Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[Soupie]

When a brain undergoes anesthesia, its not the brain's generation of consciousness that is disrupted (because brains do not generate consciousness) but rather it's the brain's generation of representational content that is disrupted.

 

[smcder]

Reading

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

I'm finding this helpful:

Biological Information (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

in terms of the lay of the land as to how information is viewed in biology

"Both philosophers and biologists have contributed to an ongoing foundational discussion of the status of this mode of description in biology. It is generally agreed that the sense of information isolated by Claude Shannon and used in mathematical information theory is legitimate, useful, and relevant in many parts of biology. In this sense, anything is a source of information if it has a range of possible states, and one variable carries information about another to the extent that their states are physically correlated. But it is also agreed that many uses of informational language in biology seem to make use of a richer and more problematic concept than Shannon’s. Some have drawn on the teleosemantic tradition in philosophy of mind to make sense of this richer concept. Other theorists have countered that Shannon’s correlational conception of information is richer than it looks.

A minority tradition has argued that the enthusiasm for information in biology has been a serious theoretical wrong turn, and that it fosters naive genetic determinism, other distortions of our understanding of the roles of interacting causes, or an implicitly dualist ontology. However, this sceptical response is fading, with key sceptics coming to accept a modest but genuine role for informational concepts in the life sciences. Others have taken the critique seriously but tried to distinguish legitimate appeals to information from misleading or erroneous ones."

So this is a key claim:

However, this sceptical response is fading, with key sceptics coming to accept a modest but genuine role for informational concepts in the life sciences.

 

[Pharoah]

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.

I have a problem with the concept of representation @Soupie. what is the nature of something that it can be represented and what is the nature of representing it as whatever it is being represented as?
No trick question... just thought I would throw it into the mix.

 

[Pharoah]

Reading

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

I'm finding this helpful:

Biological Information (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

in terms of the lay of the land as to how information is viewed in biology

"Both philosophers and biologists have contributed to an ongoing foundational discussion of the status of this mode of description in biology. It is generally agreed that the sense of information isolated by Claude Shannon and used in mathematical information theory is legitimate, useful, and relevant in many parts of biology. In this sense, anything is a source of information if it has a range of possible states, and one variable carries information about another to the extent that their states are physically correlated. But it is also agreed that many uses of informational language in biology seem to make use of a richer and more problematic concept than Shannon’s. Some have drawn on the teleosemantic tradition in philosophy of mind to make sense of this richer concept. Other theorists have countered that Shannon’s correlational conception of information is richer than it looks.

A minority tradition has argued that the enthusiasm for information in biology has been a serious theoretical wrong turn, and that it fosters naive genetic determinism, other distortions of our understanding of the roles of interacting causes, or an implicitly dualist ontology. However, this sceptical response is fading, with key sceptics coming to accept a modest but genuine role for informational concepts in the life sciences. Others have taken the critique seriously but tried to distinguish legitimate appeals to information from misleading or erroneous ones."

So this is a key claim:

However, this sceptical response is fading, with key sceptics coming to accept a modest but genuine role for informational concepts in the life sciences.

'informational concepts'? yes as a placeholder... the concepts have a very significant role. Still flawed but the best we've got. It is very difficult to unpick and present a coherent alternative. The alternative must lead to a dramatic alteration of how the world is interpreted. I have got as far as considering what it means to 'causation' (and therefore emergentism) and to the concept of 'number' and of course, representation

 

[Constance]

I have a problem with the concept of representation @Soupie. what is the nature of something that it can be represented and what is the nature of representing it as whatever it is being represented as?
No trick question... just thought I would throw it into the mix.

There seem to me to be inconsistent and uncritical uses of the term and concept 'representation' in brain, consciousness, and mind investigations, which have been foregrounded since the outset of Consciousness Studies ~thirty years ago. I think I linked a paper addressing this issue quite a while back and will try to dredge it up from our archives.

