The meanings are not identical. The more you read in philosophy of mind, esp phenomenological POM, the more you will see these two terms used carefully, distinctly, and consistently and for the same reasons.
-
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Free episodes:
- Status
The meanings are not identical. The more you read in philosophy of mind, esp phenomenological POM, the more you will see these two terms used carefully, distinctly, and consistently and for the same reasons.
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Unfortunately the "false problem" label persists in the problem-solution-problem-solution-... chain or nexus that has already erupted into and has manifested to itself the "problem-er" I also think we have to pick apart the "nature" or even "situation" or "evident" terms in order to address what has already brought these abstractions into our understanding.
What "we" are to "ourselves" is already provided in a nexus of who-thingness -- and in the necessary figure/background needed for a discerning sentient being we find a failed model for our own ability to perform the theatre which includes all of the necessary (and transparent) props, background, witnesses, etc which appears to give us an "answer." The problem of course is that the very efforts to perform the analysis already depend on something that lies in the ground which we are trying to examine.
Can a strange loop expose and comprehend it's own strangeness? Can a mathematical system prove it's own unproven axioms?
If a greater (some kind of higher-dimensional super-mind) found the answer to satisfy it's own understanding would such an explanation even be translatable into a finite string of words and symbols to convince us?
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I will have to look into this further. I've never run across it before, and my initial cross-checking appears to have been too cursory. I just ran across this: Apprehension. Vocabulary of Philosophy. William Fleming, So one distinction seems to be that apprehending seems to be identical to comprehending the concept of something as opposed to comprehending the workings of something. I'm not sure what other ways of looking at this there are. If you can add any further clarification, please do.
Last edited:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Is there confusion about what the problem is (how the mind relates to the body) or confusion about the concepts involved or confusion about why the relation between the mind and the body is a problem?
I say it’s the latter two.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
From McGinn’s paper:
“My argument will proceed as follows. I shall first argue that P is indeed perceptually closed; then I shall complete the argument to full cognitive closure by insisting that no form of inference from what is perceived can lead us to P. The argument for perceptual closure starts from the thought that nothing we can imagine perceiving in the brain would ever convince us that we have located the intelligible nexus we seek.
No matter what recondite property we could see to be instantiated in the brain we would always be baffled about how it could give rise to consciousness.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it. It is like trying to conceive of a perceptible property of a rock that would render it perspicuous that the rock was conscious.
In fact, I think it is the very impossibility of this that lies at the root of the felt mind-body problem. [Yes! This is what I mean about the pearl! -Soupie]
But why is this? [I have attempted to answer this question numerous times. I will do so again. I will contrast my answer with McGinn’s - Soupie]
Basically, I think, it is because the senses are geared to representing a spatial world; they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties. But it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem: we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain. There the brain is, an object of perception, laid out in space, containing spatially distributed processes; but consciousness defies explanation in such terms. Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial
processes; yet perception of the brain seems limited to revealing such 14
processes.”
For now I’ll just ask: what happens when a perceptual system perceives itself? Especially when we recognize that perception is inferential and representational, not naive and direct?
I think ANY perceptual system will have a MBP equivalent to the one humans face.
“My argument will proceed as follows. I shall first argue that P is indeed perceptually closed; then I shall complete the argument to full cognitive closure by insisting that no form of inference from what is perceived can lead us to P. The argument for perceptual closure starts from the thought that nothing we can imagine perceiving in the brain would ever convince us that we have located the intelligible nexus we seek.
No matter what recondite property we could see to be instantiated in the brain we would always be baffled about how it could give rise to consciousness.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it. It is like trying to conceive of a perceptible property of a rock that would render it perspicuous that the rock was conscious.
In fact, I think it is the very impossibility of this that lies at the root of the felt mind-body problem. [Yes! This is what I mean about the pearl! -Soupie]
But why is this? [I have attempted to answer this question numerous times. I will do so again. I will contrast my answer with McGinn’s - Soupie]
Basically, I think, it is because the senses are geared to representing a spatial world; they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties. But it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem: we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain. There the brain is, an object of perception, laid out in space, containing spatially distributed processes; but consciousness defies explanation in such terms. Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial
processes; yet perception of the brain seems limited to revealing such 14
processes.”
