Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[Pharoah]

Nope. It wasn't getting us anywhere. I'm more worried about concepts than what we label the concepts. However, as noted, physical information — substrate independent patterns of causation — are different from trees and rocks (substrate dependent patterns of causation). If I can't call these substrate independent patterns of causation immaterial, what can I call them! I need a fancy name, dammit!

@smcder

From the comments following the Guardian article I just posted, our Mindless Babylonians?

There is a condition called Depersonalisation Disorder - or DPD.

This entails,inter alia, a feeling of either inner or outer separation from the body. Most people experience depersonalisation at some point, whether they notice it or not (or find it unpleasant) is another matter.

Inasmuch as it is understood by psychiatrists, it is conjectured that it is an evolved form of dissociation, useful when some primeval ancestors were confronted with, say, an earthquake, something terrible and inexplicable - as opposed,say, to an angry and hungry lion, which you can see.

In the DPD sufferer, some sort of loop has closed in the brain, so the utility of the dissociative 'flight' becomes pathological.

For some individuals, the condition exists in protracted bouts or even endlessly: making one feel quite the 'zombie'- in fact, one sees the rest of the world as hopelessly determined and delusionally locked into the weird sense of 'self' and the accompanying delusion, free will.

This will sound ridiculous to anyone who has not experienced it - just as above, the ridicule of one camp for the other's position.

The Maudsley has a centre for the study of this condition (sadly, much-reduced because of cuts) - but, of course, if we can't even agree on what consciousness is it becomes rather tricky to deal with altered states of consciousness.

I have had incessant DPD since I was about 16: trust me, I've tried to explain what if feels like to a great many people, a great many times...I have a nice iatrogenic benzodiazapine addiction as a result of experimantal prescription (but no complaints; I was thrilled to find the Maudsley and would have allowed any sort of drug to be administered, whatever the possible consequences, just to get back to that feeling of being 'real').

On the other hand, I may actually be right.

A key and natural problem seems to be that if you can actually empthise and grasp its nature you probably are in the club too! Otherwise it seems like some sixth-former overwhelmed by Sartre and Camus.
​

And:

I've experienced the world like that for about 5 years. I don't really consider myself to be an "entity" as such, but a collection of reactions to external and internal stimuli that interact with each other. I don't notice there to be a coherent "self" anywhere involved, though I act like there were one. I sometimes look at other people who do experience this feeling of self as having successfully created an imaginary friend to live in their own heads. That's certainly how I look at my past self before I started disassociating.

I suspect that the "self" is in many ways as much a cultural ideology we act out internally than an actual universal fact of human biology.

The debate described above seems a little strange. intellectually, there is really no problem thinking the self is just a product of chemical reactions in a jelly blob, but that clearly doesn't necessarily prove it to be the case.​

When you turn your head to look at a noise, the difference that you heard has informed you.
When an atom's parts exchange a glance, perhaps they just react as they do.
Perhaps we should think of information as a verb to describe any reactive impact that arises from interactions.

 

[smcder]

This appears to be a listing of CS theories with summary and what questions they do and don't answer?

You've seen this @Pharoah? Summary of HST

Topic: Theories of Consciousness Camp: HST

KEY ASPECTS to the Hierarchical Systems Theory of consciousness (HST)

http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Art1HST4_4_13.pdf

The dual properties of consciousness are:

1. Phenomenal (emergent property of physics); and

2. Noumenal.

Phenomenal properties are further subdivided in the HST model. The nature of this subdivision is reductively explained by detailing a hierarchy of dynamic relations whose properties and characteristics necessarily evolve in a physical universe (http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Art1HST4_4_13.pdf)

Thus,

3. HST determines that the phenomenon of consciousness is an emergent property.

4. HST explains the functional properties and dynamics of the phenomenon of consciousness.

5. HST demonstrates that the hard problem of consciousness is not the problem of experience; and

6. HST implies that a full explanation of consciousness requires a theory that also explains the noumenon of consciousness (http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/HSTpt3noumenon.pdf).

7. The materialist, monist, and dualist can make claim to HST. The claimants views will differ in their understanding of how the noumena of consciousness relate to the phenomenal.

WHAT QUESTIONS DOES HST CLAIM TO SOLVE ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?

