Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[smcder]

During the ten seconds, his physical body is experiencing pain. His conscious mental self will be able to tell you very little about the pain his body was experiencing during those ten seconds.

OK, the first thing I need to understand is the use of the word "experiencing" in this instance.

Can you define what it means for the physical body to experience pain? One way to think about this is to see if it's possible to describe an experiment to test this hypothesis:

During the ten seconds (that the man is consciously distracted) his physical body is experiencing pain.

 

[smcder]

DID/MPD - Dissociative Identity Disorder

It seems like this touches on a lot of questions in this thread:

Do we accept cases where there appears to be more than one "I"? Does this disorder have any bearing on the normal "self" or is the process pathological and can't tell us anything about the ordinary case?

If one personality experiences something consciously, do we say there is an experience for the other personalities? Does it make sense to ask where was Mary when Rocky felt the pain, or is Mary constructed at the moment of her consciousness? Is the memory of the pain different for each personality or shared?

 

[smcder]

A few years back there were cases where people who had been raped, were administered a drug for pain relief in the ER or ambulance and subsequently lost their memory of the event. There were questions about the ethics of using (or asking for) this drug. What responsibilities does a victim have to remember the crime committed against them?

Some of this information I think was later used to work on drugs to treat PTSD. What distinguishes the two cases? Suppose a veteran elects to use these drugs in therapy and then a military inquiry is held and he is asked to testify?

When I worked with a victim's advocacy group, we were told that up to 90% of women with cognitive impairments were physically and sexually abused. Courts often did not admit the testimony of the individual with cognitive impairments.

DID/MPD - Dissociative Identity Disorder

Do we accept cases where there appears to be more than one "I"? Does this have any bearing on the normal "self" or is the process pathological and can't tell us anything about the ordinary case? If one personality experiences something consciously, do we say there is an experience for the other personalities? Does it make sense to ask where was Mary when Rocky felt the pain, or is Mary constructed at the moment of her consciousness? Is the memory different for each personality or shared?

 

[Soupie]

OK, the first thing I need to understand is the use of the word "experiencing" in this instance.

Can you define what it means for the physical body to experience pain? One way to think about this is to see if it's possible to describe an experiment to test this hypothesis:

During the ten seconds (that the man is consciously distracted) his physical body is experiencing pain.

Throughout this thread, I've described it as the body "generating" pain; I think that is a more accurate description than saying the body is "having" or "experiencing" pain.

I think this is more accurate because I believe the pain is not located in any physical part of the body; that is, the pain is not "in" the foot, the skin, or the neurons.

I've described this several times, but I'll do so again:

The body and the environment interact, exchanging information. In this case, the information is coming from within the body. (However, this doesn't change anything; the boundary between the physical body and the rest of physical reality is illusory anyhow.)

The physical state of the body has a simultaneous, inseparable informational state. These two states - while conceptually (?) separable - are not able to be (words fail me) actually separated.

The physical/psychological state of the body is the objective, and the informational state of the body (and the environment) is the subjective (and constitutes the phenomenal experience of pain).

If you're asking "what is it like" for the body to feel pain when we are not consciously aware, we can't know for certain. We can assume that "it is like" what it is like when we are consciously aware of the pain. However, our conscious awareness of the pain may change it in subtle or drastic ways.

 

[Soupie]

If that's correct, what is the basis of that phenomenal experience?

I think these physical/informational states inform the organism.

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

If you have physical structure, you have informational structure, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other. (That's why I said Chalmer's zombie argument created a false duality.)

Here's a reverse hard problem: can we have informational structures without physical structures?

 

[smcder]

I think these physical/informational states inform the organism.

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

If you have physical structure, you have informational structure, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other. (That's why I said Chalmers hard problem created a false duality.)

Here's a reverse hard problem: can we have informational structures without physical structures?

Hold on, I'm still not there ...

So we are still working off substance dualism and CRP3, correct?

Is this correct:

The nervous system evolved to be physically and phenomenally consistent so that when a nerve fires, it also reports/generates a subjective experience? Nerves are made up of the physical properties of primal stuff and pain is made up of the phenomenal properties of primal stuff? The way I view this is like those two sided jig saw puzzles, you have to put them together so that there is a picture on both sides. Each side constrains the other.

