Fly,
You're right that if a portion of the brain or CNS had "awareness" or even reflective "consciousness" then the united apperceptive "subject of experience(/thought/action)" might be completely unaware of it. I think the connectionist philosophers Gerard O'Brien and Jon Opie have mentioned that possibility, though I don't think they suggested there was any reason to believe that to be the case. They have written some interesting papers speculating on the evolutionary development of awareness and consciousness. (Btw, Kant acknowledged that animals without self-awareness might still be expected to have similar apperceptive unity, they just lacked the ability to abstractly reflect on their experience or develop logical proofs to show their access to external reality could not be a /complete/ illusion, as traditional idealism claims to be possible and empirical science alone would not be able to refute).
Caledonian, others,
There seems to be a misunderstanding of the purpose (and utility) of reflecting on the awareness as consciously perceived. The purpose was to characterize subjective perception and develop /abstract requirements/ completely independent of implementation (e.g. the eye, visual processing pathways) in order:
(1) to provide a compelling argument that our perceptions must come from an external source
and
(2) to establish rational warrant in making any claims about the reality of our interaction with the world external to our minds (including one's own body) - though science can help us eliminate false interpretations and illusory aspects of our perceptual systems, as well as the brain areas and activities correlated with perception
Subjective self-report is commonly incorporated into scientific research because modern science recognizes it as an aspect of reality. Some basic elements of subjective experience are described identically by all people without brain damage causing apperceptive agnosia. Moreover, apperception and the unity of apperception can be falsified behaviorally by demonstrating capacities or the lack thereof.
People blind since birth who have regained sight through medical advances later in life have had difficulty making any sense of visual information, including shapes and objects. People with apperceptive agnosia cannot see more than one object at a time and function virtually as though they are blind.
Again, I didn't claim world-access realist arguments prove we aren't living in a simulation, or even that conditions might not radically change in the future (yes, the "eye does not see the eye" in the sense that we don't directly access the future or past as well as in the physiological sense I suspect was intended), but presuming the perceptual and cognitive functions we seem to experience performing routinely do exist - and we don't have compelling reasons to doubt that - then we do live in a universe with a reality external to our own minds (the effort to reach some absolute grounding for epistemological realism was a pipe dream). It is a pragmatic realist perspective from a world-access perspective and I think it is the deepest, most robust proof of realism we can hope for because it focuses on what conclusions we can draw merely from analyzing our form of conscious perceptual access to the world, prior to reliance on empirical tools accessed /through/ basic conscious functions.
I don't expect most scientists or engineers who take epistemological realism as a premise to find the arguments interesting or relevant to their needs, which it typically is not. However, their epistemological models of reality technically remain vulnerable to Hume's skeptical critiques and some popular broad-brush claims made like "perceptions are illusions" carry epistemological baggage that most scientists wouldn't accept if confronted by it in detail with fleshed-out arguments.
I won't bring up this topic again here. : )
Calderon,
As I said, you can accomplish quite a lot without delving far into the subject but writing it off may leave you with a less-than-optimal framing of reality that just might leave you vulnerable to reaching inaccurate conclusions about important topics like whether to state "all perception is illusion" instead of qualifying the claim before an eccentric who buys it draws conclusions from that premise which make him or her less inclined to try to model reality accurately or act in ways that presume a lawful external world.
Of course we bring knowledge and skills to the problem that are obtained in part through the senses and stored in memory (explicit and implicit). Zen-like meditation would not allow you to analyze anything while you were doing it. Fortunately, a number of great historical thinkers have painstakingly analyzed what immediate subjective perception might tell us about the nature of our kind of reality (presuming we share the same relevant aspects of experience, which virtually every sane non-"sensible knave" claims they do), carefully developed theories about implications, ruthlessly critiqued and revised theories of predecessors, and eventually some of the forgotten or poorly interpreted work was dusted off and subjected to the tests available in a more contemporary time that coexisted with cognitive neuroscience (many implications of Kant's functionalist theories about basic aspects of the mind and world-access were exhumed and reinterpreted by non-antiquarian philosophers over the last few decades). Between the 1880s and 1980s some fatally flawed theories and theoretical frameworks (e.g. logical positivism) were developed by people whose only exposure to Kant may have been from antiquarians pushing his "transcendental idealism."
"How can you generate knowledge about knowledge without having a definition for the subject matter and a presumed method of generation and evaluation already? You can't consider the questions without taking their answers for granted."
Kant's basic epistemological question was "What can I know?" or how can any judgment I make, including empirical claims, be warranted in the face of deep skepticism of Hume, who had undermined the basis of Cartesian Rationalism and Leibnitz's elaboration by offering a compelling argument not just that reason could extend to metaphysical entities (which Kant later acknowledged, more or less) but that there was no empirical basis for knowledge because we could only directly access the present rather than the past or future and moreover the only thing about immediate experience that were the collection of individual, transient sensory impressions at any given moment.