1. Whilst rejecting Chalmers' statement that "the really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience" (1995 - Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness), HST satisfies Chalmers' (1995 - Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness) double aspect theory of information principle, (which requires that information is fundamental to consciousness, and corresponds to physical and to phenomenal features that are isomorphic - Section 7.3, para 4); Chalmers' principle of organisational invariance, (which states that any two systems with the same functional organisation will have qualitatively identical experiences. Examples of such systems might include computer systems - Section 7.2, para 1); Chalmers' principle of structural coherence, (which requires that the processes that explain awareness link structurally to the basis of consciousness by determining the relationship between that of which we are aware (and can report upon) and that of which we experience - Section 7.3).

In its explanation,

2. HST explains why and how the first-person perspective exists; explains how phenomenally conscious states have a subjective dimension; how they have feel; why there is something which it is like to undergo them; and why the properties distinctive of phenomenal consciousness seem to their subjects to be ineffable.

3. HST explains how and why consciousness evolved.

4. HST provides a means of understanding the unique and distinguishing characteristics of phenomenally consciousness humans.

WHAT QUESTIONS DOES HST NOT CLAIM TO SOLVE ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?

1. HST clarifies what is required to explain how and why the first-person exists as distinct from how and why a unique identity of self exists. However, it is incapable of explaining why a unique identity of self exists; where 'identity of self' means that which discriminates one individual self as he/she experiences him/her self - Alternatively, why it is that he or she happens to be that particular self at a certain point in time and space 13.7 billion years after the big bang rather than any other individual in a point in time and space; past or future.

2. HST does not address the mind body problem

3. HST does not explain the mechanisms of neural processing and therefore;

4. Does not have a solution to the Explanatory Gap, which would entail explaining how HST relates to physiological mechanisms. For example, HST does not address why "we have feelings of pain", relates to a mechanism, where "pain is the firing of C fibres" (for example).

 

[smcder]

Nope. It wasn't getting us anywhere. I'm more worried about concepts than what we label the concepts. However, as noted, physical information — substrate independent patterns of causation — are different from trees and rocks (substrate dependent patterns of causation). If I can't call these substrate independent patterns of causation immaterial, what can I call them! I need a fancy name, dammit!

@smcder

From the comments following the Guardian article I just posted, our Mindless Babylonians?

There is a condition called Depersonalisation Disorder - or DPD.

This entails,inter alia, a feeling of either inner or outer separation from the body. Most people experience depersonalisation at some point, whether they notice it or not (or find it unpleasant) is another matter.

Inasmuch as it is understood by psychiatrists, it is conjectured that it is an evolved form of dissociation, useful when some primeval ancestors were confronted with, say, an earthquake, something terrible and inexplicable - as opposed,say, to an angry and hungry lion, which you can see.

In the DPD sufferer, some sort of loop has closed in the brain, so the utility of the dissociative 'flight' becomes pathological.

For some individuals, the condition exists in protracted bouts or even endlessly: making one feel quite the 'zombie'- in fact, one sees the rest of the world as hopelessly determined and delusionally locked into the weird sense of 'self' and the accompanying delusion, free will.

This will sound ridiculous to anyone who has not experienced it - just as above, the ridicule of one camp for the other's position.

The Maudsley has a centre for the study of this condition (sadly, much-reduced because of cuts) - but, of course, if we can't even agree on what consciousness is it becomes rather tricky to deal with altered states of consciousness.

I have had incessant DPD since I was about 16: trust me, I've tried to explain what if feels like to a great many people, a great many times...I have a nice iatrogenic benzodiazapine addiction as a result of experimantal prescription (but no complaints; I was thrilled to find the Maudsley and would have allowed any sort of drug to be administered, whatever the possible consequences, just to get back to that feeling of being 'real').

On the other hand, I may actually be right.

A key and natural problem seems to be that if you can actually empthise and grasp its nature you probably are in the club too! Otherwise it seems like some sixth-former overwhelmed by Sartre and Camus.
​

And:

I've experienced the world like that for about 5 years. I don't really consider myself to be an "entity" as such, but a collection of reactions to external and internal stimuli that interact with each other. I don't notice there to be a coherent "self" anywhere involved, though I act like there were one. I sometimes look at other people who do experience this feeling of self as having successfully created an imaginary friend to live in their own heads. That's certainly how I look at my past self before I started disassociating.

I suspect that the "self" is in many ways as much a cultural ideology we act out internally than an actual universal fact of human biology.

