Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[Soupie]

Asking if the changes to the organism are pretty much like the changes to the environment is not helpful. We can ask how sensitive or fine grain the changes in the organism are and how many changes in the environment it is sensitive to, but these changes need not (and I argue cannot) allow us to perceive reality as it is in any meaningful sense. (This claim is too strong. I need to be more clear here.)

Yes please! (to being more clear here) - what are the differences in the world as it is and the way that we see it? - for starters.

We are fortunate that in not perceiving reality as it is in any meaningful sense we are able to conclude that we are not perceiving reality as it is in any meaningful sense. What wonderfully clever apes we are to see beyond the veil (those of us who can, that is.)

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

 

[Soupie]

I didn't get from the video that the difference in DR and IR is so miniscule as to be meaningless, I should wonder at the volume of literature generated thus! (or maybe I shouldn't), but the difference in DR and IR is the presence or absence of perceptual intermediaries and that, I suspect, is a significant difference.

And are there or arent there perceptual intermediaries?

 

[smcder]

Ok.

Good!

 

[smcder]

https://www.sfu.ca/~kathleea/docs/Boring&Myopic.pdf

I can't read this on my phone and can't find it in a better version but it may be fine on PC or other...Akins' response to WILTBAB. Sure seems like we've come across it before.

 

[smcder]

http://faculty.fiu.edu/~hermanso/research/bats.pdf

Abstract: In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, nonrepresentational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, her work has not met with any critical appraisal. It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness.

 

[Soupie]

I think it hinges on how one defines "perceiving." In my way of thinking, perceiving is a kind of experiencing. Likewise, hallucinating is a kind of experiencing. And dreaming is another kind of experiencing.

We have to maintain a distinction between experience and a perceptual experience.

The Problem of Perception (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

"Some philosophers agree with the Phenomenal Principle that whenever a sensory quality appears to be instantiated then it is instantiated, but deny that this entails the existence of sense-data. Rather, they hold that we should think of these qualities as modifications of the experience itself (Level 1). Hence when someone has an experience of something brown, something like brownness is instantiated, but in the experience itself, not an object. This is not to say that the experience is brown, but rather that the experience is modified in a certain way, the way we can call “perceiving brownly”. The canonical descriptions of perceptual experiences, then, employ adverbial modifications of the perceptual verbs: instead of describing an experience as someone’s “visually sensing a brown square”, the theory says that they are “visually sensing brownly and squarely”. This is why this theory is called the “adverbial theory”; but it is important to emphasise that it is more a theory about the phenomenal character of experience itself (Level 2) than it is a semantic analysis of sentences describing experience."

 

[smcder]

http://www.sfu.ca/~kathleea/docs/SensorySystems.pdf

Fascinating...I think.

 

[smcder]

Closing the Perceptual Gap

 

[Pharoah]

Presented with a mirror most animals with a decent brain regard the mirror’s reflection as extensions of the world—as if the mirror is a window on a world with creatures and objects in it. That is reality to them: the reflection is not a reflection but instead is a window to a three dimensional reality. Very few animals recognise the mirror’s reflection as a duplicate of themselves and their environment. That distinction is a conceptual distinction of, what amounts to, identical perceptual experiences

 

[smcder]

Presented with a mirror most animals with a decent brain regard the mirror’s reflection as extensions of the world—as if the mirror is a window on a world with creatures and objects in it. That is reality to them: the reflection is not a reflection but instead is a window to a three dimensional reality. Very few animals recognise the mirror’s reflection as a duplicate of themselves and their environment. That distinction is a conceptual distinction of, what amounts to, identical perceptual experiences

Unless they don't know how to use the mirror...

The test used to see if animals are self-aware might not actually work

 

[Pharoah]

Interestingly, for a bat, all its spatial understandings are reflections. Is a bat not aware that it’s spatial world is a product of its own echo sounding activity...?

 

[Soupie]

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-real-life-example-of-an-adverbial-theory-of-perception#mwebmodal-0

Wow, this is an interesting question. I haven't googled it to see what google wants us to believe, but i’ll give it a shot…

Let's assume that an adverb is a grammatical modifier, not only for verbs. So, perception through adverbs would be perception of existence not through proper nouns or verbs etc. but through life's qualia, or appearance as professed through a domination of adverbs as the primary grammatical expression..

