Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

[Soupie]

http://www.buildingalienworlds.com/uploads/5/7/9/9/57999785/andrew_gallimore_psypressaug2014.pdf

“If the outside world fell in ruins, one of us would be capable of building it up again, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and blossom, all that is shaped by nature lies modelled in us
- Hermann Hesse

It’s quite remarkable that Hermann Hesse wrote these words almost a hundred years ago, in his semi-autobiographical novel, Demian, and yet they beautifully capture our current understanding of brain’s role in modelling the world – all that appears in the world is modelled in our brains. It is no coincidence that the novel’s protagonist, Emil Sinclair, describes growing up in what he calls a Scheinwelt - a world of illusion. Hesse was deeply fascinated by Eastern thought and, according to Vedic and Buddhist philosophy, the phenomenal world is indeed an illusion (maya). It is comforting to see the world around us as being somehow fixed, solid and, most importantly, real. But it only takes a lungful of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to shatter this delusion. Whether the external world-in-itself, the noumenal world, is truly real is difficult to answer and, for the purposes of this discussion, it really doesn’t matter. The only world we can ever experience is the phenomenal world – the world that appears to consciousness. As far as we know, the phenomenal world is never transcendent – it never reaches out and touches the noumenal world; it is always in the head. Thomas Metzinger (2009) expresses it clearly:

The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. For us, phenomenal reality is not a simulational space constructed by our brains; in a direct and experientially untranscendable manner, it is the world we live in.

For most people and for most of the time, this phenomenal world appears stable and predictable, but only because the brain has evolved to generate a stable and predictable model of the noumenal world. However, psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, LSD and psilocybin, among others, not only show us that the phenomenal world can become fluid, unpredictable and novel, but that it can be annihilated in an instant and replaced with a world altogether stranger than anything we can imagine. It is tempting to regard such perceptual aberrations as just that – ‘tricks of the mind’, hallucinations, illusions or, if we want to appear especially smart, ‘false perceptions’. But such a self-assured attitude is hard to justify, as deciding what is true and what is false about our perceptions is far from trivial. To regard the phenomenal world as a stable and fixed entity is really just an approximation and as we begin to discover and explore worlds of astonishing beauty, complexity and strangeness, this approximation becomes less and less useful as a general model of our reality. Whilst the consensus model of reality is certainly the most informative from an adaptive standpoint, there is no reason to assume that it is the only informative model in an absolute sense and so no reason to dismiss those versions of reality that transcend our standard frame of reference. ...”

 

[Soupie]

More from article:
The cortex comprises billions of columns, allowing it to generate a practically infinite number of phenomenal worlds (Fig. 2). However, it is obvious that the brain tends to adopt a very specific set of thalamocortical states; these are the states that model the consensus world. In fact, even when dreaming, the brain tends to model the consensus world as a default. The majority of dreams are of this world and most dream activities are those from waking life (Schredl & Hofmann 2003). The thalamocortical states that generate the dream state are identical to those of waking – the brain is modelling the world in exactly the same way, despite havingno access to sensory data from the external world. This raises the question as to why the brain is capable of doing this with such adroit. The answer is rather simple – even when awake, only a small fraction of the information used to model the world actually comes from sensory data, known as extrinsic information. Most of the information results from ongoing activity of the thalamocortical system, known as intrinsic information. Sensory data doesn’t create the world, but rather, modulates this ongoing activity by being matched to it (Tononi, Sporns & Edelman 1996; Edelman 2000; Sporns 2011). The waking phenomenal world is most aptly described as a waking dream that is modulated or constrained by extrinsic sensory data (Behrendt 2003). This is perhaps a little surprising, but explains why the brain can model the world with such expert precision during dreaming. The brain’s model of the world is generated by intrinsic thalamocortical activity, modulated but not created by sensory data (Llinas, Ribary, Contreras, & Pedroarena 1998). To understand how the brain evolved to model the world so effortlessly, we need to understand a little more about the structure of the thalamocortical system and its neuroevolution.”