The debate described above seems a little strange. intellectually, there is really no problem thinking the self is just a product of chemical reactions in a jelly blob, but that clearly doesn't necessarily prove it to be the case.​

The issue isn't strictly labels ... here is my current understanding:

1. your view is physicalist/determinist and may be eliminativist - I think the only reason you don't say you are an eliminativist is that you say the mind is information we are information andthat information is immaterial ... but information in your view appears to be arrangements of matter and energy following a set of rules ... That I think is an ok way for a physicalist/eliminative reductionist to think and describe things

2. Will see what @Pharoah says to my question but I think he would question your difference in trees and information ... I'll save work on my ideas until we hear from him and - try to make sure they are coherent ...

Go back and have a look at his recent posts in light of this and also let me know where I'm wrong here - where you are not a physicalist and eliminativist - the definition of information you use I don't think is enough to say you aren't

 

[Pharoah]

The issue isn't strictly labels ... here is my current understanding:

1. your view is physicalist/determinist and may be eliminativist - I think the only reason you don't say you are an eliminativist is that you say the mind is information we are information andthat information is immaterial ... but information in your view appears to be arrangements of matter and energy following a set of rules ... That I think is an ok way for a physicalist/eliminative reductionist to think and describe things

2. Will see what @Pharoah says to my question but I think he would question your difference in trees and information ... I'll save work on my ideas until we hear from him and - try to make sure they are coherent ...

Go back and have a look at his recent posts in light of this and also let me know where I'm wrong here - where you are not a physicalist and eliminativist - the definition of information you use I don't think is enough to say you aren't

What am I responding to? What question?

Have seen canonizer.com

 

[smcder]

Nope. It wasn't getting us anywhere. I'm more worried about concepts than what we label the concepts. However, as noted, physical information — substrate independent patterns of causation — are different from trees and rocks (substrate dependent patterns of causation). If I can't call these substrate independent patterns of causation immaterial, what can I call them! I need a fancy name, dammit!

@smcder

From the comments following the Guardian article I just posted, our Mindless Babylonians?

There is a condition called Depersonalisation Disorder - or DPD.

This entails,inter alia, a feeling of either inner or outer separation from the body. Most people experience depersonalisation at some point, whether they notice it or not (or find it unpleasant) is another matter.

Inasmuch as it is understood by psychiatrists, it is conjectured that it is an evolved form of dissociation, useful when some primeval ancestors were confronted with, say, an earthquake, something terrible and inexplicable - as opposed,say, to an angry and hungry lion, which you can see.

In the DPD sufferer, some sort of loop has closed in the brain, so the utility of the dissociative 'flight' becomes pathological.

For some individuals, the condition exists in protracted bouts or even endlessly: making one feel quite the 'zombie'- in fact, one sees the rest of the world as hopelessly determined and delusionally locked into the weird sense of 'self' and the accompanying delusion, free will.

This will sound ridiculous to anyone who has not experienced it - just as above, the ridicule of one camp for the other's position.

The Maudsley has a centre for the study of this condition (sadly, much-reduced because of cuts) - but, of course, if we can't even agree on what consciousness is it becomes rather tricky to deal with altered states of consciousness.

I have had incessant DPD since I was about 16: trust me, I've tried to explain what if feels like to a great many people, a great many times...I have a nice iatrogenic benzodiazapine addiction as a result of experimantal prescription (but no complaints; I was thrilled to find the Maudsley and would have allowed any sort of drug to be administered, whatever the possible consequences, just to get back to that feeling of being 'real').

On the other hand, I may actually be right.

A key and natural problem seems to be that if you can actually empthise and grasp its nature you probably are in the club too! Otherwise it seems like some sixth-former overwhelmed by Sartre and Camus.
​

And:

I've experienced the world like that for about 5 years. I don't really consider myself to be an "entity" as such, but a collection of reactions to external and internal stimuli that interact with each other. I don't notice there to be a coherent "self" anywhere involved, though I act like there were one. I sometimes look at other people who do experience this feeling of self as having successfully created an imaginary friend to live in their own heads. That's certainly how I look at my past self before I started disassociating.

I suspect that the "self" is in many ways as much a cultural ideology we act out internally than an actual universal fact of human biology.

The debate described above seems a little strange. intellectually, there is really no problem thinking the self is just a product of chemical reactions in a jelly blob, but that clearly doesn't necessarily prove it to be the case.​

This sort of thing is also recognized in Buddhism and other contemplative traditions - various results of meditations on not self or emptiness - dis integrating the "self" - the abyss, established traditions provide a framework for understanding these states so that you don't get stuck like the commentator above ...