 

[Constance]

'informational concepts'? yes as a placeholder... the concepts have a very significant role. Still flawed but the best we've got. It is very difficult to unpick and present a coherent alternative. The alternative must lead to a dramatic alteration of how the world is interpreted. I have got as far as considering what it means to 'causation' (and therefore emergentism) and to the concept of 'number' and of course, representation

ETA:

Rovelli has some pertinent paragraphs concerning the vagueness of the term/concept 'information' toward the end of his most recent paper on relational quantum mechanics posted here a few days ago. I'll try to copy some extracts from that section of the paper later today, but y'all can find them there under heading 'Information'.

In the meantime, I have emailed Rovelli seeking an online link to a paper of his entitled "Partway Through the Woods," published in 1997 in John Earnan et al, eds, THE COSMOS OF SCIENCE: Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds, which can be searched at amazon. Rovelli replied and emailed me a link to that chapter:

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/HalfWay%20(1).pdf

I expect that Steve can find a usable link, one that all can employ, in his Google drive. (I need to find out how to implement that Google drive on my computer.)

If that can't be made to work here, I've also obtained Rovelli's permission to c&p the chapter here.

As I recall, @Pharoah had also read that paper/chapter and found it significant.

 

[Soupie]

I have a problem with the concept of representation @Soupie. what is the nature of something that it can be represented and what is the nature of representing it as whatever it is being represented as?
No trick question... just thought I would throw it into the mix.

Im not sure what you mean by "nature of." I think the concept of representation has multiple applications to perception and also to subjective experience. In regards to SE, its the concept that the contents of subjective experience are about something.

Green contents are about wavelengths, heat is about temperature, taste is about chemicals, sound is about air pressure, pain is about states of the body, self is about the system as a whole, etc.

Need to finish the emmeche paper, but subjective experience may be less about guiding the organism/system in the moment—which seems to rely on more embodied, distributed processes—and more about guiding the organism over longer spans of time, more so in the social landscape than the environmental landscape.

SE is more about weaving a phenomenal, emotional, and conceptual narrative for use in navigating life in the long term rather than guiding behavior in the short term.

 

[Soupie]

Emmeche:

"The agents approach or "nouvelle AI" is based on the physical grounding hypothesis. It states that to build a system that is intelligent it is necessary to have its representations grounded in the physical world.[38] What exactly this means is seldom made fully explicit, but some hints to the idea can be given. A physically grounded system is one that is connected to the world by sensors and actuators/effectors, in a functional circle as it were. Thus it is not adequate to study, e.g., problems of perception merely by simulation techniques; typed input and output are no longer of interest because they are not physically grounded. Intrinsic to the idea is also that systems should be build in a bottom-up manner. High level abstractions have to be made concrete. The constructed system has to express all its goals and desires as physical action (as opposed to stored non-dynamic representations in the memory); and the system should extract all its information from physical sensors, i.e., the initial input should not be delivered to the systems as symbolic information, rather as physical action. The designer of such a system is forced to make much more design components explicit. Every short-cut has a direct impact upon system competence; there is no slack in the input/output representation. Often the very notion of representation as something explicit and stable is criticized.[39] (This has even led some researchers to an 'antirepresentationalist view of cognition', which is, however, an inadequate way of expressing the fact that GOFAI had a restricted and simplistic view on such categories as 'representation' and 'symbol'; one should rather reconstruct various kinds of representation in various kinds of systems as a continuum of cases within a general semiotic and triadic model of representation, as suggested by Katz and Queiroz 1999). A slightly different way to state the idea of physical grounding is by the notions of situatedness and embodiment (Brooks 1991a, 1991b, cf. Hendriks-Jansen 1996). Situatedness implies that the robots are situated in a world; they do not deal with abstract descriptions, but with the here-and-now of the environment that directly influences the behaviour of the system. Embodiment implies that the robot have bodies and experience [ its a great paper, but i had to note this potentially problematic use of the word "experience." - Soupie ] the world directly and that the actions have an immediate feedback upon the robot's own sensations.[40]Computer-simulated robots may be 'situated' in a virtual environment, but they are certainly not embodied."