 

[Randall]

What evidence is there that the brain “causes” the phenomenal aspect of consciousness or creates the phenomenal aspect of consciousness as a new substance or thing?

Neuroscience. Mountains of it. Start with the Thalamocortical Loop: "It is reasonable to consider the thalamus a primary candidate for the location of consciousness ..." A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness | Also see the attachment below ...

They do, you just don’t understand them.

Claiming I don't understand is not valid counterpoint. I suggest you choose another approach, e.g. provide reasoning that addresses the content of a post, rather than making suppositions about the intelligence of the person making the post.

To be specific. I provided clear examples, using your own analogies, to illustrate why your examples do not apply to the issue at hand. For your counterpoint to be valid, you would need to find some flaw in my illustration and explain why it is flawed, rather than simply claim it is wrong because I don't understand.

More on the The neuronal basis for consciousness from the Royal Society

 

[Randall]

Perhaps of some peripheral interest: Naturalized Panpsychism: An Alternative to Fundamentalist Physicalism and Supernaturalism

 

[Soupie]

Neuroscience. Mountains of it. Start with the Thalamocortical Loop: "It is reasonable to consider the thalamus a primary candidate for the location of consciousness ..." A thalamic reticular networking model of consciousness

Claiming I don't understand is not valid counterpoint. I suggest you choose another approach, e.g. provide reasoning that addresses the content of a post, rather than the person making the post.

To be specific. I provided clear examples, using your own analogies, to illustrate why your examples do not apply to the issue at hand. For your counterpoint to be valid, you would need to find some flaw in my illustration and explain why it is flawed, rather than simply claim it is wrong because I don't understand. If that's too much to expect, then save your condescension ( intentional or otherwise ) for another forum.

See if my above explanation helps.

Note the difference between aspect consciousness and p consciousness (what I have taken to referring to as the phenomenal aspect of consciousness aka qualia, what-its-like, etc).

Access consciousness (world and self models) are certainly generated in the brain, however there is no evidence that p consciousness is generated in the brain.

 

[Soupie]

More from article:

“This model of neuroevolution can also be explained using information theory. If we imagine an early (and purely hypothetical) brain that hasn’t yet evolved to model the external world, this brain will still be spontaneously active and this activity will contain intrinsic information (and perhaps even generate a phenomenal world). This intrinsic self-information can be quantified as the entropy of the brain. However, this information tells the brain nothing about the environment (external world), which itself contains a quantifiable amount of information (entropy). As the brain evolves by sampling sensory information from the environment and the connectivity of the thalamocortical system is moulded, the spontaneous activity of the brain becomes more and more informative (from an adaptive perspective) about the external world. In information theory this is known as an increase in the mutual information between the brain and the environment. The mutual information between two variables (in this case the brain and the environment) is a measure of how much we can learn about one variable by knowing something about the other. This can be represented using a set diagram (Fig. 4); the entire entropy (information content) of the brain is one circle, that of the environment the other. The overlap between the circles is the mutual information between them. As figure 4 shows, the overlap gradually increases with the progression of neuroevolution, as the brain develops the ability to generate an informative and adaptive model of the world. The term entropy is often associated with disorder, but it is actually a measure of the number of possible states of a system. With regards to the brain, we can think of this as the number of possible thalamocortical activation patterns or states. As we have seen, the number of states, whilst theoretically almost infinite, is limited by the connectivity of the system. The brain evolves to minimise the overall entropy of the brain, such that the world remains stable and predictable (Friston 2010), whilst concomitantly maximising the mutual information between itself and the environment.”

 

[Constance]

But those who maintain that only neurons have p consciousness make an equally outrageous and completely unsupportable claim. There is nothing magical about neuron cells. The partial panpsychism (as it has been described) of the notion that the phenomenal aspect of consciousness only has its locus in some brain cells some of the time is magical thinking.

. . . just because we become aware of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness when we are conscious does not mean the phenomena aspect of consciousness only exists with consciousness. Its poor logic.

