Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[smcder]

What Consciousness Is Not

 

[Constance]

Jung is the one on our right, right?

 

[Constance]

What Consciousness Is Not

Excellent. Many thanks for posting this link, especially at this point in our explorations and discussions.

 

[smcder]

Excellent. Many thanks for posting this link, especially at this point in our explorations and discussions.

This is a review of Chalmers 2010 book - I skimmed it and he seems remarkably succinct and thorough. I may try to outline it as I think it's a pretty thorough critique as well as a laundry list of problems in consciousness.

 

[smcder]

What Consciousness Is Not

Raymond Tallis

"This is a great pity. For the seemingly inescapable failure of neural or materialist accounts of consciousness opens up a world of intellectual possibility. As Jerry Fodor has suggested about our attempts to understand consciousness, “The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling.... There is hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.” Indeed, this seems almost certain, given how inadequate we already know our scientific orthodoxies to be at accounting for the truths of consciousness. Just as rethinking the nature of light transformed our understanding of the physical world, shattering seemingly secure theories of physics to give rise to relativity theory and quantum mechanics, when we are finally able to account for the unfathomable depths of our own minds, it is sure to have profound and transformative consequences for our understanding of what kind of world we live in, and what manner of being we are."

 

[smcder]

The Fodor quote comes from this piece: LRB · Jerry Fodor · Headaches have themselves: Panpsychism

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

 

[smcder]

LRB · Jerry Fodor · Headaches have themselves: Panpsychism

Fodor details how Strawson comes to the conclusion of Panpsychism ... it is not by way of the Association Fallacy.

 

[smcder]

Fodor again

"Nor, having swallowed this really enormous camel, does Strawson propose to strain at the gnats. Consider, for example: he thinks (quite rightly) that there are no experiences without subjects of experience; if there’s a pain, it must be somebody or something’s pain; somebody or something must be in it. What, then, could it be that has the experiences that panpsychists attribute to ultimate things? Nothing purely material, surely, since that would just raise the hard problem all over again. So maybe something immaterial? But monism is in force; since the constituents of tables and chairs are made of matter, so too is everything else. So, Strawson is strongly inclined to conclude, the subjects of the experiences that basic things have must be the experiences themselves. Part of the surcharge that we pay for panpsychism (not, after all, itself an immediately plausible ontology) is that we must give up on the commonsense distinction between the experience and the experiencer. At the basic level, headaches have themselves."

And here's Tallis' quote entire:

In a way, I’m quite sympathetic to all that. I think it’s strictly true that we can’t, as things stand now, so much as imagine the solution of the hard problem. The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling. (That’s assuming what’s by no means obvious: that we are smart enough to solve it at all.) Philosophers used to think (some still do) that a bit of analytical tidying up would make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us. - Jerry Fodor

 

[Soupie]

I'm not suggesting that the following is THE answer. However, it is certainly an approach that I have been a long time coming to. Even sans our discussion of the MBP, I have been leaning towards a picture of Being as analog as opposed to atomistic. Coupled with my affinity for Panpsychism, then, this approach is exciting for me to say the least.

(In other sources, @smcder, someone noted that this would raise the "decomposition" problem as you anticipated.)

In any case, I will begin to read more about this approach.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/05568641.2015.1106709?journalCode=rppa20

Edit cants seem to find full version

Ps The Tallis material has been excellent. On Amazon, someone noted it was even more so because Tallis offers no alternative approach!

 

[William Strathmann]

Soupie and all, attached is a PDF for the article of which you linked the abstract above. I found the paper on Itay Shani's page at Academia. edu.

Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience

Looks interesting.

 

[Soupie]

Soupie and all, attached is a PDF for the article of which you linked the abstract above. I found the paper on Itay Shani's page at Academia. edu.

Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience

Looks interesting.

Thanks! And here's a review/critique of it:

Cosmopsychism and the Blobject

Good comments in comment section, including two by the author.

 

[Randall]

... 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? ...

