Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[smcder]

ufology, the thing is that you're not wrong that there is a problem with panpsychism. But it has nothing to do with the gibberish above.

Yes, you can periodically jump into this discussion and say "you haven't solved anything." Again you're not wrong.

But don't give yourself too much credit. Because we recognize on an even more profound level how "wrong" we are.

So your problem is not that youre wrong about us being wrong. Or more precisely you're not wrong that we don't have the answers. We know we don't have the answers.

Your problem is that you seem to think you do have a handle on consciousness. I'm actually not sure where you stand on consciousness at the moment. In the past you seem to have believed that consciousness was something that oozes from the brain like bile from the liver. Which is a fine belief so long as you own up to the plethora of problems with such a view.

I just watched a TED video by Dennett in which he patronizingly tried to explain consciousness as an illusion. Its obvious that he is explaining SE and not consciousness (feeling) at all.

This is a hard problem. Consciousness is a complex phenomenon with many moving parts. See the "5 marks of consciousness" above.

Or consume the work of Anil Seth, a neuroscientist committed to materialism who nonetheless recognizes that even if SE is completely explained via brain mechanisms that there may still be a "metaphysical residue" remaining.

Anil Seth on the Real Problem of Consciousness

Many people striving to explain consciousness are actually striving to explain Subjective Experience, which is fine but not the same thing.

Phenomenal consciousness and any explanation will have metaphysical implications for how we understand reality.

So you can continue to chastise us for "not getting anywhere" or spinning our wheels. Sure. Fine. Yes we are. But you diminish yourself when you do so in a (comically) condescending and authoritative manner because observers can see that your grasp of the problem is primitive.

(Yes, I know he has me "blocked.")

What seems to me the problem in ufology's reasoning is that I'm not aware of anyone that has actually come to Panpsychism via the Association Fallacy.

And even if someone (or everyone) had come to their conclusions via the Association Fallacy, only if it is not the case that:

• all materials possess consciousness

is Panpsychism (as Randal defines it) false.

It could be the case that:

• brains are made of materials
• and also possess consciousness
• and all materials also possess consciousness

(Socrates is a man and Socrates is also possessed of mortality and all men also are mortal.)

The problem is, of course, that I don't know how we could know that all materials possess consciousness.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie writes: "... why does phenomenal consciousness have the form/structure that it does (Easy Problem)."

David Chalmers discussed the hard and easy problems of consciousness in his 1995 paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

"At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;

• the integration of information by a cognitive system;

• the reportability of mental states;

• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

• the focus of attention;

• the deliberate control of behavior;

• the difference between wakefulness and sleep."

Here's an article by Anil Seth:

"What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable. ...

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.) ...

In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions)."

Does that make sense? Many people assume that by simply "mapping phenomenological properties onto biological mechanisms" that they are explaining "consciousness."

This what I mean about many researches explaining Subjective Experience (phenomenological properties) as opposed to phenomenal consciousness.

This is why I have been so impressed by Anil Seth. He is a neuroscientist but recognizes that while doing this mapping work is important and fruitful, it may not provide an explanation for phenomenal consciousness. (But then again it may!)

He likens his approach to neurophenomenology and iirc lists Varela as an influence in his work. He's wonderfully aware of both the scientific and philosophical ground that CS covers and seems to pull from a lot of schools. He's one to follow imo.

The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one | Aeon Essays

 

[Constance]

Here's an article by Anil Seth:

"What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable. ...

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.) ...

In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions)."

Does that make sense? Many people assume that by simply "mapping phenomenological properties onto biological mechanisms" that they are explaining "consciousness."

This what I mean about many researches explaining Subjective Experience (phenomenological properties) as opposed to phenomenal consciousness.

This is why I have been so impressed by Anil Seth. He is a neuroscientist but recognizes that while doing this mapping work is important and fruitful, it may not provide an explanation for phenomenal consciousness. (But then again it may!)

He likens his approach to neurophenomenology and iirc lists Varela as an influence in his work. He's wonderfully aware of both the scientific and philosophical ground that CS covers and seems to pull from a lot of schools. He's one to follow imo.