Right on both points imo. But it's important that physicalist neuroscience realize at some point that the phenomenal appearances of our environing world are taken up and learned in prereflective, pre-thetic, consciousness, indeed from birth onward. And that consciousness is not extinguished in sleep, thus enabling the ideations that are expressed in dreams, which indeed sometimes awaken us fully. Also, as Evan Thompson found in his research reported in Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, a minimal condition of consciousness persists even in non-dreaming sleep.

 

[Constance]

@Constance

for example, the paper I submitted above offers the (of course premature) suggestion that representations/models/simulations that are intrinsically counterfactual are those that are conscious.
it doesn’t matter if those representations/models/simulations are manifested by feedforward or feedback/recurrent neural processes. What matters is the intrinsic nature of those representations. In this case, the authors suggest the intrinsic nature is “information” that is counterfactual to the actual state of what-is.
I think it’s a thought provoking idea. A new idea we haven’t discussed here. Which is why I presented it.

I too find it interesting and hope to understand more about the authors' evidence and reasoning, especially concerning the claim I've highlighted in red. What is the origin and nature of the 'information' [of some kind] they claim to be available in consciousness and which is 'counterfactual to the actual state of what-is'?

I'm not able to follow yet the remainder of your post:

now, I happen to disagree that actual and counterfactual sims/reps/models are the difference between conscious and non conscious brain states.

As radical/ridiculous as it may sound, I’m suggesting the difference between a conscious and a non conscious sim/rep/model is the intrinsic content/symbolism of the brain state. Namely that it includes a self model.

Something that is intrinsic to the system/organism/agent that manifests the rep/sim/model.

 

[Constance]

From the objective, 3rd person, physical, mechanistic perspective, there is no consciousness, there is no “something it’s like to be.”

Only self models manifested within organisms are conscious.

I think the hard problem still lurks there. We might try to take an "objective, 3rd person, physical, mechanistic perspective" on another human being but most of us intrinsically know that this person is likely conscious [exceptions usually found in the IC unit]. We sense and recognize consciousness in most others of our species, and indeed that sensing is what awakens the sense of self in ourselves in prereflective conscious experiences.

the self that we experience as being conscious is a model our body is manifesting to allow it adaptively move through and interact with the world.

How does that happen? How does "a model our body is manifesting' in our early instinctive movements through and adaptations to our environing situation produce "the self that we experience as being conscious"? It seems to me that we respond to natural 'affordances' enabling us to explore our environment rather than to a 'model' of some kind that becomes conscious of itself. Help me understand your statement better. I guess that it is the term 'model' that throws me. I think we do gradually develop consciousness through accruing personal and social experiences in our existential 'being-in-a-world' and 'being-with-others', but this is a gradual accomplishment, clarified day by day in our 'making sense' of what we experience in our lived presence to the environing world and to others we share it with. In other words, I don't see how consciousness can be built from the inside out on a model of our body that pre-exists [where? in the brain?] our lived experiences in relation to that which surrounds us.

One must conceptually flip between the world as we experience it at the personal, “lived” level which is within the simulation our body is manifesting, and the world as it [exists?] beyond our models of it—which so far as we can discern consists of roughly 12 quantum fields that differentiate and interact via spatiotemporal perturbations.

That is indeed the scientific contribution to the phenomenological-existential ontology within which we live and think. It points to our limits. We don't know the 'World/Universe/Cosmos' at its limits. What we know and understand from within our experience in this local world on this planet enables us to understand the nature of our being and the other beings we encounter and to found our philosophies and social theories on what our experiences reveal to be real/actual in our time. We have enough to do getting all of this straight.

And yes I understand that even our physics models of what is are within the simulation. But they can reflect—I believe—some veridical patterns of what is.

You already know how little I can identify with the view of human being historically and currently in terms of 'simulations'. Maybe you can still change my mind, though.

 

[Soupie]

@Constance I haven’t been able to find a nice group of papers specifically about feedforward networks and consciousness. I know all the papers I read about IIT several years ago addressed it quite a bit.

