Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[smcder]

I found this discussion of material/immaterial
Material vs. Immaterial

I've added some notes in bold ...

"@Holiday20310401, I think notions of 'an immaterial thing' or a 'spiritual substance' are incorrect and have caused untold difficulties in Western philosophy.

I deny that there is any such thing as an immaterial substance or non-material existence. Yet I am not a materialist.

Here is an explanation based on what little understanding I have of the Neo-platonist attitude to the question of the nature of transcendent reality.

I think it can be easily shown that reality itself consists of much more than simply 'what exists'. Very simplistically, if you regard 'reality' as being the sum total of 'things that exist' (and many do) then you need to find the fundamental elements of existence. These, you might think, would be atoms. However 'atomism', in this naive sense, is no longer tenable, as the atom has been split and can no longer be regarded as the 'fundamental unit of material reality' as it was in the heyday of scientific materialism. (Maybe this is why they are calling the Higgs Boson The God Particle.)

So what fundamentally exists? Actually the difficulty you will have in answering this question is that nothing exists absolutely or in its own right. Sure everything is composed of elements, and elements are composed of atoms: but atoms are composed of...? As yet, the 'fundamental constituent of matter' is still an open question.
@Soupie's view posits the idea of "primal substance" as the fundamental constituent of matter

To change tack a little, what of things that don't exist but are real? Perhaps it can be demonstrated that what is real, and what exists, might be different.

Reality contains everything that exists, but existence is only a subset of what is real. Nothing unreal exists, but some things which are real do not exist. Existence is of objects, while reality also covers ideas beyond objects. A number is only real, while a baseball exists. The gross national product is only real, while Antarctica exists. The probability of the sun not rising tomorrow is real, while the sun itself exists. A number (in the sense beyond numeral) cannot be a sense object and so does not exist... there's no place to go to look for a number. Anything which has no spatio-temporal meaning (and thus no "there" to be at to observe) cannot be said to exist. Such things can be real if properly derived out of experience, but they do not exist.(1)

Just above it says:

there's no place to go look for a number

But we could say when five is physically instantiated, we can look for five "things", when it is communicated, we have the energy, the radio waves and we know where they are and when "five" is just an idea, then we can locate at least the brain in which that idea resides ... that's where I think a materialist should go looking for it ... right?

When you think about it, the same logic applies to many, perhaps all, elements of our experience. All of our experience, the nature of reality itself, seems to consist of the experience of 'objects' and sensations related to those objects, which in turn seems to consist largely of matter, 'dumb stuff', being randomly pushed around according to physical laws.

Yet the relationships of all of these objects to each other, and to us, and the manner in which they exist, is not actually revealed by their mere existence. (This follows from the fact that they cannot be completely analysed.) To begin with, they exist 'for us', or in relation to our particular sensory and intellectual capabilities (cf Kant). However Neoplatonism would add, there is also a sense in which the existence of any particular object is intelligible only insofar as it is lawful, and

the laws themselves are not disclosed by any of the objects of perception.

They obey these laws (which, perhaps, are still acknowledged today in the idea of 'scientific law', which arguably did evolve from this paticular aspect of Western philosophy) and are 'real' only because they are 'instances of universals'.

 

[Soupie]

So "everything in reality" is made out of material...

The discussion and comments you reference were before I had discovered CRP3.

The concept I was trying to convey was that the mind was constituted of something. I felt that it was made of some "material." I think I may have even said the material was nonphysical but that was just way too confusing.

Once CRP3 entered the picture and the language of "constitute" and "combination" via Chalmers entered the discussion, I no longer had to explain the concept. (Thats not to say its correct.)

and the same material but thoughts and qualia are not constituted of matter/energy ...

Yes, the same primal substance. I subscribe to some form of property dualism or dual aspect monism. It probably hinges on whether information and matter are intrinsic or extrinsic properties of Undus Mundus.

but they (consciousness) must be made out of something ... but again everything in reality is made out of material and the same material. So this seems to be a contradiction.

Again, at this point "constituted" is the preferred, less confusing language.

And everything "derives" from the same substance, but may be constituted of different aspects/properties of this substance.

 

[Pharoah]

Search on ADD and dyslexia or Ritalin and dyslexia ...

Panksepp discussed ADD and Ritalin a bit in the Shrinkrap interview ... I did find this of possible interest.

Hope for millions as scientists find 'cure' for dyslexia | Daily Mail Online

So he could remember more than average digits in order and only two backward?

that bit sounds like me, STM has always been lousy in some ways.

A lot of that article is rubbish. It is the Daily Mail so that is hardly surprising

Strategies for putting short term, into medium, and then into long term memory are great - repeating over and over in my head doesn't work.

 

[smcder]

The discussion and comments you reference were before I had discovered CRP3.

The concept I was trying to convey was that the mind was constituted of something. I felt that it was made of some "material." I think I may have even said the material was nonphysical but that was just way too confusing.

