AB,
You seem to be implying that "rational thought" and "critical thinking" can somehow be automated processes being performed without any form of conscious control. So if you take away the conscious control, what precisely does ensure that your thoughts are rational and critically thought out?
I’ve explained to you several times why your “what exactly” question is misplaced, most recently in Reply 44847. Here it is again as you just ignored it last time:
“There’s so much wrong with your approach still that it’s hard to know where to start. As clearly as I can though:
First, you need to grasp the concept of the burden of proof. It’s
your assertion that consciousness as a natural phenomenon is “impossible” so it’s
your job to justify the claim. You’ve either not bothered with the attempt or have only expressed your incredulity (“but how…?” etc). It’s not the job of others to tell you how consciousness works – it’s
your job to show that it must work supernaturally.
Second, even without an explanation in detail the naturalistic model is the default for a reason. And that reason is that the only knowledge we’ve ever obtained is known to be knowledge at all (rather than just guessing) because it’s been verified by naturalistic means. That’s not to say that there could never be non-naturalistic phenomena (whatever that would even mean) but it does mean that you need a very strong reason to abandon the default paradigm. And, so far at least, not only do you not have a very strong reason to do that –
you have reason at all.
Third, even if you could address points 1 & 2, still all you’d have is “OK, consciousness is not a function of natural laws and forces then”. That though would tell you absolutely nothing whatsoever about what it might be instead. Just inserting “God” as your answer with no evidence at all to support the claim is epistemically equivalent to saying it’s "u87to7ty". It’s just white noise.
Fourth, although our understanding so far of consciousness is far from complete we make further inroads into it all the time. Here for example is an article that describes the current two front-running contenders (global neuronal workspace (GNW), and Integrated information theory (IIT)).
Maybe one of them will turn out to be correct. Maybe neither of them will. Who can possibly say? The point though is that a problem being a hard one is not a good reason to throw up our hands and exclaim, “It must be magic then”. To the contrary, the hardness of the problem is exactly a good reason to keep working at it until we obtain a verifiable answer.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/ Fifth, as I keep explaining to you (and you keep ignoring or misrepresenting) whether we have partial answers or no answers at all at this time doesn’t help you. A "don’t know" is still a "don’t know" whichever way you look at it, and your, “aha – in that case I do know" is just very, very bad thinking. If you want to demonstrate that you do know something the absence of a different answer doesn’t help you at all – for your claim to be taken seriously
you still have all your work to do to justify it.
Apart from all that though…”
No doubt you’ll ignore it all again but there it is nonetheless.