There appears to be in most people an aversion to thinking of them-selves as jelly blobs or Jelly Kluges (c) ... interesting if that disgust is innate/natural ... is it just disgust at the physical brain? No culture has been built on this idea ... has embraced this ... and few individuals ... maybe that's changing maybe people don't need to be more than their brains and the depressing part is just cultural conflict ... Being told you were something else.

 

[smcder]

"NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation."

 

[smcder]

The DPD depersonalization thing ... that's a kind of Zombie ... Interesting the one said he "needed" to feel real ... where does that discomfort come in?

Do we "need" to feel we are more than Jelly Kluges (c) or that our children are? Why love this particular collection of strings and wheels ... because our genes tell us to? Culture - fear of punishment - emotional reward?

Why did nature go to all the trouble to motivate us with emotion? Why not simply a set of drives? Because the brain/mind isn't unified? So things like humor evolve out of the kluge? As within so without?

Zombies aren't conceivable .., but emotional zombies? We can conceive of someone who doesn't feel or is consciously aware of emotions but simply acts on condition of various drives and impulses?

 

[smcder]

What am I responding to? What question?

Have seen canonizer.com

Should all be marked @Pharoah

 

[Soupie]

The issue isn't strictly labels ... here is my current understanding:

1. your view is physicalist/determinist and may be eliminativist

I think the only reason you don't say you are an eliminativist is that you say the mind is information we are information and that information is immaterial …

but information in your view appears to be arrangements of matter and energy following a set of rules …

That I think is an ok way for a physicalist/eliminative reductionist to think and describe things

Not having a complete grasp of all that the label “eliminativist” implies, I would say the following:

On the one hand, my view can be considered eliminativist in the sense that I do not think consciousness is a “thing,” “stuff,” or “substance” that exists independent of organisms.

Unless (!) one is willing to accept that data/information exists independent of organisms. I think all of what-is is filled with data/information (cause-effect relationships), so in that sense -- if one is willing -- consciousness can be considered “stuff” that exists independent of organisms.

On the other hand (we do have two), I do not think consciousness *is* anything commonly considered physical, such as a neuron, a particle, a chemical, etc.

Rather, my view is that consciousness *is* constituted of the cause-effect relationships of the matter and energy in the environment and the organism.

That is, consciousness is not the matter and energy in the environment and the organism, it is the cause-effect relationship between the matter and energy in the environment and the organism.

This cause-effect relationship can be referred to as a pattern, as information, or as information, in my opinion.

The information that exists between an organism and the environment, in my opinion, is always about something: Some stimulus in the environment or in the organism. Not coincidentally, in my opinion, consciousness seems to always be about something as well, namely a stimulus in the environment or in the organism.

At some point, and in some way, some organisms come to recognize that (1) their perceptions and sensations represent stimuli in the environment and in their physical bodies, and (2) that they are distinct from that which they are experiencing (and that they are distinct from their environment and their bodies). That is, they become self-aware. They are able to form concepts about their perceptions and sensations.

On my view, I have phrased this as “information becoming aware of information.” It could also be phrased: “A pattern of cause-effect becoming aware of a pattern of cause-effect.”

If we put a person in an MRI machine, we might be able to see this pattern of cause-effect. However, since we are not the pattern of cause-effect that we are seeing from a 3rd person perspective, we won’t experience what it’s like to be that pattern of cause-effect.

Seeing a pattern of cause-effect is different from being a pattern of cause-effect.

Saying that “the mind is green,” is saying that “the mind is a pattern of cause-effect;” a pattern of cause effect that is about wavelength X.

From a 3rd person perspective, we can see wavelength X and we can see a (neuronal) pattern of cause-effect that is “about” wavelength X, but we can’t see green in either of these things. We can only experience green if we *are* the (neuronal) pattern of cause-effect that is about wavelength X. Edit: Said differently, we could say: We can only experience green if we are green.

I’m sure that sounds like complete gibberish for a number of reasons, haha. Apologies.

Whether this view is physicalist, eliminativist, panpsychist, crazy, or what have you, I’m not sure.

To make matters perhaps even more confusing for some, I hold that this cause-effect pattern generated by our body-brain can -- in theory -- be replicated by any substrate. Thus, just as information is substrate independent, I think theoretically consciousness/minds are substrate independent. However, I do not think humans are anywhere near having the capability of translating a human cause-effect pattern (mind) into/onto a non-original substrate.

