Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 13

[Randall]

Dark matter is known to exist because the shape of the spirals of galaxies would look different otherwise.
So we also can tweak one neurone here or there and note the sensations they elicit.
These are observables which science can look to explore in increasingly fine detail.
But the whole point of the HP/EP paper is that it claims that consciousness is a uniquely difficult question for addressing, not observables, but subjectivity itself, which has no physical essence that can be dissected with the physical scientist's scalpel.

As I said earlier, it's equally as "hard" a problem to explain why bodies should be accompanied by consciousness, as it is to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by bodies. We just tend to think consciousness is more mysterious because we take the material world for granted. But the question of why there is something rather than nothing ( WSRTN ) is even more of a mystery, and is at the root of all "hard problems" ( including consciousness ). Getting this illuminates why there can be no "solution" to the HPC.

 

[marduk]

Ok, that posted. Still no ordinary tools available. But I have a question for @marduk: why do you seem to believe that some or many of the questions we have been pursuing in this thread require the addition of "another universe" in order to be answered?

Ah ok sure.

We know the physical universe is a thing. It is a whole and complete thing. Down to being somewhat isotropic. There’s no need to have a non-physical force describe the smallest particle’s behaviour as well as we know.

To posit a non-physical thing - say ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘consciousness’ if you believe it to be non-physical implies a whole second universe of non-stuff for it to exist in. It could be big or small, doesn’t matter. What matters is that it has to be isolated from the universe, because nothing in it can alter the physical - because you don’t need it to explain the physical universe’s behaviour.

Then you’d have to explain how that second universe of stuff answers the question, and then how it interacts with the physical universe.

To imply that (say) the spirit is non-physical is to literally imply there’s a whole plane of existence where such stuff inhabits.

 

[Randall]

Ah ok sure ....

I wish there would be at least a few days every once in a while when "Ah ok sure ..." would turn out to be just that easy .

 

[Soupie]

I wish there would be at least a few days every once in a while when "Ah ok sure ..." would turn out to be just that easy .

But Randall, that is essentially your position.

You don’t believe that active brain states are consciousness. You believe that active brain states cause consciousness. You’ve suggested that the consciousness created by active brain states is some type of field.

Invoking mysterianism, you’ve said that we can’t ever explain why active brain states cause this consciousness field. (Strong emergence.)

It follows then, that we certainly can’t explain how this consciousness field interacts with all other physical processes. You’ve certainly never provided an explanation. (Of course no one has.)

You’ve also repeatedly brushed aside the problem of over determination. The fact that humans, being physical, can have all their behavior explained via physical processes, and therefore don’t need a consciousness field for anything.

You’ve brushed aside the problem of causal closure. Which is similar: if the physical world is closed, as @marduk says, how does this strongly emergent, mysterious consciousness field have any causal power?

Your position is essentially dualism. Active brain states somehow produce something ontologically new: a consciousness field. It is caused by and interacts with the physical world as if by magic.

You seem to think that simply referring to this consciousness field as “physical” is somehow explanatory. But you have never shown how it could be physical.

I’m sorry to sound so harsh, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I’ll throw you a bone: if I’ve misunderstood your position, please explain. Thanks!

 

[marduk]

But Randall, that is essentially your position.

You don’t believe that active brain states are consciousness. You believe that active brain states cause consciousness. You’ve suggested that the consciousness created by active brain states is some type of field.

Invoking mysterianism, you’ve said that we can’t ever explain why active brain states cause this consciousness field. (Strong emergence.)

It follows then, that we certainly can’t explain how this consciousness field interacts with all other physical processes. You’ve certainly never provided an explanation. (Of course no one has.)

You’ve also repeatedly brushed aside the problem of over determination. The fact that humans, being physical, can have all their behavior explained via physical processes, and therefore don’t need a consciousness field for anything.

You’ve brushed aside the problem of causal closure. Which is similar: if the physical world is closed, as @marduk says, how does this strongly emergent, mysterious consciousness field have any causal power?

Your position is essentially dualism. Active brain states somehow produce something ontologically new: a consciousness field. It is caused by and interacts with the physical world as if by magic.

You seem to think that simply referring to this consciousness field as “physical” is somehow explanatory. But you have never shown how it could be physical.

I’m sorry to sound so harsh, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

I’ll throw you a bone: if I’ve misunderstood your position, please explain. Thanks!

You also haven’t explained why a non-material explanation for consciousness solves anything, or is testable.

A lack of an answer doesn’t imply that materialism is wrong. Godel’s inconsistency theorem didn’t invalidate math, for example. All he showed is that there are mathematical truths that can’t be derived axiomatically.

Consciousness could be an analogous kinda thing.