The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one | Aeon Essays

This neuroscientist seems to me to still be working at the level of establishing correlations between what can be measured in brain activity and what is being assumed to be the depth of the integrated content of experiences -- both subconscious and conscious -- reflected in both waking and dreaming states.

Re this sentence, for example:

"Complexity measures of consciousness have already been used to track changing levels of awareness across states of sleep and anaesthesia."

These measurements might indicate varying physical levels of brain activity, but I do not see how they can measure the complexity of the contents of the mind in these states. What is the full complement of the content of one's dreaming mind? What accounts for the veridical experiences undergone in real time by victims of cardiac arrest whose brain activity has flat-lined by the time they reach emergency rooms? Why does the minimal level of brain activity of persons in comas thought to be permanent radically spike at the time the decision has been made [out of the patient's hearing] to shut off their life support? How many kinds of past and even present experiential content are being processed by our subconscious minds as we go about our ordinary interactions with others, with tasks, with texts we're reading in daily 'waking' consciousness? Our conscious and subconscious minds influence one another; their boundaries are mutually permeable. We remember events, feelings, and insights absorbed in both levels of consciousness, and at times these meanings, these significations, do not correspond with one another. I think that might be the primary reason why we (and other animals) dream -- in an attempt to integrate the different levels of what we have sensed in waking consciousness and subconsciousness.

I don't think that neuroscience has the tools/means by which to uncover the contents of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious experience, or indeed to comprehend the intricacy of the interactivity of these variously absorbed contents.

 

[smcder]

I suppose I should read the article ...

 

[Constance]

I need to remember that next time I get really mad at someone - er, I mean next time my cortical singular gyrate excretes high levels of cortico-opial neuro-styulates at alpha frequencies above 10Hz.

Perhaps some relief might be obtainable if we can find a path to the depths the sub-corticular winnebago area. That has a relaxing sound to me.

 

[Randall]

Olivia Goldhill's article is so good that I'm going to c&p it here [in a next post] and dedicate that post to Randall / @Usual Suspect.

Sure. There's some points to be made there. However I'm not sure what it speaks to specifically, or why you think you need to dedicate it to me. If you're wanting to address something specifically to me, then something that addresses specific points made in a meaningful way rather than comments about the personal traits or behavior of the writer might be more advantageous.

 

[smcder]

Here's an article by Anil Seth:

"Soupie, post: 261017, member: 6548"

"What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’."

smcder is that accurate? mind and matter stuff makes me think of substance dualism, is that debate still 'raging'?

I do like that he says both scientists and philosophers make consciousness more mysterious than it needs to be - but it's a useful piece of rhetoric nonetheless - the progression is:

mystery -> mystical -> religion, woo, fuzzy thinking, non-scientific etc.

I would also ask: how mysterious does it need to be? It is currently, technically a "mystery" meaning we aren't sure in how to go about solving it or what a solution would look like.

But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers.

smcder "the rise of modern" (insert field here)" also a handy phrase ... and what approach does rely on "philosophical research" to provide the answers? And really, any guidance in any field is going to be "philosophical" if not "Philosophical".

Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable. ...

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.) ...

smcder I like the overall approach - but note that calling this the "real" problem and saying the hard problem is a "distraction" is to say that what science can accomplish is what's "real" ... another way he could have said this is less rhetorical, for example simply stating "this approach is one that science can take"

In the same way, tackling the real problem of consciousness depends on distinguishing different aspects of consciousness, and mapping their phenomenological properties (subjective first-person descriptions of what conscious experiences are like) onto underlying biological mechanisms (objective third-person descriptions)."

Does that make sense? Many people assume that by simply "mapping phenomenological properties onto biological mechanisms" that they are explaining "consciousness."

This what I mean about many researches explaining Subjective Experience (phenomenological properties) as opposed to phenomenal consciousness.

smcder it makes sense and that's what science can currently attempt, but again why call this the "real" problem of consciousness instead of saying "one aspect of"?

This is why I have been so impressed by Anil Seth. He is a neuroscientist but recognizes that while doing this mapping work is important and fruitful, it may not provide an explanation for phenomenal consciousness. (But then again it may!)

smcder that's good and it's owing to Nagel, Chalmers and many others pointing this out over and over (which is what philosophers do) that some are starting to not ignore it ...