For now I’ll just ask: what happens when a perceptual system perceives itself? Especially when we recognize that perception is inferential and representational, not naive and direct?
I think ANY perceptual system will have a MBP equivalent to the one humans face.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Maybe this is a good time to exercise that difference between apprehension and comprehension. I submit that it is entirely possible to apprehend that there is some regional situation that the brain produces wherein consciousness resides, but that it is impossible to comprehend every facet of its existence. In short, we may apprehend that there are minds and bodies, but never fully comprehend it.
So the MBP seems to be one of not being able to comprehend exactly how such a situation happens, not that we don't comprehend that there are such situations. This might also be what accounts for our differing opinions on the validity of the MBP. Because I see the former as a fool's errand, and the latter as simply the way things are, I conclude that moving past the MBP is the only reasonable direction to take.
Last edited:
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
You need to participate more. You have this knack for catching me when I'm too quick to judge, and I have a knack for walking into glass walls. So it serves us both. You can be entertained, and I can learn something new ;-)
Last edited:
@Soupie: "For now I’ll just ask: what happens when a perceptual system perceives itself? Especially when we recognize that perception is inferential and representational, not naive and direct?
I think ANY perceptual system will have a MBP equivalent to the one humans face."
Trying to grok your last statement. What other 'perceptual systems' do you [or others] have in mind as comparative/comparable to that which we experience in ourselves, and therefore might be conceived to confront a mind-body equivalent to ours?
Last edited:
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I have the germ of an idea of how to proceed. I am excited.
You had asked for papers that deal with this self-reference issue and the mbp. I haven’t really been able to find any. That means 1) this idea is doa (but I don’t think so), 2) there are papers I just haven’t found them.
I think the mbp is a unique scientific problem. I think what makes the mbp unique is that it is a problem of self-reference.
I will try to flesh out. I think I found an a way to illustrate the problem. I also have an idea for helping people see the problem.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Did you get as far as this in McGinn's paper?
"Should we say that the mind-body problem is onlyrelatively closed or is the closure absolute? This depends on what we allow as a possible concept-forming mind, which is not an easy question. If we allow for minds that form their concepts of the brain and consciousness in ways that are quite independent of perception and introspection, then there may be room for the idea that there are possible minds for which the mind-body problem is soluble, and easily so. But if we suppose that all concept formation is tied to perception and introspection, however loosely, then no mind will be capable of understanding how it relates to its own body—the insolubility will be absolute. I think we can just about make sense of the former kind of mind, by exploiting our own faculty of a priori reasoning. Our mathematical concepts (say) do not seem tied either to perception or to introspection, so there does seem to be a mode of concept formation that operates without the constraints I identified earlier. The suggestion might then be that a mind that formed all of its concepts in this way—including its concepts of the brain and consciousness—would be free of the biases that prevent us from coming up with the right theory of how the two connect. Such a mind would have to be able to think of the brain and consciousness in ways that utterly prescind from the perceptual and the introspective—in somewhat the way we now (it seems) think about numbers. This mind would conceive of the psychophysical link in totally apriori terms. Perhaps this is how we should think of God's mind, and God's understanding of the mind-body relation. At any rate, something pretty radical is going to be needed if we are to devise a mind that can escape the kinds of closure that make the problem insoluble for us—if I am right in my diagnosis of our difficulty. If the problem is only relatively insoluble, then the type of mind that can solve it is going to be very different from ours and the kinds of mind we can readily make sense of(there may, of course, be cognitive closure here too). It certainly seems tome to be at least an open question whether the problem is absolutely insoluble; I would not be surprised if it were."
I'm not sure he's right about how we think of math...see Lakoff and Nunez...but if so or if there are otherwise minds such as he describes, how does this answer to @Soupie's "self reference" and @Michael Allen 's broader skepticism?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I think the mbp directly relates to perception. I think I can show how this is the case.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I know!