If you're asking "what is it like" for the body to feel pain when we are not consciously aware, we can't know for certain. We can assume that "it is like" what it is like when we are consciously aware of the pain. However, our conscious awareness of the pain may change it in subtle or drastic ways.

If the model of physical/phenomenal consistency is correct, then there is a "what is it like" for the body to feel pain when we are not consciously aware. In other words, there is a subjective experience there waiting for us to pay attention? The experience is step one, the awareness is step 2 and meta-awareness is step three, right? So what is happening at each step and where is it happening?

If all that is right, how would we devise an experiment to test this?

-----------------

If you have physical structure, you have informational structure, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other. (That's why I said Chalmers hard problem created a false duality.)

While we are at it, we need to get clear on what materialism/physicalism is too because I don't think you are a materialist.

I don't think Chalmers creates a false duality. The "hard problem" is a problem for a physical explanation of consciousness. PPP is Chalmers' answer to the hard problem, on his view it is not exactly a materialist theory ... so if you are an adherent of CRPPP then on his view, you aren't exactly a materialist.

This view (Type-F monism) has elements in common with both materialism and dualism. From one perspective, it can be seen as a sort of materialism. If one holds that physical terms refer not to dispositional properties but the underlying intrinsic properties, then the protophenomenal properties can be seen as physical properties, thus preserving a sort of materialism. From another perspective, it can be seen as a sort of dualism. The view acknowledges phenomenal or protophenomenal properties as ontologically fundamental, and it retains an underlying duality between structural-dispositional properties (those directly characterized in physical theory) and intrinsic protophenomenal properties (those responsible for consciousness). One might suggest that while the view arguably fits the letter of materialism, it shares the spirit of antimaterialism.

From the Wikipedia article on physicalism:

While the force of Hempel's dilemma against theory-based conceptions of the physical remains contested,[11] alternative "non-theory-based" conceptions of the physical have also been proposed. Frank Jackson (1998) for example, has argued in favour of an "object-based" conception of the physical whereby (roughly speaking) an object or property is physical if and only if it is either a paradigmatic example of the physical, such as a rock or a tree, or it is required for a complete account of such entities or properties.[12] An objection to this proposal, which Jackson himself noted in 1998, is that if it turns out that panpsychism or panprotopsychism is true, then the aforementioned understanding of the physical gives the incorrect (for some anyway) result that physicalism is, nevertheless, also true since such properties will figure in a complete account of paradigmatic examples of the physical. Finally, David Papineau[13] and Barbara Montero[14] have advanced and subsequently defended[15] a "via negativa" characterization of the physical. The gist of the via negativa strategy is to understand the physical in terms of what it is not: the mental. In other words, the via negativa strategy understands the physical as "the non-mental". An objection to the via negativa conception of the physical is that (like the object-based conception) it doesn't have the resources to distinguish neutral monism (or panprotopsychism) from physicalism.[16]

 

[smcder]

CRP3 is an attractive theory because there is no hard problem, subjectivity is fundamental to the universe, its a property of the "primal stuff" of the universe. But instead of the hard problem, we have the combination problem:

each primal unit has two properties, the phenomenal and the physical:

Ph/Phy
And CRP3 says we can put them together like a two sided jigsaw puzzle so that we get a brain on one side and a mind on the other:
..................................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
..........................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
.......................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
..............................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
..................................Ph/PhyPh/PhyPh/PhyPh/Phy
.....................................................Ph/PhyPh/Phy

The combination problem is "how"?

In the meantime if we make a statement about there being "something that it is like" to have pain when we are not aware of it, we should be able to devise an experiment to test it?

 

[Constance]

DID/MPD - Dissociative Identity Disorder

It seems like this touches on a lot of questions in this thread:

Do we accept cases where there appears to be more than one "I"? Does this disorder have any bearing on the normal "self" or is the process pathological and can't tell us anything about the ordinary case?