Once CRP3 entered the picture and the language of "constitute" and "combination" via Chalmers entered the discussion, I no longer had to explain the concept. (Thats not to say its correct.)



Yes, the same primal substance. I subscribe to some form of property dualism or dual aspect monism. It probably hinges on whether information and matter are intrinsic or extrinsic properties of Undus Mundus.


Again, at this point "constituted" is the preferred, less confusing language.

And everything "derives" from the same substance, but may be constituted of different aspects/properties of this substance.

The discussion and comments you reference were before I had discovered CRP3.

No, I checked that:

This is from April 15th:

Haha, well, my emphasis is on the "material" root of the word. That is, I think everything in reality is made out of "material." And moreover, I think everything is made of the same kind of material.
But the key thing we are looking for is property dualism: Yes, the same primal substance. I subscribe to some form of property dualism or dual aspect monism. Right?

This is from March 27th

Yes, the concepts of property dualism and reflexive monism sound compatible to me.

I would say both concepts are compatible with my conception of reality. I haven't completely digested all the information/terminology related to both, but I wouldn't label the most primal substance (what I have been - probably confusingly - referring to as an "element") as a "physical substance" per se. I would simply say that it's a substance that has both physical and mental properties.

And on April 3rd:

Trained Observer
You are seeing consciousness as the molecular activity associated with the various processes of the brain. The "experience" is something that can only be realized by the brain in question. I hope that made sense.

It does make sense. It is the view I held previous to property dualism.
You are saying that the physical exchange of information between a physical brain and the physical environment give rise to (what would be) physical experience. If experience is physical, it would follow that it could be "realized" - as you say - objectively. It cannot. As you say, it is only realized by the brain in question. Thus, experience is subjective, not objective. It follows that this subjective experience is thus non-physical.

So by April 3rd you are a property dualist and on April 17th you made the statements:

Haha, well, my emphasis is on the "material" root of the word. That is, I think everything in reality is made out of "material." And moreover, I think everything is made of the same kind of material.

 

[smcder]

A lot of that article is rubbish. It is the Daily Mail so that is hardly surprising

Strategies for putting short term, into medium, and then into long term memory are great - repeating over and over in my head doesn't work.

You do have to be careful but ... it also reminds me of the Panksepp interview where he gave a speculative account of EMDR which comes in for a lot of skepticism (see the entry at skepdic) as well as more moderate criticism over why it works ...

Panskepp had some good results with that personally and suggested an interesting way that it might work. I think I quoted the passage in a post above.

 

[smcder]

The discussion and comments you reference were before I had discovered CRP3.

The concept I was trying to convey was that the mind was constituted of something. I felt that it was made of some "material." I think I may have even said the material was nonphysical but that was just way too confusing.

Once CRP3 entered the picture and the language of "constitute" and "combination" via Chalmers entered the discussion, I no longer had to explain the concept. (Thats not to say its correct.)



Yes, the same primal substance. I subscribe to some form of property dualism or dual aspect monism. It probably hinges on whether information and matter are intrinsic or extrinsic properties of Undus Mundus.


Again, at this point "constituted" is the preferred, less confusing language.

And everything "derives" from the same substance, but may be constituted of different aspects/properties of this substance.

Again the problem with CRP3 is the combination problem ... on Chalmers' account, mind is still epiphenomenal - not casually effective.

So you can say things like:

My contention is that the "pattern" of input is the phenomenal experience.

(Although when I think of the two-sided puzzle and each side constraining the other, there is a sense in which, in constraining the physical structure (the nervous system) that is causally effective, the "phenomenal structure" does have a causal role. But I think that metaphor may be misleading, I'll have to go back and look at the article on Phenomenal Bonding. It may have addressed this. It seems like it also didn't allow a causal role for phenomenal experience. I think too, this whole model is challenged by the argument I posted above on causal closure.)

At any rate, mind being epiphenomenal in your view may be the source of @Constance's impression:

My impression is that you have been 'focusing on' a concept of phenomenal experience, one largely of your own construction that bypasses experience itself.

A couple of days ago you write about the phenomenal in the terms of your old view, or so it seems:

If I understand correctly, it seems this is done via electrical impulses. Thus, if our sensory organs can be “reduced” to electrical impulses and phenomenal experiences can still be realized, than this is informative.
To me, this means one of two things: (1) somewhere in the body – other than our sense organs – incoming data triggers the “release” of a substance constituting phenomenal experience, or (2) the data itself becomes phenomenal experience by way of being meaningful information.
In other words, with the success of artificial sense organs, we are narrowing down list of physical systems required for the existence of phenomenal experience.

Does CRP3 choose (1) or (2) above? Or are both possibilities for you?