He likens his approach to neurophenomenology and iirc lists Varela as an influence in his work. He's wonderfully aware of both the scientific and philosophical ground that CS covers and seems to pull from a lot of schools. He's one to follow imo.

smcder reading this article critically and looking over some of his very impressive list of papers - I'm not sure I'd say "wonderfully aware" but "aware" He doesn't list any philosophical (formal) eduction but that's ok. He even includes philosophers in his work! (just don't let their "research" provide the answers!) Philosophers and scientists do need to be aware of one another's work but also disciplined to stay in their fields - an exact line, I realize, is hard to draw. I would note there is a philosophy of science, but no science of philosophy - so the relationship might be a little asymmetrical?

The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one | Aeon Essays

smcder I went through the whole article in the same manner - with a critical eye to rhetorical elements ... I found the reference to "beast-machines" and "flesh bags" strange - it didn't seem to fit in the article and I wasn't sure what he was trying to accomplish by wanting us to think of ourselves this way?

Does he expand on those ideas "flesh-bag/beast machines" in other writings?

 

[smcder]

Perhaps some relief might be obtainable if we can find a path to the depths the sub-corticular winnebago area. That has a relaxing sound to me.

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

Anil Seth

The Cybernetic Bayesian Brain available as PDF

Is there a single principle by which neural operations can account for perception,
cognition, action, and even consciousness? A strong candidate is now taking
shape in the form of “predictive processing”. On this theory, brains engage in predictive
inference on the causes of sensory inputs by continuous minimization of
prediction errors or informational “free energy”. Predictive processing can account,
supposedly, not only for perception, but also for action and for the essential contribution
of the body and environment in structuring sensorimotor interactions. In
this paper I draw together some recent developments within predictive processing
that involve predictive modelling of internal physiological states (interoceptive inference),
and integration with “enactive” and “embodied” approaches to cognitive
science (predictive perception of sensorimotor contingencies). The upshot is a development
of predictive processing that originates, not in Helmholtzian perception-
as-inference, but rather in 20th-century cybernetic principles that emphasized
homeostasis and predictive control. This way of thinking leads to (i) a new view of
emotion as active interoceptive inference; (ii) a common predictive framework linking
experiences of body ownership, emotion, and exteroceptive perception; (iii)
distinct interpretations of active inference as involving disruptive and disambiguatory—
not just confirmatory—actions to test perceptual hypotheses; (iv) a neurocognitive
operationalization of the “mastery of sensorimotor contingencies” (where
sensorimotor contingencies reflect the rules governing sensory changes produced
by various actions); and (v) an account of the sense of subjective reality of perceptual
contents (“perceptual presence”) in terms of the extent to which predictive
models encode potential sensorimotor relations (this being “counterfactual richness”).
This is rich and varied territory, and surveying its landmarks emphasizes
the need for experimental tests of its key contributions.

....

I first identify an unusual starting point for PP, not in Helmholtzian perception-as-inference, but in the mid 20th-century cybernetic
theories associated with W. Ross Ashby (1952, 1956; Conant & Ashby 1970). Linking these origins to their modern expression in Karl Friston’s “free energy principle” (2010), perception emerges as a consequence of a more fundamental
imperative towards homeostasis and control, and not as a process designed to furnish a detailed inner “world model” suitable for cognition
and action planning. The ensuing view of PP, while still fluently accounting for (exteroceptive) perception, turns out to be more naturally
applicable to the predictive perception of internal bodily states, instantiating a process of interoceptive inference (Seth 2013; Seth et al.
2011). This concept provides a natural way of thinking of the neural substrates of emotional and mood experiences, and also describes a
common mechanism by which interoceptive and exteroceptive signals can be integrated to provide a unified experience of body ownership
and conscious selfhood (Blanke & Metzinger 2009; Limanowski & Blankenburg 2013).

---

 

[smcder]

Google search "critique of neuroscience"

smcder So the point of all this is not to throw out the neuro-scientists but to think a lot about what neuroscience has and hasn't/can and can't do ... and the implications of the current projects in neuroscience which, like all human activity, are full of social, political and philosophical problems and agendas.