 

[Constance]

Soupie wrote:

"That is, consciousness is not the matter and energy in the environment and the organism, it is the cause-effect relationship between the matter and energy in the environment and the organism.

This cause-effect relationship can be referred to as a pattern, as information, or as information, in my opinion.

The information that exists between an organism and the environment, in my opinion, is always about something: Some stimulus in the environment or in the organism. Not coincidentally, in my opinion, consciousness seems to always be about something as well, namely a stimulus in the environment or in the organism.

At some point, and in some way, some organisms come to recognize that (1) their perceptions and sensations represent stimuli in the environment and in their physical bodies, and (2) that they are distinct from that which they are experiencing (and that they are distinct from their environment and their bodies). That is, they become self-aware. They are able to form concepts about their perceptions and sensations."


Soupie, that's a much clearer statement of your hypothesis than I've seen before. I still have a question about what 'consciousness' is like in your approach before it becomes conceptual. I take it that there is something you call 'consciousness' going on before the event occurring in the last paragraph paragraph (underscored) above. How does it exist as 'consciousness' before the point at which organisms becomes conceptually aware of being 'conscious': i.e., "recognize that (1) their perceptions and sensations represent stimuli in the environment and in their physical bodies, and (2) that they are distinct from that which they are experiencing (and that they are distinct from their environment and their bodies)"? This is the first time in your outline in which you use the word 'experiencing', and up to this point there seems to be no experiencing of what's going on in terms of 'information exchange'. Can you clarify how in (1) the former unawareness of any experience suddenly becomes awareness of the connection between the organisms's "perceptions and sensations" related to "stimuli in the environment and in the organisms's physical body" in the first place [note: perceptions and sensations of which the organism has formerly been ignorant, unaware], and simultaneously in (2) recognizes that the organism itself is "distinct from that which it has been [experiencing?]" and also somehow distinct from its body and the environment? Again, how can the organism be said to have been 'experiencing' qualities it has not heretofore experienced?


After reading this post I did an internet search with the terms 'concept of consciousness without consciousness' and came up with this link to a forum devoted to objectivist philosophy:


[URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164']Concept of "existence" excluding consciousness? - Metaphysics and Epistemology - Objectivism Online Forum
[URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164']
[URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164'][URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164'][URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164'][URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164'][URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164'][URL='http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=16164']
[/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL][/URL]

 

[Constance]

The DPD depersonalization thing ... that's a kind of Zombie ... Interesting the one said he "needed" to feel real ... where does that discomfort come in?

It must, I think, come from the afflicted individual's former sense of being integrated with and yet separate from the surrounding world and the others in it. How does one lose this sense, this foundation?

Do we "need" to feel we are more than Jelly Kluges (c) or that our children are? Why love this particular collection of strings and wheels ... because our genes tell us to? Culture - fear of punishment - emotional reward?

Why did nature go to all the trouble to motivate us with emotion? Why not simply a set of drives? Because the brain/mind isn't unified? So things like humor evolve out of the kluge? As within so without?

All excellent questions that point to aspects of normal consciousness we need to recognize and account for in our descriptions of consciousness.

Zombies aren't conceivable .., but emotional zombies? We can conceive of someone who doesn't feel or is consciously aware of emotions but simply acts on condition of various drives and impulses?

I agree that "zombies aren't conceivable." Chalmers was trying to make a point with that thought experiment, precisely that we aren't zombies, but his thought experiment has, in my opinion, led many philosophers of mind of the analtic school astray in their thinking about consciousness. "Emotional zombies" might be of two types, one genuinely psychotic and in need of psychiatric pharmaceutical intervention, the other a victim of one or another form of personality disorder [esp Borderline Personality Disorder], requiring psychiatric medication and also deep psychological therapy usually involving family therapy. I think there might be a third manifestation of DPD developing in our culture as a result of a number of ideological and sociological influences peculiar to our historical period.

