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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

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Soupie said:
Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

"Abstract : Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement."
Click to expand...

This Bitbol paper, "Is Consciousness Primary?", is a tour de force. Very glad that @Soupie has cited it again here. Halfway through it and looking forward to finishing it tomorrow as well as the second paper linked by @Pharoah above. I hope we can engage with Pharoah's two papers and the papers by Rovelli and Bitbol for awhile before going off in some other direction. I think if we do that we will develop some shared understandings and have a better platform from which to continue our survey of various positions taken in consciousness studies..
 
Constance said:
This Bitbol paper, "Is Consciousness Primary?", is a tour de force. Very glad that @Soupie has cited it again here. Halfway through it and looking forward to finishing it tomorrow as well as the second paper linked by @Pharoah above. I hope we can engage with Pharoah's two papers and the papers by Rovelli and Bitbol for awhile before going off in some other direction. I think if we do that we will develop some shared understandings and have a better platform from which to continue our survey of various positions taken in consciousness studies..
Click to expand...

Agreed - there are a number of things I am working with in P's paper ... here are 2

THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION AND THE NATURALIZATION OF MENTAL CONTENT | Philosophy of Consciousness

1. smcder far from equilibrium and dynamic equilibrium - not sure the distinction is clear ... or that they are "diametrically opposed"

B. smcder - whether this makes its case - whether the argument in 3. is successful, I need to outline the argument, sometimes that is helpful - the outline form lets you see the exact steps of the argument and re-writing then lets the author see their own words in other words

"In this final part, I will consider what a body could be beyond this materialist presupposition. This will entail exploring the possibility that a physically interacting body that maintains a dynamic equilibrium need not be a material thing at all. The question will then gravitate to considering what such a non-material body could be and how it might constitute a novel differentiated ontological class. My intention, therefore, will be to challenge ontological suppositions of what a physical body could be and how a body might alternatively interact physically. What kinds of singular unitary identities might there be, what might be their temporal and behavioural characteristics and in what way could they be considered informational constructs? But still deeper to this inquiry, at its core, is a challenge to our idea of what physicalism should encapsulate."
 
Pharoah said:
@smcder. Part 3 has had v little attention editorially from me.. Might cut it. Part 2 important and tricky to put across
Click to expand...

But that's the interesting part...

"In Part 3, I will consider what those classes might be specifically and indicate how the identification of those classes undermines the notion of a homogenous complexity greyscale and supports instead the notion of ontological emergence."
 
"On this account, far from warding-off equilibrium, living organisms are proactively maintaining a complex dynamic equilibrium state."

...

" I take the view that living organisms unquestionably maintain a dynamic adaptive equilibrium and in doing so stave off thermodynamic equilibrium."

To ward...nay, to stave...

;-)
 
smcder said:
But that's the interesting part...

"In Part 3, I will consider what those classes might be specifically and indicate how the identification of those classes undermines the notion of a homogenous complexity greyscale and supports instead the notion of ontological emergence."
Click to expand...

I agree about the importance of this part. And I think that it is life/lived experience that is the key. The emergence of life is the major, the key emergence in nature. The most helpful books regarding this, so far as I know, are these two:

The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, followed by

Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

In the 90s I read an insightful paper entitled, as I recall, "The Mind-Body-Body Problem," but I can no longer recall who wrote it and cannot find it by searching the title. The author might have been Chalmers, Thompson, or Shaun Gallagher. In any event, the mind-body-body problem is developed in this paper by Robert Hanna and Evan Thompson:

Robert Hanna & Evan Thompson, The mind-body-body problem - PhilPapers

which is available in full at academia.edu.
 
Steve, you will be interested in NASA's success in identifying significantly more extrasolar planets though the aid of deep learning capabilities of computer neural nets developed by Google specialists. This was announced at 1 pm today in a NASA teleconference at this link, where the teleconference should soon be archived. A link to further discussions at Reddit is included in the page at the link:

NASA Live

I still question the application of the term 'deep learning' to computer neural nets such as those employed in this research. For me, 'deep learning' implies understanding of the significance of what is learned rather than the simpler accomplishment of recognizing subtler visual manifestations of a physical phenomenon about which the computer is informed and guided by its human engineers.
 
How persuasive is this paper by Seth?

http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(13)00211-8

Abstract
The concept of the brain as a prediction machine has enjoyed a resurgence in the context of the Bayesian brain and predictive coding approaches within cognitive science. To date, this perspective has been applied primarily to exteroceptive perception (e.g., vision, audition), and action. Here, I describe a predictive, inferential perspective on interoception: 'interoceptive inference' conceives of subjective feeling states (emotions) as arising from actively-inferred generative (predictive) models of the causes of interoceptive afferents. The model generalizes 'appraisal' theories that view emotions as emerging from cognitive evaluations of physiological changes, and it sheds new light on the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the experience of body ownership and conscious selfhood in health and in neuropsychiatric illness.
 
