Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
“Conscious is shaped” which is to say consciousness is, in some sense, unchanging or constant; living things shaped it. Consciousness is, in this sense, like an ether...
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Amazing. I will need to explore this.
My view—and I know this is hard to fathom—is that the difference between 'unexperienced' qualities and experienced qualities is itself a difference in quality.
In other words, the relation between qualities and experience is often characterized in the way some characterize perception. "There are objects, and we perceive those objects." Like seeing things in a viewfinder.
Likewise, some say there are qualities, and we experience those qualities."
My approach to experience is similar to the adverbial approach to perception. Instead of saying we are perceiving green, we might say we are perceptually experiencing greenly.
I think it is likewise with subjective experience. Subjective experience is a specific quality of consciousness.
So 'subjective experience' is itself a certain quality/character of consciousness.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
How you find all this stuff!
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Consciousness in this sense just is <MATTER>.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
How you find all this stuff!
It's the SEP article on Panpsychism.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
@Soupie:
“The question subtly shifts from "how do living organisms give rise to consciousness" to the question of "how is consciousness shaped by the processes of life into subjective experience?"
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Or by shaped do you mean integrated
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“The question subtly shifts from "how do living organisms give rise to consciousness" to the question of "how is consciousness shaped by the processes of life into subjective experience?"
= how is <MATTER> shaped by the processes (of life)...
?
Or by shaped do you mean integrated
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
By 'shaped' I just mean how has <MATTER> evolved into living organisms/subjects of experience.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Individuality, subjectivity, and minimal cognition - PhilPapers
Abstract
"The paper links discussions of two topics: biological individuality and the simplest forms of mentality. I discuss several attempts to locate the boundary between metabolic activity and ‘minimal cognition.’ I then look at differences between the kinds of individuality present in unicellular life, multicellular life in general, and animals of several kinds. Nervous systems, which are clearly relevant to cognition and subjectivity, also play an important role in the form of individuality seen in animals. The last part of the paper links these biological transitions to the evolutionary history of subjective experience."
Thanks for posting on minimal consciousness and opening up a whole new area...there are also rich connections to evolutionary robotics.
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Individuality, subjectivity, and minimal cognition - PhilPapers
Abstract
"The paper links discussions of two topics: biological individuality and the simplest forms of mentality. I discuss several attempts to locate the boundary between metabolic activity and ‘minimal cognition.’ I then look at differences between the kinds of individuality present in unicellular life, multicellular life in general, and animals of several kinds. Nervous systems, which are clearly relevant to cognition and subjectivity, also play an important role in the form of individuality seen in animals. The last part of the paper links these biological transitions to the evolutionary history of subjective experience."
Thanks for posting on minimal consciousness and opening up a whole new area...there are also rich connections to evolutionary robotics.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
For the sake of anyone new here, this is a very brief summary of the progress of this thread with respect to identifying what consciousness is and how it relates to the paranormal. First there are two contexts of what we mean by the word "is". The first is what we mean by the word "consciousness" itself. The second is the question of what consciousness is made of in a physical ( as opposed to psychological ) sense. With respect to the first context, there appears to be consensus that consciousness is our real-time experience of things, things being anything we're capable of perceiving, including objects, ideas, and even the absence of things. There is no certainty on the physical composition of consciousness, or even agreement that there is a physical ( physical meaning objectively measureable as opposed to simply solid or material ) component to consciousness.
This brings us to the relationship between consciousness and the paranormal. The paranormal is loosely defined here as phenomena that is impossible to explain scientifically ( Encarta World English Dictionary ). If there is no physical component to consciousness ( as defined above ), then it is impossible to scientifically explain, which puts consciousness itself into the realm of the paranormal. On the other hand, if consciousness turns out to be a field composed of physically measureable phenomena, then it's no longer in the realm of the paranormal.
Either way, paranormal experiences are merely a subset of all types of experiences, and therefore don't differ subjectively from any other type of experience. The question is therefore: Do paranormal phenomena differ objectively? The very nature of the question makes it impossible to answer. Not surprisingly there appears to be no consensus opinion either, or even agreement as to whether or not there are subjective and objective realities.
So the discussion continues ...
This brings us to the relationship between consciousness and the paranormal. The paranormal is loosely defined here as phenomena that is impossible to explain scientifically ( Encarta World English Dictionary ). If there is no physical component to consciousness ( as defined above ), then it is impossible to scientifically explain, which puts consciousness itself into the realm of the paranormal. On the other hand, if consciousness turns out to be a field composed of physically measureable phenomena, then it's no longer in the realm of the paranormal.
