Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[smcder]

My view is that the constituent of consciousness is fundamental; that is, I believe consciousness (subjectivity) is information. It is essentially the state of matter at any given (plank?) moment.

When I speak of recursive or strange loops, I'm referring to the origin of the sense of self - not the origin of consciousness per se. (We know the confusion the arises due to the different meanings of "consciousness.")

That is, consciousness (or the mental aspect of reality) is fundamental on my view. However, I entertain the idea that the sense of self "layer" of mind emerges from a process of meta-awareness; this meta-awareness (being aware of being aware) may involve a recursive loop.

Re: time

I think the mental aspect of reality is ontologically the same as the informational aspect of reality.

I think the informational aspect of reality is — if not the same – intimately related to the motion of matter.

I think the motion of matter is ontologically the same as Time.

Thus, I think the mental aspect of reality is intimately related to time.

Motion > Time-Information > Mental


Matter is the outside aspect of reality which can be objectively measured, and information is the inside aspect of reality which constitutes subjectivity.

Strange loops as Marduk discusses it refers to Hofstadter's idea ... it's been a while since I've read him. Here is a review by Martin Gardner:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200707/tx070700852p.pdf

I haven't read it but Gardner is usually very good. There's one on academia.edu too. I'll try to read them and get back to you.

 

[Constance]

An Old Man Asleep

The two worlds are asleep, are sleeping, now.
A dumb sense possesses them in a kind of solemnity.

The self and the earth -- your thoughts, your feelings,
Your beliefs and disbeliefs, your whole peculiar plot;

The redness of your reddish chestnut trees,
The river motion, the drowsy motion of the river R.

Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

 

[smcder]

My view is that the constituent of consciousness is fundamental; that is, I believe consciousness (subjectivity) is information. It is essentially the state of matter at any given (plank?) moment.

When I speak of recursive or strange loops, I'm referring to the origin of the sense of self - not the origin of consciousness per se. (We know the confusion the arises due to the different meanings of "consciousness.")

That is, consciousness (or the mental aspect of reality) is fundamental on my view. However, I entertain the idea that the sense of self "layer" of mind emerges from a process of meta-awareness; this meta-awareness (being aware of being aware) may involve a recursive loop.

Re: time

I think the mental aspect of reality is ontologically the same as the informational aspect of reality.

I think the informational aspect of reality is — if not the same – intimately related to the motion of matter.

I think the motion of matter is ontologically the same as Time.

Thus, I think the mental aspect of reality is intimately related to time.

Motion > Time-Information > Mental


Matter is the outside aspect of reality which can be objectively measured, and information is the inside aspect of reality which constitutes subjectivity.

My view is that the constituent of consciousness is fundamental; that is, I believe consciousness (subjectivity) is information. It is essentially the state of matter at any given (plank?) moment

I don't follow ... this seems to be a contradiction:

1. the constituent (sic) of consciousness is fundamental
2. consciousness is information
3. it (information (formerly consciousness)) is essentially the state of matter at any given moment ...

... so you appear to be defining consciousness as the state of matter at any given moment, you appear to say the mental is fundamental but that it is also ontologically the same as the informational aspect of reality ... we have a lot of fundamentals here for one primal substance ...

and you say the information aspect of reality (mental) is either the same as the motion of matter or intimately related to it

the motion of matter is ontologically the same as Time

information = mental = motion of matter = time

so, I could make this whole argument with just matter? ... I don't see anything fundamental to mind or information, everything appears to resolve to matter and motion ... but that would be strict materialism ... ?

 

[smcder]

My view is that the constituent of consciousness is fundamental; that is, I believe consciousness (subjectivity) is information. It is essentially the state of matter at any given (plank?) moment.

When I speak of recursive or strange loops, I'm referring to the origin of the sense of self - not the origin of consciousness per se. (We know the confusion the arises due to the different meanings of "consciousness.")

That is, consciousness (or the mental aspect of reality) is fundamental on my view. However, I entertain the idea that the sense of self "layer" of mind emerges from a process of meta-awareness; this meta-awareness (being aware of being aware) may involve a recursive loop.