All experiences are veridical experiences. So it's not necessary to add that qualifier. The question is whether or not the interpretation of those experiences can be considered reasonable or accurate. We've been through the issue of NDEs more than once and identified the weaknesses in assuming that such experiences represent continuity of consciousness after death. For some people those weaknesses don't dissuade them from their beliefs, which they're entitled to, but at the same time, none of the reasoning I've encountered as to why people continue to have such beliefs regardless of the weaknesses has yet to add-up to anything objectively substantial.

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.

Convincing evidence doesn't always require non-existent tools. Sometimes the tools we have suffice well enough. In the case of NDE/OOBEs for example, experiments involving the placement of specific messages up and out of sight of patients in operating rooms so that in the event of and NDE/OOBE the patient could float up and see the message and report back upon regaining consciousness have never provided any verifiable unambiguous substantial evidence.

These are simple experiments with simple tools that could easily produce powerful results, and if all the beliefs about NDE/OOBE experiences were true, by now we'd have mountains of evidence so powerful that denying it would be completely unreasonable. But such evidence doesn't exist. So it's not simply a matter of wait and see while having faith that future equipment will verify people's beliefs. All that's ever been needed is some basic logic, language, and a few props.

 

[Soupie]

"Fourthly, the model assumes that the absolute can be likened to a vast, dynamically fluctuating, ocean (or field). In accordance with the lateral duality principle, this ocean has two complementary sides: concealed, and revealed. Since there is nothing outside the absolute, its revealed side must be thought of as revealed to observers constructed and situated within the ocean (cf. Mathews 2011). To such observers, it appears as a spatially extended medium, evolving in time, and differentially structured into various phases and configurations. In short, it appears as what, in common parlance, we identify as physical nature. The concealed side, however, is presumed, on the present account, to be an intrinsically sentient medium, a vast ocean of consciousness. Needless to say, the phenomenal contents of this medium, the ebbs and flows of experience coursing it, are private and inscrutable. In other words, the observers mentioned above face an asymmetry between the revealed and the concealed dimensions of the absolute: the methods and modes of acquaintance which grant them access to the former do not provide access to the latter. ...

It is worth stressing, however, that the distinction between a revealed and a concealed order, or dimension, of reality does not amount to ontological dualism: i.e., to the affirmation of the existence of two utterly distinct domains of being, inexplicably fastened together. Rather, there is only one ocean and it is an intrinsically sentient medium, a sea of consciousness. At the same time, this oceanic plenum is a dynamic entity whose incessant activity and heterogeneous distribution of intensity give rise to various quasi-independent patterns and configurations, co-evolving in mutual interaction. Now, some of these emergent forms—those which qualify as genuine subjects (see below)—are such that they are capable of perceiving structural patterns of these interactions, which, in turn, are internally presented as an ordered external layout, an environment. The revealed side of the absolute is, on the present account, nothing more than the sum total of these presented environments: it is the absolute in its appearance as an exterior complement to the subjective realities of created selves."

 

[Constance]

"Fourthly, the model assumes that the absolute can be likened to a vast, dynamically fluctuating, ocean (or field). In accordance with the lateral duality principle, this ocean has two complementary sides: concealed, and revealed. Since there is nothing outside the absolute, its revealed side must be thought of as revealed to observers constructed and situated within the ocean (cf. Mathews 2011). To such observers, it appears as a spatially extended medium, evolving in time, and differentially structured into various phases and configurations. In short, it appears as what, in common parlance, we identify as physical nature. The concealed side, however, is presumed, on the present account, to be an intrinsically sentient medium, a vast ocean of consciousness. Needless to say, the phenomenal contents of this medium, the ebbs and flows of experience coursing it, are private and inscrutable. In other words, the observers mentioned above face an asymmetry between the revealed and the concealed dimensions of the absolute: the methods and modes of acquaintance which grant them access to the former do not provide access to the latter. ...