Either way, paranormal experiences are merely a subset of all types of experiences, and therefore don't differ subjectively from any other type of experience. The question is therefore: Do paranormal phenomena differ objectively? The very nature of the question makes it impossible to answer. Not surprisingly there appears to be no consensus opinion either, or even agreement as to whether or not there are subjective and objective realities.
So the discussion continues ...
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
"However, as philosophers we may be interested in finding out what the intrinsic nature of matter is, or at least having our best guess as to what it might be. And if the above line of reasoning is correct, we must look beyond physics for this. The panpsychist has a proposal: the intrinsic nature of matter is, at least in part, consciousness. Supposing for the sake of discussion that electrons are fundamental constituents of reality, the panpsychist proposal is as follows: physics tells us how an electron behaves, but in and of itself the electron is essentially a thing that instantiates consciousness (of presumably some extremely basic kind)."
...
"Furthermore, assuming the falsity of dualism, we know that the intrinsic nature of at least some matter is consciousness-involving: namely the matter of brains (or whole organisms if we think that organisms are the bearers of consciousness). This is perhaps our only real clue as to the intrinsic nature of matter in general; as regards the intrinsic nature of stuff outside of brains (or of the parts of brains) we can only speculate. Goff (2016, 2017: ch. 7) has argued that from this epistemic starting point there is a clear “simplicity argument” in favour of panpsychism: in the absence of any reason to suppose otherwise, the most simple, elegant, parsimonious hypothesis is that the matter outside of brains is continuous with the matter of brains in also having a consciousness-involving nature. Eddington (1928: 259–60; quoted in Strawson 2003) remarked that it was rather “silly”, given that we know nothing from physics of the intrinsic nature of matter, to suppose that its nature is incongruent with mentality and then to wonder where mentality comes from. These panpsychists try to put the onus is on their opponents to come up with a non-panpsychist proposal as to the intrinsic nature of matter, and to give reasons to prefer it to the prima facie much simpler and more parsimonious panpsychist proposal."
This is an important point:
as regards the intrinsic nature of stuff outside of brains (or of the parts of brains) we can only speculate.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Soupie says:
"Amazing. I will need to explore this.
My view—and I know this is hard to fathom—is that the difference between 'unexperienced' qualities and experienced qualities is itself a difference in quality.
In other words, the relation between qualities and experience is often characterized in the way some characterize perception. "There are objects, and we perceive those objects." Like seeing things in a viewfinder.
Likewise, some say there are qualities, and we experience those qualities."
My approach to experience is similar to the adverbial approach to perception. Instead of saying we are perceiving green, we might say we are perceptually experiencing greenly.
I think it is likewise with subjective experience. Subjective experience is a specific quality of consciousness.
So 'subjective experience' is itself a certain quality/character of consciousness."
Notes on concepts and terminology
SEP on the adverbial theory
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.
Part of the point of the adverbial theory, as defended by Ducasse (1942) and Chisholm (1957) was to do justice to the phenomenology of experience whilst avoiding the dubious metaphysical commitments the sense-datum theorists take on in responding to the Problem of Perception. The only entities which the adverbialist needs to acknowledge are subjects of experience, experiences themselves, and ways these experiences are modified. This makes the theory appear less controversial than the sense-datum theory."
And in re: talk of qualities:
Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"Properties (also called ‘attributes,’ ‘qualities,’ ‘features,’ ‘characteristics,’ ‘types’) are those entities that can be predicated of things or, in other words, attributed to them. Moreover, properties are entities that things are said to bear, possess or exemplify. For example, if we say that that thing over there is an apple and is red, we are presumably attributing the properties red and apple to it, and, if the attribution is veridical, the thing in question exemplifies this property. Thus, properties can be characterized both as predicables and as exemplifiables. Relations, e.g., loving and between, can also be viewed as predicables and exemplifiables. More generally they can be treated in many respects on a par with properties and indeed they may even be viewed as kinds of properties. Accordingly, this entry will also discuss them to some extent, although they are treated in more detail in another entry: relations."
And @Pharoah - I'm fine to get in that boat ...
"Perhaps then we can move forward with the resolve that it doesn't matter whether consciousness is matter... or not.... Instead, we just want to figure out "the evolved" bit or "the process" bit... and that puts us all in the same boat. or no
?"
"Amazing. I will need to explore this.
My view—and I know this is hard to fathom—is that the difference between 'unexperienced' qualities and experienced qualities is itself a difference in quality.
In other words, the relation between qualities and experience is often characterized in the way some characterize perception. "There are objects, and we perceive those objects." Like seeing things in a viewfinder.
Likewise, some say there are qualities, and we experience those qualities."