The way I understand CRP3 - the phenomenal properties of the primal stuff that ultimately makes up the nervous system are stimulated by the electrical impulses (themselves having phenomenal properties) just as the physical properties are being stimulated. So you do get out of having to explain the concept but at the cost of having to solve the combination problem.

The combination problem reminds me a lot of the causation problem under dualism. If you ask how does the mental effect the physical under dualism, it seems to me you can just as easily ask how does the phenomenal aspect of material constrain or effect its physical aspect? I'm not sure they are two entirely different questions.

Anyway, that's why I hesitate on CRP3.

 

[smcder]

What's so scary about explanation?
I can understand why it was a problem for the early church; threatening the fabric of religious doctrine.
But in a secular society, what is the motivation for the denial of explanation? - perhaps hankering for something to believe in...
This forum excels in the art of avoiding critical analysis. Everytime it gets remotely close, it swerves off. It is like the footballer running toward the goal and missing because the excitement of trying is more compelling that achieving the aim. Is the bond of running around the pitch together excitedly greater than realising the purpose of the activity?
One of the techniques I have employed with myself is to ask questions with only a yes or no answer, and from that developed a train of thought from which there could be no divergence - a disciplined way of thinking about something to deny distracting vicissitudes. Where is this forum discussion going? In a way it is like a master mind group, but without a direction, a chair, a means of assessing or measuring progress. If it were an operating theatre, all the doctors would be slashing at the body in various places saying, 'here looks like a good place to operate... or perhaps here, or here... this bit looks interesting, look'. Yep... but the patient is going to be dead.

You asked about kinds of explanation, one thing I am going to look for on a new explanation is very simple and that is can we sort it out with an experiment or a prediction? Can the explanation given be tested or does it make a prediction the old explanation does not or is it more useful for some other reason?

In terms of critical analysis, you've put several questions to @Soupie and I think that's a good model, I am going to look at the questions you ask for future use.

In the past, all the critical questions that did get asked, didn't all get answered. And that's because people come and go and have other things to do and because there aren't always answers or they didn't read the post - so I'm not lodging a complaint, it's just giving you some history on the thread and the dynamic ... if someone doesn't answer a question, I try to ask it again later if I can remember, I do the same thing I'm sure ... so lots of questions get asked repeatedly and the answers may be forgotten because this is all done asynchronously.

One thing that would really help and your Google group may have this is a place to put up FAQs or just key exchanges. All we can do here on the forum is search and search and that takes remembering/guessing the right key word.

You and Soupie are putting forward new ideas, so the reason it may seem I am against explanation is that my role has been to try and understand them and pick them apart. I think I can do that better with the model questions you put to Soupie and by just trying to change the tone of my approach.

 

[smcder]

Those are the same responses to the Penrose-Hameroff theory that I heard ten years ago, and yet well-schooled quantum physicists continue with various quantum brain experiments. But science is long, of course, and presuppositions and opinions are of relatively short-term value.

Besides, in posting my theoretical approach to consciousess above (in response to your asking for it) I wrote as follows:



This is what "seems likely to me," from my own reading in quantum physics and consciousness studies (Stapp, Tiller, and others) and theories developed by biologists and neuroscientists such as Panksepp and before him Varela, Thompson, Noe, and others). The dictionary I consulted for a definition of the quantum substrate (which you requested) provided the quotation referring to Penrose-Hameroff's usage of that term. So far as I have seen, the P-H theory might turn out to be valid; testing it in living human subjects is not, however, possible. Maybe you have another suggestion for testing it?

I'm going to provide you with a list of books you will need to consult if you're going to be persuaded away from a materialist/objectivist/mechanistic definition of consciousess. If you're not interested in finding out about the cognitive-enactive approach underway in the investigation of consciousness, just ignore it.

But even a ten-minute reading of the Hasker paper linked here several times in the last week would enable you to see the shortcomings in the computational theory of mind out of which enactivism has proceeded.

I was looking for something else this morning and came across something relevant to your discussion with Marduk:

Topic for #95: Gödel on Math | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog
"So if we know a system is consistent, then we know it without a proof. According to Turing, the mind is a machine that generates its knowledge through something going on under the surface that is much like the process of mathematical proof, so on this conception, we just couldn’t know anything that we couldn’t get through this kind of proof. The ultimate conclusion of Gödel’s paper is a disjunction:
Either mathematics is incompletable…, that its evident axioms can never be comprised in a finite rule, that is to say, the human mind (even within the realm of pure mathematics) inifinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine, or there exist absolutely unsolvable [mathematical problems].
He spends the rest of the paper discussing these two possibilities. Folks like Roger Penrose run with the first option here: we are not Turing machines, our minds are not computers in any sense."
smcder, Jun 11, 2014 Report
#2144
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Oct 20, 2011
@@Constance (from the same link)
We also read a less developed, more philosophical unpublished essay from 1961 called “The Modern Development of the Foundations of Mathematics in Light of Philosophy” (read it here:

http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.co...Godel-Modern-Mathematics-and-Philosophy-1.pdf

with an introduction with helpful background from Dagfinn Føllesdal) that more directly takes on the mathematical realism vs. nominalism debate: there are “rightward” strains in philosophy like rationalism (in the sense of Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz) and theology, and “leftward” strains like empiricism. Despite the historical precedence of the leftward with the rise of science, he describes projects (like Mill’s) that try to derive mathematical truths from experience to have been largely unpersuasive. Gödel sees the best option as a middle way between the two directions, and ends up recommending Husserl’s phenomenology as a good option for exploring what this kind of intuition consists in, though he doesn’t give us much detail in the paper about what advantages he thinks this will bring us.