 

[Soupie]

For example:

As a child, you accidentally touch a burner on a stove. You pull your hand away before too much damage is done.

Afterward you have the complex, rich, temporally extended, subjective experience of [qualities such as] pain, scared, anger, and of [concepts such as] stove, cooking, bad, accident, danger, be more careful, never again, etc.

Your SE didnt do work in the moment, but rather constitues a narrative/memory that will do work moving forward.

 

[smcder]

I have a problem with the concept of representation @Soupie. what is the nature of something that it can be represented and what is the nature of representing it as whatever it is being represented as?
No trick question... just thought I would throw it into the mix.

 

[smcder]

For example:

As a child, you accidentally touch a burner on a stove. You pull your hand away before too much damage is done.

Afterward you have the complex, rich, temporally extended, subjective experience of [qualities such as] pain, scared, anger, and of [concepts such as] stove, cooking, bad, accident, danger, be more careful, never again, etc.

Your SE didnt do work in the moment, but rather constitues a narrative/memory that will do work moving forward.

Hebbian learning ... synapses that fire together ... wire together ...

 

[smcder]

'informational concepts'? yes as a placeholder... the concepts have a very significant role. Still flawed but the best we've got. It is very difficult to unpick and present a coherent alternative. The alternative must lead to a dramatic alteration of how the world is interpreted. I have got as far as considering what it means to 'causation' (and therefore emergentism) and to the concept of 'number' and of course, representation

And I say a dramatic alteration of how the world is interpreted must lead to an alternative. Have you read Lightman's Einstein's Dreams ...

See section 6 in the SEP article above ... this is a bit along the lines of my objection to how much the scientists can derive from eDNA:

"Second, DST theorists have often endorsed a “parity thesis”: genes play an indispensable role in development, but so do other causal factors, and there is no reason to privilege gene’s contribution to development. This claim is often buttressed by reference to Richard Lewontin’s arguments for the complexity and context sensitivity of developmental interaction, and his consequent arguments that we cannot normally partition the causal responsibility of the genetic and the environmental contributions to specific phenotypic outcomes (Lewontin 1974, 2000). DST theorists think that informational models of genes and gene action make it very tempting to neglect parity, and to attribute a kind of causal primacy to these factors, even though they are just one of a set of essential contributors to the process in question. Once one factor in a complex system is seen in informational terms, the other factors tend to be treated as mere background, as supports rather than bona fide causal actors. It becomes natural to think that the genes direct, control, or organise development; other factors provide essential resources. But, the argument goes, in biological systems the causal role of genes is in fact tightly interconnected with the roles of many other factors (often loosely lumped together as “environmental”). Sometimes a gene will have a reliable effect against a wide range of environmental backgrounds; sometimes an environmental factor will have a reliable effect against a wide range of genetic backgrounds. Sometimes both genetic and environmental causes are highly context-sensitive in their operation. Paul Griffiths has emphasised this issue, arguing that the informational mode of describing genes can foster the appearance of context-independence:

etc. etc. et al ad lib ad hominem

Q.E.D.

 

[Constance]

Who is this guy and what is he meant to be thinking?

 

[smcder]

Rovelli has some pertinent paragraphs concerning the vagueness of the term/concept 'information' toward the end of his recent paper on relational quantum mechanics, posted a few days ago. I'll try to copy some extracts from that section of the the paper later today.

In the meantime, I have emailed Rovelli seeking an online link to a paper of his entitled "Partway Through the Woods," published in 1997 in John Earnan et al, eds, THE COSMOS OF SCIENCE: Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds, which can be searched at amazon. Rovelli replied and emailed me a link to that chapter:

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/HalfWay%20(1).pdf

I expect that Steve can find a usable link, one that all can employ, in his Google drive. (I need to find out how to implement that Google drive on my computer.)

If that can't be made to work here, I've also obtained Rovelli's permission to c&p the chapter here.

Sorry - I think it was unclear when I referred to "Google drive" - that was just the link title on the page, I don't have actually a "Google drive" per se.