Neuroscience/Criticism - Wikiversity

Neuroscience has been criticized by some philosophers because the methods and inferences are suspicious of not being logic neither scientific, when relating the brain to the mind, therefore this discipline would not be scientific, at least in the way it has been applied.

It is commonly thought that neuroscience is an authentic understanding of the mind, with many people and institutions having invested a lot of capital on neuroscience research. Such investments may lead to the increased scarcity of research presenting critical or contradictory results within the discipline. Public and economic interests withstanding, it is possible for an (yet unknown) proportion of neuroscience research to be susceptible to confirmation bias, which does not mean the results aren't informative, but instead do not support hypotheses implicitly predicated on the mind-body problem-- i.e., they do not glean insight about brain function.

from 2010

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

Neuroscience & Critique (2015)

sample chapter available

Neuroscience and Critique is a ground-breaking edited collection which reflects on the impact of neuroscience in contemporary social science and the humanities. It is the first book to consider possibilities for a critique of the theories, practices, and implications of contemporary neuroscience. Bringing together leading scholars from several disciplines, the contributors draw upon a range of perspectives, including cognitive neuroscience, critical philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism, and also critically examine several key ideas in contemporary neuroscience.

I also think of the letter exchanged by Ian McGilchrist and Stephen Pinker - the exchange is available on McGilchrist's site dedicated to his book The Master and His Emissary.

Also, Catherine Malibou's What Should We Do With Our Brain?

What Should We Do with Our Brain? // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

Another area we've barely touched on is neuroscience and criminal law (including the question of free will/personal responsibility) - if we are not free to do other than we did - what do we do with those who (unfreely) broke the law?

This article takes an interesting approach and looks at the history of the question - we tend to leave out the history of a subject and give ourselves too much credit for our current ideas being "new" when they generally have a long history.

http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2034&context=fac_pubs

 

[Constance]

Google search "critique of neuroscience"

smcder So the point of all this is not to throw out the neuro-scientists but to think a lot about what neuroscience has and hasn't/can and can't do ... and the implications of the current projects in neuroscience which, like all human activity, are full of social, political and philosophical problems and agendas.

Neuroscience/Criticism - Wikiversity

Neuroscience has been criticized by some philosophers because the methods and inferences are suspicious of not being logic neither scientific, when relating the brain to the mind, therefore this discipline would not be scientific, at least in the way it has been applied.

It is commonly thought that neuroscience is an authentic understanding of the mind, with many people and institutions having invested a lot of capital on neuroscience research. Such investments may lead to the increased scarcity of research presenting critical or contradictory results within the discipline. Public and economic interests withstanding, it is possible for an (yet unknown) proportion of neuroscience research to be susceptible to confirmation bias, which does not mean the results aren't informative, but instead do not support hypotheses implicitly predicated on the mind-body problem-- i.e., they do not glean insight about brain function.

from 2010

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

Neuroscience & Critique (2015)

sample chapter available

Neuroscience and Critique is a ground-breaking edited collection which reflects on the impact of neuroscience in contemporary social science and the humanities. It is the first book to consider possibilities for a critique of the theories, practices, and implications of contemporary neuroscience. Bringing together leading scholars from several disciplines, the contributors draw upon a range of perspectives, including cognitive neuroscience, critical philosophy, psychoanalysis, and feminism, and also critically examine several key ideas in contemporary neuroscience.

I also think of the letter exchanged by Ian McGilchrist and Stephen Pinker - the exchange is available on McGilchrist's site dedicated to his book The Master and His Emissary.

Also, Catherine Malibou's What Should We Do With Our Brain?

What Should We Do with Our Brain? // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

Another area we've barely touched on is neuroscience and criminal law (including the question of free will/personal responsibility) - if we are not free to do other than we did - what do we do with those who (unfreely) broke the law?

This article takes an interesting approach and looks at the history of the question - we tend to leave out the history of a subject and give ourselves too much credit for our current ideas being "new" when they generally have a long history.

http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2034&context=fac_pubs

Thanks for the links, Steve, and for your comments and questions interspersed between extracts from some of them gathered in this post and also for your comments on the first of the two Anil Seth papers @Soupie has linked.