...

 

[Soupie]

So by April 3rd you are a property dualist and on April 17th you made the statements:

Haha, well, my emphasis is on the "material" root of the word. That is, I think everything in reality is made out of "material." And moreover, I think everything is made of the same kind of material.

So it seems that:

i. I changed my mind 14 days later (and then changed it back)

ii. Held both views simultaneously

iii. Was still struggling with correct terminology and explanation

iv. Was still developing my view

v. Was lying

I'm gonna guess it was a combination of 3 and 4. For instance, Chalmers — a property dualist — labels the primal substance as physical, and says it has physical and mental properties. That has always seemed odd to me. I wasnt sure that the primal substance needed to be physical. And I wasnt sure if that was a requirement for propert dualism.

My view now is much clearer, but still not perfectly clear. Im not sure how many properties the Unus Mundus has (probably many) and i'm not sure if they are intrinsic or extrinsic (probably extrinsic).

However, at the end of the day, methinks this has little bearing on whether phenomenal experience is information/meaning constituted of data.

 

[Pharoah]

I found this discussion of material/immaterial
Material vs. Immaterial

I've added some notes in bold ...

"@Holiday20310401, I think notions of 'an immaterial thing' or a 'spiritual substance' are incorrect and have caused untold difficulties in Western philosophy.

I deny that there is any such thing as an immaterial substance or non-material existence. Yet I am not a materialist.

Here is an explanation based on what little understanding I have of the Neo-platonist attitude to the question of the nature of transcendent reality.

I think it can be easily shown that reality itself consists of much more than simply 'what exists'. Very simplistically, if you regard 'reality' as being the sum total of 'things that exist' (and many do) then you need to find the fundamental elements of existence. These, you might think, would be atoms. However 'atomism', in this naive sense, is no longer tenable, as the atom has been split and can no longer be regarded as the 'fundamental unit of material reality' as it was in the heyday of scientific materialism. (Maybe this is why they are calling the Higgs Boson The God Particle.)

So what fundamentally exists? Actually the difficulty you will have in answering this question is that nothing exists absolutely or in its own right. Sure everything is composed of elements, and elements are composed of atoms: but atoms are composed of...? As yet, the 'fundamental constituent of matter' is still an open question.
@Soupie's view posits the idea of "primal substance" as the fundamental constituent of matter

To change tack a little, what of things that don't exist but are real? Perhaps it can be demonstrated that what is real, and what exists, might be different.

Reality contains everything that exists, but existence is only a subset of what is real. Nothing unreal exists, but some things which are real do not exist. Existence is of objects, while reality also covers ideas beyond objects. A number is only real, while a baseball exists. The gross national product is only real, while Antarctica exists. The probability of the sun not rising tomorrow is real, while the sun itself exists. A number (in the sense beyond numeral) cannot be a sense object and so does not exist... there's no place to go to look for a number. Anything which has no spatio-temporal meaning (and thus no "there" to be at to observe) cannot be said to exist. Such things can be real if properly derived out of experience, but they do not exist.(1)

Just above it says:

there's no place to go look for a number

But we could say when five is physically instantiated, we can look for five "things", when it is communicated, we have the energy, the radio waves and we know where they are and when "five" is just an idea, then we can locate at least the brain in which that idea resides ... that's where I think a materialist should go looking for it ... right?

When you think about it, the same logic applies to many, perhaps all, elements of our experience. All of our experience, the nature of reality itself, seems to consist of the experience of 'objects' and sensations related to those objects, which in turn seems to consist largely of matter, 'dumb stuff', being randomly pushed around according to physical laws.

Yet the relationships of all of these objects to each other, and to us, and the manner in which they exist, is not actually revealed by their mere existence. (This follows from the fact that they cannot be completely analysed.) To begin with, they exist 'for us', or in relation to our particular sensory and intellectual capabilities (cf Kant). However Neoplatonism would add, there is also a sense in which the existence of any particular object is intelligible only insofar as it is lawful, and

the laws themselves are not disclosed by any of the objects of perception.

They obey these laws (which, perhaps, are still acknowledged today in the idea of 'scientific law', which arguably did evolve from this paticular aspect of Western philosophy) and are 'real' only because they are 'instances of universals'.

