Iris Young's "Throwing Like a Girl" is a wonderful description of gendered experience. Our experiences of the world are influenced by many factors that have to do with our positions in the world, both our physical positions (biological sex, physical disabilities) and our political positions (race, gender, social class, power). "Experience" is defined broadly to encompass all we are conscious of (some call it phenomenological experience). I recommend Kay Toombs work on the phenomenology of disability as another rich description of perspective.

Louise Anthony's reply is absolutely right, though the problem of other minds will be always with us no doubt. I wonder whether there is something else in addition in your mind that lies behind the question. Are you suggesting that whenever I am conscious there is a very interesting cause in the external world - the consciousness of others? So, for example, when I catch someone's eye, or when I become aware of the intelligence embodied in the design of a building, I become conscious. I think that there is truth to this interesting empirical proposal, but I wonder whether what is happening is that I become more conscious than I was in these cases, or conscious in a new way. A certain amount of education involves this, and, as Nagel pointed out a long time ago, the consciousness of mutual desire does too. But presumably there has to be a basis of consciousness already, or I could not become aware of anything conscious tugging at me from the external world. There has to be a consciousness there to be snagged by another consciousness. Babies do respond to consciousness in their environment, and grow and socialize with it, but presumably in their development the growth to consciousness would happen without the stimuli offered by other human beings, though perhaps in a different way.

Maybe you asking what it is about a thing you observe that brings you to the conclusion that that thing is a conscious being, say, a person? If that's the question, here's the answer. You can rely on a couple of kinds of evidence: the way the individual looks (like a human being), the way the individual behaves (agents' trajectories through space appear to violate the laws of physics: they can start moving and then just stop and change direction without there being any external force), and the fact that the individual displays behavior (like speaking or gesturing or wearing clothes) that appears to be meaningful. Individual things displaying one or more of these signs very likely are conscious beings. Buildings and trees do not display these signs, so there is no reason to take them to be conscious beings. (The fact that the building was made by a conscious being doesn't seem to me to provide any reason whatsoever to think that it is itself conscious -- I don't know what you have in mind there.)

If the question is, instead, how do I know that the evidence that I in fact rely on in judging something to be a person is actually good evidence, then I can't give you an answer so quickly. Then the question would be the philosophical problem we call the "problem of other minds": how do I know that anything other than me is conscious. For proposed answers to that question, I'd advise you to search the archive and see if any of the responses already on record address your concern.

Suppose there are two mutations that would allow a species of plant to gather more sunlight for energy, one that would make it grow taller than competing plants and another than would make it grow wider. The species happens to evolve to grow taller. It is true that it might have achieved the adaptive function of gathering more energy without growing taller (i.e., by growing wider instead). So, growing taller was not necessary (i.e., the only way) to achieve this function. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to say that the plant's height is causally irrelevant to its capacities to gather energy from sunlight.

Similarly, it might be that a species (call them p-zombies) might have evolved that could gather and synthesize information about various features of its environment just as well as us but without being phenomenally conscious. But the possibility of such a species tells us nothing about whether phenomenal consciousness in us (and other animals) plays a causal role in gathering and synthesizing information about our environment. Consciousness may have been selected for even if p-zombies are possible. Consciousness may be the particular way (among many possible ways) that our ancestral species solved the challenge of gathering and synthesizing information about the environment and using it to guide adaptive behavior.

If your p-zombies are physically identical to us in every way, then we might wonder why consciousness evolved. But this already assumes that consciousness plays no causal role, since that's the only way that a physical duplicate of us without consciousness could still behave just like us. Once we recognize this, the conceivability of p-zombies becomes much more dubious (at least to me). I have a hard time conceiving of conscious states as causally inert, in part because I assume conscious properties are essential properties of certain underlying neural states.

(Another possibility is that consciousness was not selected for but was a side-effect of some other adaptation, but this still allows that consciousness eventually took on important roles in our behavior.)

Compare the case of pain to the heat of spicy curries or steamy saunas: I recognize certain green curries to be just as hot/spicy as certain red curries, but I have a higher tolerance for the heat/spicyness of green curries; and I can tolerate steamy saunas better than in dry saunas even when I experience them as equally hot. I am not less sensitive to the heat of green curries or the heat of a steamy sauna, but I am not bothered by them as much as I am bothered by the heat of spicy curries or dry saunas. Why isn't pain like this -- tolerated differently in different forms, or by different people, even when the amount or degree of pain is recognized to be the same?