And I'm asking would a mind "able to think of the brain and consciousness in ways that utterly prescind from the perceptual and the introspective" have a mbp problem?
Last edited:
Interesting question, and none too clear in McGinn. Can you figure out a way to re-word the phrase 'prescind from' for clarification? I can't. I've looked for and found online several examples of this intransitive verb in usage examples at this link:
Prescind | Definition of Prescind by Lexico
The etymology is interesting (see Merriam-Webster definition for example). The intransitive usage of this verb seems to have developed after the word's first usage in the 17th century when 'prescind' meant 'to cut off at the front' / ~ to cut off at the outset? I'm wondering why McGinn used this word? Do you know if he uses it elsewhere?
I checked Black's Law Dictionary for possible legal uses of the term and there are none. Black referred me to an embedded google search, here:
prescind - Google Search
Speaking of perception, this news from phys.org is very interesting:
'Profound' evolution: Wasps learn to recognize faces
'Profound' evolution: Wasps learn to recognize faces
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I'm pretty sure that's it's already been well established that minds and brains are related to perception.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
McGinn says: "No matter what recondite property we could see to be instantiated in the brain we would always be baffled about how it could give rise to consciousness.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it."
He then asks "but why is this?" and provides an answer. I will attempt to answer this question myself. I will contrast my answer with his. However, I must note that McGinn holds a position that I do not. Namely that the brain "give(s) rise to consciousness."
Although my position is nuanced, I do not believe that the brain gives rise to the mind. It would be more appropriate to say that in my view the brain-in-action literally is the mind. (Note: This fact can only be understood in the context of self-reference.) Here we go. My thoughts in blue.
“No matter what recondite property we could see to be instantiated in the brain we would always be baffled about how it could give rise to consciousness.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it. It is like trying to conceive of a perceptible property of a rock that would render it perspicuous that the rock was conscious.
In fact, I think it is the very impossibility of this that lies at the root of the felt mind-body problem.
I agree. I think the perceived structural mismatch between the brain and the mind is at the root of the mind-body problem.
But why is this?
Basically, I think, it is because the senses are geared to representing a spatial world; they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties.
This is the first hurdle. The senses represent the world. Represent. The critical concept. McGinn says the senses represent a spacial world. It might be better to say the senses represent the world, and this representation is spatial. This is no minor quibble.
The point I want to make though is that the senses represent the world. One does not perceive the world directly. The world and our representations of the world are distinct. X and x1
But despite what McGinn seems to think, the fact that the senses represent the world as spatial is not a problem in forging a link between the brain and mind.
But it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem: we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain. There the brain is, an object of perception, laid out in space, containing spatially distributed processes; but consciousness defies explanation in such terms.
Why has McGinn reached this conclusion? Why does he say "we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain?"
Recall that McGinn assumes that brian gives rise to the mind. If I held this same assumption, I would agree with him: spatial properties cannot give rise to the mind. Or at least it is hard to see how spatial properties could give rise to the mind.
However, I reject McGinn's assumption that the brain gives rise to the mind. But you might be surprised that I reject his claim that "we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain." We can't make a link IF we are trying to establish a causal link, as McGinn seems to be doing. But we can, in principle (very important) establish a link, one of identity.
Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial processes; yet perception of the brain seems limited to revealing such processes.”
I agree that consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller, spatial processes. But we need not believe that consciousness is made up out of smaller spatial processes. Consciousness appears to be analog and continuous. But as McGinn points out, the senses represent the brain as being made up out of smaller spatial processes.
There are two critical responses to this apparent structural mismatch.
1) The mismatch is (I submit) apparent and not actual. Recall that the senses represent the world. Ergo, the senses may represent the brain as made up of smaller spatial processes, but the actual brain may be radically different. Or more likely it is simply different. Which leads to the second point.
2) Quantum field theory represents the world (mathematically) as consisting of non-classical, continuous fields. The brain thus can be modeled in principle as the interaction of non-classical, continuous fields.