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What we need to get ahold of is this special issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition edited by Dorothee Legrand exploring the topic Subjectivity and the Body:

Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 16, Issue 3, Pages 577-768 (September 2007)
Subjectivity and the Body
Edited by Dorothee Legrand

Its contents are listed on this page from the loathsome Elsevier operation which places almost all of the journals and journal articles I am interested in behind prohibitive paywalls. So we are left to try to find copies of these articles in other online sources.

Copying the contents page of this special issue of Consciousness and Cognition, which Elsevier tantalizingly provides:


  1. Editorial

  2. Target Article

  3. Commentary

  4. Target Article

  5. Commentary

  6. Target Article

  7. Commentary

  8. Target Article

  9. Commentary

  10. Target Article

  11. Commentary

  12. Target Article (Review)

  13. Commentary

  14. Target Article

  15. Commentary

  16. Target Article

  17. Commentary

  18. Target Article

  19. Commentary


Sign me 'Highly Pissed in Tallahassee'.
 
Here is one paper from the above collection that is available free from Elsevier, facilitated by Science Direct apparently through a Google link, and it is essential reading concerning prereflective consciousness, which we most need to recognize and penetrate:

Legrand, Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives, at

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/LEGRAND_2007_ESPRACC.pdf

I don't remember how I accessed this link, and y'all will probably need to find your own way to it. The Legrand paper, as I'm able to access it, cannot be reproduced here by copying and pasting or I would do so.

[ETA: Short of reading the full complement of MP's philosophical oeuvre or perhaps a majority of Varela's, Thompson's, and Zahavi's publications, this Legrand paper provides the best means into a comprehensive understanding of what prereflective consciousness is. That is, depending on one's ability to access it online.]

Further links to papers citing the Legrand paper are provided along the right-hand panel on this page at PubMed:
Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives. - PubMed - NCBI.

.
 
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Constance said:
Here is one paper from the above collection that is available free from Elsevier, facilitated by Science Direct apparently through a Google link, and it is essential reading concerning prereflective consciousness, which we most need to recognize and penetrate:

Legrand, Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives, at

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/LEGRAND_2007_ESPRACC.pdf

I don't remember how I accessed this link, and y'all will probably need to find your own way to it. The Legrand paper, as I'm able to access it, cannot be reproduced here by copying and pasting or I would do so.

[ETA: Short of reading the full complement of MP's philosophical oeuvre or perhaps a majority of Varela's, Thompson's, and Zahavi's publications, this Legrand paper provides the best means into a comprehensive understanding of what prereflective consciousness is. That is, depending on one's ability to access it online.]

Further links to papers citing the Legrand paper are provided along the right-hand panel on this page at PubMed:
Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives. - PubMed - NCBI.

.
Click to expand...

Dorothée Legrand, Pre-reflective self-as-subject from experiential and empirical perspectives - PhilPapers

Then go to google sites link to download
 
Constance said:
Steve, you will be interested in NASA's success in identifying significantly more extrasolar planets though the aid of deep learning capabilities of computer neural nets developed by Google specialists. This was announced at 1 pm today in a NASA teleconference at this link, where the teleconference should soon be archived. A link to further discussions at Reddit is included in the page at the link:

NASA Live

I still question the application of the term 'deep learning' to computer neural nets such as those employed in this research. For me, 'deep learning' implies understanding of the significance of what is learned rather than the simpler accomplishment of recognizing subtler visual manifestations of a physical phenomenon about which the computer is informed and guided by its human engineers.
Click to expand...

I agree - Artificial Intelligence is probably questionable as well, since I don't know of any actually smart machines.

One way to think about (artificial) neural networks is as computational units - some problems are very difficult to compute with conventional techniques, what a neural network does is "spread out" the computation and hand it to thousands (or more) individual units, each of which makes one decision (to "fire" or not) based on its inputs and passes that decision along. The computation is then made in the aggregate. When you write a simple code for a neural network, some people refer to this as "self-programming" ... believe me, the programmer has to do the programming ... the part that is automated is the process of deciding when each unit will fire. This starts randomly and then as a solution is approached, a simple mathematical function insures, with each iteration, that the individual units' weights are updated in such a way as to converge on a solution (not always the best solution, there is still art involved here).

The big idea of Pitts-McCulloch was that you could use these simple units ("Perceptrons" they called them) to compute the basic logic gates: AND OR etc ... this was important because, at the time, this logic, modern logic dating from the late 1800s, was held to be independent of human thought - McCulloch and Pitts seemed to have found a way to get logic into the way that the brain works, because they thought this was how neurons worked - based on the biology of the time (the AI community general knows better now) - when the Perceptron was found to be unable to compute XOR gates, Minsky and Papert wrote their book that diverted attention back to digital computation (I'm not sure why - because they knew that a "network" of three Perceptrons can compute XOR and also that a number of digital logic gates are required to compute XOR, below is one way to do it with transistors ... as you can see, not so simple)

xor.png
One motivation may have been that digital logic was dominant at the time and they were interested in getting people to commit to this, as they thought digital would be sufficient. But, it turns out, networks of Perceptrons can compute any computable function as well and "neural" nets are more efficient for some problems.