Isn't the problem, not the term "immaterial" but the term "material". Things that appear solid, substantial, consisting of something are actually, states of change. As dynamic changing processes, we nevertheless, identify them as temporally stable for sufficient lengths of time to conclude, "they are matter", "we are made of matter". The temporal coherence of the stable conditions we identify as matter is tricking us into thinking that there is some kind of permanence, an "either matter or immatter" etc
Of course, once one regards matter as merely a state of immense temporal yet vulnerable coherence and stability, then one can think of the states of change that we associate with mentality as just another form of temporal stability differing to matter only in so far as it is derived from processes that are fleeting by comparison. In virtue of this lack of permanence, particulalry in the way we relate to it, we identify mentality as constituted by something ephemerally distinctive to the apparent "solid permanence of matter".

 

[Soupie]

Again the problem with CRP3 is the combination problem ... on Chalmers' account, mind is still epiphenomenal - not casually effective.

So you can say things like:

My contention is that the "pattern" of input is the phenomenal experience.

(Although when I think of the two-sided puzzle and each side constraining the other, there is a sense in which, in constraining the physical structure (the nervous system) that is causally effective, the "phenomenal structure" does have a causal role. But I think that metaphor may be misleading, I'll have to go back and look at the article on Phenomenal Bonding. It may have addressed this. It seems like it also didn't allow a causal role for phenomenal experience. I think too, this whole model is challenged by the argument I posted above on causal closure.)

At any rate, mind being epiphenomenal in your view may be the source of @Constance's impression:

My impression is that you have been 'focusing on' a concept of phenomenal experience, one largely of your own construction that bypasses experience itself.

A couple of days ago you write about the phenomenal in the terms of your old view, or so it seems:

If I understand correctly, it seems this is done via electrical impulses. Thus, if our sensory organs can be “reduced” to electrical impulses and phenomenal experiences can still be realized, than this is informative.
To me, this means one of two things: (1) somewhere in the body – other than our sense organs – incoming data triggers the “release” of a substance constituting phenomenal experience, or (2) the data itself becomes phenomenal experience by way of being meaningful information.
In other words, with the success of artificial sense organs, we are narrowing down list of physical systems required for the existence of phenomenal experience.

Does CRP3 choose (1) or (2) above? Or are both possibilities for you?

The way I understand CRP3 - the phenomenal properties of the primal stuff that ultimately makes up the nervous system are stimulated by the electrical impulses (themselves having phenomenal properties) just as the physical properties are being stimulated. So you do get out of having to explain the concept but at the cost of having to solve the combination problem.

The combination problem reminds me a lot of the causation problem under dualism. If you ask how does the mental effect the physical under dualism, it seems to me you can just as easily ask how does the phenomenal aspect of material constrain or effect its physical aspect? I'm not sure they are two entirely different questions.

Anyway, that's why I hesitate on CRP3.

I'm not sure if the mind is epiphenomenal or not. I'm not there yet. My (primitive) thought has been that if the mind does have causal effects, it would derive from meta-cognition.

However, I'm not basing my ideas about the origin and nature of phenomenal experience on whether it is epiphenomenal or not (especially since we dont know).

That is, to judge a model on whether it allows for mental causation or not seems problimatic to me since we dont know if there is mental causation, right?

I would say CRP3 would only allow option (2) as it is substance monistic and not substance dualistic.

And technically, since my "model" seems to entail extrinsic properties rather than intrinsic properties, it is not compatible with CRP3. (As ive noted, my main affinity for CRP3 is the idea that mind is constitued of something.)

 

[smcder]

So it seems that:

i. I changed my mind 15 days later (and then changed it back)

ii. Held both views simultaneously

iii. Was still struggling with correct terminology and explanation

iv. Was still developing my view

v. Was lying

I'm gonna guess it was a combination of 3 and 4. For instance, Chalmers — a property dualist — labels the primal substance as physical, and says it has physical and mental properties. That has always seemed odd to me. I wasnt sure that the primal substance needed to be physical. And I wasnt sure if that was a requirement for propert dualism.

My view now is much clearer, but still not perfectly clear. Im not sure how many properties the Unus Mundus has (probably many) and i'm not sure if they are intrinsic or extrinsic (probably extrinsic).

However, at the end of the day, methinks this has little barring on whether phenomenal experience is information/meaning constituted of data.

Clearly you were lying. That's the first thing that came to my mind.

I'm gonna guess it was a combination of 3 and 4. For instance, Chalmers — a property dualist — labels the primal substance as physical, and says it has physical and mental properties. That has always seemed odd to me. I wasnt sure that the primal substance needed to be physical. And I wasnt sure if that was a requirement for propert dualism.

