Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[technomage]

Just to clarify, it's axiomatic to me that I have free will, not that you have free will.

 

[marduk]

No system; it's based on my direct perception and also by demonstrating (in previous comments) that it has the qualities of an axiom in that it can't be proved or disproved.

Ah, insightful. Hadn't thought of that before.

 

[marduk]

I'm almost ready to agree. But then we'd miss the drama of marduk's acting out his outrage at ideas he's not to ready to listen to, much less entertain.

@marduk, why not at least read the Chalmers papers Steve linked for you and the lucidly argued paper that Pharoah linked a little while ago?

Just haven't got there yet. I do have a day job y'know, and I'm easily annoyed, as you can tell.

And it's not about not being ready, it's about not thinking your arguments are rational, or even clearly stated.

Linking to other's work is not stating your position, and reason for taking that position.

 

[marduk]

Just to clarify, it's axiomatic to me that I have free will, not that you have free will.

I assumed that. I can prove that I exist, but I can't prove that you exist.
Just as the reverse is true.

 

[marduk]

Just to clarify, it's axiomatic to me that I have free will, not that you have free will.

Where does it exist?

 

[technomage]

In my mind/consciousness. That's all I can say. The rest is a mystery.

 

[marduk]

In my mind/consciousness. That's all I can say. The rest is a mystery.

As a part or as the whole?

What I mean is, at least parts of our "minds" seem deterministic. We can predict what they are going to do based on past behaviour or whatever. Parts of us seem random. The two sometimes fight each other, all in what I think of as "me."

I'm wondering if there's a super secret randomizer embedded in our skull that rolls the dice occasionally just so that we can't be predicted completely.

This would actually be a good evolutionary feature.

 

[technomage]

As a part or as the whole?

What I mean is, at least parts of our "minds" seem deterministic. We can predict what they are going to do based on past behaviour or whatever. Parts of us seem random. The two sometimes fight each other, all in what I think of as "me."

I'm wondering if there's a super secret randomizer embedded in our skull that rolls the dice occasionally just so that we can't be predicted completely.

This would actually be a good evolutionary feature.

Right, it's not the entire mind that has free will. It's a property of mind. Sense perceptions are not subject to free will for example.

Definitely the mind has different "contradictory" aspects making us predictable in many ways, but not in others.

I like the randomizer. I just hope the random seed isn't always the same number as in the story below.

I worked with someone who had to write a simple random number generator and he presented it to his boss, so the boss said, "Let's run it". So the number came back as some number (let's say 362). Then his boss asked him to run it again and it came back again as 362. The boss said "Hmmm, that's odd. " My co-worker insisted it was working fine and that this was a random number. His boss asked him to run it again and 362 appeared again at which point he said that something was not working right. My co-worker continued to insist that this was a random number. I think it took 3 more runs for him to accept that this wasn't a random number.

 

[marduk]

I had a similar issue, and my solution was to piggyback on the work of others, and hook a ccd to a lava lamp to use as the seed.

It all worked well until the bulb burned out.

 

[technomage]

I had a similar issue, and my solution was to piggyback on the work of others, and hook a ccd to a lava lamp to use as the seed.

It all worked well until the bulb burned out.

What's a "ccd"? In his case, he just needed to call the randomize function which set the seed to some function of the clock time.

 

[marduk]

What's a "ccd"? In his case, he just needed to call the randomize function which set the seed to some function of the clock time.

Charge coupled device. A digital camera with the camera bit taken away, just the sensor.

Time isn't random tho, and besides that's how everyone does it. I was bored.

 

[marduk]

Does a lobotomy not reduce my free will?

Is it not therefore physical and in my brain?

 

[technomage]

Does a lobotomy not reduce my free will?

Is it not therefore physical and in my brain?

Absolutely. This is very good evidence that the brain and mind are very linked, if not synonymous.

 

[smcder]

Give'r.

Give'r?

 

[smcder]

Just haven't got there yet. I do have a day job y'know, and I'm easily annoyed, as you can tell.

And it's not about not being ready, it's about not thinking your arguments are rational, or even clearly stated.

Linking to other's work is not stating your position, and reason for taking that position.