Re: time

I think the mental aspect of reality is ontologically the same as the informational aspect of reality.

I think the informational aspect of reality is — if not the same – intimately related to the motion of matter.

I think the motion of matter is ontologically the same as Time.

Thus, I think the mental aspect of reality is intimately related to time.

Motion > Time-Information > Mental


Matter is the outside aspect of reality which can be objectively measured, and information is the inside aspect of reality which constitutes subjectivity.

Here is Gardner's take on I Am A Strange Loop:

Like his friend Dennet, who wrote a book brazenly
titled Consciousness Explained, Hofstadter
believes that he too has explained it. Alas, like Dennet, he has merely described it. It is easy to describe a rainbow. It is not so easy to explain a rainbow. It is easy to describe consciousness. It is not so easy to explain the magic by which a batch
of molecules produce it. To quote a quip by Alfred North Whitehead, Hofstadter and Dennet “leave the darkness of the subject unobscured.

Gardner continues:

Let me spread my cards on the table. I belong to a small group of thinkers called the “mysterians”.It includes such philosophers as Searle (he is the scoundrel of Hofstadter’s book), Thomas Nagel, Colin McGinn, Jerry Fodor, also Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, and a few others. We share a conviction that no philosopher or scientist living today has the foggiest notion of how consciousness, and its inseparable companion free will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material brain. It is impossible to imagine being aware we exist without having some free will, if only the ability to blink or to decide what to think about next. It is equally impossible to imagine having free will without being at least partly conscious.

So Gardner is also an emergentist (aka "hand waver") ...

This is interesting though:

In dreams one is dimly conscious but usually without free will. Vivid out-of-body dreams are exceptions. Many decades ago, when I was for a short time taking tranquilizers, I was fully aware in out-of-body dreams that I was dreaming, but could make genuine decisions. In one dream, when I was in a strange house, I wondered if I could produce a loud noise. I picked up a heavy object and flung it against a mirror. The glass shattered with a crash that woke me. In another OOB dream I lifted a burning cigar from an ashtray, and held it to my nose to see if I could smell it. I could.

...

finally ...

A few mysterians believe that science, some glorious day, will discover the secret of consciousness. Penrose, for example, thinks the mystery ma yield to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. I belong to a more radical wing. We believe it is the height of hubris to suppose that evolution has stopped improving brains. Although our DNA is almost identical to a chimpanzee’s, there is no way to teach calculus to a chimp, or even to make it understand the square root of 2. Surely there are truths as far beyond our grasp as our grasp is beyond that of a cow.


Why is our universe mathematically structured? Why does it, as Hawking recently put it, bother to exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? How do the butterflies in our brain—or should I say bats in our belfry—manage to produce the strange loops of consciousness? There may be advanced life forms in Andromeda who know the answers. I sure don’t. Nor do Hofstadter and Dennet. And neither do you.

The link to the Academia.edu review is here:

Review of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas R. Hofstadter | Constantine Sandis - Academia.edu

 

[Pharoah]

I think your pebbles and shells analogy is interesting, but I'm not sure it serves your purpose clearly enough yet. My impression of the post as a whole is that you have several purposes in mind (overcoming Velman's arguments against reductionism concerning consciousness; challenging Chalmers's identification of phenomenal experience as the hard problem of consciousness; defending reductionism in general; and presenting your own theory as one that resolves all questions and issues in consciousness studies). What I would like to read is a paper in which you untangle your presentation of all these issues and lay out a defense of the premises of HCT [clearly stated], issue by issue, against all comers. As it is you draw conclusions before you have constructed the arguments supporting them, as in the last two sentence above, highlighted in blue. You might not want to proceed in that workmanlike manner, but I think it will be necessary for you to make the case persuasively for HCT.




I'm lost here. Nor do I see what you're seeing in applying your pebbles and streams analogy to Velmans.





Where did you get the idea that phenomenology seeks to "explain every individual's phenomenal consciousness"? (The phenomenologist would indeed be 'beset' by that task.)
Again your concluding sentence leaps beyond whatever grounds you may be building it on in your own mind for you have not expressed those grounds. And your claim itself -- that "the reductionist and phenomenologist are working on two entirely different if not unrelated projects" -- would/will come as a great surprise to most consciousness researchers since they all seem to think they are working on the same problem: i.e., the present lack of an adequate account of consciousness and its relation to the world.