That's an interesting question. You go get the physical right off the bat that way. I suppose it could just as easily be mental and then you could be kind of an Idealist with property dualism ... not sure that is coherent. Chalmers isn't entirely clear to me either on this point:

Type-F monism is the view that consciousness is constituted by the intrinsic properties of fundamental physical entities: that is, by the categorical bases of fundamental physical dispositions.[*] On this view, phenomenal or protophenomenal properties are located at the fundamental level of physical reality, and in a certain sense, underlie physical reality itself.

But I don't think it's a requirement for "property dualism" itself - that just means having two properties: the phenomenal and the physical. Maybe you can have CSPPP3 with an imphysical primal substance ...

You do have to keep your reader in mind ... using consistent terminology is important and if you are referring to a specific theory like CRP3 or to something Chalmers' wrote, using that same terminology is important, it's not nit-picky. You know what you are talking about ... but likely your reader does not.

 

[smcder]

Isn't the problem, not the term "immaterial" but the term "material". Things that appear solid, substantial, consisting of something are actually, states of change. As dynamic changing processes, we nevertheless, identify them as temporally stable for sufficient lengths of time to conclude, "they are matter", "we are made of matter". The temporal coherence of the stable conditions we identify as matter is tricking us into thinking that there is some kind of permanence, an either or, etc

I started with it just from the vocabulary standpoint, with the words themselves, noticing that the default words we have at hand seem to be material and then we negate them ... I wondered what the history of that was?

But now I don't think that's quite right - now I think we have lots of words for nonphysical things but they are spiritual or religious. What's hard to find is words for non-physical things that aren't spiritual/religious ... I haven't found one. Wait ... ectoplasm?

Since this is Descartes' fault, we didn't need non-spiritual non-physical words before he came long, I'll have a look at how he handled it.

What you say above is very like what Strawson says in his lecture on Nietzsche's metaphysics. Nietzsche goes back to Heraclitus. Buddhist thought/philosophy also goes into this.

 

[smcder]

I'm not sure if the mind is epiphenomenal or not. I'm not there yet. My (primitive) thought has been that if the mind does have causal effects, it would derive from meta-cognition.

However, I'm not basing my ideas about the origin and nature of phenomenal experience on whether it is epiphenomenal or not (especially since we dont know).

That is, to judge a model on whether it allows for mental causation or not seems problimatic to me since we dont know if there is mental causation, right?

I would say CRP3 would only allow option (2) as it is substance monistic and not substance dualistic.

And technically, since my "model" seems to entail extrinsic properties rather than intrinsic properties, it is not compatible with CRP3. (As ive noted, my main affinity for CRP3 is the idea that mind is constitued of something.)

Wait ... when did the Undus Mundus come into it?? ... October 11 ... ok, I'm making a note.

And I guess I still don't grok/parse the mind is constituted of something? I thought it was green? Just kidding. In what theories of mind is it not constituted of something ?

 

[smcder]

Isn't the problem, not the term "immaterial" but the term "material". Things that appear solid, substantial, consisting of something are actually, states of change. As dynamic changing processes, we nevertheless, identify them as temporally stable for sufficient lengths of time to conclude, "they are matter", "we are made of matter". The temporal coherence of the stable conditions we identify as matter is tricking us into thinking that there is some kind of permanence, an "either matter or immatter" etc
Of course, once one regards matter as merely a state of immense temporal yet vulnerable coherence and stability, then one can think of the states of change that we associate with mentality as just another form of temporal stability differing to matter only in so far as it is derived from processes that are fleeting by comparison. In virtue of this lack of permanence, particulalry in the way we relate to it, we identify mentality as constituted by something ephemerally distinctive to the apparent "solid permanence of matter".

Not sure about that last ... have to think about it ... mentality "emphemerally distinctive" do you mean we identify mentality as made of something less solid than matter?


This is from Strawson's lecture on Nietzsche, about Descartes and substance

"One might think that Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza want to hang on to a robust notion of substance in a way that Nietzsche doesn’t, but there’s a fundamental respect in which this is not so—in which they’re at one. The great rationalists are not less radical than Nietzsche.

All agree, of course, that something exists, and all agree that whatever exists is identical with (nothing substantially over and above) concrete propertiedness. This thesis is indeed radical and initially difficult to think, given the structure of human thought and language, given in particular that ‘property’ is an intrinsically relational word that demands something for it to be a property of, but it’s sufficiently understandable for all that, and fully in line with the intuitive metaphysics of physics.

Does it seem hard to think? Yes, but it’s not that hard, and it’s something one can cultivate and grow into—deeply. This is doing philosophy.

Descartes is Mr. Substance, for most philosophers, but the popular version of early modern philosophy bears little resemblance to the true story, which is much more exciting. Descartes was neither the first nor the last to think that ‘substance’ is an empty word, a mere place holder with no clear meaning other than ‘existent’ or ‘real’, and zero explanatory power. I believe this is one of the reasons he preferred the word ‘thing’, (Latin res, French chose) to the word ‘substance’. At the same time, he badly wanted to be left in peace to get on with his work, was anxious not to annoy the church, and used the word ‘substance’ increasingly in communication with others who weren't prepared to talk in other terms."