In conclusion, I submit that the brain-mind link is one of identity. The apparent structural mismatch is not actual and is rather a byproduct of self-percpetion, i.e., the actual brain perceiving itself and representing itself as the squishy, gray brain we know and love.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it."
He then asks "but why is this?" and provides an answer. I will attempt to answer this question myself. I will contrast my answer with his. However, I must note that McGinn holds a position that I do not. Namely that the brain "give(s) rise to consciousness."
Although my position is nuanced, I do not believe that the brain gives rise to the mind. It would be more appropriate to say that in my view the brain-in-action literally is the mind. (Note: This fact can only be understood in the context of self-reference.) Here we go. My thoughts in blue.
“No matter what recondite property we could see to be instantiated in the brain we would always be baffled about how it could give rise to consciousness.
I hereby invite you to try to conceive of a perceptible property of the brain that might allay the feeling of mystery that attends our contemplation of the brain-mind link: I do not think you will be able to do it. It is like trying to conceive of a perceptible property of a rock that would render it perspicuous that the rock was conscious.
In fact, I think it is the very impossibility of this that lies at the root of the felt mind-body problem.
I agree. I think the perceived structural mismatch between the brain and the mind is at the root of the mind-body problem.
But why is this?
Basically, I think, it is because the senses are geared to representing a spatial world; they essentially present things in space with spatially defined properties.
This is the first hurdle. The senses represent the world. Represent. The critical concept. McGinn says the senses represent a spacial world. It might be better to say the senses represent the world, and this representation is spatial. This is no minor quibble.
The point I want to make though is that the senses represent the world. One does not perceive the world directly. The world and our representations of the world are distinct. X and x1
But despite what McGinn seems to think, the fact that the senses represent the world as spatial is not a problem in forging a link between the brain and mind.
But it is precisely such properties that seem inherently incapable of resolving the mind-body problem: we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain. There the brain is, an object of perception, laid out in space, containing spatially distributed processes; but consciousness defies explanation in such terms.
Why has McGinn reached this conclusion? Why does he say "we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain?"
Recall that McGinn assumes that brian gives rise to the mind. If I held this same assumption, I would agree with him: spatial properties cannot give rise to the mind. Or at least it is hard to see how spatial properties could give rise to the mind.
However, I reject McGinn's assumption that the brain gives rise to the mind. But you might be surprised that I reject his claim that "we cannot link consciousness to the brain in virtue of spatial properties of the brain." We can't make a link IF we are trying to establish a causal link, as McGinn seems to be doing. But we can, in principle (very important) establish a link, one of identity.
Consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller spatial processes; yet perception of the brain seems limited to revealing such processes.”
I agree that consciousness does not seem made up out of smaller, spatial processes. But we need not believe that consciousness is made up out of smaller spatial processes. Consciousness appears to be analog and continuous. But as McGinn points out, the senses represent the brain as being made up out of smaller spatial processes.
There are two critical responses to this apparent structural mismatch.
1) The mismatch is (I submit) apparent and not actual. Recall that the senses represent the world. Ergo, the senses may represent the brain as made up of smaller spatial processes, but the actual brain may be radically different. Or more likely it is simply different. Which leads to the second point.
2) Quantum field theory represents the world (mathematically) as consisting of non-classical, continuous fields. The brain thus can be modeled in principle as the interaction of non-classical, continuous fields.
In conclusion, I submit that the brain-mind link is one of identity. The apparent structural mismatch is not actual and is rather a byproduct of self-percpetion, i.e., the actual brain perceiving itself and representing itself as the squishy, gray brain we know and love.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I like what you're suggesting above.
If I understand you correctly, the logic would seem to be that because everything material can be thought of as some sort of field, then those who believe that consciousness is simply a function of the material brain, also, are perhaps unintentionally, putting themselves in the position that consciousness is a field ( like anything else ), and therefore we don't need to bolt-on this "extra" thing we call consciousness. Am I following you?
- Status