If one personality experiences something consciously, do we say there is an experience for the other personalities? Does it make sense to ask where was Mary when Rocky felt the pain, or is Mary constructed at the moment of her consciousness? Is the memory of the pain different for each personality or shared?

Good questions and good call to bring this issue into the discussion. Multiple personality disorder has been of great interest to psychical researchers for nearly 150 years. F.W.H. Myers provided a detailed investigation of it in his monumental psychological/psychical study published in 1903 which is a bulwark of the major book Irreducible Mind by Kelly and Kelly, et al published about five years ago. We referenced both these works in Part I. Myers's pursued the commonalities and differences between MPD and the intentional mental activities of mediums, who somehow submerge or set aside their waking consciousness to enable a bride between their subconscious minds of others now discarnate. Steve, I think you linked to an online presentation of Myers's text and maybe you can find it again or still have the address. That book, Human Personality and its Survival of Physical Death (roughly), originally appeared in two volumes and I'm not sure whether both are available online.

 

[smcder]

Good questions and good call to bring this issue into the discussion. Multiple personality disorder has been of great interest to psychical researchers for nearly 150 years. F.W.H. Myers provided a detailed investigation of it in his monumental psychological/psychical study published in 1903 which is a bulwark of the major book Irreducible Mind by Kelly and Kelly, et al published about five years ago. We referenced both these works in Part I. Myers's pursued the commonalities and differences between MPD and the intentional mental activities of mediums, who somehow submerge or set aside their waking consciousness to enable a bride between their subconscious minds of others now discarnate. Steve, I think you linked to an online presentation of Myers's text and maybe you can find it again or still have the address. That book, Human Personality and its Survival of Physical Death (roughly), originally appeared in two volumes and I'm not sure whether both are available online.

Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers
Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death by F. W. H. Myers - Free Ebook

I think it can be found online elsewhere - the link above has Epub, Kindle, HTML and Plain text.

 

[Constance]

A few years back there were cases where people who had been raped, were administered a drug for pain relief in the ER or ambulance and subsequently lost their memory of the event. There were questions about the ethics of using (or asking for) this drug. What responsibilities does a victim have to remember the crime committed against them?

I also wonder about the ethics involved in using such drugs where the well-being of the person himself/herself is concerned. The goal of psychiatry and psychology has long been to enable the psychological integration of individuals who suffer from various kinds of dis-integration. It seems to be generally recognized by psychological therapists that people suffer worsening psychological syndromes, conditions -- such as compulsiveness, depression, dysfunction, self-destructiveness -- when they carry unresolved grief or mental pain in their subconscious minds. It therefore seems wrong to administer drugs that 'bury' damaging experiences deeper rather than enabling individuals to process them, come to terms with them, and regain their ability to live well beyond them. At the same time there is the practical problem of the lack of access of many people to skillful therapists. Given that, the quick fix [forgetfulness to some extent] might seem to be the only alternative to keep damaged individuals 'up and running', but it may be no 'fix' at all if it means that their experiences in the present are less conscious and vital, their felt awareness of their existence is less vibrant, and their lives are lived at shallower levels of being, of the sense of being and its intrinsic natural satisfactions.

Some of this information I think was later used to work on drugs to treat PTSD. What distinguishes the two cases? Suppose a veteran elects to use these drugs in therapy and then a military inquiry is held and he is asked to testify?

When I worked with a victim's advocacy group, we were told that up to 90% of women with cognitive impairments were physically and sexually abused. Courts often did not admit the testimony of the individual with cognitive impairments.

Tragic and widespread problems with little adequate and appropriate social response. As Hawthorn said, approximately, 'the most unforgiveable sin is the sin against the spirit'. As Camus said, precisely: "the only mistake is to cause suffering." As a species, we fail one another and ourselves not only by causing suffering but in refusing to ameliorate it to the fullest extent possible.