It is worth stressing, however, that the distinction between a revealed and a concealed order, or dimension, of reality does not amount to ontological dualism: i.e., to the affirmation of the existence of two utterly distinct domains of being, inexplicably fastened together. Rather, there is only one ocean and it is an intrinsically sentient medium, a sea of consciousness. At the same time, this oceanic plenum is a dynamic entity whose incessant activity and heterogeneous distribution of intensity give rise to various quasi-independent patterns and configurations, co-evolving in mutual interaction. Now, some of these emergent forms—those which qualify as genuine subjects (see below)—are such that they are capable of perceiving structural patterns of these interactions, which, in turn, are internally presented as an ordered external layout, an environment. The revealed side of the absolute is, on the present account, nothing more than the sum total of these presented environments: it is the absolute in its appearance as an exterior complement to the subjective realities of created selves."

Excellent.

 

[Soupie]

"The fifth basic postulate of the model concerns the character of cosmic consciousness as it appears in relation to individual creature’s consciousness. On the present account, cosmic consciousness is on par with the Vedic notion of pure consciousness in that, like the latter, it serves as a deeper layer of consciousness grounding the particular streams of consciousness of individual creatures (more precisely, for reasons that are explained below, the relation between cosmic consciousness and individual creature consciousness is that of partial grounding). Cosmic consciousness may be likened to the vacuum in quantum field theory. Just as the vacuum is really a plenum, constantly teeming with spontaneous activity, so we may think of cosmic consciousness as an inner expanse constantly teeming with a spontaneous buzz of qualitative feel. And just as the vacuum serves as a relatively homogenous background against which local field excitations, and patterns thereof, are discerned as events and entities (i.e., as the particles and systems of our world) so we may think of cosmic consciousness as a background against which local interference patterns are discerned as phenomenal states, viz., as the states characteristic of the consciousness of individual creatures (more on this below). Thus, on this view, the universal medium which grounds the particular states of consciousness of individual creatures is an intrinsically sentient medium, or as I call it elsewhere (Shani 2014), an endo-phenomenological expanse. As such, it is a locus of experience even in the absence of any stimulation or manipulation, but at the same time it also serves as raw material and a crucible for the construction of the conspicuously localized states of consciousness of individual creatures."

 

[Constance]

Soupie and all, attached is a PDF for the article of which you linked the abstract above. I found the paper on Itay Shani's page at Academia. edu.

Cosmopsychism: A Holistic Approach to the Metaphysics of Experience

Here are links to additional papers by Itay Shani, many of which respond to issues we have been working through here:

Itay Shani | Kyung Hee University - Academia.edu

 

[Constance]

And here is a compendium of papers on panpsychism by various philosophers available for online reading at academia.edu:

https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Panpsychism

 

[Constance]

[quoting Shani] ". . . on this view, the universal medium which grounds the particular states of consciousness of individual creatures is an intrinsically sentient medium, or as I call it elsewhere (Shani 2014), an endo-phenomenological expanse. As such, it is a locus of experience even in the absence of any stimulation or manipulation, but at the same time it also serves as raw material and a crucible for the construction of the conspicuously localized states of consciousness of individual creatures."

That underscored phrase of course caught my eye and from this paper's bibliography it was easy to locate the other Shani paper that develops his concept of the "endo-phenomenological expanse." I'll read and report about that paper. Here is the link:

Knowing How it Feels: on the Relevance of Epistemic Access for the Explanation of Phenomenal Consciousness
Itay Shani, Kyung Hee University

Abstracst: Herein lies the great mistake of the Cartesians, that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived. [Leibniz, Monadology] Consciousness ties together knowledge and feeling, or sapience and sentience. The connection between these two constitutive aspects – the informational and the phenomenal – is deep, but how are we to make sense of it? One influential approach maintains that sentience ultimately reduces to sapience, namely, that phenomenal consciousness is a function of representational relations between mental states which, barring these relations, would not, and could not, be conscious. In this paper I take issue with this line of thought, arguing that neither of these salient aspects of consciousness reduces to the other. Instead, I offer an explanatory framework which takes both sentience and sapience as ontological fundamentals and explore how they co-evolve. In particular, I argue that while epistemic access cannot generate experience from scratch it does play a crucial role in constituting an important form of higher-order experience, namely, the capacity to experience a sense of ownership over one's experiential domain.

Keywords: sapience, sentience, panpsychism.