 

[smcder]

I'm not sure if the mind is epiphenomenal or not. I'm not there yet. My (primitive) thought has been that if the mind does have causal effects, it would derive from meta-cognition.

However, I'm not basing my ideas about the origin and nature of phenomenal experience on whether it is epiphenomenal or not (especially since we dont know).

That is, to judge a model on whether it allows for mental causation or not seems problimatic to me since we dont know if there is mental causation, right?

I would say CRP3 would only allow option (2) as it is substance monistic and not substance dualistic.

And technically, since my "model" seems to entail extrinsic properties rather than intrinsic properties, it is not compatible with CRP3. (As ive noted, my main affinity for CRP3 is the idea that mind is constitued of something.)

See the section on variations for just what we were talking about above ... I'm still reading the rest of the article.

The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

"Under conventional panpsychism all matter has some form of consciousness. One can put this by saying that all the ultimates -- matter's smallest components whatever those are -- have conscious experiences.

intermediates
Panpsychists disagree over whether there are experiencers intermediate between the ultimates and ourselves (for example our organs, brain-hemispheres, or neurons) and whether there are experiencers of a grander order -- a universe-mind for example.
...

explanatory power
Now, the unique contribution panpsychism makes towards solving the hard problem -- that of explaining how, as materially-composed beings, we come to be phenomenally conscious -- is to impute consciousness to the material ingredients composing us. If the ultimates were not conscious, their assembly could not yield consciousness like ours, panpsychists maintain -- encouraged by zombies and imprisoned color scientists to think that 'mere' physical matter doesn't have what it takes for feeliness. For panpsychists it's just a question of assembling the little bits of consciousness appropriately, not one of generating sentience out of dead stuff, as physicalism seems to require.

the combination problem
So much for panpsychism's claimed explanatory virtue. It faces a big problem, however, in making sense of the combination of micro-experiencers (the ultimates) into macro-experiencers (us). As James (almost) said, you can bang ten people's heads together as hard as you like, you'll never get them to form a single group consciousness. What then accounts for the grouping of the ultimates into a single consciousness (assuming that's what we each have)? This is the combination problem.

variations
Blamauer believes the combination problem rests on construing the ultimates as having two sides: mental and physical. If we shed this 'microdualism', say by going full-blown idealist (or Leibnizian), we would not have a combination problem, he maintains. I don't see this; but before explaining why, it would seem a good place for a note on panpsychic variations.

What Blamauer is referring to is a panpsychist microdualism, on which all ultimates have irreducible physical as well as mental properties. So a given ultimate might instantiate mass, charge, spin and so on, alongside a separate phenomenal property. This, I believe, is Strawson's position. Another way of implementing panpsychism is more thoroughgoingly mentalistic, close, in fact, to idealism. On this view -- one might call it a 'pure panpsychism', I show here my preference -- the physical properties that ultimates have are strictly derivative upon their phenomenal properties. A way to think about this is to take the physical properties as purely structural -- physics describes a causal/relational web of entities, but remains silent about their intrinsic natures. Pure panpsychism slots phenomenality into this lacuna. The mass of an electron tells us something about how the electron will interact with other things -- but the thing that so interacts is intrinsically, and wholly, phenomenal in character. 'Mass' shows up just as a way of describing the interactive propensities of this phenomenal thing. Is this idealism? Not in this sense: physics can be a true theory on this view, plus there is nowhere a requirement that ultimates (or the dry goods they make up) only exist in so far as they are perceived. I think that pure panpsychism has a good claim to be considered a sensible form of physicalism (there's the tiniest of puns here).

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

here's the dirty on emergentism and panpsychism

This reductio proceeds from the assumption that our consciousnesses compose the universal consciousness, so that its consciousness is (in some sense) the blend of our own. This mereological principle is not something panpsychists can profitably reject -- for that would mean a universe-consciousness that stood apart from 'smaller' ones like ours. But this is not a model of combination. To return to the relation between ourselves and the ultimate-minds: if our minds stood apart from theirs in likewise fashion, and were somehow spawned by a magical law applying to a specific (but otherwise arbitrary) arrangement of ultimates, this would amount to the emergence of a human mind. Yet if the panpsychist finds herself embracing emergentism at this juncture, it is hard to see why she fought shy of allowing that consciousness simply emerges from the physical. The positing of subjects of experience that compose us, in short, is in strong tension with the anti-emergentist motivations of panpsychism.

 

[smcder]

@Constance
The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

This part is on Manzotti on perception (The Spread Mind) ... is he reading Manzotti right?

What really needs doing is to develop a conception of mental units that can compose a subject but which are not themselves subjects.[2] I'll come at this view -- a form of neutral monism -- via consideration of Riccardo Manzotti's paper on perception.