The Chalmers and Nagel papers aren't linked as statements of my position, they are were where we started on the thread ... so everyone who's been here a while has read them, it's so we don't have to re-hash what's been covered.

Here's the first bit of the Chalmers paper, if it doesn't strike your fancy, so be it:

The real gist of it is this:

The discussion will be cast at an abstract level, giving an overview of the metaphysical landscape. Rather than engaging the empirical science of consciousness, or detailed philosophical theories of consciousness, I will be examining some general classes into which theories of consciousness might fall. I will not pretend to be neutral in this discussion. I think that each of the reductive views is incorrect, while each of the nonreductive views holds some promise. So the first part of this paper can be seen as an extended argument against reductive views of consciousness, while the second part can be seen as an investigation of where we go from there.

*[[This paper is an overview of issues concerning the metaphysics of consciousness. Much of the discussion in this paper (especially the first part) recapitulates discussion in Chalmers (1995; 1996; 1997), although it often takes a different form, and sometimes goes beyond the discussion there. I give a more detailed treatment of many of the issues discussed here in the works cited in the bibliography.]]

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature.

In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is posed most acutely in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (Broad 1925). The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad's exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation.[*] On Broad's taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent ("delusive"), as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance (a "differentiating" attribute). The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a four-by-four matrix of views results. (The seventeenth entry arises from Broad's division of the substance/substance view according to whether one substance or two is involved.) At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive.
*[[The taxonomy is in the final chapter, Chapter 14, of Broad's book (set out on pp. 607-11, and discussed until p. 650). Andrew's Chrucky's website devoted to Broad has an illustration of the four-by-four matrix..]]

In this paper I take my cue from Broad, approaching the problem of consciousness by a strategy of divide-and-conquer. I will not adopt Broad's categories: our understanding of the mind-body problem has advanced in the last 75 years, and it would be nice to think that we have a better understanding of the crucial issues. On my view, the most important views on the metaphysics of consciousness can be divided almost exhaustively into six classes, which I will label "type A" through "type F." Three of these (A through C) involve broadly reductive views, seeing consciousness as a physical process that involves no expansion of a physical ontology. The other three (D through F) involve broadly nonreductive views, on which consciousness involves something irreducible in nature, and requires expansion or reconception of a physical ontology.

The discussion will be cast at an abstract level, giving an overview of the metaphysical landscape. Rather than engaging the empirical science of consciousness, or detailed philosophical theories of consciousness, I will be examining some general classes into which theories of consciousness might fall. I will not pretend to be neutral in this discussion. I think that each of the reductive views is incorrect, while each of the nonreductive views holds some promise. So the first part of this paper can be seen as an extended argument against reductive views of consciousness, while the second part can be seen as an investigation of where we go from there.

 

[Soupie]

Can you go ahead and define "the sense of free will" as you are using it here?

It feels like I have free will, but I'm not sure if I really do. Thus, I might refer to it with the neutral phrase: sense of free will.

I do think a "sense of free will" is contingent on a "sense of self." And I think a sense of self is contingent on meta cognition.

So why do we have the ability to think about thinking (including our own thinking and the thinking of others): for social problem solving. Along with the ability for social thinking are the executive functions which allow us to self-regulate.

People with poor executive functioning (ADHD, ASD, MR, brain injury, etc.) have poor self-regulation. People with poor self-regulation struggle with social problem solving.

This by no means proves that free will exists. I only mean to say that the sense of free will appears to be a higher order cognitive thingy and such thingies seem to be related to social problem solving, one of the most cognitive intense tasks humans and other uber social creatures do.

 

[smcder]

[

Oh, man, this guy is exactly what I hated about academic philosophy:
http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf


That's a pretty big bias.
Even more here:

Ok, with that being said, perhaps he'll settle down a bit...

Nope.

Whee!

We don't know any of that, and it's contradictory. It happens a lot, although we're not sure about it, and it may not happen at all outside us but I think that's dumb.

Well, that's a good argument.

That doesn't mean anything, except "I think therefore I am."

No it isn't! Hoefsteader himself proposed that we are "strange loops!"
OMG, he's really starting to piss me off.

