smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
here is the transcript
Transcript of "How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality"
-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
- Status
@Constance
here is the transcript
Transcript of "How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality"
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"There's one last thing I want to draw your attention to, which is that experiences of the body from the inside are very different from experiences of the world around us. When I look around me, the world seems full of objects -- tables, chairs, rubber hands, people, you lot -- even my own body in the world, I can perceive it as an object from the outside. But my experiences of the body from within,they're not like that at all. I don't perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ... I don't know where my spleen is, but it's somewhere. I don't perceive my insides as objects. In fact, I don't experience them much at all unless they go wrong. And this is important, I think. Perception of the internal state of the body isn't about figuring out what's there, it's about control and regulation --keeping the physiological variables within the tight bounds that are compatible with survival. When the brain uses predictions to figure out what's there, we perceive objects as the causes of sensations. When the brain uses predictions to control and regulate things, we experience how well or how badly that control is going."
This hasn't been my experience ... not based on what he writes here, he may expand on this somewhere ...
But my experiences of the body from within,they're not like that at all. I don't perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ... I don't know where my spleen is, but it's somewhere. I don't perceive my insides as objects. In fact, I don't experience them much at all unless they go wrong.
I don't know where my spleen is either - but that seems different than perceiving an object like a chair - why should I know where my spleen is ... why would the sensations in my body be attached to the organs as we have defined them? (cf. "referred pain") - see also "Chakra" and other medical/healing systems that seem to identify important centers of energy and sensation (meditations are built around being able to visualize and sense these centers) and these centers may be in the same places in various systems and may also correlate to actual physiological centers (nerve centers?) in the body - those may be the correct mappings rather than expecting to have some constant sensation in your "spleen" - corresponding to how we perceive the outer world ... I can expand on this ... at any rate I do feel lots of things inside (and in a consistent manner, so much that I would say there is an "internal furniture") and not just when things go wrong.
you can also try various visualization exercises - yoga and various other systems - including modern systems - or you can just try to concentrate on what you experience in the body ... ?
This hasn't been my experience ... not based on what he writes here, he may expand on this somewhere ...
But my experiences of the body from within,they're not like that at all. I don't perceive my kidneys here, my liver here, my spleen ... I don't know where my spleen is, but it's somewhere. I don't perceive my insides as objects. In fact, I don't experience them much at all unless they go wrong.
I don't know where my spleen is either - but that seems different than perceiving an object like a chair - why should I know where my spleen is ... why would the sensations in my body be attached to the organs as we have defined them? (cf. "referred pain") - see also "Chakra" and other medical/healing systems that seem to identify important centers of energy and sensation (meditations are built around being able to visualize and sense these centers) and these centers may be in the same places in various systems and may also correlate to actual physiological centers (nerve centers?) in the body - those may be the correct mappings rather than expecting to have some constant sensation in your "spleen" - corresponding to how we perceive the outer world ... I can expand on this ... at any rate I do feel lots of things inside (and in a consistent manner, so much that I would say there is an "internal furniture") and not just when things go wrong.
you can also try various visualization exercises - yoga and various other systems - including modern systems - or you can just try to concentrate on what you experience in the body ... ?
Last edited:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
No, just a good overview.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Thanks very much Steve. This transcript is especially welcome since my computer's audio device(s?) are not presently connected. From the transcript:
"Anesthesia -- it's a modern kind of magic. It turns people into objects, and then, we hope, back again into people. And in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy."
An overspun conclusion and claim. Anesthesia is a modern medical technology that suppresses waking consciousness during medical procedures. I had a surgery 17 years ago during which I awoke twice to overhear conversations between the surgeon and one of the surgical nurses and then joined in the conversations, at which points the anesthesiologist increased the level of the anaesthetic and put me 'under' again. Anvil needs to read Thompson's recent book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy and also research the use of hypnosis to block out sensation and pain during surgeries and childbirth. I have a friend who chose to employ a hypnotist to suppress or minimize pain in the delivery of her first child, which by the way took place in a hospital.
Another extract:
"Many experiments show, and psychiatrists and neurologists know very well, that these different ways in which we experience being a self can all come apart. What this means is the basic background experience of being a unified self is a rather fragile construction of the brain. , , ,[/quote]
Not demonstrated, and far from being proved. Like all reductivists concerning consciousness, Anvil quickly abandons multivalent embodied experiences of an individual's sensed being in the {a} world -- in a meaningfully felt and perceived plenum of interactions with both thingly and conscious occupants of the same world -- which ground the combined self- and other-referentiality of lived experience.
The sense of 'self' arises early in life from the temporally ongoing experiential integration of the subjective and objective aspects of lived experience. But conceptions of the self-world relationship can come apart in a number of ways (including psychosis and drug-produced altered states of consciousness), though in the latter most people recover their accustomed sense of self-world integration when the effects of the drug fade away.