You might think that pain just is intolerance, and that the degree of one's pain is equivalent to the degree of one's intolerance, so that finding a sauna less intolerable should be equated with finding it less painful. But since the two words, "pain" and "intolerance" are used in rather different ways, and since (as you note) people do often say they are more or less tolerant of pain, it would not a linguistic equivalence. Still, as you suggest, if the evidence for one is equally evidence of the other then perhaps they are in fact the very same thing.

I do not think the evidence for one is the same as the evidence for the other, however. Aside from introspective reports (which constitute one kind of evidence, after all), here are some (more objective) kinds of evidence that help to distinguish insensitivity to pain from tolerance of pain:

(1) A racing heartbeat and tensed muscles (showing sensitivity to pain) together with a calm demeanor (showing tolerance of pain).

(2) A spontaneous cry or flinch (showing sensitivity to pain) together with willingness to continue painful procedure or activity (showing tolerance of pain).

(3) An ability to give nuanced reports on the character of one's pain (showing sensitivity to pain) together with lack of interest in using pain medications (showing tolerance of pain).

While (1) and (2) may suggest two parts oneself -- one responding automatically and the other more reflectively resists these automatic responses, (3) suggests an interesting, if unusual, disconnect between the feeling of pain and the awfulness of pain. You may be interested to look at a recent book by Nikola Grahek, entitled Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, that describe some carefully documented cases of pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain.

There are lots of things that don't exist that we can conceive of, most obviously fictional characters and objects, though our conceptions of them may be less detailed or thorough-going than our conceptions of things that do exist. (They may also be more detailed. We may know more about the characters in Tolstoy's novels than about some real people.) We can conceive of an elixir of youth, though there may not be such a thing, for example. And if consciousness exists, where does it go when you are meditating or fast asleep? Well, why does it have to go anywhere? Isn't it more like a noise, say, that is real enough in its way, but which just shuts down or disappears when the thing making it go stops, and doesn't have to go anywhere? Of course if the individual consciousness is a sort of stuff, rather than a kind of attention, a substance even, in the philosophical sense, then presumably it keeps on going even if it isn't with you any more. But it is difficult to see how that would work; what happens to your consciousness if it continues to exist but you are not conscious of it? It is hard to say, as Aristotle would say! On the other hand it is easy enough to see how you can go on with or without consciousness. It happens to me every day.

The fact that one thing causes another does not mean than the second could not exist without the first. Consider the case of a forest fire, for example. A carelessly flung match could be the cause, and yet (a) the fire could continue even after the match is destroyed, and (b) other things, such as a bolt of lightning, could substitute for the match as cause of the fire. Similarly, one could think (a) that brain activity causes consciousness, but consciousness can continue even after the brain is destroyed, or (b) that things other than brain activity, e.g. cosmic vibrations, could also cause consciousness. Without evidence to support these possibilities, they remain mere possibilities; but they do show why the causal relation you cite does not "destroy an ideas of an afterlife".

If you think that an individual's consciousness is not just caused by the activity of her brain but is identical with it, then that consciousness must indeed cease when the activity of that brain ceases. But many who agree that there is an "obvious" causal relationship between consciousness and the brain do not think that consciousness is identical with the brain.

It doesn't.

There are several possibilities here. One is that there is a causal relationship between the physical brain and a non-physical mind, which can still make sense of the idea that when alcohol is coursing through your veins into your brain it causes your conscious experiences to be funky or when a part of your brain is lesioned it causes mental disorders. This view is Descartes' dualism. If it is true, then presumably your non-physical mind (or soul) can survive after your physical body dies (though it's hard to imagine how things would be for your bodiless soul in "heaven"--e.g., how do you find grandma? and what would you do for fun?). This view becomes less plausible the stronger the correlations between brain states and mental states become (the soul seems to have nothing left to do).

