New Version of UPCA Church Interior
This is an updated version of a previous post of the interior of United Presbyterian Church in Albany, Oregon.
This picture was updated to improve the appearance of the windows, although there’s some more improvement that could be made. The problem is that this picture was taken under conditions that make it very difficult to capture everything. It would be better to take another picture with better lighting. Perhaps I’ll do that someday.
In the older post, I used this picture to introduce some thoughts about the nature of consciousness. By using the stained glass windows as metaphors. I explored that further in this post. Here, I’ll look at that idea further and see it as an example of a technique that might be more generally useful for exploring consciousness.
For example, one of the big debates about consciousness is whether or not physical processes are all that’s needed to explain it. In other words, whether the brain is sufficient to generate consciousness, or whether it’s necessary but something else is also needed. If it is merely necessary, then anything that affects the brain is likely to affect consciousness, but there may still be other things that are necessary.
The stained glass metaphor can be expanded to illustrate how different consciousness is from all other phenomena.
One of the things that drives this difference is the fact that it is purely subjective – the only way we can know about it is through personal experience. No machine can measure consciousness; the best we can do is to measure how brain activity relates to it (so-called “neural correlates”), but these are still not direct measurements of the effect itself.
Because of this, the only real tool we have to use is introspection. For example, neurologists may rely on people to report what they experience in various situations and then try to relate those reports to what must be happening to their conscious minds. Similarly, philosophers often use thought experiments that illustrate what people seem to experience and then reason from those what the structure of those conscious experiences must be.
In both cases, the probing is indirect and so fraught with uncertainty. When that happens in science, it’s often helpful to use additional types of probes to look at the problem from different angles.
Consider, for example, how art is sometimes used to elicit particular responses from people. Discussions of art may include these responses, including how they vary from person to person. This seems like a sort of “probe” that explores peoples’ personal inner experiences in a way that allows comparison. If that’s true, then could art be helpful, perhaps in a way similar to thought experiments, to explore the nature of the conscious mind? To the extent that there is any validity to this, then is seems that photography could serve to do this.
I briefly mentioned this before in the context of science’s limitations in general and how they apply to the problem of consciousness, so this is really just a further exploration of that thought. The examples of using stained glass windows as metaphor, a room full of them as a further exploration of that, and waterfalls as explorations of qualia, are all attempts to start applying this idea.
All of these could be expanded and refined, and I can’t help but think there are more that could be constructed. So, perhaps there is some value here; further learning and experiments will tell.