What was taken for granted by both Hume and Kant was that we seem to have warranted access to the world but Hume claimed we have absolutely no basis for any claims we make about the world and we just act out of custom and habit, and unsubstantiated beliefs - including beliefs that merely seem to have empirical support. Kant couldn't take for granted that he could offer a better justification for such warrant than Hume - in fact he said Hume's ideas awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Hume's non-physiological account for how we could gain immediate experiences of number did not acknowledge (1) that the sensations had to be encountered in a spatiotemporal way by us regardless of the actual physics of the matter, an aspect that is just an irreducible "given" or basic intuition or (2) that acts of judgment - however implemented - need to be performed on any transient sensory impressions to perceive them as we do in our sensory perceptions let alone attribute any meaning or temporal context (e.g. in music) to them because no such interpretations are inherent in transient sensation signals. Kant employed religious language in his book for ideas that can be accepted from a secular perspective, such as the world-access expression "transcendental synthesis" to describe the necessity of intellectual acts of judgment on sensory appearances to achieve perception.
I would need to write a great deal more to provide a clear and compelling case for the claims that follow, but for a single paragraph synopsis, here goes...
The crucial importance of some form of judgment in the conversion of raw sensation into the kinds of perceptions we continually seem to have offered Kant leverage in his effort because judgment is an intrinsic part of even transient perceptual experience rather than being something detached from it; therefore, the use of judgment was no less warranted than the use of the sensory appearances (including imagination) and they only functioned well in combination. He offered an argument that the nature of our perceptions regarding things we interact with in our environment, external to what is under the complete and direct control of our minds (e.g. imagination), supports the existence of "physical objects" meeting desired criteria as well as the larger context of a lawful physical universe. Moreover, to function effectively and achieve goals, our kinds of minds require interaction with an external physical world (taking this as a premise Hegal offered additional arguments against solipsism based on the means by which humans learn from one another). While the types of abstract judgment he cites as being possible based on the demonstrated ability of people to do them may not be exhaustive or universal they provided warrant for the kinds of theoretical work Kant and other intellectuals had done, as well as the practice of scientific inquiry.
- Are all the arguments in each case water-tight?
That's doubtful. Kant's idealism certainly was flawed.
- Are there fatal flaws?
I haven't noticed them in the arguments on which I focused and the cases can be considered separately rather than a completely interdependent system.
- Why bother with all this?
Aside from the modest utility of the functionalist phenomenological insights (and avoiding flawed models of our own minds), any epistemology that starts at a shallow level with "sense data" (sensory perception, w/o considering the functional judgment involved in transforming sensations into perceptions) remains open to the similar lines of attack as used by Hume and other skeptics. Kant's world-access realist work not only outlined the limits of human reason (the physical universe) but defended against skeptical attacks our warrant in claiming to be capable of gaining and possessing knowledge.
Caledonian,
Philosophy has developed quite a bit since the Greeks started the Western tradition and I wasn't invoking Greek traditions but I don't recall the ancient skeptics getting very far.
The saying "Scientists need philosophy of science [and epistemology] like birds need ornithology" is true in a practical sense but dismissing the whole topic as irrelevant is unwarranted. Ignoring epistemological issues may be pragmatic depending on one's career but lack of attention doesn't resolve epistemological issues.
Through reason we can use our senses to discover flaws in our sensory systems and intuitions about the world (as well as empirically confirm the existence of cognitive biases). However, we could never have begun to make such discoveries in this world if our reason had no access to sensory perceptions or if our sensory perceptions were not accessible in a framework of space and time offered as "basic intuitions." Whatever may exist beyond our access, our kind of experience in which we interact with physical objects outside of the direct and complete control of our imagination implies that some kind of world external to ourselves in which spatiotemporal kinds of interactions can occur exists, regardless of whether it is a "simulation" or something unfamiliar overlying a deeper reality. AGI programmers simulate a spatial world in which a young AGI system can operate temporally in part to verify actual learning is achieved, and do so in ways we can recognize based on how we learn about our environment.
Ultimately, little or no part of our experience can be cast into doubt save for immediate, transitory experience (including the experience of remembering). Everything else, including the memory of recent immediate experience used for purposes of analysis, can be doubted as a complete illusion because our minds only have direct observational access to the present (Hume). However, while "absolute" knowledge and certainty is beyond the access of minds like ours, our experiences have a sufficient amount of regularity (e.g. the unity of apperception) and predictability to allow us to reach judgments about the conditions of our day-to-day reality (e.g. locating a doorknob, expecting a sunrise) and subject questions to formal scientific methods that offer much higher degrees of warranted confidence. Whatever they believed, the only "knowledge" people have ever had applies within their domain of access as spatiotemporal beings with reason and an ability to manipulate their environment - whether or not deeper truth lies beyond it - but that scope of warrant is fully sufficient for purposes relating to their domain of experience. This view, with some other components such as arguments to cast doubt on solipsistic beliefs, is a version of "pragmatic realism."