Multiple personality disorders demonstrate ways in which integral consciousness can become dis-integrated yet lead to the development of two or more internally integrated senses and experiences of different 'selves' alternately occupying the same body. This phenomenon in itself is an astonishing development in human consciousness and one of the phenomena that must be investigated and understood before we can comprehend how embodied consciousnesses respond to being-in-the-world in usually holistic ways, but in a variety of cases [and out of various causes] in broken, fragmented, ways as a result of different conditions of or events in their lives. The mind-body relation is immensely complex and can only be comprehensively understood by further investigations of human experience as lived by human individuals {persons} in their temporally unfolding lives. As Anvil himself goes on to say in the above quoted paragraph:
Yes, indeed -- the variety of types of human experiences all require explanation. But Anvil's reductive hypothesis jumps to a conclusion not based in thorough research into lived human experience out of which we might one day hope to understand what conscious and subconscious experience is in its full complexity. F.W.H. Myers began such comprehensive analysis in 1903 and it has been continued in research described in detail in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, edited by Edward Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly, essential contributions to the field of consciousness studies.
Last edited:
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I'm always leery about TED.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
But I get the sense that we long for a more satisfying "story" -- my point is not that we don't already possess the complete story that simply doesn't exist, more like the point that we may be (emotionally) fundamentally unsatisfiable.
Who is "we"?
We can possess all of the answers without having a sense of the questions that were supposed to be answered. It seems to me that it is possible for human consciousness to devise answers to itself for which questions are impossible to formulate in symbols or words--but this is a digression.
We can possess all of the answers without having a sense of the questions that were supposed to be answered.
This needs some untangling.
It seems to me that it is possible for human consciousness to devise answers to itself for which questions are impossible to formulate in symbols or words--but this is a digression.
And this. For example, are these answers also impossible to formulate in symbols or words?
"Comprehension" is something we like to pretend lies wholly within the realm of the light of logic and analysis. But its more likely hard-wired into the most basic instinctual elements of what we call "consciousness." My thesis is that we might already know the answers to the biggest questions we ask -- the problem (in my opinion) is the form of our questioning.
Again, who is "we"? What do you think the answers are that we might already know? ... and can you be more specific or expand on "the problem ... is the form of our questioning"?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Constance, as best I have been able to gather over these years, you seem to favor a view of consciousness as being strongly emergent from physical processes (meaning that though consciousness emerges from physical processes, it cannot be reduced to physical processes). Moreover, you seem to hold that this strong emergence occurs at the level of life itself, and not on the level of brains. Finally, though you hold that consciousness strongly emerges from physical processes and cannot be reduced to physical processes--thus giving consciousness the status of an ontologically distinct, non-physical phenomenon--you nonetheless feel that consciousness has causal power over the physical.
Do I have that right? If not, what would you amend?
Finally, would you say that phenomenological philosophy supports the above position? If so, can you explain how phenomenological philosophy supports the above position?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Can you explain how this is a challenge to my "perspectival" approach to the mind-body problem upon which consciousness is not something that emerges from non-physical processes but is instead the substrate within which mind and life form, giving rise to subjective experience and all it entails: emotions, affects, perceptions, and conceptions, etc.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
As far as I can tell - your approach can NOT be challenged.
Can you think of a way it could be falsified?
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
Last edited:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
It's like missing the forest for the trees, right?
"It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine. ” — Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology
Or like missing the mind for the perception of the mind.
I suspect that the question from whence phenomenal consciousness is the same question as from whence anything.
No, I cannot prove or disprove that phenomenality and being are one and the same. I can claim that physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being and that a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing.
@Michael, I too hope you will respond to these questions Steve has asked. Looking forward to your responses.
That's an accurate representation of my views except for the last sentence following the dash. Human consciousness [the only kind of species consciousness we have direct experience of] includes subconsciousness, which appears to include not only personal subconscious mentality/mentation but also deeper traces of lived being maintained in a collective unconscious. So that what we humans are capable of thinking and speculating about draws on subconscious influences affecting what we can think and even what we can experience.
Theories of 'mind', including various philosophies of mind, are in my opinion inadequate if they fail to attempt to comprehend and incorporate these subconscious or preconscious influences in characterizing the development of mind out of the basis of lived experience -- our own and potentially that of earlier species of life in the process of evolution.
Re "consciousness [having] causal power over the physical," we have various indications among some members of our own species -- experiences of psi, precognition, pk, remote viewing -- that to limited extents some human beings can a) transcend normal or standard physical limitations of perception based in ordinary human perception situated both physically and temporally in the unfolding, evolving world/universe/cosmos, and b) minimally influence both physical mechanisms [e.g., random number generators] and the consciousnesses and minds of other humans.