This appears to be what you hope to demonstrate and prove. There is an ambiguity in your use of the term 'environment'. Phenomenologists study the situation of consciousness in the local environment {that which is present to an embodied consciousness and to which the embodied consciousness becomes present in varying degrees following the line of evolution from protoconscious to prereflective consciousness to reflective consciousness and thought}. Setting aside descriptions of cosmic consciousness which some individuals claim to have achieved through certain intentional practices, conscious beings generally achieve the fullness of the consciousness they attain in relation to the local environment, subsequently thinking abstractly beyond that to the unanswered question of the nature of being as a whole, while existing in temporally embodied relations that are always in motion, change, flux.

For your pebbles and shells, there is likely no sense of presence or situated consciousness. Soupie might disagree. Wallace Stevens, with his sense of the living world and of the need for presence within it and to it, might also have disagreed, though it's hard to tell in this poem, which your pebbles and shells called to mind:

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
be a place of perpetual undulation.
whether it be in mid-sea
on the dark, green water-wheel,
or on the beaches,
there must be no cessation
of motion, or of the noise of motion,
the renewal of noise
and manifold continuation;
and most, of the motion of thought
and its restless iteration,
in the place of the solitaires,
which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

We (I) don't get a sense of consciousness there, but we do get an ontological evocation of a world characterized by continuous motion in which any 'place' is "a place of perpetual undulation." Nevertheless a consciousness was required to write the poem and another consciousness is required to read it if it is to generate a signifying statement, and the same applies to every other form of protoconsious and conscious expression. The place of protoconsciousness and consciousness -- multiplied a trillion-trillion-trillion times in the universe (even perhaps on this planet) -- is the unique place in which the awareness of being makes a profound difference in what-is.




Pharoah, I admire the ambitiousness of your project and your deep background in philosophy of mind and I might yet be persuaded of the soundness of HCT, but I'm not persuaded yet. I think you might do well to begin a paper-length presentation of HCT with the sentences highlighted in blue just above, distinguish the problems you want to separate and the reasons why they must be separated, state your arguments on these issues with others such as Chalmers and Velman, and then present the details of HCT as the solution.

Super response... I am so glad you are taking me on with more detailed criticism. This is what I need.

 

[Soupie]

I don't follow ... this seems to be a contradiction:

1. the constituents of consciousness are fundamental
2. consciousness is information
3. information is the state of matter at any given moment ...

[I made changes to (1) and (3).]

I believe consciousness is a process. An example might be the difference between a ripple of water (process) and a circular disturbance on the water's surface (what the ripple is constituted of).

So in my analogy, a "bit" of information ("data" might be more appropriate, not sure) would be the circular disturbance, and consciousness would be the rippling process.

so, I could make this whole argument with just matter?

Technically no. The motion of matter is critical. I've read that some believe motion is a fundamental property of matter. Interesting. In any case, do we know why matter moves?

I believe that if matter did not move, there would be no time nor consciousness.

... I don't see anything fundamental to mind or information, everything appears to resolve to matter and motion ... but that would be strict materialism ... ?

I'm not suggesting anything is fundamental "to" mental or information; I'm proposing that mental/information/motion are fundamental.

Essentially what I am saying is that matter and mental are fundamental aspects of reality. On my view, mental can be equated to information bits, and information bits can be equated to the state of matter. Matter is the objective pole of reality, and its relation to other matter at any given moment (information) is the subjective pole. (Yes, I fully understand how absurd this sounds.)

The question then becomes: How is information (proto-consciousness) combined (combination problem) in a way that gives rise to mind (consciousness): phenomenal experience, thoughts, and a sense of self?

Back to the ripple analogy: We could say a circular disturbance on the water is a proto-ripple, and a unique sequence of unique circular disturbances "combine" to realize a ripple.