DID/MPD - Dissociative Identity Disorder

Do we accept cases where there appears to be more than one "I"? Does this have any bearing on the normal "self" or is the process pathological and can't tell us anything about the ordinary case? If one personality experiences something consciously, do we say there is an experience for the other personalities? Does it make sense to ask where was Mary when Rocky felt the pain, or is Mary constructed at the moment of her consciousness? Is the memory different for each personality or shared?[/QUOTE]

Fascinating questions, and we have to accept their reality. It seems almost obvious to me that persons who develop alternate personalities are driven to do so by one kind of interpersonal violence or another. But deep psychological therapies have worked to re-integrate people victimized this way as 'whole selves' with a chance to live meaningful and satisfying lives. I'd add that it seems especially off the mark in cases like these to think that 'integrated information' in the computational sense produces consciousness. Our understanding of consciousness has got to understand what the integral human being is emotionally as well as mentally. And Panksepp's focus on 'affectivity' as the early mark of protoconsciousness points in the same direction: sensing the 'ownness' of its experience by a primitive organism is incipient feeling, and this is the ground of the evolution of consciousness.

 

[smcder]

I think these physical/informational states inform the organism.

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

If you have physical structure, you have informational structure, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other. (That's why I said Chalmer's zombie argument created a false duality.)

Here's a reverse hard problem: can we have informational structures without physical structures?

@Soupie says:

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

So you are not an epiphenomenalist, correct?

Wikipedia again:

"Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. Fear seems to make the heart beat faster; though, according to epiphenomenalism, the state of the nervous system causes the heart to beat faster.[1] Because mental events are a kind of overflow that cannot cause anything physical, epiphenomenalism is viewed as a version of monism.[2]

In the physicalist account, its the nerves firing that causes the heart to beat faster. "fear" is a mental event, an overflow that cannot cause anything physical.

How does this work for you on the property dualist account? What makes the heart beat faster?

 

[Constance]

I think these physical/informational states inform the organism.

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

If you have physical structure, you have informational structure, and vice versa. You can't have one without the other. (That's why I said Chalmer's zombie argument created a false duality.)

Here's a reverse hard problem: can we have informational structures without physical structures?

What are 'informational structures'? It seems to me that they begin to exist in increasing exchanges of information originating in the quantum substrate, producing increasingly complex systems that are purely physical. Something different begins to exist when life turns up out of that manifold -- a qualitative difference occurs in the self-referentiality of organisms, producing something new on the planet -- lived experience, reality as lived -- as Husserl identified it. That consciousness is fluid, changing in its focus from moment to moment or quarter-hour to quarter-hour, is but one part of the puzzle we need to understand in consciousness studies. It is not in itself a solution to the larger problem of the meaning of consciousness. Indeed, it appears that consciousness continually operates at several levels at the same time. We are just beginning to explore the subconscious and unconscious and even supraconscious levels that inform our waking conscious states and our minds. There is no way to simplify the description of consciousness, or to divide it up into separate 'modules'. What we need to understand is the integration of experience at different levels enabled by the complexity of consciousness, rather than the integration of 'information'.

 

[smcder]

I also wonder about the ethics involved in using such drugs where the well-being of the person himself/herself is concerned. The goal of psychiatry and psychology has long been to enable the psychological integration of individuals who suffer from various kinds of dis-integration. It seems to be generally recognized by psychological therapists that people suffer worsening psychological syndromes, conditions -- such as compulsiveness, depression, dysfunction, self-destructiveness -- when they carry unresolved grief or mental pain in their subconscious minds. It therefore seems wrong to administer drugs that 'bury' damaging experiences deeper rather than enabling individuals to process them, come to terms with them, and regain their ability to live well beyond them. At the same time there is the practical problem of the lack of access of many people to skillful therapists. Given that, the quick fix [forgetfulness to some extent] might seem to be the only alternative to keep damaged individuals 'up and running', but it may be no 'fix' at all if it means that their experiences in the present are less conscious and vital, their felt awareness of their existence is less vibrant, and their lives are lived at shallower levels of being, of the sense of being and its intrinsic natural satisfactions.



Tragic and widespread problems with little adequate and appropriate social response. As Hawthorn said, approximately, 'the most unforgiveable sin is the sin against the spirit'. As Camus said, precisely: "the only mistake is to cause suffering." As a species, we fail one another and ourselves not only by causing suffering but in refusing to ameliorate it to the fullest extent possible.