[edited]Reading several times through this present post re some critiques of neuroscientific claims concerning brain, mind, and consciousness I think I've been able to sort out your comments from extracsts of some sources you link, but it would be easier for me to do that if you would repost that post with your own remarks highlighted and underscored in another color. Your own mind is so agile that you are more capable than I am of absorbing different positions and texts re the mind/brain issues and juggling them.

I'm going to post some longer extracts from the second Seth paper, re 'predictive processing' within the brain, and respond to them in some detail later tonight or tomorrow. From what I've read of Seth so far, he is just another in a long series of neuroscientists whose goal is explain away the complexity and nature of consciousness with a hypothesis based in supposedly explanatory neural processing. While his approach is as reductive as that of most neuroscientists, his predictive processing hypothesis appears to me to be distinct in reinstating a homunculus residing within the brain case to replace actual embodied and enactive experiential being-in-the-world as the source of consciousness (at all its levels) and of mind as they are developed in and out of biological evolution.

 

[Constance]

Sure. There's some points to be made there. However I'm not sure what it speaks to specifically, or why you think you need to dedicate it to me. If you're wanting to address something specifically to me, then something that addresses specific points made in a meaningful way rather than comments about the personal traits or behavior of the writer might be more advantageous.

I dedicated the posting of Olivia Goldhill's paper to you because it responds so well to the claims and complaints you registered in your post of about a week ago at

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

 

[Randall]

I dedicated the posting of Olivia Goldhill's paper to you because it responds so well to the claims and complaints you registered in your post of about a week ago at

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

The idea that continuing to approach the issue the same way will prove pointless is more than a mere "complaint". Guys like Chalmers and Friedman talk about progress coming from something new and radical or different and unexpected. I'm not sure how we'd apply that here, but whatever it is, it's not more walls of text, volumes of books, and hours of multimedia. None of that is new, radical, different, or unexpected. So maybe if we set all that aside and tried another approach, maybe something other than someone else's pre-existing ideas might come out of it?

 

[Constance]

The idea that continuing to approach the issue the same way will prove pointless is more than a mere "complaint".

What "same way" are you talking about? In this thread we've followed the development of consciousness studies in its interdisciplinary proliferations over the last thirty years and continuing.

I'm not sure how we'd apply that here, but whatever it is, it's not more walls of text, volumes of books, and hours of multimedia.

Not sure what you mean by 'multimedia' other than the links to videotaped lectures posted from time to time in the midst of links to, extracts from papers, and often whole papers (and links to some whole books available online and elsewhere) that present significant contributions to the progress of consciousness studies. The authors of these contributions to CS, whether philosophers or scientists, express themselves in "walls of text," and what they offer cannot be understood if it is not read in detail.

None of that is new, radical, different, or unexpected. So maybe if we set all that aside and tried another approach, maybe something other than someone else's pre-existing ideas might come out of it?

You evidently haven't been paying attention to all that's been linked and discussed here or you would have recognized the increasing integration of philosophical and neuroscientific approaches to consciousness and mind that we've been surveying.

If you have something of your own to offer, something so 'radically new' that it need not take account of the premises and developments in thinking and scholarship in these fields, go ahead and offer it.

Otherwise please do quit your vague and repetitious complaining about the thread. If you don't like it, you can always stop dropping in and finding yourself frustrated and resentful that you don't see the point of these discussions.

 

[Constance]

I'm relinking this paper by Atmanspacher on Jung and Pauli's Dual-Aspect Monism to our current discussions of monism since we haven't yet considered and discussed it.

Dual-Aspect Monism`a la Pauli and Jung
Harald Atmanspacher
Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, Freiburg Collegium Helveticum, Zurich

Abstract: Dual-aspect monism and neutral monism offer interesting alternatives to mainstream positions concerning the mind-matter problem. Both assume a domain underlying the mind-matter distinction, but they also differ in definitive ways. In the 20th century, variants of both positions have been advanced by a number of protagonists. One of these variants, the dual-aspect monism due to Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung, will be described and commented on in detail. As a unique feature in the Pauli-Jung conception, the duality of mental and material aspects is specified in terms of a complementarity. This sounds innocent, but entails a number of peculiarities distinguishing their conjecture from other approaches.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/408b/55a0421223fbe8217a34d7621fd5ebbc349f.pdf

 

[Randall]

... If you don't like it, you can always stop dropping in and finding yourself frustrated and resentful that you don't see the point of these discussions ...