Note: D'oh. Okay, I see what you mean! It might be more appropriate to say matter and motion are fundamental, and that information is a property of motion. But then, can we have motion without matter? Can we have matter without motion? I'm not sure. Still a wip (at least for me). Maybe there is a trinity of fundamentality: matter, motion, and information (the relationships betwixt matter).

 

[Soupie]

A very relevant article:

Prosthetic limbs: Once more, with feeling | The Economist

Once more, with feeling

Artificial limbs that feel like the real thing are getting closer

Daniel Tan and his colleagues at the Louis Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Centre, in Cleveland, Ohio, created signals that appeared to come from the prosthetic arms of two volunteers by implanting electrodes around nerves in the amputees’ stumps (see picture). When they connected these electrodes to a machine that generated electrical signals, both volunteers reported sensations which seemed, to them, to be coming from their hands.

The nature [phenomenology] of the sensations depended on what sort of current Dr Tan applied. The simplest stimulation—a repetitive square-wave—produced an unnatural, vaguely electrical feeling. Using more elaborate patterns, though, the researchers could recreate everything from simple sensations such as pressure, vibration and tapping to more complicated feelings, as of a pen brushing lightly against the skin or of the hand rubbing across a texture. ...

Intriguingly, one unexpected benefit was that the device’s feedback banished the phenomenon of phantom limbs, in which an amputee perceives that his missing appendage is still present. Without the computer-generated sensations, both volunteers reported that their prosthetic hands felt like external tools (one described it as like an artificial hand that he was holding with his phantom hand). Switching the sensations on made the hand feel like an integral part of the body. ...
​

Absolutely fascinating.

 

[Pharoah]

I think your pebbles and shells analogy is interesting, but I'm not sure it serves your purpose clearly enough yet. My impression of the post as a whole is that you have several purposes in mind (overcoming Velman's arguments against reductionism concerning consciousness; challenging Chalmers's identification of phenomenal experience as the hard problem of consciousness; defending reductionism in general; and presenting your own theory as one that resolves all questions and issues in consciousness studies). What I would like to read is a paper in which you untangle your presentation of all these issues and lay out a defense of the premises of HCT [clearly stated], issue by issue, against all comers. As it is you draw conclusions before you have constructed the arguments supporting them, as in the last two sentence above, highlighted in blue. You might not want to proceed in that workmanlike manner, but I think it will be necessary for you to make the case persuasively for HCT.
I'm lost here. Nor do I see what you're seeing in applying your pebbles and streams analogy to Velmans.
Where did you get the idea that phenomenology seeks to "explain every individual's phenomenal consciousness"? (The phenomenologist would indeed be 'beset' by that task.)
Again your concluding sentence leaps beyond whatever grounds you may be building it on in your own mind for you have not expressed those grounds. And your claim itself -- that "the reductionist and phenomenologist are working on two entirely different if not unrelated projects" -- would/will come as a great surprise to most consciousness researchers since they all seem to think they are working on the same problem: i.e., the present lack of an adequate account of consciousness and its relation to the world.
This appears to be what you hope to demonstrate and prove. There is an ambiguity in your use of the term 'environment'. Phenomenologists study the situation of consciousness in the local environment {that which is present to an embodied consciousness and to which the embodied consciousness becomes present in varying degrees following the line of evolution from protoconscious to prereflective consciousness to reflective consciousness and thought}. Setting aside descriptions of cosmic consciousness which some individuals claim to have achieved through certain intentional practices, conscious beings generally achieve the fullness of the consciousness they attain in relation to the local environment, subsequently thinking abstractly beyond that to the unanswered question of the nature of being as a whole, while existing in temporally embodied relations that are always in motion, change, flux.
For your pebbles and shells, there is likely no sense of presence or situated consciousness. Soupie might disagree. Wallace Stevens, with his sense of the living world and of the need for presence within it and to it, might also have disagreed, though it's hard to tell in this poem, which your pebbles and shells called to mind:

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
be a place of perpetual undulation.
whether it be in mid-sea
on the dark, green water-wheel,
or on the beaches,
there must be no cessation
of motion, or of the noise of motion,
the renewal of noise
and manifold continuation;
and most, of the motion of thought
and its restless iteration,
in the place of the solitaires,
which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