 

[Constance]

Here's some information we all need to put in our kit bags as we think and talk more about what consciousness is and how it is related to the brain. Two cases:

1. "Consciousness Without a Brain
Posted Jan 07 2011 7:49am
The debatable concept of the existence of life, primarily a conscious life, without a brain is proven once again. Not only is my own son living proof of the ability to live a conscious life without his cerebral cortex, defying medical textbooks that define hydranencephaly as incompatible with life, but there are many others proving this to be possible as well. There are hundreds of children who are growing in to young adulthood with hydranencephaly, there are brain-injured patients coming out of long-term comas who were never expected to recover, and now there is proven scientific research in the brain's ability to communicate despite being in a seemingly unconscious state.

So, for the many college classmates, friends, and acquaintances that I have argued this debate with... I'll say it yet again, the intricate functions of the human brain is the biggest mystery of the universe. Consciousness does not exist in a little box within our brain, perhaps within our soul or amidst the aura that surrounds our body. Quality of life can be possessed despite a grim prognosis, perhaps when missing these perceived essentials to life we are able to grasp life from the best perspective... one without judgment, fear, and any ability to do anything less than love and appreciate all that life has to offer."


2. Scans Unlock Hidden Life in Vegetative Brains
by Kat McGowan

From the January-February special issue; published online December 16, 2010
Martin M. Monti

A man believed to be in a vegetative state managed to answer doctors’ questions—using only his thoughts. The startling experiment, described in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggests a new way to measure consciousness in brain-injured patients.

Following a traffic accident, the patient had not spoken or made any other intelligible responses for five years before being included a study conducted by Adrian Owen and his team at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England. The team tracked the patient’s brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) while posing simple questions, such as whether he had a brother. He was asked to imagine walking around his house to indicate yes, and to think about playing tennis to signal no. In a healthy brain, these responses are easy to tell apart on a scan: Tennis activates motor-related brain areas, while navigating activates spatial regions. Using this simple code, the patient answered five of six questions correctly.

Martin Monti, a neuroscientist and lead author of the study, was “blown away” by the data. “We now know this patient has much more cognitive function than we ever imagined,” he says. Monti looks toward the day when fmri can improve diagnosis in disorders of consciousness and search for signs that patients are actually cognizant and alert. In some cases, imaging might also be used to communicate, but Monti thinks this may be rare. Only 5 of 54 patients whom he has studied have been able to do the visualization task at all."


Re the second case, this research supports research reported by Pim von Lommel in his major study of NDEs involving measurements of brain activity re-emerging rapidly in comatose patients medically considered to be in permanent vegetative states in the minutes before they are to be disconnected from artificial life support. As von Lommel observes, this and other recent neurological research will soon change not just medical responses to such patients but change our entire conception of what consciousness is.


Re the second paragraph of case 1.:

"So, for the many college classmates, friends, and acquaintances that I have argued this debate with... I'll say it yet again, the intricate functions of the human brain is the biggest mystery of the universe. Consciousness does not exist in a little box within our brain, perhaps within our soul or amidst the aura that surrounds our body. Quality of life can be possessed despite a grim prognosis, perhaps when missing these perceived essentials to life we are able to grasp life from the best perspective... one without judgment, fear, and any ability to do anything less than love and appreciate all that life has to offer."

Physicalists will not take seriously the concepts of either souls or, probably, the extension of personal consciousness beyond the brain and body where it is open to and intermingles with, perhaps at times merges with, the consciousnesses of particular others. If 'information' such as that which Soupie considers the operative principle in life and rocks alike produces the phenomena the author of that post experiences as present in his son, we will have to think about that information in different ways from the way Tononi has conceived it so far. To do so will take us back to the elan vital rejected by materialist scientists a century ago, will it not?

What other kind of explanation could also account for the persistence of awareness in cases such as the second one described above and, further, in the astonishing [and repeated] discovery reported from the Netherlands by von Lommel that brain activity is aroused to very significant levels in 'vegetative' individuals whose life-support machinery is about to be disconnected?

 

[Constance]

"NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's safety) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation."

Hobbes's The Leviathan, which I have not read?

 

[Constance]

a@Soupie, not 'Objectivism', which is reserved for Ayn Rand's poor excuse for philosophy, but rather Harmon's "Object-Oriented Ontology" and the "Speculative Realism" group developing in France in recent years. Here is an amazon page collecting some of the books published by this group.