Manzotti wants to extend consciousness into the environment, on the grounds that this is the only way to capture the nature of perceptual experience. He opens with a stock anti-physicalist maneuver, rejecting the suggestion that 'certain neural patterns are by their very nature phenomenal' (84), and rails against the neuralist internalism of brain theorists. Manzotti's proposal is that when one consciously perceives a flamingo, say, one's consciousness 'spreads' beyond the head and includes the flamingo. This is not the direct realist view that the flamingo is a constituent of one's experience. I think the relevant difference is that the flamingo doesn't 'enter into' the experience, as on conventional direct realism, but for Manzotti the conscious mind expands outside the head and envelops the perceptual object. How does this relate to panpsychism? I'm not completely sure, though consciousness will be far more widespread than normally held if Manzotti's general account is correct -- every conscious experience with an object stretches out to envelop that object. Be that as it may, the theory recommends itself, Manzotti says, because it captures the sense that consciousness is world-involving, and it offers a simple answer to the problem of intentionality: your conscious state has the intentional object it does because that object is inside the conscious state. In the case of perception, the object perceived is the cause of your experience of it.

I confess to misgivings concerning the theory's supposed virtues. Why is neural machinery judged an inappropriate home for phenomenal properties? Manzotti does not say exactly, though his feeling seems to have to do with That Old Chestnut: apparent differences between physical and phenomenal properties. But if this is the basis, it's hard to see why extending consciousness beyond the brain will provide a more acceptable vehicle for phenomenality: external objects are ultimately composed of parts every bit as mundanely physical as the brain (prior to embracing panpsychism). Moreover, I can't see how the problem of intentional objects has been solved. If I understand, the perceptual object is the cause of your experience of it and gets to be enveloped in the experience itself as a result. But there are notoriously many causes of a perceptual experience, including everything that occurs behind the face but before the experience, and much of what's on the other side of the perceptual object, going all the way to the big bang. Why is it that I don't see the big bang when I see the flamingo, or the flamingo's parents flirtatiously pecking one another, both causes of my present experience? The answer that my experience envelops the flamingo begs the question: why, one wants to know, does my experience envelop just this far, and no further?

.....

 

[smcder]

The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism
Published: January 17, 2012
Michael Blamauer, The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism, Ontos, 2011, 172pp., $93.00 (hbk), ISBN 9783868381146.


Amazon.com: The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism (9783868381146): Michael Blamauer: Books


Without micro-subjects everywhere, there seems no unavoidable reason why we will run into a combination problem. Basile finds this Russellian avenue foreclosed by the thesis that experiences cannot exist without an experiencer -- which suffices to put ubiquitous micro-subjects back in the frame, and the combination problem, with its threat of emergentism, thereby re-surfaces. I accept this thesis, that experiences require subjects. But what the Russellian posits are less than experiences. The option overlooked in this collection, though it also puts mentality -- in a sense -- into the ontological fundamentals, is that phenomenal qualities can be split up: into qualities, which perhaps exist throughout micro-ontology as the panpsychist envisages, and that which makes these phenomenal, i.e., conscious to us. This latter is likely to be a relational matter. The options, then, appear to be emergentism of some form (whether it be physicalism, emergentism proper, or panpsychist emergentism) or a Russellian compote of realism about qualities, topped with a little light deflationism about consciousness. Overall, The Mental as Fundamental is a mixed bag, much as one would expect of any newly (re)born field of research, where rampant innovation gives a certain roughness to proceedings. But for devotees of panpsychism, as well as those intrigued by an idea steadily gaining in relevance, this is a book worth having.

 

[Soupie]

Wait ... when did the Undus Mundus come into it?? ... October 11 ... ok, I'm making a note.

The Unus Mundus is very similar to the concept of Unbound Telesis that I first encountered in Langan. As I understand it—or perhaps conceive it—the Unus Mundus and Unbound Telesis are synonomous with the Quantum Foam, the holistic, non-boolean state of what-is.

It is a state of unbound potential; a potential for nothing to exist and for something to exist.

For something to exist, it seems that it must at the very least have structure (if only temporary structure).

This structure needs to be constitued of something; that something appears to be boolean states; that is, yes/no states.

These yes/no states can manifest as energy-matter or information. (Since these yes/no states may be quasi-fundamental, this may be why some hypothesize that information may be fundamental.)

So the question is, how do boolean matter-energy structures and boolean data/information structures emerge from this holistic state? From what I can gather, the cause of state collapse is unknown.

I like the idea of archtypal structures—both physical and informational—that emerge in various instantiations. These structures might be as simple as quarks, photons, or molecules with corresponding archtypal data structures.

In what theories of mind is it not constituted of something ?

I'm not sure. Probably spiritual ones in which the mind is equated with an eternal, homunculus soul.