We (I) don't get a sense of consciousness there, but we do get an ontological evocation of a world characterized by continuous motion in which any 'place' is "a place of perpetual undulation." Nevertheless a consciousness was required to write the poem and another consciousness is required to read it if it is to generate a signifying statement, and the same applies to every other form of protoconsious and conscious expression. The place of protoconsciousness and consciousness -- multiplied a trillion-trillion-trillion times in the universe (even perhaps on this planet) -- is the unique place in which the awareness of being makes a profound difference in what-is.
Pharoah, I admire the ambitiousness of your project and your deep background in philosophy of mind and I might yet be persuaded of the soundness of HCT, but I'm not persuaded yet. I think you might do well to begin a paper-length presentation of HCT with the sentences highlighted in blue just above, distinguish the problems you want to separate and the reasons why they must be separated, state your arguments on these issues with others such as Chalmers and Velman, and then present the details of HCT as the solution.

I have a problem with this statement: "Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view."
The problem I have can be expressed as follows:
In my opinion, you can explain why and how the first-person perspective must exist and have all the characteristics that it has including an individuated identity, without explaining anyone's first-person perspective.
Put it this way... say that an atom could speak and were to tell us that 'life is just great being an atom' (probably in a squeaky high voice). Now... laws of physics are pretty good at explaining why certain types of atoms exist, behave as they do, react as they do etc. Say that there was a law of physics that explained that atoms had a first-person perspective, supported by the fact that they talk. We still wouldn't have an explanation of any given atom's first-person perspective. We would just know that they would have to have that perspective.
So my point is this. Does the phenomenological approach sometimes confuse the problem of explaining the first-person perspective, with the problem of explaining their own personal perspective?
I just think that they are different problems leading to cross-talk... but this isn't something I hear mentioned very often. You could tell me why I am mistaken.

 

[smcder]

A very relevant article:

Prosthetic limbs: Once more, with feeling | The Economist

Once more, with feeling

Artificial limbs that feel like the real thing are getting closer

Daniel Tan and his colleagues at the Louis Stokes Veterans Affairs Medical Centre, in Cleveland, Ohio, created signals that appeared to come from the prosthetic arms of two volunteers by implanting electrodes around nerves in the amputees’ stumps (see picture). When they connected these electrodes to a machine that generated electrical signals, both volunteers reported sensations which seemed, to them, to be coming from their hands.

The nature [phenomenology] of the sensations depended on what sort of current Dr Tan applied. The simplest stimulation—a repetitive square-wave—produced an unnatural, vaguely electrical feeling. Using more elaborate patterns, though, the researchers could recreate everything from simple sensations such as pressure, vibration and tapping to more complicated feelings, as of a pen brushing lightly against the skin or of the hand rubbing across a texture. ...

Intriguingly, one unexpected benefit was that the device’s feedback banished the phenomenon of phantom limbs, in which an amputee perceives that his missing appendage is still present. Without the computer-generated sensations, both volunteers reported that their prosthetic hands felt like external tools (one described it as like an artificial hand that he was holding with his phantom hand). Switching the sensations on made the hand feel like an integral part of the body. ...
​

Absolutely fascinating.

1. Did you not expect something like this? I may be missing something but it seems like that's the way it would work. Cochlear implants and implants for vision, I think using sonar sound similar to me?

2. It surprised me that the effect of relieving phantom pain was "unexpected" for the researchers?

3. Phenomenology as used here isn't exactly the same as the branch of philosophy ...

From "I sing the body electric" - Whitman

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

 

[smcder]

I have a problem with this statement: "Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view."
The problem I have can be expressed as follows:
In my opinion, you can explain why and how the first-person perspective must exist and have all the characteristics that it has including an individuated identity, without explaining anyone's first-person perspective.
Put it this way... say that an atom could speak and were to tell us that 'life is just great being an atom' (probably in a squeaky high voice). Now... laws of physics are pretty good at explaining why certain types of atoms exist, behave as they do, react as they do etc. Say that there was a law of physics that explained that atoms had a first-person perspective, supported by the fact that they talk. We still wouldn't have an explanation of any given atom's first-person perspective. We would just know that they would have to have that perspective.
So my point is this. Does the phenomenological approach sometimes confuse the problem of explaining the first-person perspective, with the problem of explaining their own personal perspective?
I just think that they are different problems leading to cross-talk... but this isn't something I hear mentioned very often. You could tell me why I am mistaken.