Let me think of a real-life example…

If we were to let go of labels and action, nouns and verbs and instead see existence through adverbs, we may be approaching the mystical. There are no distinct categories or cause and effect in some of my uncontrollable experiences. There is simply a world of modifiers. This is hard to explain, since it is simply my experience, and I am no guru.

Try a day without labeling anything. A tree is not a tree but an expression. This avoids labels. Then try to remove yourself from cause and effect, verbs. You need to have a free day to do this alone or with a fellow practitioner.

Everything you see, say “I am that”. This removes duality.

What may open up is a world of connections through the expression of each thing. This expression is the adverb tense.

Just an idea

Cheers

This is approaching what I have meant by "the mind is green." We don't perceive green, the mind is green. I am green; I am greening.

I mind/organism is a process within reality; I am a realist about external reality. We perceive external reality via a process of covariational change. However, this process is open-ended. Both the external environment and the organism are evolving. The nervous system is not a designed program running and algorithm to veridically detect and reveal the environment as it is.

Both the environment and the organism enmeshed within the environment are dynamic and changing. Dynamic and opened ended.

Ive tried to articulate the idea expressed in the above quora comment before. The phenomenal world we experiencing is us; as the commentor above says we can say "I am that" to everything in our experience.

Importantly though I do not deny there is an "external" concrete reality. I am a realist about that. But there will always be a numerical duality between the environment (X) and our perceptual experiences (X1). (Which themselves are part of the environment.) however, there is not an ontological duality between X and X1.

 

[Soupie]

Interestingly, for a bat, all its spatial understandings are reflections. Is a bat not aware that it’s spatial world is a product of its own echo sounding activity...?

It's the same for a human, just a different modality. Id wager that many people are not aware of this fact. It's certainly transparent to perception.

 

[smcder]

Presented with a mirror most animals with a decent brain regard the mirror’s reflection as extensions of the world—as if the mirror is a window on a world with creatures and objects in it. That is reality to them: the reflection is not a reflection but instead is a window to a three dimensional reality. Very few animals recognise the mirror’s reflection as a duplicate of themselves and their environment. That distinction is a conceptual distinction of, what amounts to, identical perceptual experiences

I've never had a dog look in a mirror with any interest. Nor tv ...they don't seem to see either as an "extension of the world".

Occasionally they will cock their heads at a bark or bird sound on tv but very rarely. Why is that?

 

[smcder]

Never mind, I googled it.

 

[smcder]

 

[smcder]

It's the same for a human, just a different modality. Id wager that many people are not aware of this fact. It's certainly transparent to perception.

We also get spatial information from haptic systems...sense of balance, intero extero ception etc?

 

[Soupie]

Closing the Perceptual Gap

Very helpful.

"Conceptual Representations: Embodied
While the term “embodied” covers a wide variety of related schools of thought, the common thread is a view of cognition that emerges from treating the brain and the body as a cohesive unit. Put another way: “cognition is not represented in terms of propositional and sentential information but is grounded in and structured by various patterns of our perceptual interactions, bodily actions, and manipulations of objects” 16. If our conceptual systems are embodied in this way, we should expect representational content to be both generated and constrained by the state and/or nature of the body in which the system operates. Our conceptual representation , for example, "would be the kinds of experiences we have had, are now having, or might someday have, with that sort of thing" given the type of body we have [^Johnson2015]."

 

[Pharoah]

My point in mentioning this is that it is the brain that decides what perception reveals reality is
My guess is that dogs are only interested if something smells or can be chewed when caught...?

 

[smcder]

Very helpful.

"Conceptual Representations: Embodied
While the term “embodied” covers a wide variety of related schools of thought, the common thread is a view of cognition that emerges from treating the brain and the body as a cohesive unit. Put another way: “cognition is not represented in terms of propositional and sentential information but is grounded in and structured by various patterns of our perceptual interactions, bodily actions, and manipulations of objects” 16. If our conceptual systems are embodied in this way, we should expect representational content to be both generated and constrained by the state and/or nature of the body in which the system operates. Our conceptual representation , for example, "would be the kinds of experiences we have had, are now having, or might someday have, with that sort of thing" given the type of body we have [^Johnson2015]."

There's not much on "narcissism" in perceptual systems after mid 2000s. Terminology may have changed.