We don't know that at all. In fact, the turing test surmises that if we can't tell if something is conscious or not, we should assume that it is.

OK, so your idea that thoughts can't lead to causation just went poof smcder.

Do we "reductionists" know everything about it? No!
Does that mean that we're done? No!
God, has this guy picked up a textbook on logic?

And now I just laughed out loud in a boardroom, thanks for that.

That's like saying since "physicalism" doesn't currently have all the answers, it never will, and because I (at list think I have) a subjective experience, it must not exist physically!

My god.

I give up.

Reason didn't just go right out the window, it went down to the corner pub, got loaded, into a fight, and thrown in the gutter to be found by it's angry wife at 3 am.

I can't go on.

Chalmers trained under Hofstadter, not Nagel.

Nagel's paper is #17 of the 100 most cited papers in philosophy of mind

MindPapers: 100 most cited works by philosophers in MindPapers according to Google Scholar

... so, good, bad or indifferent, it's probably been thrown at him over the I think 40 years since its publication and there have been counter arguments and counter counter arguments, etc ... so we should be able to address your concerns above - and most of them are pretty common reactions in discussions of the bat paper, for example:

That's like saying since "physicalism" doesn't currently have all the answers, it never will, and because I (at list think I have) a subjective experience, it must not exist physically!

The first bit is more in line with McGinn's position of New Mysterianism which should drive you even battier than Nagel's paper.

But the overall critique is addressed in a couple of places in the text:

What moral should be drawn from these reflections, and what should be done next? It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false. Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true. Perhaps it will be thought unreasonable to require such a conception as a condition of understanding. After all, it might be said, the meaning of physicalism is clear enough: mental states are states of the body; mental events are physical events. We do not know which physical states and events they are, but that should not

prevent us from understanding the hypothesis. What could be clearer than the words 'is' and 'are'?
Of course he goes on, but he does recognize/anticipate your critique.

And in footnote 15:

I have not defined the term 'physical'. Obviously it does not apply just to what can be described by the concepts of contemporary physics, since we expect further developments. Some may think there is nothing to prevent mental phenomena from eventually being recognized as physical in their own right. But whatever else may be said of the physical, it has to be objective. So if our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it will have to assign them an objective character—whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical It seems to me more likely, however, that mental-physical relations will eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed clearly in either category.

This is a good link that points out the rhetorical aspect of Nagel's argument that can be missed in a first reading:

Conscious Entities » What is it like to be a bat

You might find it a good tonic for your limbic system. What I'm interested in getting from Nagel is that from what I've seen people are split neatly on this paper ... they either kind of go "yeah, that's obvious" or they go ballistic like you did ... so I'm curious if he'll share how he has taught his idea through the years and handled various objections to them.

 

[smcder]

It feels like I have free will, but I'm not sure if I really do. Thus, I might refer to it with the neutral phrase: sense of free will.

I do think a "sense of free will" is contingent on a "sense of self." And I think a sense of self is contingent on meta cognition.

So why do we have the ability to think about thinking (including our own thinking and the thinking of others): for social problem solving. Along with the ability for social thinking are the executive functions which allows us to self-regulate.

People with poor executive functioning (ADHD, ASD, MR, brain injury, etc.) have poor self-regulation. People with poor self-regulation struggle with social problem solving.

This by no means proves that free will exists. I only mean to say that the sense of free will appears to be a higher order cognitive thingy and such thingies seem to be related to social problem solving, one of the most cognitive intense tasks humans and other uber social creatures do.

I still want to dissect that paper, I think it touches on a lot of what is crucial in this discussion. But it does seem to hinge on an innate and universal sense of free will and self, sense of agency and something else they define and acronymize it ... and I'm not sure that's OEM for everyone, or if it is, there is a lot of cultural overlay.

 

[Soupie]

I think they are, in the sense that they're only real to the entity experiencing them.

To me, your qualia are merely patterns in your brain.

Patterns in your brain = information, no? Ergo mind is information?

 

[marduk]

The Chalmers and Nagel papers aren't linked as statements of my position, they are were where we started on the thread ... so everyone who's been here a while has read them, it's so we don't have to re-hash what's been covered.

Sorry, that wasn't aimed at you.