Consciousness, Death, Existentialism etc.

[Dent]

I asked the ADMINS to move my definitions post to this thread, It would be great if we could collectively come up with some terms we all agree on.

Consciousness

Originally Posted by physicalism

Accurately if inelegantly, consciousness may be described following Nagel ("What is it like to be a bat?") as the subjective what-it's-like-ness of experience. Academic philosophers term such self-intimating "raw feels" "qualia" - whether macro-qualia or micro-qualia.

Raw Feels, what-it's-like-ness, something it's like to be.
I don't experience any of these things in a dreamless sleep, it's not even dark.

On my understanding there is no need for varying mental planes to be conscious, superfluid helium is conscious/experiential, there's something it's like to be it, but it needn't change over time and it doesn't have to be able to respond in a fitness relevant way to it's environment.

I'd love to pin down "causal efficacy" too, I LOL when I compare my thoughts on it a few years ago.

Here's a couple of William James quotes, of course I want an explanation for the different textures of consciousness that "we" experience, and I can relate to what you've said.

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different."
(William James)

If it's the mereology/neo-cortex bit you didn't understand I hope this helps.

"4.4.3. The binding problem
One of the motivations for models with quantum coherence in the brain was the so-called binding problem. In the words of James [77,78], ``the only realities are the separate molecules, or at most cells. Their aggregation into a `brain' is a fiction of popular speech''. James' concern, shared by many after him, was that consciousness did not seem to be spatially localized to any one small part of the brain, yet subjectively feels like a coherent entity. Because of this, Stapp [3] and many others have appealed to quantum coherence, arguing that this could make consciousness a holistic effect involving the brain as a whole.''
(Max Tegmark)

(I'm saying we are an extremely brief coherent entity, and it's the "seperate" molecules/cells/atoms/quarks that are fiction)