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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

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"Rather than Consciousness from nothing invades "unthinking" matter... "

Consciousness as something fundamentally different from matter invading and taking control...like a spirit taking "possession" of something alien to itself
 
Michael Allen said:
"Rather than Consciousness from nothing invades "unthinking" matter... "

Consciousness as something fundamentally different from matter invading and taking control...like a spirit taking "possession" of something alien to itself
Click to expand...

Why not a nascent capacity initially enabled in primordial forms of life (or if you prefer, 'in living matter')? Even Erwin Schrodinger asked this question -- 'what is life?' -- and wrote a book with this title in the heady era of the discovery of quantum mechanics.

Perhaps, as Wallace Stevens, the modern poet par excellence, wrote in the late 1940s, "The spirit comes from the body of the world" and carries forward the expression, the elaboration, of the world as lived.

The whole poem is here: Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
 
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A difficult case: Diagnosis made by hallucinatory voices

A previously healthy woman began to hear hallucinatory voices telling her to have a brain scan for a tumour. The prediction was true; she was operated on and had an uneventful recovery. Born in continental Europe in the mid-1940s the patient settled in Britain in the late 1960s. After a series...
www.bmj.com www.bmj.com

“In the winter of 1984, as she was at home reading, she heard a distinct voice inside her head. The voice told her, “Please don't be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.”

AB had heard of the Children's Hospital, but did not know where it was and had never visited it. Her children were well, so she had no reason to worry about them. This made it all the more frightening for her, and the voice intervened again: “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following”—and the voice gave her three separate pieces of information, which she did not possess at the time. She checked them out, and they were true, but this did not help because she had already come to the conclusion …”

The rest of the article is behind a paywall. Sadly I wasn’t able to find any other documentation of this case after a brief Google search.

Superficially it reminds me of my episode of dehydration when I experienced the extreme vivid multi sensory images of root beer and gummy candies.

Apparently she did go to the hospital, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and had successful surgery.
 
USI Calgary said:
What is it that I keep hearing ( figuratively )? Something about correlation not equalling causation?
Click to expand...

. . . until you face the music by examining the full weight, depth, and detail of two thousand years of such correlations in written human history. Do some research, dear Randall.
 
Constance said:
Hmm, I took your response to @Soupie's post as your usual rejection of all psychical and parapsychological research without your having researched these fields in depth. Did I misinterprete your comment then?
Click to expand...
There has been no "usual rejection of all psychical and parapsychological research ..." As for what you by me doing personal "in-depth research", I don't know. What I have done is review what you and others appear to consider the best evidence of paranormal researchers, compared it against the counterpoint of other scientists, researchers, and skeptics, interviewed investigators and authors, seriously participated in our own forum discussions, and from all this formed a logical analysis and summary of the overall situation. This is significantly more than most people do. If you are choosing to be dismissive of my efforts, that is your choice. However I would ask that you don't misrepresent my position in the process.
 
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Michael Allen said:
Accept the re-writing "what is [likely omitted] the case?"

"Do we KNOW that?" No...point made. Question remade = "if we are 100% ___ that is "
"Do we know ___?"

I am only applying the razor in it's literal sense:

"Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

What kind of miracle is mind....does it require two or one fundamental?
Click to expand...

Telegram received. STOP Still not 100% clear. STOP. ;-)

I don't know if it is a "miracle". Also, "What is a fundamental?" can be answered in such a way as to spawn such monsters as dual aspect monism.

The problem with Occam's Razor is I don't see competing theories to apply it to.
 
Michael Allen said:
"Rather than Consciousness from nothing invades "unthinking" matter... "

Consciousness as something fundamentally different from matter invading and taking control...like a spirit taking "possession" of something alien to itself
Click to expand...

Is anyone here proposing that?

We also have unrunning matter and unseeing matter ... etc etc
 
smcder said:
This is the paper I've referenced a few times above.

[Link no longer works.]
Click to expand...
“illusion. Likewise the ipsundrum does not have phenomenal properties in its own right. The most we might say is that it’s proto-phenomenal (or ‘phenomenous’, as I put it in an earlier paper — Humphrey, 2008).“

That’s cheating.
 
smcder said:
This is the paper I've referenced a few times above.

[Link no longer works.]

From a metaphysics POV what he is saying:

Nature is proto-phenomenal and becomes fully phenomenal via representational function in organisms.

he takes a stab at Goff and Strawson but their views are essentially the same as this.

this is also essentially what Bach would say he’s trying to do with machine intelligence.

semantics is a problem and there are differences in views that go beyond semantics.

this is why I’ve said Dennett’s approach could be construed as a panpsychist view.

Nature is protophenomenal and becomes phenomenal via representational functions of organism sensational and perceptual faculties.
Click to expand...
 
Soupie said:
From a metaphysics POV what he is saying:

Nature is proto-phenomenal and becomes fully phenomenal via representational function in organisms.

he takes a stab at Goff and Strawson but their views are essentially the same as this.

this is also essentially what Bach would say he’s trying to do with machine intelligence.

semantics is a problem and there are differences in views that go beyond semantics.

this is why I’ve said Dennett’s approach could be construed as a panpsychist view.

Nature is protophenomenal and becomes phenomenal via representational functions of organism sensational and perceptual faculties.
Click to expand...

I'm not seeing where he says nature is proto-phenomenal or are you saying that's implied? I just don't see where he directly addresses the phenomenal.
 
Re Dennett any (standard) materialist who denies the hard problem likely holds a view similar to Humphrey. Which is essentially panpsychism. Ie nature is (proto) phenomenal and becomes fully phenomenal via the representational facilities of living organisms.
 
smcder said:
I'm not seeing where he says nature is proto-phenomenal or are you saying that's implied? I just don't see where he directly addresses the phenomenal.
Click to expand...
“Likewise the ipsundrum does not have phenomenal properties in its own right. The most we might say is that it’s proto-phenomenal (or ‘phenomenous’, as I put it in an earlier paper — Humphrey, 2008). The phenomenality emerges only when this brain activity is read by an inner observer with a sense of consciousness
who
gets
the sensa-tion. But again this doesn’t mean the phenomenality is an illusion...”
 
Soupie said:
“Likewise the ipsundrum does not have phenomenal properties in its own right. The most we might say is that it’s proto-phenomenal (or ‘phenomenous’, as I put it in an earlier paper — Humphrey, 2008). The phenomenality emerges only when this brain activity is read by an inner observer with a sense of consciousness
who
gets
the sensa-tion. But again this doesn’t mean the phenomenality is an illusion...”
Click to expand...

Does that get you all the way to panpsychism? The ipsundrum is an organized state of matter:

"I’ve constructed a story about how sentition evolved to be a quasi-magical attractor state hidden in the
brain, and suggested a plausible evolutionary trajectory by which this could have happened"

which is not saying all matter is phenomenous
 
Soupie said:
Re Dennett any (standard) materialist who denies the hard problem likely holds a view similar to Humphrey. Which is essentially panpsychism. Ie nature is (proto) phenomenal and becomes fully phenomenal via the representational facilities of living organisms.
Click to expand...

I don't think Dennett would say nature is protophenomenal, I think he doubts phenomenality.
 
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