immense diversity.The other example is that my elder brother has been paralysed by MS for many years where he can only blink or slightly shake is head and I cared for him for several years in the past when I lived with him for around 6 years. During this Period and to the present I never assumed I knew what it was like to be my brother and I find people who second guess in this situation impose their believes on the ill person.To be a good carer you are supposed to ask what the person you are caring through wants exactly. You can never assume you know better than them. With my own mental health issues it has been really painful combatting peoples prejudices about why you are how you are and that includes damaging interactions with the mental health services.So I think an excess of (alleged) objectivity can lead to just ignoring the role and value of subjective input. It is implausible we can replace symbolic language with pointing at brain scans or subsume consciousness under a physicalist paradigm.

It is challenging the idea that consciousness is an emergent property, that can be readily explained eventually and derived from natural selection.I don't agree that science has access to other people's consciousness to examine it objectively like cell mechanisms. Here I am highlighting the problem of accessing consciousness in order to study it and reduce it to a mechanistic by product and the weakness of neural correlations as access to mental content.Therefore the scope of evolutionary explanation is limited.

It's nothing to do with the skull or failure to access the brain and neurons etc it is that consciousness is private subjective and only directly accessible one person the experiencing subject. It is not accessible in principle to any other than the self.

You never have access to anyone's consciousness other than your own. Looking at someone's behaviour or their brain is not observing their consciousness.If I am in pain you can never experience it and looking at my brain or body is not accessing my pain.There are lots of phenomena that are dependent on one another but do not fully describe the individual phenomena. You are assuming consciousness can only arise in brains and in certain types of brains. What properties of the brain make it the only type of thing that could be associated with or cause consciousness.And by consciousness here I explicitly mean the experiencer who is subject to experiences, the subjective perspective and so. In consciousness studies there has been a lot argument about not restricting consciousness to brains and proposing artificial consciousness and consciousness in animals with different nervous systems.Nevertheless I don't see how evolution explains this property or predicts or ensures it.I am sure natural selection would select something as rich as consciousness.....select it after it began to exist for no reason as a free disposition from nature. It seems nature and chemistry/physics gives a lot of free gifts to evolution for it to work with. Hence the primeval soup of treasures.

Have you discussed this list on here?http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php"Signatories of the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism must either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine. Signatories must also agree with the following statement:We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.Sign the List – Dissent from Darwin

I attempted to start a thread a related issue a while ago."The essential questions being: Why do organisms create increasingly bizarre and incredibly elaborate schemes to reproduce?Why do things attempt to survive? Why do genes have a survival motive?Why the need for survival at all? (Including what does actually survive?)"It seems the most important thing for selection is continued reproduction. And as I say reproduction happens in numerous bizarre ways and more bizarre ways to reproduce emerge, but why does inanimate or soulless matter or genetic information care to survive or try to in such elaborate ways?

I would describe myself as an agnostic who is skeptical of any claims. I have no interest in invoking gods. You can suggest the deficiency of one explanation without proffering an alternative.I used to be quite atheistic (after a traumatic religious childhood) until I did my degree later in life which involved a lot of philosophy mind and some cognitive science and theorizing about perception.It is in these areas that you explore how we might access reality, the scope of the physical, problems with squaring mind and matter and the problems are nontrivial.
Philosophy of mind also studies philosophy of language as did cognitive psychology and looks at the problem of semantic and representational properties.An example of representation issues might be this. Someone may say "The moon looks like a peeled orange" What they are usually saying is that they see the moon as similar in appearance to an orange. But in the case of mental representation the brain has to actually turn brain matter into real representational states such as the vivid memory I have of what my deceased grandmother looked like.In the case of the moon it is not attempting to represent an orange, that similarity is made in our minds, but for memory and language the brain has to have semantic properties to represent to our consciousness as the meaning of words, ideas, memories and concepts etc. (ie we don't just experience neuronal properties)Perception theory undermines our knowledge of and access to the world and ends invoking mysterious homunculi receiving representational maps in the brain.And the properties of mental states like representation are not those found in descriptions of other scientific disciplines (qualia properties, representation, subjectivity etc).

There is no motivation involved there it just happens instantaneously.

I don't know what you mean by that. You can scan a brain and have brain surgery. peoples brain can be exposed and stimulated whilst they are awake. There are lots of ways to directly access a brain.