DID/MPD - Dissociative Identity Disorder

Do we accept cases where there appears to be more than one "I"? Does this have any bearing on the normal "self" or is the process pathological and can't tell us anything about the ordinary case? If one personality experiences something consciously, do we say there is an experience for the other personalities? Does it make sense to ask where was Mary when Rocky felt the pain, or is Mary constructed at the moment of her consciousness? Is the memory different for each personality or shared?

Fascinating questions, and we have to accept their reality. It seems almost obvious to me that persons who develop alternate personalities are driven to do so by one kind of interpersonal violence or another. But deep psychological therapies have worked to re-integrate people victimized this way as 'whole selves' with a chance to live meaningful and satisfying lives. I'd add that it seems especially off the mark in cases like these to think that 'integrated information' in the computational sense produces consciousness. Our understanding of consciousness has got to understand what the integral human being is emotionally as well as mentally. And Panksepp's focus on 'affectivity' as the early mark of protoconsciousness points in the same direction: sensing the 'ownness' of its experience by a primitive organism is incipient feeling, and this is the ground of the evolution of consciousness.[/QUOTE]

I was just listening to a Dhamma talk (a Buddhist instructional talk) entitled "Unskillful Voices." the idea is how there is a committee of the mind and we can choose from among the voices in our mind as to what we might do next. In Buddhism, skillful action is action that does not cause suffering. So we can become skillful in terms of choosing our action from among suggestions from the committee. (I think of Libet's "veto" here! ;-) In the talk, the instructor mentioned multiple personality disorder - how at an extreme, the voices become detached from one another. But we all have the experience of multiple voices and tendencies. So our conception of self can get identified with one of these voices instead of a more skillful sense of self that can choose from among the voices. On that idea of the self, you don't have to react when a terrible thought comes into the mind, you don't have to feel guilty and in time, such voices can fade and the mind becomes quieter and more integrated, with fewer voices that perhaps tend to agree.

 

[smcder]

What are 'informational structures'? It seems to me that they begin to exist in increasing exchanges of information originating in the quantum substrate, producing increasingly complex systems that are purely physical. Something different begins to exist when life turns up out of that manifold -- a qualitative difference occurs in the self-referentiality of organisms, producing something new on the planet -- lived experience, reality as lived -- as Husserl identified it. That consciousness is fluid, changing in its focus from moment to moment or quarter-hour to quarter-hour, is but one part of the puzzle we need to understand in consciousness studies. It is not in itself a solution to the larger problem of the meaning of consciousness. Indeed, it appears that consciousness continually operates at several levels at the same time. We are just beginning to explore the subconscious and unconscious and even supraconscious levels that inform our waking conscious states and our minds. There is no way to simplify the description of consciousness, or to divide it up into separate 'modules'. What we need to understand is the integration of experience at different levels enabled by the complexity of consciousness, rather than the integration of 'information'.

I'm reading his and your previous post together:

"It seems almost obvious to me that persons who develop alternate personalities are driven to do so by one kind of interpersonal violence or another. But deep psychological therapies have worked to re-integrate people victimized this way as 'whole selves' with a chance to live meaningful and satisfying lives. I'd add that it seems especially off the mark in cases like these to think that 'integrated information' in the computational sense produces consciousness.

Our understanding of consciousness has got to understand what the integral human being is emotionally as well as mentally.

And Panksepp's focus on 'affectivity' as the early mark of protoconsciousness points in the same direction: sensing the 'ownness' of its experience by a primitive organism is incipient feeling, and this is the ground of the evolution of consciousness."

This in particular struck me:

There is no way to simplify the description of consciousness, or to divide it up into separate 'modules'.

I think that's right. And I think no matter what we find out about the physical substrate of consciousness as we see it in human beings, we are in a position only to understand ourselves in a certain way to a certain degree. We have to deal with the complexity of human consciousness and accept that part of us will always be a mystery to us.