I may misunderstand but I don't think phenomenology claims to "explain" (which would be to solve the hard problem) but, as in Constance's quote, to study consciousness from the inside. Insights gained this way have given direction to objective research programs - see the article by Dreyfus on why GOFAI failed, based on Heidegger's philosophy. Other contemplative/introspective efforts seem to have been confirmed by later studies of the brain at least where "what it is like" corresponds to an underlying physical structure or processes.

James Austin's Zen and the Brain correlates brain states with specific meditative states. Austin is a neuroscientist and Zen practitioner ...

 

[smcder]

I have a problem with this statement: "Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view."
The problem I have can be expressed as follows:
In my opinion, you can explain why and how the first-person perspective must exist and have all the characteristics that it has including an individuated identity, without explaining anyone's first-person perspective.
Put it this way... say that an atom could speak and were to tell us that 'life is just great being an atom' (probably in a squeaky high voice). Now... laws of physics are pretty good at explaining why certain types of atoms exist, behave as they do, react as they do etc. Say that there was a law of physics that explained that atoms had a first-person perspective, supported by the fact that they talk. We still wouldn't have an explanation of any given atom's first-person perspective. We would just know that they would have to have that perspective.
So my point is this. Does the phenomenological approach sometimes confuse the problem of explaining the first-person perspective, with the problem of explaining their own personal perspective?
I just think that they are different problems leading to cross-talk... but this isn't something I hear mentioned very often. You could tell me why I am mistaken.

Austin's site:

  Zen and The Brain             James H. Austin M.D. - Zen and The Brain

"Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view"

"Does the phenomenological approach sometimes confuse the problem of explaining the first-person perspective, with the problem of explaining their own personal perspective?"

I'll be interested to hear Constance response but I take it what you mean by explain the first person perspective IS the hard problem?

It seems to hinge on "explain" in two different contexts:

1 explain subjectivity objectively (hard problem)
2 explaining ones own personal experience ... Here actually it seems you'd want to say "describe"- that's what I think phenomenology claims to do - I don't see how phenomenology can "explain" subjective experience generally?

 

[smcder]

@Soupie
@Pharoah

Articles by Austin:

Article and Book Chapters - Zen and The Brain James H. Austin M.D.

Example abstract

James H. Austin

Consciousness Evolves When the Self Dissolves

"We need to clarify at least four aspects of selfhood if we are to reach a better understanding of consciousness in general, and of its alternate states.
First, how did we develop our self-centred psychophysiology? Second, can the four familiar lobes of the brain alone serve, if only as preliminary landmarks of convenience, to help understand the functions of our many self-referent networks? Third, what could cause one’s former sense of self to vanish from the mental field during an extraordinary state of consciousness? Fourth, when a person’s physical and psychic self do drop off briefly, how has conscious experience then been transformed? In particular, what happens to that subject’s personal sense of time?"

 

[smcder]

Tip for dealing with AI

When I make a call and get an automated voice (US) I speak in German:

Ich möchte mit einer Person sprechen bitte.

(I wish to speak with a person, please.)

in a polite tone and simply repeat, a really persistent AI will repeat three or four times before handing you over to an operator (I've never had to wait to get an operator either) - it works better than gibberish, raising your voice or using an aggressive tone or mumbling, I assume the AI recognizes you are speaking in a consistent pattern in some kind of language ...

Little efforts like this may at least help slow down the coming AI revolution and give us a chance to organize our resistance, if nothing else it sure has saved me a lot of time over the years ...

 

[Soupie]

It seems to hinge on "explain" in two different contexts:

1 explain subjectivity objectively (hard problem)

I think Pharoah raises an excellent point, and I think there has been some cross talk.