Pointing out the seeming futility of an approach is at least as constructive as continuing to engage in such futility, and even if by chance all the effort leads to some epiphany, words aren't going to be able to adequately convey it, especially not someone else's words, and this "dual-aspect" theory is yet another example. It isn't really anything new here or in philosophy. It's just another label for the idea that minds and materials are both part of a bigger picture.

The recurring experience in all my reflections is that every time I think I may have made some breakthrough, I find out someone else decades, centuries, or millennia earlier, have already crossed that bridge, or one pretty much like it, but at least I have the small consolation that it was my brain came-up with it rather than having to have read it in some else's paper. Maybe the Internet has made it too easy for people. Just cut & paste and then add ten or twelve thousand dollars of institutional extortion money to say they did it in some school and suddenly people think they're special.

The only really different thing that has come out of these discussions for me so far is the way Chalmers frames consciousness in terms of experience and meaning and asks how it's possible for that to come out of, well, pretty much anything else, no matter what we might call it ( matter, particles, energy, physical structure ). But even that isn't a new problem. It's just his particular vector on it and he's managed to get a lot of notoriety for giving it a label. Yet in his lectures we still see him admit that he doesn't have the answers either, and he almost pleads with his audience that if we're going to make progress we need to try something else.

In the meantime, I'm fully prepared to admit that my posts are almost as useless as posting walls of other people's material, but I like the experience of doing it and maybe by occasionally trying to nudge others outside their habitual comfort zones something new might come out of it. So once in a while if I "drop-in" and do that, please don't confuse it with trolling. It's not. I don't need a degree in philosophy to be able to express the same courage of hopelessness others have with respect to the problem.

 

[smcder]

 

[Soupie]

@smcder @Constance

As you should know, I don't think there is a casual relationship between the body and the mind; I think there is a perceptual/perspectival relationship. Thus, I believe that any neuroscientist seeking to explain how the body causes consciousness and mind will fail.

(As noted several posts back, my notions of consciousness and mind seem best captured by the terms protoconsciousness [the ocean] and consciousness [waves within the ocean].)

Constance, your position as clarified above is that consciousness/mind strongly emerges from life processes as an ontologically new and distinct entity. And that once emerged, evolves and unfolds presumably along side the physical but according to its own, non-physical processes. Though he may deny it, I think Smcder has an affinity for this non-local approach as well. However, please don't project this view onto my approach as that will create confusion for you.)

Where I do agree with the neuroscientists is in the notion that the mind is essentially brain-based. (IE, the waves in the ocean of protoconsciousness are very likely, er, brain waves.) Again, I'm not saying that the mind emerges strongly from the brain. I'm saying the brain (or more specifically brain processes) and the mind are the same thing!

Again, the brain doesn't cause the mind, and the mind doesn't emerge strongly from the brain. Brain processes and the stream of consciousness are one and the same.

The structural mismatch question then needs to be answered. If brain processes and the stream of consciousness are one and the same, why do they seem to be structurally mismatched? My answer is 1) there has been some successful albeit primitive matching between brain processes and the stream of consciousness (see color perception), and 2) the perspectival approach to the Mindy-Body Problem logically leads to a Direct Scientific Realism (also known as Critical Realism) approach to perception--and knowledge itself?--therefore we shouldn't be surprised that brain processes and the stream of consciousness have a structural mismatch.

This means--on this view--that the stream of consciousness (the mind) will in principle never be fully explain via brain mechanics. At the most, we will continue to map brain processes and properties of the mind onto one another, but there will never be a 1:1 match. And there will never be a hard causal relationship established, only correlational relationships bidirectionally between brain processes and mind processes.

 

[Constance]

Google search "critique of neuroscience"

smcder: So the point of all this is not to throw out the neuro-scientists but to think a lot about what neuroscience has and hasn't/can and can't do ... and the implications of the current projects in neuroscience which, like all human activity, are full of social, political and philosophical problems and agendas.