I suspect the way out of that will lie, as ever, in the tendency of technology to "perfect" whatever it encounters. In my darker moments I think techne will crawl up inside of us mind first and then come to inhabit our genes - the vision of uploaded consciousness, instantaneous, is halcyon, the vision of gradual, parasitic replacement at the genetic level is troubling.

I appreciate science and philosophy as limited pursuits. I wish they could intertwine more, but I think that very wish may be rooted in a misunderstanding on my part of the western tradition.

 

[smcder]

I don't follow? I think the information philosophy of mind answers the hard question, i.e., that mental/information is fundamental. Of course, IPTM can't say why/how the primal stuff exists exists at all. I suppose that would be the Really Hard Problem. (And unbound telesis, as you know, is my answer to that one.)

Have you thought about this one yet:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

Also, to add some clarity to what I've been saying; I've talked about awareness and meta-awareness. I consider qualitative experience to be awareness. And when we say "I was consciously aware that I was seeing the color green," I consider this meta-awareness. Awareness of being aware. (I did add confusion above by failing to add the "meta" to one use of awareness.)

I can't find it now, but I recall finding and posting here a quote by Chalmer's in which he says something to the effect of: One of the other mysteries (besides the hard problem) is how the cognitive mind has access to the phenomenal mind.

I take that to mean: How can we even be aware of our bodies qualitative experiences? (I've said I think it's possible because both forms of "mind" are fundamentally constituted of information. But how "awareness" becomes aware of itself is fascinating.)

As @marduk has said, it must involve some form of strange loop.

I can't find it now, but I recall finding and posting here a quote by Chalmer's in which he says something to the effect of: One of the other mysteries (besides the hard problem) is how the cognitive mind has access to the phenomenal mind.

Do you mean this:

“The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate.”

 

[smcder]

Emergentism/Epiphenomenalism
The Hard Problem
Materialism
Panpsychism

Part I

I'm posting up the basic ideas around the hard problem of consciousness and Panpsychism that have formed the backbone of this discussion so far.

1. I want to clear up some terminology questions
2. I want to be able to refer back to this post when questions about the hard problem and Panpsychism come up
3. once we know what we know and are all clear on these basics, then there are some very interesting questions that @Soupie has raised for me that I want to seek answers for in order to have a more complete view of Panpsychism. The primary one is this quote by Chalmers:

“The paradox to be explained is not that body and mind communicate but that cognition and consciousness communicate.”

I plan a second post on the Combination Problem for Panpsychism.

The two principle sources for this post and the next are:

Panpsychism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The phenomenal bonding solution to the combination problem | Philip Goff - Academia.edu

The hard problem of consciousness (Nagel, Chalmers)
Asks:

"How do you get mind from matter?"

The hard problem is a problem for materialist explanations of consciousness – as argued by Nagel, it is a direct challenge to physicalism which otherwise seems to offer the possibility of a complete description of the world.

Materialist theories of consciousness are forms of emergentism – the idea that mental attributes come from physical causes.

Emergentism
1. fundamental physical entities do not have mental attributes
2. systems of fundamental physical entities, e.g. human brains, do

The problems with emergentism are greater than is generally thought, as epitomized by the presence of then a miracle occurs at some point in all explanations of emergence.

There is the obvious difficult of how do you get consciousness from mere matter?

It's hard to articulate a form of emergentism that doesn’t make the emergent features causally impotent (epiphenomenal).

Physics has nothing to say about the categorical nature of fundamental particles. It has plenty to say about how they behave but nothing to say about what they are. So, if you are at all curious, you take your ball and you go elsewhere.

Where you go is:

Panpsychism

We already know three things about it:

1. panpsychism is not a materialist theory
2. there is no hard problem for panpsychism
3. panpsychism rejects emergentism

Panpsychism is the view that each and every fully real, concrete entity is conscious … that physically fundamental entities have mental properties, roughly (very roughly) that there is something it is like to be an electron.

There is no observational data for Panpsychism. However, consciousness is a nearly* inescapable fact – it is the only thing we know directly, first hand …it is how the world shows up for us.