“Conversely, [IIT] predicts that feed-forward networks, even complex ones, are not conscious...”

“A second class of zero-phi systems are purely feed-forward computational networks in which one layer feeds the next one without any recurrent connections. In a feed-forward network, the input layer is always determined entirely by external inputs and the output layer does not affect the rest of the system, hence neither layer can be part of a complex, and the same is true recursively for the next layers downstream and upstream. According to IIT, then, a feed-forward network does not exist intrinsically—for itself—but is a zombie—carrying out tasks unconsciously. Yet from the extrinsic perspective of a user, feed-forward networks, like those used in deep learning, perform plenty of useful computational functions, such as finding faces or cats in images, labelling images, reading zip codes and detecting ... fraud.”

“For example, why is consciousness generated by the cerebral cortex (or at least some parts of it), but the cerebellum does not contribute to it, despite the latter having even more neurons; ?”

“This is the kind of organization that yields a comparatively high value of phi max. Instead, the cerebellum is composed of small modules that process inputs and produce outputs largely independent of each other.”

If I come across more about feed-forward and consciousness, I’ll post here. But not having much luck doing a direct search.

It seems to me that we respond to natural 'affordances' enabling us to explore our environment rather than to a 'model' of some kind that becomes conscious of itself.

Remember, from inside the simulation, it doesn’t feel like we’re in a simulation. (Nick Bostrom and Joe Rogan had a painful conversation about this. Joe kept saying “but I can feel this table. It’s solid. It’s real. So how could I be in a simulation!?” In a simulation, the table would feel solid and real.)

See bolded text:

The global model of reality constructed by our brain is updated at such great speed and with such reliability that we generally do not experience it as a model. For us, phenomenal reality is not a simulational space constructed by our brains; in a direct and experientially untranscendable manner, it is the world we live in.

One time that people do potentially get to peek behind the curtain is during psychedelic experiences, deep meditative states, and maybe lucid dreaming. That’s when people seem to experience first hand the brains ability to construct a vivid world that is presumably completely counterfactual to the noumenal world.

In other words, I don't see how consciousness can be built from the inside out on a model of our body that pre-exists [where? in the brain?] our lived experiences in relation to that which surrounds us.

To a certain extent the model does “pre-exist” as I understand it. We don’t completely build it from scratch. Thomas Metzinger has written about this and I’ve posted about this before.

A lady I work with—after having discussed this topic with her—shared that her daughter almost wrecked her car several years ago. She had started to drift off the road and instinctually tried to grab steering wheel with her right arm but couldn’t grab the wheel.
She couldn’t grab the wheel because she doesn’t have a right arm.

The friend said her daughter sometimes feels like she does have a right arm, like in the situation above. I had asked, or the conversation went that way, how she had lost her right arm. Her daughter was born without a right arm.

So yes, to an extent we are born with an internal map of our “body,” or at least a typical human body.

You already know how little I can identify with the view of human being historically and currently in terms of 'simulations'. Maybe you can still change my mind, though.

Ha, well I’m not trying to change your mind.

One way I think about it is to wonder: how can an organism composed of billions of individual cells and multiple organs and sensory systems, achieve complex, unified behavior?

While we’ve already talked about how brains/bodies use procedural learning that can presumably be carried out non-consciously, there are many novel situations that seem to call for behavior that isn’t procedural and stimulus-response in nature.

That’s were the concept of a unified model of what-is comes in to play for me. If the organism composed of billions of cells, multiple organs and muscle groups, and sensory systems doesn’t have a unified perspective on the world, how does it behave adaptively? That “unified perspective” is generated by the body/brain with the help of sensory information gathered from the world, which it uses to inform the unified model it generates and uses to insure unified action of the plethora of cells, muscle groups, and other bodily processes.

And finally our minds/conscious experiences seem to fit the bill as being this unified model. Whether one calls it a simulation, model, representation, presentation, mind, stream of consciousness, they are referring to the same thing.