Sorry for veering a bit off-topic but I thought epistemology was relevant to the idea of consciousness just consisting of "illusions." The prevailing cognitive science view these days seems to be that "perception = a kind of illusion." My response is, "no and yes" - sensations are vital means of accessing the reality of an external world that have interpretative biases (e.g. color vision) as well as inaccuracies and quirks (e.g. blind spots, blindsight, saccades).
Ben Jones,
I'm not sure I understand the question; I don't see personal identity v. non-identity as a binary distinction but a fuzzy one. While artifacts and characterizing information can be thought of as a form of extended identity I think sustaining relevant kinds of functional processing to produce awareness and self-awareness somewhat like what we experience would be important for creating a similar subjective experience, but over the long run the manner of information processing might become very different (hopefully enriched and more expansive) from what realizes our kind of experience. Ben Goertzel has shared some useful perspectives on the future of uploaded human minds over the long run, such as running <99% on post-human programs, swapping human life memory files (preferably from a very large and highly diverse selection), perhaps eventually finding no compelling reason not to dissolve increasingly artificial barriers between individual identities.
Cases of apperceptive agnosia, and to a lesser extent brains split at a mature stage of development, provide examples of how apperception, and the apperceptive "I" is in fact relevant to performing typical cognitive functions. I try to be careful not to make sweeping blanket statements about features of experience with a variety of uses or subtle aspects (e.g. "self = illusion"; "perception = illusion"; "judgment = illusion"; "thought = illusion"; "existence = illusion"; "illusions = ???" ...now let's just claim that "sense-data" grounds scientific methodology and knowledge, somehow... ).
The fact that information doesn't converge in a single location in the brain does not imply that a functionally coherent "I" is not realized with access to sensory signals (and internally produced sensory imagination) and a capacity to make judgments about such content - even if physics says any instantiation within our domain of knowledge ultimately is timeless, not located in discrete 3D space and with subtle permutations manifested throughout a many-worlds space of causal possibility.
Epistemology (grounds for our ability to know anything at all, albeit without total certainty) precedes ontology (knowledge from scientific sources like empirical observation, logical analysis, mathematical modeling, Bayesian prediction, etc.) and at a deep level epistemology still reduces to basic intuitions of time and space accessed as frames of existence in which functional apperception - however it is instantiated - must integrate components of sensory perception (uni- or multimodal) into coherent physical objects as well as into collections of physical objects in unified perceptions.
Kant's epistemology had major flaws, most centrally his weak attempt to claim his world-access idealism was just as warranted as his world-access realism, but he was right when he claimed that without functional apperception - which probably is achieved largely by temporal coordination in addition to shared access to similar information by different brain regions - we would have as many functionally discrete "I"s as we have elements of experience. On the contrary, personal experience, which we seem to be able to intersubjectively communicate and display via behavior, negates that possibility (even for people with partial disorders of apperceptive access).
Other issues relevant to the claim of a coherent, integrated "self" over longer time scales (from a subjectively "timeful" view of a given causal path) with memory or even among similar paths in the same "time slice" seems to be less substantial though not completely insignificant. However, there seems to be no basis whatsoever for claiming relevant continuity of physical instantiation (i.e. atoms aren't localized and matter may not even "pass through" time).
I should mention I find both the "timeless/multiverse/non-experientially-determined" and "timeful/trajectory/experientially-undetermined" interpretations of physics to be helpful to consider as the "real context" to the best of our knowledge, as a global whole and an imagined/predicted local trajectory of one's experience. The first interpretation offers means of gaining some detachment from the vicissitudes of life and some tolerance for risk and loss (e.g. delivering a campaign speech to a large crowd). The second interpretation promotes the inclination to seek optimal outcomes and reasoned selectivity among a wide array of options (e.g. choosing a better platform than "Free beer and toilet paper!" - unless one is running for a student office on a campus where satire sells).
Clearly it's a waste of time to try to have a reasoned debate with someone not even willing to consider one's arguments but rather intent on misrepresenting them as directed toward purposes for which they never were intended to serve (e.g. a fleshed-out psychology or comprehensive analysis of the perceptual system).
It's a shame you haven't read Hume's skeptical critiques of empirical claims of "fact," but as I said before, deep epistemology isn't of interest to everyone and isn't relevant to the vast majority of scientific claims that can be made.
Peace.