"Consciousness is a multifaceted phenomenon, and the concept of consciousness is a mongrel connoting a variety of different senses (see Block, 1995; Van Gulick, 2004). It is widely assumed that the puzzle of consciousness is the puzzle of fitting this multifaceted and remarkable phenomenon into the wider nexus of reality, finding it a place in nature, as it were (see, for example, Rosenberg, 2004). Yet, it is not hard to see that part of the puzzle is also internal, namely, that the challenge consists, in part, in the difficulty of bringing the various facets of consciousness into mutual accord. When the task emphasized is that of integrating consciousness with the rest of nature we ask questions such as: Can the raw feels of conscious experience be nothing but physical processes? Or, can the subjective dimension of consciousness be a part of an objective physical order? In contrast, when emphasis is laid on the internal task of bringing the various facets of consciousness into mutual accord the relevant query is of a different type, to wit: What has one aspect of conscious experience, X, to do with another aspect Y.
It is this latter sort of problem which occupies me here. More specifically, my goal is to investigate the nature of the connection between two of the most fundamental features of consciousness: the phenomenal dimension of felt experience, and the cognitive dimension of knowledge and information processing. . . . ."

Knowing how it Feels: on the Relevance of Epistemic Access for the Explanation of Phenomenal Consciousness

Two notes I want to insert here:

1. "endo-phenomenology" links back to the papers I linked early in this thread presented in the 90s on the subject of "endophysics," but Shani's paper will likely pursue the ramifications of endophysics into an articulated theory of panpsychism implicit in consciousness.

2. Major phenomenological philosophers we've read, or read explications of, in this thread have not directly developed panpsychist insights implied in phenomenology, but some other phenomenological philosophers we have not concentrated on have done so, including Gabriel Marcel and Gaston Bachelard. I think that Merleau-Ponty's concept of the Chiasm, developed in his later philosophy, comes closest to expressing phenomenological grounds of panpsychism.


Bachelard is most interesting -- a philosopher of science at the Sorbonne [who anticipated key issues in the critique of scientific epistemology being developed in our time] and also a philosopher of consciousness, language, and poetry. See this entry on him at wikipedia for a quick overview of the range of his thinking.

Gaston Bachelard - Wikipedia

Two chapters from The Poetics of Reverie, one of the books he produced concerning consciousness and expression, are available at this link:

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/o/obriene/art192b/bachelard-poetics of reverie.pdf

 

[Constance]

All experiences are veridical experiences. So it's not necessary to add that qualifier. The question is whether or not the interpretation of those experiences can be considered reasonable or accurate.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/veridical

 

[Randall]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/veridical

Did you really think I don't know what "veridical" means? LOL. Just to be sure I wasn't misinterpreting your usage with some obscure philosophical jargon, I cross referenced it back when I first encountered your use of it, and the version you link to above confirms what I had already determined, and in doing so affirms the point I'd made about your use of the phrase, "veridical experiences". However because my point doesn't appear to have been clear to you, I'll explain:

If we are to replace the word "veridical" with a synonym like "truthful" we get "truthful experience". A small amount of grammatical analysis quickly reveals that the word "veridical" acts as a qualifier for the noun "experience" which results in the claim that the experience is truthful.

The thing is. There's an important difference between claiming to have had a "truthful experience" and claiming that the interpretation of the content of that experience is true. For example people who lie about having had a particular experience obviously have not had a "veridical experience". It is equally true that a person who has had a "veridical experience" could be misinterpreting that "veridical experience" as meaning something that it really doesn't. So simply because we have a "veridical experience" doesn't necessarily count as substantial evidence for the accuracy of how they are interpreted, but sometimes I wonder if that's what you're trying to suggest?

If you are using the word "veridical" to suggest that the interpretation of the content of experiences is true, then you're in danger of having used what is called "loaded words", a logical fallacy: "A word or phrase is "loaded" when it has a secondary, evaluative meaning in addition to its primary, descriptive meaning." Logical Fallacy: Loaded Words

In the future it would therefore be more prudent to avoid that sort of phrasing unless you want to be accused of using loaded language. That concludes my English lesson for today .