 

[Soupie]

Here’s the articles I quoted from above:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167

 

[Pharoah]

“Physical systems cannot be conscious, only simulations can be.”

One must conceptually move past naive realism and understand the indirect nature of perception to appreciate the above.

I continue to believe that Bach is approaching consciousness and the mbp in very unique, refreshing, but also very rigorous and scientifically grounded ways.

@Pharoah

I see some of your thinking in the following paper (although you may not).

Although you don’t couch your approach in computational terms, I think your approach is compatible with Bach’s and the following paper.

Information generation as a functional basis of consciousness

Abstract. What is the biological advantage of having consciousness? Functions of consciousness have been elusive due to the subjective nature of consciousn

academic.oup.com

@Soupie. Not sure this really relates to my approach... can’t see it....
Bach?

 

[Constance]

@Constance I haven’t been able to find a nice group of papers specifically about feedforward networks and consciousness. I know all the papers I read about IIT several years ago addressed it quite a bit.

“Conversely, [IIT] predicts that feed-forward networks, even complex ones, are not conscious...”

“A second class of zero-phi systems are purely feed-forward computational networks in which one layer feeds the next one without any recurrent connections. In a feed-forward network, the input layer is always determined entirely by external inputs and the output layer does not affect the rest of the system, hence neither layer can be part of a complex, and the same is true recursively for the next layers downstream and upstream. According to IIT, then, a feed-forward network does not exist intrinsically—for itself—but is a zombie—carrying out tasks unconsciously. Yet from the extrinsic perspective of a user, feed-forward networks, like those used in deep learning, perform plenty of useful computational functions, such as finding faces or cats in images, labelling images, reading zip codes and detecting ... fraud.”

“For example, why is consciousness generated by the cerebral cortex (or at least some parts of it), but the cerebellum does not contribute to it, despite the latter having even more neurons; ?”

“This is the kind of organization that yields a comparatively high value of phi max. Instead, the cerebellum is composed of small modules that process inputs and produce outputs largely independent of each other.”

If I come across more about feed-forward and consciousness, I’ll post here. But not having much luck doing a direct search.

Remember, from inside the simulation, it doesn’t feel like we’re in a simulation. (Nick Bostrom and Joe Rogan had a painful conversation about this. Joe kept saying “but I can feel this table. It’s solid. It’s real. So how could I be in a simulation!?” In a simulation, the table would feel solid and real.)

See bolded text:

One time that people do potentially get to peek behind the curtain is during psychedelic experiences, deep meditative states, and maybe lucid dreaming. That’s when people seem to experience first hand the brains ability to construct a vivid world that is presumably completely counterfactual to the noumenal world.

To a certain extent the model does “pre-exist” as I understand it. We don’t completely build it from scratch. Thomas Metzinger has written about this and I’ve posted about this before.

A lady I work with—after having discussed this topic with her—shared that her daughter almost wrecked her car several years ago. She had started to drift off the road and instinctually tried to grab steering wheel with her right arm but couldn’t grab the wheel.
She couldn’t grab the wheel because she doesn’t have a right arm.

The friend said her daughter sometimes feels like she does have a right arm, like in the situation above. I had asked, or the conversation went that way, how she had lost her right arm. Her daughter was born without a right arm.

So yes, to an extent we are born with an internal map of our “body,” or at least a typical human body.

One way I think about it is to wonder: how can an organism composed of billions of individual cells and multiple organs and sensory systems, achieve complex, unified behavior?

While we’ve already talked about how brains/bodies use procedural learning that can presumably be carried out non-consciously, there are many novel situations that seem to call for behavior that isn’t procedural and stimulus-response in nature.

That’s w[h]ere the concept of a unified model of what-is comes in to play for me. If the organism composed of billions of cells, multiple organs and muscle groups, and sensory systems doesn’t have a unified perspective on the world, how does it behave adaptively? That “unified perspective” is generated by the body/brain with the help of sensory information gathered from the world, which it uses to inform the unified model it generates and uses to insure unified action of the plethora of cells, muscle groups, and other bodily processes.