So, supposing such dualism is implausible and we assume this evidence of a causal relationship between brains and consciousness is evidence of a physicalist view, one that says the mind just is the brain or that mental states are constituted by brain states, etc. Then, perhaps you are asking how there could be an afterlife (i.e., how our conscious selves could survive) after our physical brains die. One answer is that, even though our minds/selves depend entirely on our brains (and perhaps bodies), we can survive after our bodies die, because God reconstitutes our bodies in heaven (or more generally, because some power reconstitutes our bodies somewhere). Perhaps this sounds implausible. But it shouldn't to religious people. In fact, the way the Bible talks about life after death sounds more like this than like an afterlife of non-physical entities floating around (can something non-physical float?). Jesus is said to have risen bodily from the grave and ascended to heaven. If one wants these heavenly bodies to be indestructible, then God would have to either give them special (spiritual?) powers to avoid normal physical decay or rejuvinate them regularly. Again, there are no obvious problems with this view of the afterlife and several advantages over the view that we can survive after death only with non-physical minds.

All of this suggests that any conflicts between physicalism (or materialism) and theism (or religiosity) need not be about life after death but are more likely to be about the existence of God (or certain properties of God or of heaven) given a physicalist or naturalist worldview. On a naturalistic view, it is hard to make sense of where or how (a non-physical) God exists or where a heaven where God reconstitutes us exists or what explanatory work is being done by God or heaven (beyond alleviating our fear of death).

Finally, if we take the functionalist view that our mental states are essentially complex functional interactions, one might think we could survive the death of our brains if the functions (or "programs") of our brains could be adequately replicated in an artificial replica (e.g., a complex computer or a Matrix or something). Whether this would count as personal survival is an interesting question. On this view, perhaps heaven is a matrix!

There is one very general reason and two more specific reasons that philosophers are interested in the question of whether consciousness is identical to a particular bodily state.

The general reason is this: we are interested in knowing what the most basic constituents of the world are, and how they are related. If consciousness is not identical to a bodily state, then we want to know what sort of thing it is and how it seems to be able to interact with the body. But if consciousness is identical to a particular pattern of brain waves, for example, then we are justified in thinking that mental states are not something different than physical states and consciousness can be understood through the study of the brain. In short, we want to clarify different categories of existence, eliminating the confusions that result from thinking that there are two (or more) things when there is just one, or thinking that that there is just one thing when there are actually two (or more).

A more specific, existential reason that we are interested in whether consciousness is identical to a bodily state concerns the possibility of life after death. If consciousness is identical to a particular bodily state, then it cannot continue after that bodily state ceases to exist. So those who think that there is life after death must reject the claim that consciousness is identical to a bodily state. (There are physical particles and forces that continue after the death of a particular body, of course, so if consciousness is identical to these particles and forces then it may continue after a particular body ceases to exist. Most identity theories, however, equate consciousness with a brain state.)

There is also a social or ethical reason for being interested in whether consciousness is identical with a physical state of the body. If there is such an identity, then anything that lacks the relevant physical state (a robot, an insect, a Martian, or a cloud of dust) also lacks consciousness, and needn't be treated as though it were conscious. On the other hand, if there is not such an identity, then there could be consciousness in many places we don't expect it to be, and an appropriate sort of humility is called for.

My little toe is conscious, and it is a part of me, perhaps even a "constituent" part. I put in the scare quotes because I am wondering whether "constituent" means "essential"; if it does my big toe is not a constituent part of me. But if "A is a constituent of B" means "A is part of B", then my big toe is a constituent part of me, but the phrase "constituent part" is a tautology - it says that same thing twice. Are there parts of me which are not constituent parts, but some other kind?

You can imagine after surgery a doctor asking, "Is your little toe conscious?", and the answer might be "Yes", and working through to the big toe; the answer then might be, "No".

It is not at all obvious why we should feel the Cartesian tug to say that it is I, not my big toe, that is conscious, except for dubious epistemological reasons such as that we can imagine the consciousness without the toe. The same seems to be true of my psychological parts in Descartes' sense in the Meditations. My thinking might be highly conscious, my feelings almost or completely unconscious, perhaps to my detriment, or the other way round. Is there any reason beyond a fondness for the unity of panpsychism (everything is more or less conscious) to suppose that individual cells might be? You might suppose that my armchair is conscious, but there is no special reason to think so, whereas there is for my cat. Cells don't seem to have the psychological activity usually associated with consciousness.

Naturally my little toe is not a person (or a "self") but why should that prevent it from being conscious? Wasn't that Descartes' mistake?