To put the shoe on the other foot, explain how dualism solves the consciousness problem? Specifically:
1. what is this ‘other’ that allows consciousness to exist?
2. how does it solve the hard problem of consciousness?
3. how does it interact with matter to give rise to the human experience?

 

[Soupie]

You also haven’t explained why a non-material explanation for consciousness solves anything, or is testable.

A lack of an answer doesn’t imply that materialism is wrong. Godel’s inconsistency theorem didn’t invalidate math, for example. All he showed is that there are mathematical truths that can’t be derived axiomatically.

Consciousness could be an analogous kinda thing.

To put the shoe on the other foot, explain how dualism solves the consciousness problem? Specifically:
1. what is this ‘other’ that allows consciousness to exist?
2. how does it solve the hard problem of consciousness?
3. how does it interact with matter to give rise to the human experience?

As @Constance has tried to say several times, no one in this thread is arguing for “supernatural” dualism. We are all exploring the same question: how are the mind and body related?

@smcder for one has explicated quite nicely the fact that no matter how one approaches the mind body problem, one encounters major problems.

To me that is exciting bc it means there are deep truths/patterns of reality that we have yet to understand.

 

[Randall]

But Randall, that is essentially your position.

While the view from the vantage point may make the situation seem obvious, the path to get there can be anything but.

You don’t believe that active brain states are consciousness.

That depends on how one looks at the situation. Back to the pile of bricks analogy.

You believe that active brain states cause consciousness.

More accurately, I believe that according to a least some definitions of causality, normally functioning brains in beings who are having subjective experiences, can be considered as causal with respect to those experiences.

You’ve suggested that the consciousness created by active brain states is some type of field.

From a non-subjective perspective, that seems to be a reasonable suggestion.

Invoking mysterianism, you’ve said that we can’t ever explain why active brain states cause this consciousness field. (Strong emergence.)

More accurately I've said that we cannot provide non-trivial answers to "why type questions". There may be some exceptions someplace, but the focus here is on consciousness, and because of that, this situation seems to fit the definition of Mysterianism. So Mysterianism is more of an observed consequence of the situation than an "invocation". I might also be wrong about the situation, but if that's the case, I haven't been exposed to sufficient counterpoint yet to justify a change in my position. Or if I have, I simply glossed over it, and it deserves revisiting.

It follows then, that we certainly can’t explain how this consciousness field interacts with all other physical processes. You’ve certainly never provided an explanation. (Of course no one has.)

We find ourselves in a situation with "how type questions" that is similar to that of"why type questions". For example we could say that how a consciousness field interacts with other physical phenomena e.g. brain matter, is via exposure of the brain matter to the field. However that is what I would call a trivial answer. In other words, while it may be true, it doesn't explain the existence of the situation. But then again, what explanation do we have on a fundamental level for the existence of anything?

You’ve also repeatedly brushed aside the problem of over determination. The fact that humans, being physical, can have all their behavior explained via physical processes, and therefore don’t need a consciousness field for anything.

I would dispute the accusation that I've brushed aside the issue of determination. I may however be guilty diving into it on a relatively superficial level compared to PhD philosophers. For example if reviewing this article Mental Causation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is "brushing aside", then I'm guilty.

Also, given that I consider any object or phenomenon that can be measured or detected by any means, including our subjective experiences, to be something physical, then whatever explanation might be provided for consciousness would fall into the realm of the physical. I'll make a flow chart for this later.

You’ve brushed aside the problem of causal closure. Which is similar: if the physical world is closed, as @marduk says, how does this strongly emergent, mysterious consciousness field have any causal power?

Again, the "brushed aside" comment isn't quite accurate. I recently posted a really good video that describes non-linear causation, and I've alluded to the idea in other ways in the past.

Your position is essentially dualism. Active brain states somehow produce something ontologically new: a consciousness field. It is caused by and interacts with the physical world as if by magic.

Everything seemingly interacts by way of magic. Zeno showed us that ages ago when he logically deduced that even simple movement from point A to point B shouldn't be possible. Even physicists don't know what imparts the fundamental forces onto the particles or strings or whatever the case may be that give rise to what we call existence. At some point we either accept this and apply it to the circumstances we're in, or we waste our lives chasing the impossible dream.

You seem to think that simply referring to this consciousness field as “physical” is somehow explanatory. But you have never shown how it could be physical.

If one reviews the logic that @marduk relayed to us from his school teacher on this issue, and see the logic, then one is left with no other conclusion that consciousness must be physical. I see no way around it. If you do, then by all means please post your counterpoint or a link back to where I missed it in the past.

I’m sorry to sound so harsh, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

IMO you're not being harsh. You're just expressing your viewpoint, and although I would have thought that the finer details would be self-evident by now, perhaps they're not. Or perhaps there is no bridge between our respective views, which is fine too. If you can convince me that I ought to plant my flag over there next to yours because there's a better view of the valley, I'm all for that.