And finally our minds/conscious experiences seem to fit the bill as being this unified model. Whether one calls it a simulation, model, representation, presentation, mind, stream of consciousness, they are referring to the same thing.

"And finally our minds/conscious experiences seem to fit the bill as being this unified model. Whether one calls it a simulation, model, representation, presentation, mind, stream of consciousness, they are referring to the same thing."

Thanks for this detailed reply. As I recall our discussions here of Tononi's 'Integrated Information Theory' (two years ago or more) he was issuing revised versions of that theory around the time we were discussing it, and in the third (possibly fourth) revision he had recognized the necessity of incorporating phenomenal experience into it. I believe I linked that revision at the time it was issued. I'll look back in the archives to link it again here.
I want to say that your concluding statement, highlighted in red above, suggests that the theorists you continue to follow and cite have not actually plumbed the details necessary to account for the evolution of consciousness out of phenomenal consciousness based first in the natural affordances provided to all organisms as 'instincts' and 'needs' to sustain themselves through interactions with their given organic environments (i.e., the environments in which they occur). It makes a great deal of difference whether we attempt to research, understand, and verify the actual/tangible existential conditions felt and experienced by degrees all the way up in the evolution of species to the point of our existence (at the top of the local heap, having aegis above all other species to manipulate the actual environment and ecology that has enabled life in general to develop on this planet. It makes an enormous difference in our attempts to account for the nature of our being -- our being-here, historically and currently, as individuals as well as representatives of a species, embedded in societies and cultures that frame the ways in which we think and act in this local world -- and yet also capable of thinking beyond those frames. Phenomenological philosophy presents an investigation of affectivity, awareness, and responsiveness to things and others in this shared world that begins in prereflective consciousness and in our species (and possibly others) proceeds into reflective consciousness within which we develop minds capable of philosophy, science, aesthetic experience, the propagation of shared values, the progress of what we think of as human civilization and the differences expressed in the pluralism of human points of view on the existential questions of what we are, who we are, and what we should do with our capabilities of thinking the nature of our individual and contextualized being and influencing what we do to or with one another and the local world we inhabit. In phenomenology, thinking the nature of our being is taken to grasp the closest approximation we can make to the nature of the Being of all that is.

I think the notion that we can account for all of what we know has taken place and been expressed in human history, and of the intense conflicts of beliefs and ideas current in our time concerning how and why this plurality of thought exists, cannot be understood in terms of a 'model' located prior to human experience in and of the local world we exist in.

One more point referencing your example of the automatic attempt by a woman without a right arm from birth to use her right arm and hand to avoid an auto accident: phenomenology has long since recognized (esp in MP and his successors) that there is a deeply embedded subconscious awareness of the human 'body schema', and also in the multitude of other species inhabiting this planet. We need to understand why and how the impulse to use an arm, or other limb, that has never existed in one's experienced lifetime is nevertheless called upon in some crisis situations. This automatic impulse is a preconscious, neurologically wired, 'knowledge' in the brain that there 'should be' a limb to use despite one's never having experienced the use of it. We might be able to think of this kind of subconscious knowledge as a 'model' in some sense, but it surely can't account for all human experience and behavior as 'simulation' or 'information integration'.

ETA: a clearer statement of the phenomenological understanding of consciousness might be expressed this way: Some unconscious processes laid down and evolved in the brain which regulate purely physical/bodily systems and functions that enable humans and other animals to survive or thrive in their lived environmental situations might be conceived of as a 'model' for survival, but they cannot explain or account for the wide variety of ways in which we humans think, behave, and interact with others and with the mutually shared environment in which we live.

 

[Randall]

... We might be able to think of this kind of subconscious knowledge as a 'model' in some sense, but it surely can't account for all human experience and behavior as 'simulation' or 'information integration'.