Amazon.com: object oriented ontology: Books

One of them (a kind of omnibus collection of essays and articles by 'speculative realists') is available online and we linked and discussed it briefly in part 2 of this thread. That's the book entitled Towards a Speculative Realism, edited by Graham Harmon. The book listed below that one in the amazon list, might be of interest to @Pharoah -- this one, entitled Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes:



ps: I just read samples of this book available at amazon and find that it appears to be a very good analysis and critique of OOO and SR (and as well as an explanation of their appearance out of postmodernism, poststructuralism, Derridean deconstruction, Deleuze and Guattari's complex syntheses, and other fallouts of phenomenology and analytic philosopy), so I ordered it. I'd obtained two years ago copies of two books by Harmon (Guerilla Metaphysics and the one entitled Object-Oriented Ontology) and lost interest in them without finishing them. I think the author of this recent book has identified the problems I had pursuing the two Harmon books.

 

[Soupie]

Soupie, that's a much clearer statement of your hypothesis than I've seen before.

I still have a question about what 'consciousness' is like in your approach before it becomes conceptual. I take it that there is something you call 'consciousness' going on before the event occurring in the last paragraph below. How does it exist as 'consciousness' before the point at which organisms becomes conceptually aware of being 'conscious': i.e., "recognize that (1) their perceptions and sensations represent stimuli in the environment and in their physical bodies, and (2) that they are distinct from that which they are experiencing (and that they are distinct from their environment and their bodies)"?

This is the first time in your outline in which you use the word 'experiencing', and up to this point there seems to be no experiencing of what's going on in terms of 'information exchange'.

Can you clarify how in (1) the former unawareness of any experience suddenly becomes awareness of the connection between the organisms's "perceptions and sensations" related to "stimuli in the environment and in the organisms's physical body" in the first place [note: perceptions and sensations of which the organism has formerly been ignorant, unaware], and simultaneously in (2) recognizes that the organism itself is "distinct from that which it has been [experiencing?]" and also somehow distinct from its body and the environment?

Again, how can the organism be said to have been 'experiencing' qualities it has not heretofore experienced?

If it is the case that an organism can possess phenomenal consciousness in the absence of reflective and conceptual consciousness, then it is hard to say what it would be like.

I wonder if a good — but not perfect — description might partially be provided by Helen Keller:

The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller

The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

On the afternoon of that eventful day, I stood on the porch, dumb, expectant. I guessed vaguely from my mother's signs and from the hurrying to and fro in the house that something unusual was about to happen, so I went to the door and waited on the steps. The afternoon sun penetrated the mass of honeysuckle that covered the porch, and fell on my upturned face. My fingers lingered almost unconsciously on the familiar leaves and blossoms which had just come forth to greet the sweet southern spring. I did not know what the future held of marvel or surprise for me. Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

I felt approaching footsteps, I stretched out my hand as I supposed to my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.

The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.
​

She also had this to say: While Helen was still at Radcliffe she wrote in her first book, The Story of My Life: "When I learned the meaning of 'I' and 'me' and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me".

It's really hard to make sense of this. It's definitely something, definitely meaningful to what we are trying to do here, but just what, I don't know.

Helen clearly had conscious experiences prior to language: emotions, sensations, and perceptions. I'm even tempted to say she had conceptual thinking, despite her suggestiong her thoughts — prior to language — were more like sensations.

And it's quite possible that thoughts do percolate out of the unconscious not unlike sensations...

But if we take her word for it, her ego — self-awareness — did not exist for her prior to having language. (How to compare this to the DPD individuals above?)

Which leads me to this next thought:

The brain really does seem to be a kluge and thus the mind as well. Constance you posted above about people with brain damage who still had — albeit altered — consciousness. We have the DPD individuals, Helen Keller, people with blind sight, and even people with calcified amygdala who can't experience fear.

Meet the woman who can’t feel fear - The Washington Post

And as always, I am fascinated by how chemicals effect our moods, alertness, sensations, and perceptions.

The relationship between the mind and body is clearly tight, but not identical. Consciousness — and its many facets — does not appear to reside in only one small part of the body.

I'm cautiously open to the idea that the mind/consciousness can exist independent of the body in extreme cases, but I don't see how it could.

 

[Constance]

The source of 100 years of confusion regarding mind and consciousness {not to mention our own as part of that} is reasonably well sorted out here:

"Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self" at SEP:

Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind and consciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of his ideas came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Ideas central to his view are now central to cognitive science. Other ideas equally central to his point of view had almost no influence on subsequent work, however. In this article, first we survey Kant's model as a whole and the claims that have been influential. Then we examine his claims about consciousness of self specifically. Many of his ideas about the consciousness of self and related issues have not been influential. Indeed, even though he achieved remarkable insights into consciousness of self, they next appeared only 200 years later, in the 1960s and 1970s.