Steve, among the helpful links you provided in that post I think the paper by Raymond Tallis is the most specific and articulate in identifying the reasons why neuroscience cannot provide a complete account of consciousness and mind. If we all read this paper we might be able to arrive at some agreement about the uses and limitations of neuroscience for an understanding of consciousness and mind.

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves
Raymond Tallis

Extract:

“. . . Ironically, by locating consciousness in particular parts of the material of the brain, neuroscientism actually underlines this mystery of intentionality, opening up a literal, physical space between conscious experiences and that which they are about. This physical space is, paradoxically, both underlined and annulled: The gap between the glass of which you are aware and the neural impulses that are supposed to be your awareness of it is both a spatial gap and a non-spatial gap. The nerve impulses inside your cranium are six feet away from the glass, and yet, if the nerve impulses reach out or refer to the glass, as it were, they do so by having the glass “inside” them. The task of attempting to express the conceptual space of intentionality in purely physical terms is a dizzying one. The perception of the glass inherently is of the glass, whereas the associated neural activity exists apart from the cause of the light bouncing off the glass. This also means, incidentally, that the neural activity could exist due to a different cause. For example, you could have the same experience of the glass, even if the glass were not present, by tickling the relevant neurons. The resulting perception will be mistaken, because it is of an object that is not in fact physically present before you. But it would be ludicrous to talk of the associated neural activity as itself mistaken; neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken.

Let us tease out the mystery of intentionality a bit more, if only to anticipate the usual materialist trick of burying intentionality in causation by brushing past perception to its behavioral consequences. If perceptions really are material effects (in one place — the brain) of material causes (in another place — the object), then intentionality seems to run in the contrary direction to and hence to lie outside causation. That your perception of the glass requires the neural activity in your visual cortex to reach causally upstream to the events that caused it is, again, utterly mysterious. Moreover, it immediately raises two questions. First, why does the backward glance of a set of effects to some of their causes stop at a particular point in the causal chain — in this case, at the glass? And, second, how does this reaching backward create a solid, stable object out of something as unstable as an interference with the light? The ordinary inference implicit in everyday perception is that the events which cause nerve impulses are manifestations of something that transcends those events — namely, an “object” that is the relatively permanent locus of possibility for many future events — making intentionality even more mysterious.

The bounce back is necessary to mark the point at which sense experiences are, as it were, “received”; the same point where, via a variety of intermediate steps, they can trigger behavioral outputs. This is a crucial point of demarcation within the causal nexus between perceptual input and behavioral output. And yet there is nothing within the nervous system that marks this point of arrival, or the point at which arrival passes over into departure (perceptual input into behavioral output). Nor is there anything to distinguish, on the one hand, those parts of the nervous system that are supposed to be the point of arrival of neural activity as a component of conscious experience from, on the other, those parts that are mere unconscious way stations en route to some other point of arrival.

In any event, identifying experiences with neural activity requires that intentionality, which has no place in the material world — since no material object is about any other material object — nevertheless fastens us into the material world. Examination of neural activity reveals only an unbroken causal chain passing from sensory inputs to motor outputs. Intentionality is significant because it is that which opens up the otherwise causally closed physical world. It lies at the root of our being a point of departure in the world, a site at which events originate — that is, of our being actors. And the weaving together of individual intentional spaces creates the human world — that shared, public, temporally deep sphere of possibilities, that outside-of-nature which makes our individual and collective human lives possible. It lies at the origin of everything that distances us from the material world. Without intentionality, there is no point of arrival of perceptions, no point of departure for actions, no input and output, no person located in a world. It is intentionality that opens up the present to the absent, the actual to the possible, and the now to the past and the future, so that we are able to live in a world that is an infinitely elaborated space of possibilities, rather than being simply “wired in” to what is. These are large claims, some of which I have already elaborated in these pages (see “How Can I Possibly Be Free?,” Summer 2010). But the aspects presented here will be enough to wrest ourselves back from being assimilated into our brains. . . . .”

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

 

[Constance]

@smcder @Constance

As you should know, I don't think there is a casual relationship between the body and the mind; I think there is a perceptual/perspectival relationship. Thus, I believe that any neuroscientist seeking to explain how the body causes consciousness and mind will fail.

(As noted several posts back, my notions of consciousness and mind seem best captured by the terms protoconsciousness [the ocean] and consciousness [waves within the ocean].)