I get the impression that your resistance to the idea that we and our realm are simulations, is more intuitive than reasoned. Oddly enough, if that is correct, then we may have something in common. Despite my affinity for the simulation hypothesis, I also feel that consciousness isn't something that can be programmed into any system. I do not know how to reconcile the dichotomy. Perhaps it is the case that while this realm is a simulation, the presence of consciousness within it is an unexpected consequence; something that even the architects themselves didn't plan for.

 

[Soupie]

@Pharoah

No, not Bach. The paper on “information generation” and counterfactuals is what I was thinking. Bach was not associated with that.

the section of hct that talks about individual organisms having their own spatiotemporal perspective on the world had some parallels with the emergence of the ability to manifest counterfactual mental states in organisms.

 

[Soupie]

I get the impression that your resistance to the idea that we and our realm are simulations, is more intuitive than reasoned. Oddly enough, if that is correct, then we may have something in common. Despite my affinity for the simulation hypothesis, I also feel that consciousness isn't something that can be programmed into any system. I do not know how to reconcile the dichotomy. Perhaps it is the case that while this realm is a simulation, the presence of consciousness within it is an unexpected consequence; something that even the architects themselves didn't plan for.

Note the simulation/representation approach to perception/mind doesn’t resolve the hard problem.

 

[Soupie]

I get the impression that your resistance to the idea that we and our realm are simulations, is more intuitive than reasoned. Oddly enough, if that is correct, then we may have something in common. Despite my affinity for the simulation hypothesis, I also feel that consciousness isn't something that can be programmed into any system. I do not know how to reconcile the dichotomy. Perhaps it is the case that while this realm is a simulation, the presence of consciousness within it is an unexpected consequence; something that even the architects themselves didn't plan for.

Also, while it is confusing, the simulation approach to perception/mind is different than the simulation theory of reality as presented by Bostrom and Musk.

 

[Constance]

@Pharoah

No, not Bach. The paper on “information generation” and counterfactuals is what I was thinking. Bach was not associated with that.

the section of hct that talks about individual organisms having their own spatiotemporal perspective on the world had some parallels with the emergence of the ability to manifest counterfactual mental states in organisms.

You also responded to Randle's recent post as follows:

"Also, while it is confusing, the simulation approach to perception/mind is different than the simulation theory of reality as presented by Bostrom and Musk."

@Soupie, what we need is a paper, or symposium, or book that traces the development of the concepts of information, phenomenal experience and consciousness, and mind that have contributed to Bach's representations. He can make his claims and you can repeat and recommend them to us but they remain 'claims' at this point. What and where is the evidence substantiating any of them and integrating them to form a persuasive theory about consciousness and mind?

 

[Constance]

Note the simulation/representation approach to perception/mind doesn’t resolve the hard problem.

Re: this response to Randle, I have to ask why we as researchers into consciousness should be interested in "the simulation/representation approach to perception/mind" if it does not resolve 'the hard problem', which has been the focal point of Consciousness Studies since Chalmers named it?

 

[Randall]

Re: this response to Randle, I have to ask why we as researchers into consciousness should be interested in "the simulation/representation approach to perception/mind" if it does not resolve 'the hard problem', which has been the focal point of Consciousness Studies since Chalmers named it?

I see three separate issues. The first is that there is no way the HPC can be resolved ( other than to simply accept it as a given ). Therefore, the HPC's primary value is in leading those who ponder it to that understanding. The other two issues are the contexts in which we're using the word "simulation". As @Soupie points out, there are two contexts to the word "simulation" being referenced in this discussion. They are the cosmological and the experiential.

From an experiential perspective, the words "simulation" and "experience" appear to be occasionally conflated, which I think is a mistake, because one assumes the other, when that may not be the case. In other words, take away the simulation and hypothetically we would experience an absence of the simulation. It's a reversion back to the Cartesian Theatre problem where the simulation is the movie, and consciousness is the experiencer of the movie.

The third issue is that of a simulation being responsible for the existence of our universe. This issue is tangential. But it does evoke some interesting questions, like the idea that if this realm is some sort of generated construct, then perhaps consciousness is quantized. How that relates to the fundamentalness of consciousness is interesting to ponder.