Panpsychism offers:

a unified picture of the world –the nature of non-fundamental things is continuous with the nature of fundamental things

materialism supposes that fundamental particles have some entirely unknown categorical nature, thus adding complexity, discontinuity and mystery

The theoretical imperative is clear:

form as simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data

Thus, we go with Panpsychism.

But … Panpsychism has one serious problem: the combination problem.

Fortunately, there is a proposed solution: Phenomenal Bonding

*eliminative materialism

 

[marduk]

A profoundly big word, that little preposition 'or'. That neurons are "involved in" human experience and thought is a long way from saying, as Crick said (hypnotizing a generation or two of materialists), "You are your neurons." You seem unwilling to say that. Good show.

OK, I'll say it again.

Just like Hoefsdaeder did.

I'm a strange loop -- the result of a lot of continuous feedback loops of my neurons firing in certain patterns that can become somewhat aware of their own activity.

I am not my neurons, because a bunch of non-functioning neurons would no longer be me. I'm the result of my physical substrate firing in certain patterns. Those patterns are me.

Like iTunes is not silicon, iTunes is the software playing my music. But it is still materialistic, and exists in the physical universe.

Take away the silicon, and iTunes goes away. Describe the silicon to a sufficient degree, including the electrons going through it, and I can reproduce the state iTunes is in right now with 100% fidelity.

I make the same assertion of my mind. It should be replicable with 100% fidelity, and since it exists in the material universe, I should be able through equivalency make the substrate abstract -- replace it in any substrate capable of simulating what the neurons do.

 

[marduk]

Marduk, you claim that we go around in circles, but actually it's you who are doing that, laying down the hydra-headed homunculus constituted of neurons that think and even philosophise and then immediately forgetting him/it/them by bringing consciousness and mind back into your description to serve the humble purposes of moving the body.

I make no homunculus claim, don't put words in my mouth, especially when you've asserted nothing back.

In fact, I'm asserting the exact opposite of the dualist claim.

Frankly, you're quite frustrating to discuss things with.

 

[Soupie]

The experience is step one, the awareness is step 2 and meta-awareness is step three, right? So what is happening at each step and where is it happening?

No, I see it as:

(1) Phenomenal Experience (Awareness)
(2) Phenomenal Experience of Phenomenal Experience (Meta-Awareness)

It seems that Chalmers has made a distinction between phenomenal experience and cognition, but I view them both as aspects of mind. As we've noted in this thread, thoughts/cognition do have a phenomenal "feel" to them. I don't think phenomenal experience and thoughts are ontologically (?) different. They are both constituted of information.

@Soupie says:

It's two sides of the same coin; organisms and consciousness have evolved together. From one perspective (the idealist perhaps?) we could say the physical side of the coin was "epiphenomenal!"

@smcder asks:

So you are not an epiphenomenalist, correct?

Another way of conceptualizing what I am saying (and there are a few) is to say:

(1) A physical organism (structure) has a corresponding informational structure. The physical body is "aware" in the sense that it has phenomenal experiences.

(2) A self-aware physical organism has a corresponding informational structure that is aware of itself! That is, the physical body has phenomenal experiences (awareness), and this awareness is able to be aware of itself.

A tentative outline/timeline might be:

Physical structure - Proto-Mind
Living Physical structure - Mind
Self-Aware Physical structure - Meta-Mind

I will need to think more about it, but I do believe that meta-mind has causal influence on the organism. Thus, I would not be an epiphenomenalist in the strong sense. That is to say, I do think mind can have causal influence on the organism.

 

[Soupie]

What we need to understand is the integration of experience at different levels enabled by the complexity of consciousness, rather than the integration of 'information'.

The "integration of experience" on my view is synonymous with the "integration of information."

There is no way to simplify the description of consciousness, or to divide it up into separate 'modules'.

Do you believe that jelly fish have the same "kind of mind' that humans, dolphins, and whales have? I don't. There is a real difference.

The distinctions I'm making may only be conceptual or by degree, but I do believe (1) minds - like organisms - have evolved, and (2) minds - like organisms - are different. Thus, I think there are a variety of "minds" in our reality, and they have a variety of differences.