I don't think we can ever objectively describe an organism's subjective experiences. However, my belief/assumption has been that it is conceivable that we might be able to objectively explain how subjectivity exists.

 

[smcder]

I think Pharoah raises an excellent point, and I think there has been some cross talk.

I don't think we can ever objectively explain or describe an organism's subjective experiences. However, my belief/assumption has been that it is conceivable that we might be able to objectively explain how subjectivity exists.

I'm not sure there has been cross-talk, that's why I asked @Pharoah for clarification ... I don't think phenomenology claims to explain subjective experiences ... as to describing an organism's subjective experiences objectively, human organisms do that every day and it's called communication.

This is from the SEP article on phenomenology:

We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something.

That seems to me to say that phenomenology is not trying to explain consciousness objectively because it has bracketed out the very question of the existence of the natural world ... this is why we all need to have read some phenomenology or these misunderstandings will continue.

When you say that we might be able to objectively explain how subjectivity exists ...

1. what would the shape or outline of such an answer entail for you?

2. this still misses the full import of the hard problem which actually says, you can provide a fully objective explanation (as Nagel and Chalmers use the word objective, they mean specifically giving a physicalist account, force by force, molecule by molecule, the full physical "recipe" for the process, the way we'd write a chemical formula)

... and you would still not convey the "what it is like to be" aspect of subjectivity, so something is left over from the fully objective explanation whereas in explaining say h20 to water (@technomage example) everything is fully described by the chemical equation ...

another way to think about it is to just step back and look at:

objective
subjective

this to me is the rhetorical part of the argument, if subjectivity means anything, it can't be explained objectively, so your accounting of the world has to take that in consideration and you have to admit physicalism fails or you have to reject that subjectivity exists and that's a damned hard argument to make ... ask the eliminative materialists

so on that basis, a reduction to a physical explanation fails - it does not give a complete account - I think that point is still being missed.

 

[Soupie]

1. Did you not expect something like this? I may be missing something but it seems like that's the way it would work. Cochlear implants and implants for vision, I think using sonar sound similar to me?

2. It surprised me that the effect of relieving phantom pain was "unexpected" for the researchers?

No, I do expect this. And yes, I believe researchers have now been able to create artificial organs that generate stimuli that the body (?) uses to produce (?) qualia.

So do we think these artificial patterns of information are translated by the body into a non-material, dual substance, or is it possible that qualia are patterns of information? Obviously, once the body-brain receives the stimuli from the artificial organs, there is still a lot going on. However, I do continue to be amazed at how adeptly our bodies integrate with artificial sensory devices. Again, it makes me wonder of the universal nature of information. Information is substrate neutral.

I also think the illusion of the artificial hand being integrated with the body is important. I believe current research indicates that it is actually the same phenomena happening with our native body as well. And Velmans touched on this as well. To a large extent, the brain is projecting and estimating what is the body and what is not-body. (It makes me wonder about obe when the body-brain are in crises.)

There was a researcher who wore a belt with a compass that would vibrate in the direction of north. Im not sure how often. Apparently the researcher said his nervous sytem began to integrate this information into his being. It became one of his senses, so to speak. I wonder did it have a qualitative feel to it, beyond just the vibrations around his waist.

 

[smcder]

No, I do expect this. And yes, I believe researchers have now been able to create artificial organs that generate stimuli that the body (?) uses to produce (?) qualia.

So do we think these artificial patterns of information are translated by the body into a non-material, dual substance, or is it possible that qualia are patterns of information? Obviously, once the body-brain receives the stimuli from the artificial organs, there is still a lot going on. However, I do continue to be amazed at how adeptly our bodies integrate with artificial sensory devices. Again, it makes me wonder of the universal nature of information. Information is substrate neutral.

I also think the illusion of the artificial hand being integrated with the body is important. I believe current research indicates that it is actually the same phenomena happening with our native body as well. And Velmans touched on this as well. To a large extent, the brain is projecting and estimating what is the body and what is not-body. (It makes me wonder about obe when the body-brain are in crises.)