I’ll throw you a bone: if I’ve misunderstood your position, please explain. Thanks!

The problem with some of this stuff is that it needs to be intuited on some level in order to see it, e.g. why I liken the HPC to a koan. If one doesn't see it, then one could simply deny that there's any resemblance. I've done my best to get around these barriers in the past by trying to take the focus off of me personally.

For example the koan analogy came from @smcder and it was a breakthrough for me, not because it showed me I was "wrong" or "right" but because it opened to the door to another vantage point. So who knows, maybe something might come out of further discussion that opens some other door. For me, the most recent has been a deeper look into causality, which revealed non-linear causality, and the way we can apply the principles of causality to the issue of brains and subjectivity.

 

[Soupie]

Everything seemingly interacts by way of magic.

This is absolutely true. Look no further than the papers I recently linked above re spacetime.

Having said that, it’s not as if the laws of physics—as magic as they are—were described overnight. The have been described slowly and carefully over centuries.

It could be that there is something unique about neural activity (in relation to all other physical processes) by which it follows in a law-like fashion that when neural activity occurs, a field of subjective consciousness strongly emerges into the universe.

We could, lacking a mechanistic explanation for this fact, simply consider this phenomenon a new, quasi-fundamental law of nature. (It would be strongly emergent, so not technically fundamental.)

Of course there are many additional questions and problems with thinking about subjective consciousness as an objective process. Trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole.

Yes, mind and body are related. They “interact.” However it simply doesn’t follow that they HAVE to have a causal relationship.

There are other, non supernatural, ways of conceiving of the mind body relation.

Personally I am a monist. I believe that the mind and the body are, ultimately, the same process. I believe that active brains states just are the mind. To understand this one has to understand the inferential nature of perception. Like any approach it has its problems. However it means that there is one nature, with characteristics that we normally attribute to either mind or body.

The reason that neural activity seems to be accompanied by mental processes, is because they are one and the same.

Mental processes are objectively neural processes, and neural processes subjectively are mental processes.

Neither can be reduced into the other bc they don’t share a causal relationship but rather have a relationship of identity.

 

[Randall]

Yes, mind and body are related. They “interact.” However it simply doesn’t follow that they HAVE to have a causal relationship.

That all depends on the version of causality one adopts. If the brain is like a prism, and consciousness is like a rainbow, then does the prism cause the rainbow? Yes. Does a prism explain where the light came from in the first place? No.

 

[Constance]

I haven’t concluded that.

It seemed to me that you had, along with Marduk and Randall, but I should have indicated my reason for saying so -- i.e., that scientific experiments such as the ones you referred to have usually been attempts to find and establish physical or material explanations for various manifestations of psychic phenomena or para-normal phenomena. This is too obvious to need saying, but in this thread we have only rarely read and discussed the responses of parapsychological researchers to such dismissals of creditable evidence of anomalies in conscious experiences.

It’s quite evident that in order to solve the mbp we will need to let go of some sacred cows.

Perhaps we need to specify which sacred cows are involved on each side of the debates we rehearse again and again. Why don't we compose a list of them? I'll start with the sacred cows of determinism and the myth of the closed universe that I see among physicists, physicalists, and materialists. Someone else can provide what they see as sacred cows I'm protecting in my existential-phenomenological perspective.

"Certainly the mind-body problem is difficult enough that we should be suspicious of attempts to solve it with the concepts and methods developed to account for very different kinds of things.

"Instead, we should expect theoretical progress in this area to require a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory, the introduction of electromagnetic fields into physics--or the original scientific revolution itself..."

Seconding Thomas Nagel.

So far as I can tell, everyone in this discussion is seeking a natural explanation for the mb relation. We must be careful not to equate naturalism with physicalism. Or at the very least, like Randall, one must be willing to stretch the definition of physicalism way beyond what is orthodox.

Seconding Soupie.

Let’s explore all options and resist shutting ideas down out of fear.

Maybe we should also identify which ideas on both sides of our debates can be recognized as fearful or dependent on presuppositions rigidly maintained.

 

[Constance]

That all depends on the version of causality one adopts. If the brain is like a prism, and consciousness is like a rainbow, then does the prism cause the rainbow? Yes. Does a prism explain where the light came from in the first place? No.

Randall, interesting metaphor. But not appropriate or persuasive because it is consciousness, rather than the brain, that opens the way to encountering the world in which we exist, shedding light on what we encounter in it and can reason about it. I think it would be better if you would plunge into your own consciousness and swim around in it for awhile, reflecting on the stream of images, ideas, senses, and feelings that move through it over a day or several days, and contemplating the relationships among them, rather than trying to describe consciousness in objective terms through analogies with bricks and houses, rainbows and prisms, etc..