 

[Constance]

'informational concepts'? yes as a placeholder... the concepts have a very significant role. Still flawed but the best we've got. It is very difficult to unpick and present a coherent alternative. The alternative must lead to a dramatic alteration of how the world is interpreted. I have got as far as considering what it means to 'causation' (and therefore emergentism) and to the concept of 'number' and of course, representation

ETA:

Rovelli has some pertinent paragraphs concerning the vagueness of the term/concept 'information' toward the end of his most recent paper on relational quantum mechanics posted here a few days ago. I'll try to copy some extracts from that section of the paper later today, but y'all can find them there under the heading 'Information'.

In the meantime, I have emailed Rovelli seeking an online link to a paper of his entitled "Partway Through the Woods," published in 1997 in John Earnan et al, eds, THE COSMOS OF SCIENCE: Philosophical Problems of the Internal and External Worlds, which can be searched at amazon. Rovelli replied and emailed me a link to that chapter:

file:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Packages/Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe/TempState/Downloads/HalfWay%20(1).pdf

I expect that Steve can find a usable link, one that all can employ, in his Google drive. (I need to find out how to implement that Google drive on my computer. It might be as easy as switching my browser back to Chrome. Does that sound right?)

If that can't be made to work here, I've also obtained Rovelli's permission to c&p the chapter here. It is tremendously informative about qm vis a vis relativity.

As I recall, @Pharoah had also read that paper/chapter and found it significant.

 

[smcder]

Who is this guy and what is he meant to be thinking?

LOL - he is the "Sicillian" from Princess Bride - a refreshingly original vision of the child's bedtime story ... a fun movie. Here is it in reference to @Pharoah's "not a trick question" comment ... it just means "watch out!" No implication meant that @Pharoah is trying to be tricky ... but it is a little like the inveterately underestimated Columbo's seemingly innocuous question at the end of each episode, just before he traps the criminal ...

 

[smcder]

I am going through @Pharoah's paper here:

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

and "re-writing" it as I have done in the past, in an attempt to get inside of it - and also to get the scaffolding of the argument - to get it point by point ... I got through section two this morning but I want to go over that again - may take a bit ...

 

[Constance]

. . . DST theorists think that informational models of genes and gene action make it very tempting to neglect parity, and to attribute a kind of causal primacy to these factors, even though they are just one of a set of essential contributors to the process in question. Once one factor in a complex system is seen in informational terms, the other factors tend to be treated as mere background, as supports rather than bona fide causal actors. It becomes natural to think that the genes direct, control, or organise development; other factors provide essential resources. But, the argument goes, in biological systems the causal role of genes is in fact tightly interconnected with the roles of many other factors (often loosely lumped together as “environmental”). Sometimes a gene will have a reliable effect against a wide range of environmental backgrounds; sometimes an environmental factor will have a reliable effect against a wide range of genetic backgrounds. Sometimes both genetic and environmental causes are highly context-sensitive in their operation.

Very good. This insight is paralleled and supported by the core of Rovelli's Relational QM. It seems that we've been witnessing a naïve leap from Neo-Darwinist presuppositions concerning the evolution of species to a parallel presupposition operating in computer science and AI.

 

[Pharoah]

Who is this guy and what is he meant to be thinking?

A film 'the princess bride' I think. A funny sketch where one cup has poison in the drink and the second cup has not. He is saying something like, 'You are saying this is the poisened cup. But You know that I know that I will think that you are lying... but then you know that I will think that you know that I know, etc etc... so therefore...' etc etc... he drinks and dies. It's funny to watch... promise

 

[Pharoah]

I am going through @Pharoah's paper here:

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

and "re-writing" it as I have done in the past, in an attempt to get inside of it - and also to get the scaffolding of the argument - to get it point by point ... I got through section two this morning but I want to go over that again - may take a bit ...

gulp!
I am not happy with section 2. I continue to work on it... I wade through it like its treacle myself. Will email you the latest