The modern history is that interest continued in researching neural networks and then, only a few years ago, the computational power became available to run very large ANNs and that is one reason we are seeing so much about them - there are also some innovations in the structures of ANNs but the basic idea is the same.

I do think the innovators in the field of neural networks and AI generally, are very aware of the gap in complexity (and efficiency) between artificial and real neural networks, because that is what they compare their efforts to every day ... what I think could well happen is going to be in terms of biological engineering ... at some point, I think that will happen - it's a very scary area from our perspective, with a lot of ethical issues, but I see no reason to think we won't move into that area eventually.
 
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Constance said:
This Bitbol paper, "Is Consciousness Primary?", is a tour de force. Very glad that @Soupie has cited it again here. Halfway through it and looking forward to finishing it tomorrow as well as the second paper linked by @Pharoah above. I hope we can engage with Pharoah's two papers and the papers by Rovelli and Bitbol for awhile before going off in some other direction. I think if we do that we will develop some shared understandings and have a better platform from which to continue our survey of various positions taken in consciousness studies..
Click to expand...

Yes and the conclusion includes a very specific prescription for progress:

e.g.

(c) If you wish to formulate a new amplified science, if you wish to embed contents of experience or phenomenological reports into a generalized relational network together with the laws of an objectified nature, do not content yourself with looking for correlations between previously established categories and structures. Instead, show that the very process of interconnection between experiential data and objective data may give rise to new categories and new unexpected structures. Varela’s notion of “mutual generative constraints” precisely points towards a process of reciprocal alteration and enrichment of experiential and objective concepts :

o Phenomenological reports may help to pick out and ascribe meaning to previously unnoticed neural configurations (Petitmengin et al., 2006) ;
o Conversely, neurological findings may become an incentive for re-categorization and further development in phenomenological research (Depraz et al., 2002).

(d) Show how objectivity arises from a universally accepted procedure of intersubjective debate. Do not construe it as a transcendent resource of which intersubjective consensus is only an indirect symptom. Draw inspiration from a careful reflection about physics : either from the process of emergence of objective temperature valuations from an experiential underpinning (see section 1), or from the model of quantum mechanics construed as a science of inter-situational predictive invariants rather than a science of “objects” in the ordinary sense of the word (see section 6). Then, recognize that intersubjectivity should be endowed with the status of a common ground for both phenomenological reports and objective science. Start from this common ground in order to elaborate the amplified variety of knowledge that results from embedding phenomenological reports and objective findings within a unique structure.
 
continuing:

(e) Do not rely on a minimal and most elementary form of intersubjective consent, but try to amplify the criteria of intersubjective understanding by refining the stability and sharpness of subjective experience. After all, the reason why numerical values and ratios are privileged as objects of intersubjective agreement is likely to be the fact that they are not too difficult to be agreed upon, even among subjects with a poorly cultivated experience 10 . But if experience is systematically trained and educated, either in the first person by meditation (Wallace, 2000, Lutz et al. 2004), or in the second person by making explicit unsuspected features of experience in dialogue (Depraz et al., 2002 ; Petitmengin, 2007), or in a combination of first- and third-person modes by bio-feedback, the basis of possible intersubjective consensus is likely to expand beyond recognition.

that is a fascinating idea ...
 
smcder said:
@Soupie

"Could YOU explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?"

....take the HCT challenge!
Click to expand...
I cannot with any confidence. I was under the impression that the current version of HCT argues for the strong emergence of the mental; but the paper the pharaoh shared in response to the rqm paper seems to me at least make an argument along the lines of non-material physicalism, which would thus allow the mental* to weakly emerge.

In other words, if the focus shifts away from questions about the substrate of the subjective field and the inferred objective world and instead the focus becomes relations, then a tenuous bridge between subjectivity and the inferred objective world can be forged.

*when @Pharoah speaks of mental he if I may seems to mean it in the sense below:

"
  • Two marks of mind are consciousness and representation
This acknowledges the importance of consciousness to theories of mind. If I remember, Burge lays some significance on our not knowing much about consciousness and so he focuses on representation - (reading between the lines, this seems the standard approach of pursuing what you do know something about hoping it will lead into areas you don't ...)

Representational mind, or representational psychology, begins in the arthropods. We lack scientific knowledge about the beginnings of consciousness. Consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient for perception."

In other words, pharaoh speaks of the mental in terms of what it represents: quality, meaning, value, etc.

These are all "relations" and again when we focus only on relations we can use this stance to describe the inferred objective world and the subjective field, and even point to relations between them. RQM can lend itself to this endeavor.

However via Bitbol we see that RQM does not touch the (phenomenal) consciousness Mark of mind, only the representational/intentional aspect.
 
Soupie said:
Consciousness is neither necessary nor sufficient for perception.
Click to expand...
The question then is not why certain brain processes are conscious and not others, but rather what is significant about the representational content that makes up our experential field. (But of course under a monist paradigm, these would be ontologically one and the same. However, while all brain processes are conscious, not all brain processes are representational content.)

And the Emmeche paper is wonderful.
 
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