Setting aside the issue you raised over the capacity of consciousness to exert "causal power over the physical," your expressions of my operating premises are, to the best of my knowledge, consistent with phenomenological philosophy. But with the caveat that Varela, Thompson, Rosch et al, in the development of 'neurophenomenological' approaches to studying consciousness, do open the door to accessing subconscious influences on human experience, the same door opened by psychical researchers and researchers of paranormal experience.
Phenomenological philosophy in general places human consciousness in a given actual world in which everything experienced -- from things and natural processes to other conscious beings with whom intersubjective relations are possible -- affects consciousness and thus mind. Consciousness, mind, and world cannot be categorized as radically separate in this philosophy, and 'reality' as lived consists in the phenomenological experience of what-is and that which we can learn from the analysis of all aspects of what we experience -- including experience of the physical actualities of things and processes in nature and experience of what we feel and think in the presence of a world also lived by many instantiations of protoconsciousness and consciousness among the other species of life and other humans with whom we share a world in common.
Last edited:
Ultimately, yes. But from where and when we are/exist/feel/and think in the early 21st century, we have means, both scientific and philosophical, by which to separate these questions. I think Dimitar Sakalov provides us with an intelligent path into separating those questions in his Edge presentation in a seminar entitled "Life: What a Concept!" that I have cited earlier in this thread. I'll link again the text of his presentation, incorporating discussions of parts of it by the other seminar participants. Below that link I'll also link the online book that Edge has produced from all the presentations in that seminar, and a third link that provides links to video recordings of each presentation. The collected text of the seminar, in either form, might facilitate some further discussions here about the relationship of consciousness and mind to that which appears to exist 'outside of' {or might exist inscrutably beyond} consciousness and mind in the cosmos as a whole}.
Dimitar D. Sasselov | Edge.org
https://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf
Scroll down on this page for links to all the videotaped presentations:
Life: What A Concept! | Edge.org
I have to leave now but will return later to respond to this paragraph from @Soupie:
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I think we need to postpone discussion of your view until we have a written version of it.
I think so too, and hope @Soupie will provide such a text. I'm particularly interested in Soupie's recent suggestions of a correspondence between his own views and those of Strawson in this paragraph:
"No, I cannot prove or disprove that phenomenality and being are one and the same. I can claim that physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being and that a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing."
I've struggled to find a coherent model of consciousness, mind, and being in the Strawson papers we've read so far in this thread and would benefit from an understanding of that 'model', so I hope that Soupie might begin with it. And then perhaps compare it with other approaches in consciousness studies that he has found significant [such as Tononi's IIT and Hoffman's hypothesis].
Steve, I've now been able to connect to the entirety of this paper you linked a day or two ago re Evan Thompson's most recent book:
Anita Pacholik-Zuromska, Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy
and will read it tonight. Here is the link again:
Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, Columbia University Press,
Anita Pacholik-Zuromska, Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy
and will read it tonight. Here is the link again:
Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, Columbia University Press,
@Soupie, I said I'd return to this paragraph from your most recent post to comment on it:
"No, I cannot prove or disprove that phenomenality and being are one and the same. I can claim that physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being and that a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing."
I remain perplexed by what appears to me to be the incoherence of the three claims made there: that "phenomenality and being are one and the same"; that "physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being"; and that "a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing." I do not see how the first two claims can be understood as coherent with the third claim. Explicating the coherence of these claims as you understand it might be a good way to begin providing the text that Steve has asked for.
"No, I cannot prove or disprove that phenomenality and being are one and the same. I can claim that physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being and that a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing."
I remain perplexed by what appears to me to be the incoherence of the three claims made there: that "phenomenality and being are one and the same"; that "physics and perception give us only extrinsic access to being"; and that "a la Strawson we only know being intrinsically by way of be-ing." I do not see how the first two claims can be understood as coherent with the third claim. Explicating the coherence of these claims as you understand it might be a good way to begin providing the text that Steve has asked for.
Last edited:
This post, addressed to me, links back to my post #303 in which I responded to Steve's citation of the Goldstone and Barsalou paper "Reuniting Perception and Cognition," which is linked in post #316. Some related papers have been linked along the way. Here again is the link to Goldstone and Barsalou's paper:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.211.7875&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Steve responded to question you ask in your above post by observing that your approach cannot be challenged because it cannot be falsified:
I'll ask the same question: can you think of a way in which/a means by which your "perspectival hypothesis" re consciousness, mind, and being -- which postulates that everything that exists in being [or Being ?] arises from a single ontological primitive which you define as consciousness -- could be falsified? I can't. I think it remains a metaphysical proposition, as unfalsifiable as the materialist proposition that all that is in being as we experience it is generated from physical processes and particles. And as unfalsifiable as the recent proposition that all-that-is consists of 'information' and computation. To accept any of those propositions we have to ignore our experience of being in an actual evolved world in which subjectivity intersects with objectivity in the development of our understanding of where and what we are.
- Status