There was a researcher who wore a belt with a compass that would vibrate in the direction of north. Im not sure how often. Apparently the researcher said his nervous sytem began to integrate this information into his being. It became one of his senses, so to speak. I wonder did it have a qualitative feel to it, beyond just the vibrations around his waist.

Light comes into your eyes, sound comes into your ears - stick your finger in a socket, you feel something, stick a wire into a nerve in your shoulder you feel something, change the input enough and it will feel "like" your real arm did ... where's the new information?

Take a pencil and run it along a smooth surface ... now run it along a rough surface ... "where" do you feel the surface, at the tip of the pencil?

Homo something or other became a cyborg the moment he did this:

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

There was a researcher who wore a belt with a compass that would vibrate in the direction of north. Im not sure how often. Apparently the researcher said his nervous sytem began to integrate this information into his being. It became one of his senses, so to speak. I wonder did it have a qualitative feel to it, beyond just the vibrations around his waist.

Take a compass around with you for a couple of weeks and check for north every so often, you will find yourself more and more aware of when you are going north, you will integrate this information into your being.

 

[Constance]

No, I do expect this. And yes, I believe researchers have now been able to create artificial organs that generate stimuli that the body (?) uses to produce (?) qualia.

It seems to me that the artificial organs and other devices you're discussing facilitate nervous transmissions in injured or absent parts of the body that enable those parts to function again sufficient to the degree that qualia experienced through those injured or missing parts are restored. Again, the body does not "produce" qualia; it experiences qualia, and it is this capacity for qualitative experience that is restored to the individual through technologies that reintegrate the sense of the bodily capacity to interact again with the world through the agency it formerly experienced through the amputated limb. Not only the 'brain' but the conscious self and the mind of an amputee are shocked and estranged from the local world, the environment, when a primary means of access to and agency in it are cut off. This is a measure of the holistic integration of the mind and the body it inhabits.


"That which a being is made to bear it is not made to bear the want of." I don't remember who wrote or said that. The statement was cited several times by a professor of mine in graduate school and it has stayed with me for years.

 

[Soupie]

I don't think phenomenology claims to explain subjective experiences ...

Do you mean "explain how subjective experiences exist?" If so, I agree that they cannot, and that has been my only point regarding phenomenology.

as to describing an organism's subjective experiences objectively, human organisms do that every day and it's called communication.

Haha, yes, but (1) can we do so objectivily, and (2) I meant the subjective experiences of others.

When you say that we might be able to objectively explain how subjectivity exists ...

1. what would the shape or outline of such an answer entail for you?

We would be able to explain which physical systems generate/have subjective experiences and we would be able to explain how they generate/have subjective experiences.

However, we will never be able to objectively describe subjective experiences.

2. this still misses the full import of the hard problem which actually says, you can provide a fully objective explanation (as Nagel and Chalmers use the word objective, they mean specifically giving a physicalist account, force by force, molecule by molecule, the full physical "recipe" for the process, the way we'd write a chemical formula)

... and you would still not convey the "what it is like to be" aspect of subjectivity, so something is left over from the fully objective explanation

I dont disagree with this. I don't think we can ever objectively describe subjective experiences.

this to me is the rhetorical part of the argument, if subjectivity means anything, it can't be explained objectively...

Hm, this might be some cross talk, and im not saying its your or Constances, or anybody's fault. (But it might be mine, haha.)

I think there is a difference between "explaining" subjectivity objectively, and "describing" subjectivity objectively.

For instance, we could explain subjectivity objectively by saying "its been discovered that when cluster X of X type neurons fire at X rate for X number of X seconds, patients report the subjective experience of the tast of apple pie. We've built an AI using the same architecture and principles and lo and behold, when an isomorphic,malbeit silicone cluster of X type neurons etc etc the AI reports experiencing the taste of apple pie."

Can we objectively describe the taste of apple pie? Nope. The best we could do is maybe create a printout of the pattern that the neurons fired at, haha. Or write a poem about apple pie.

a reduction to a physical explanation fails - it does not give a complete account - I think that point is still being missed.

Hm, I don't think subjective experience is physical. But as noted, I think it's conceivable that we could objectively explain how it exists.