I think I now understand the ontological/metaphysical way in which you are using the term 'protoconsciousness'. Your usage constitutes a great metaphysical leap beyond the way in which the concept of protoconsciousness is used in philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and affective neuroscience (per Panksepp and his colleagues). Where the latter disciplines focus on degrees of protoconsciousness and prereflective consciousness as developments in the evolution of reflective consciousness and mind in biological species, your ontological concept of protoconsciousness is meant to refer to a form of consciousness assumed to be present (or potential) in a postulated substrate of all developments of being, both physical and subjective. Is that correct?

Constance, your position as clarified above is that consciousness/mind strongly emerges from life processes as an ontologically new and distinct entity. And that once emerged, evolves and unfolds presumably along side the physical but according to its own, non-physical processes. Though he may deny it, I think Smcder has an affinity for this non-local approach as well. However, please don't project this view onto my approach as that will create confusion for you.)

It's not clear to me which position ["this non-local approach"] you are attributing to Steve/smcder. Is it the apparently non-local approach you are taking or something different? In either case, I don't think I am projecting Steve's ideas 'onto your approach'. As I see it, Steve remains open to all or most possible approaches to/interpretations of consciousness and mind.

Where I do agree with the neuroscientists is in the notion that the mind is essentially brain-based. (IE, the waves in the ocean of protoconsciousness are very likely, er, brain waves.) Again, I'm not saying that the mind emerges strongly from the brain. I'm saying the brain (or more specifically brain processes) and the mind are the same thing!

I think I do understand what you're claiming re the identity of mind and brain. As you know, my view is that consciousness and mind as we experience them constitute an inescapable confluence of objective and subjective aspects of being, an integration of mind and world that emerges with the evolution of life. As Husserl expressed the core phenomenological insight: no consciousness without things; no things without consciousness. The world precedes and exceeds all living beings in all the evolutionary stages of embodied existence, of lived experience. Consciousness and mind develop out of the grounds of experienced being.

Again, the brain doesn't cause the mind, and the mind doesn't emerge strongly from the brain. Brain processes and the stream of consciousness are one and the same.

As you know I disagree with the equation of brain processes with the streams of consciousness we experience moment by moment. I think that is a claim that needs to be proved. There is no doubt that brain processes enable our awareness of the world in which we exist and of ourselves as existents within it. We could not learn, think, or act without the support/the facilitation of our learning, thinking, and acting provided by neurological development. At the same time, the nature of consciousness is not identical to, and thus cannot be reduced to, the nature of neurological activity in our brains.

The structural mismatch question then needs to be answered. If brain processes and the stream of consciousness are one and the same, why do they seem to be structurally mismatched?

I think they seem to be 'structurally mismatched' because they are structurally mismatched, as you go on to recognize in the rest of your post.

My answer is 1) there has been some successful albeit primitive matching between brain processes and the stream of consciousness (see color perception), and 2) the perspectival approach to the Mindy-Body Problem logically leads to a Direct Scientific Realism (also known as Critical Realism) approach to perception--and knowledge itself?--therefore we shouldn't be surprised that brain processes and the stream of consciousness have a structural mismatch.

This means--on this view--that the stream of consciousness (the mind) will in principle never be fully explain via brain mechanics. At the most, we will continue to map brain processes and properties of the mind onto one another, but there will never be a 1:1 match. And there will never be a hard causal relationship established, only correlational relationships bidirectionally between brain processes and mind processes.

". . . This means--on this view--that the stream of consciousness (the mind) will in principle never be fully explained via brain mechanics. At the most, we will continue to map brain processes and properties of the mind onto one another, but there will never be a 1:1 match. And there will never be a hard causal relationship established, only correlational relationships bidirectionally between brain processes and mind processes."


Not sure what you mean by 'mind processes'; can you clarify that? It seems to me that our minds are -- or can become -- as open to the world as our consciousnesses are because both consciousness and mind are inescapably co-relational with the multivalent complexity of the experienced world in which we find ourselves existing. The question then becomes: to what extent can we confidently say, try to say, that we understand the relationship between Being {the Being of All-That-Is} and the nature of our own be-ing.