 

[Constance]

Don Dianda
Author, ‘See for Your Self: Zen Mindfulness for the Next Generation’

Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.
— The Diamond Sutra

“Working with this koan alters how I might meet the world in two ways. In one twist, it opens life up in a way where I can’t expect anything to happen outside of the now, and in another, the koan takes my attention to my thoughts and opinions about what I come into contact with each moment. For example, I might see a tree and think ‘out of nowhere the tree comes forth.’ Deepening into understanding the present in this way gives an object a sudden miraculous quality. For a moment, the tree is mind-boggling and I begin to touch on something innate – beyond the confines of what I can conceive of or label. The fact that I take mundane shrubs, trees, stray cats, and rain squalls for granted or even consider them to be inconvenient nuisances at times is something the koan quietly forces me to examine more closely. What would life be like without these images, moments, and experiences? Do I create an inner world in which only some of what is present makes it through my ingrained mental filters? If yes, what would happen if I deconstructed these borders and removed them? Maybe everything that graces my life has a subtle extraordinariness and that allowing this connection to blossom on its own is a practice that takes place naturally when I just begin to notice.”

 

[Constance]

LINK to the above image and text and to additional koans:

The Profound And Ancient Wisdom Of Zen Buddhist Koans

 

[Randall]

Randall, interesting metaphor. But not appropriate or persuasive because it is consciousness, rather than the brain, that opens the way to encountering the world in which we exist, shedding light on what we encounter in it and can reason about it. I think it would be better if you would plunge into your own consciousness and swim around in it for awhile, reflecting on the stream of images, ideas, senses, and feelings that move through it over a day or several days, and contemplating the relationships among them, rather than trying to describe consciousness in objective terms through analogies with bricks and houses, rainbows and prisms, etc..

And if while swimming around in my own consciousness I happen to encounter analogies with bricks, houses, rainbows, prisms, etc. ?

 

[Constance]

And if while swimming around in my own consciousness I happen to encounter analogies with bricks, houses, rainbows, prisms, etc. ?

When that happens, as it habitually seems to do for you, try to break the habit of looking for or imagining material/physical/objective 'things' or processes as reductive explanations for the fluid and persistent openness of consciousness, including your own. The subjective pole of consciousness cannot be reduced to the status of a 'thing' or parts of a thing or a mechanical or computational process, and it customarily interacts continually {even in our dreams} with the phenomena we encounter in our lived and living experiences of things in our natural and cultural environments.

 

[Randall]

When that happens, as it habitually seems to do for you, try to break the habit of looking for or imagining material/physical/objective 'things' or processes as reductive explanations for the fluid and persistent openness of consciousness, including your own.

Well, considering that emergence is a non-reductive phenomena and is linked to holism, and non-linear causation, it would seem that I've already been doing as you suggest, but maybe you just haven't noticed.

The subjective pole of consciousness cannot be reduced to the status of a 'thing' or parts of a thing or a mechanical or computational process, and it customarily interacts continually {even in our dreams} with the phenomena we encounter in our lived and living experiences of things in our natural and cultural environments.

Perhaps the most important word there is "status". I tried to get that same idea across in a recent post where I included a clip from the film AI, a story that blurs the lines between the "mechanical" and whatever else might exist beyond that.

 

[marduk]

As @Constance has tried to say several times, no one in this thread is arguing for “supernatural” dualism.

Forgive me if I'm being pedantic, but what's the functional difference between supernatural dualism and any other kind of dualism?

I view them as somewhat abstractly equivalent. There's an attempt being made to approach the hard problem of consciousness by a non-physical process. That could be spiritual, or any other non-event happening in non-spacetime.

 

[marduk]

Yes, mind and body are related. They “interact.” However it simply doesn’t follow that they HAVE to have a causal relationship.

Can you say more about that?

Love the rest.

 

[Soupie]

Forgive me if I'm being pedantic, but what's the functional difference between supernatural dualism and any other kind of dualism?

I view them as somewhat abstractly equivalent. There's an attempt being made to approach the hard problem of consciousness by a non-physical process. That could be spiritual, or any other non-event happening in non-spacetime.

Strong emergence would be an example of non-supernatural dualism.

Consciousness “emerging” from physical processes in a way that can’t be predicted or explained and, if epiphenominalism isnt claimed, interacting with physical processes in ways that likewise can’t be predicted or explained.

Edit: sorry. To answer your actual question, there would be no functional difference.

 

[Soupie]

Can you say more about that?

Love the rest.

Neural Correlates of Consciousness Meet the Theory of Identity

One of the greatest challenges of consciousness research is to understand the relationship between consciousness and its implementing substrate. Current research into the neural correlates of consciousness regards the biological brain as being this substrate, but largely fails to clarify the...

www.frontiersin.org