My approach to experience is similar to the adverbial approach to perception. Instead of saying we are perceiving green, we might say we are perceptually experiencing greenly.
I think it is likewise with subjective experience. Subjective experience is a specific quality of consciousness.
So 'subjective experience' is itself a certain quality/character of consciousness."
Notes on concepts and terminology
SEP on the adverbial theory
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.
Part of the point of the adverbial theory, as defended by Ducasse (1942) and Chisholm (1957) was to do justice to the phenomenology of experience whilst avoiding the dubious metaphysical commitments the sense-datum theorists take on in responding to the Problem of Perception. The only entities which the adverbialist needs to acknowledge are subjects of experience, experiences themselves, and ways these experiences are modified. This makes the theory appear less controversial than the sense-datum theory."
And in re: talk of qualities:
Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"Properties (also called ‘attributes,’ ‘qualities,’ ‘features,’ ‘characteristics,’ ‘types’) are those entities that can be predicated of things or, in other words, attributed to them. Moreover, properties are entities that things are said to bear, possess or exemplify. For example, if we say that that thing over there is an apple and is red, we are presumably attributing the properties red and apple to it, and, if the attribution is veridical, the thing in question exemplifies this property. Thus, properties can be characterized both as predicables and as exemplifiables. Relations, e.g., loving and between, can also be viewed as predicables and exemplifiables. More generally they can be treated in many respects on a par with properties and indeed they may even be viewed as kinds of properties. Accordingly, this entry will also discuss them to some extent, although they are treated in more detail in another entry: relations."
And @Pharoah - I'm fine to get in that boat ...
"Perhaps then we can move forward with the resolve that it doesn't matter whether consciousness is matter... or not.... Instead, we just want to figure out "the evolved" bit or "the process" bit... and that puts us all in the same boat. or no
?"
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Here's a pdf of this paper by Godfrey-Smith:
petergodfreysmith.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Individuality-and-Minimal-Cog-PGS-2016-G3-Dst.pdf
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"The aim of this paper is to connect two projects discussed in different parts of philosophy and biology. One project is understanding individuality in a biological sense – the sense seen in the discussion stemming from Leo Buss's book The Evolution of Individuality (1987) and related works. The other is the attempt to describe the beginnings of mentality, the simplest forms, and to do so in a way that contributes to an understanding of the most puzzling features of the mind, subjective experience and consciousness.
One link between the two topics is the idea of an organism. An organism is one kind of biological unit, one kind of "individual," and the clear cases of mental phenomena are the mental states of organisms, such as ourselves. Even if you think there is some contingency in that relationship, because of the possibility of minds in AI systems and nonliving robots, the nature of organisms certainly seems relevant to the problem. I think the link is tighter, too. With or without a biological framing, the right approach to the most elusive issues about the mind is by way of the notion of a subject, and subjectivity. If so, part of what we have to understand is a certain kind of unit, a certain kind of constituent of the world: systems that are subjects. Setting aside dualist and panpsychist views, it seems that the special features of subjects are organizational, and this organization will be the product of some sort of evolutionary process. Biological organisms are such important evolutionary products that some connection between the evolution of subjectivity and the evolution of organisms seems inevitable. This does not make it clear how organisms and subjects are related – whether all organisms are subjects, whether subjects are a subset of organisms, whether subjectivity and organismality are matters of degree with some association between them... but biology certainly seems primed to do some of the work.
A literature that is especially relevant here is recent discussion of minimal cognition. How does the category of cognition relate to living activity generally? Do plants have cognitive capacities? Is all life cognitive to some degree?"
@Pharoah this boat...? Shades of EDNA the knowing alien plant and HCT generally.
Thanks for the PDF @Constance one of PGS's books came across our desk this weekend.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Well... maybe
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Oh. I didn't expect any stronger agreement...
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
A very good summary of the Simulation Hypothesis
The only problem is that it's framed in terms of Idealism vs. Materialism
There's no logical requirement that the simulator be either
conscious or immaterial. In fact the same evidence
suggests the opposite. The rest is excellent.
The only problem is that it's framed in terms of Idealism vs. Materialism
There's no logical requirement that the simulator be either
conscious or immaterial. In fact the same evidence
suggests the opposite. The rest is excellent.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
That boat... and the donkey in it that's been flogged to death... perhaps no more. Alternatively, if consciousness is matter then we are looking at its evolution, maybe, in quantitive form, or, in the nature of its co-formation, or, in its transcendence... etc... This isn't my view really, I'm just putting it out there for @Soupie to consider. Come up with some ideas to make panpsychism work for me.
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