• 1. A Sketch of Kant's View of the Mind
• 2. Kant's Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It
  • 2.1 Transcendental Aesthetic
  • 2.2 Metaphysical Deduction
  • 2.3 Transcendental Deduction, 1st Edition
  • 2.4 Attack on the Paralogisms, 1st Edition
  • 2.5 Two Discussions in the 2nd-edition TD and Other Discussions
• 3. Kant's View of the mind
  • 3.1 Method
  • 3.2 Synthesis and Faculties
    • 3.2.1 Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition
    • 3.2.2 Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination
    • 3.2.3 Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept
  • 3.3 Synthesis: A 90° Turn
  • 3.4 Unity of Consciousness
• 4. Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self
  • 4.1 Thesis 1: Two Kinds of Consciousness of Self
  • 4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Self
  • 4.3 Thesis 3: Conscious Only of How One Appears to Oneself
  • 4.4 Thesis 4: Referential Machinery of Consciousness of Self
  • 4.5 Thesis 5: No Manifold in Consciousness of Self
  • 4.6 Thesis 6: Consciousness of Self is not Knowledge of Self
  • 4.7 Thesis 7: Conscious of Self as Single, Common Subject of Experience
• 5. Knowledge of the Mind
• 6. Where Kant Has and Has Not Influenced Contemporary Cognitive Research
• 
  
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[smcder]

The Well of Galabes

"That is to say, I don’t share the pervasive biophobia and noophobia, the terrified loathing oflife and consciousness, that plays so large and so rarely discussed a role in the modern popular imagination. It was probably inevitable that a culture as obsessed with machines as ours would end up longing for a universe as clean, lifeless, mindless and obedient as a well-oiled mechanism. That longing has deep historical roots, which we’re going to need to explore shortly, and it also plays a huge role in the popular insistence that human beings are the only intelligent beings in the cosmos, or its extreme form—the claim, perennially popular among a certain subset of atheists, that consciousness does not exist at all, and human beings are merely one variety of “meat robots” that like to delude themselves into thinking that they have minds, wills, and so on.
It’s an interesting detail of philosophy that this claim can be neither proved nor disproved using the tools of logic. Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy I’m going to discuss at some length further on down the road, noted trenchantly that logic only relates to objects of experience, and won’t work when turned inward and applied to experiencing subjects. You, dear reader, can read these words, and by an act of introspection, watch yourself experiencing the words and their meaning; by that act, you can know yourself to be a conscious being; and the more often you engage in that sort of introspection, the clearer a sense you’ll get of the nature, functions, and potentials of consciousness—a sense that over time opens up in some remarkably interesting directions.
Under ordinary conditions, though, you can’t do that with anyone else’s consciousness, because you can only know them as an object of experience; you can’t know them as an experiencing subject, the way you know yourself. Logically speaking, as a result, you can’t prove that there’s anyone home in any of the apparently conscious beings that you encounter. They might be meat robots programmed to act like conscious beings. I’ve occasionally considered suggesting that those atheists who deny the reality of consciousness might actually be meat robots who are telling the truth about themselves—after all, they have no more power to detect the presence of consciousness outside themselves than the rest of us do, so they have no way of knowing that their unfortunate state isn’t universal.
It’s worth noting, though, that in significant ways, most humans behave more like conscious beings than like meat robots. In particular, if you act as though they’re conscious beings, and take their consciousness into account as a factor in their behavior, you’ll get better results than if you treat them as meat robots who can be made to follow orders if you just apply the right manipulations. It’s largely because modern industrial society is so prone to try the latter approach—to try to push people around by mechanical manipulations, rather than finding ways to enlist their conscious cooperation—that it’s facing a shattering crisis of legitimacy now and in the future. "

 

[smcder]

Irreducible Mind just came into our library ... it's big.

 

[smcder]

"first, like other critics of the CTM ... (John) Searle has been startled by the intensity of the reactions he provokes:

Oddly enough I have encountered more passion from the adherents of the computational theory of the mind than from the adherents of traditional religious doctrines of the soul. Some computationalists invest an almost religious intensity into their faith that our deepest problems about the mind will have a computationalist solution.

Many people apparently believe that somehow or other, unless we are proven to be computers, something terribly important will be lost."

 

[smcder]