Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[smcder]

@Constance Reading phenomenology papers at moment
@Soupie Will do 20 page... it has been on my mind for some time.
@smcder ? There is only so much wriggle room...
And the research is as flawed as the theory A Theoretically Based Index of Consciousness Independent of Sensory Processing and Behavior
The term "integration" is defined as "distributed interactions in the brain (integration)", and
the term "information" is defined as the "algorithmic complexity (information)" evident in the spatiotemporal pattern of neural responses.
So that when the brain is perturbed by transcranial magnetic stimulation
The perturbational complexity index measures, by its own theoretical definition, the levels of "information" and "integration" (yes, by its own definition) and by doing so determines the "level of consciousness" - unsurprisingly by virtue of the definition that states that consciousness is defined by levels of information and integration.
Alternatively one might say that levels of brain activity have something to do with levels of consciousness. As I said in a thread when IIT was first broached; "It's the brain wot does it" hardly ground breaking.

Ok just To clarify then - when you say you are done discussing "it" here ... "it" = IIT, correct?

 

[smcder]

G7

I think Chalmers has a comment on IIT ... not sure he's said much though

Giulio Tononi on Consciousness as Integrated Information | Richard Brown

This seems to indicate that Chalmers had the idea first then Tononi developed it mathematically as Phi ... Chalmers seems to be saying it's the leading theory!

The hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers at TED2014 | TED Blog

 

[smcder]

A review of Phi

The Secrets of Consciousness and the Problem of God | The Los Angeles Review of Books

Has anyone read the book Phi?

"But the irreducibility of integrated information and the irreducibility of consciousness are not the same thing.

For a scientist, Tononi is, to be sure, impressively interested in philosophical questions, but he doesn’t quite see the purport of some quite penetrating philosophical arguments. He’s a little too lazy (and a little too snarky), for example, when he reviews and shrugs off Kant‘s point about the elusive unity of apperception. Kant is less important here, though, than the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, whom Tononi also cites without quite coming to grips with him.

... But if Nagel’s scientific objections are amateur, then his philosophical critique is powerful, a culminating synthesis of arguments he’s been making for over 40 years.

Tononi’s fictional Galileo meets Nagel in a purgatorial region of his dream, complete with a scared (and scary) bat; as Nagel famously argued in his seminal essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” it is like something to be one.

Tononi doesn’t think it much matters that we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat: bats have their qualia and we have ours. But he misses, or nearly misses, the force of Nagel’s critique. Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.

Objectively speaking, we could accept that there are many different conscious beings. But we don’t have the ghost of an idea of how there could be an objective explanation for the distribution of subjectivities among them. Why is my consciousness mine? Why isn’t your consciousness mine?

The hard question of consciousness is less this question, “How can consciousness exist?” than the question of how there can be more than one. What is the principle of discrimination between them?"

 

[smcder]

Dennett, Chalmers and Tononi ... Oh my!

http://rudar.ruc.dk/bitstream/1800/15573/1/The Hard Problem (FINAL EDITION).pdf

 

[Pharoah]

Ok just To clarify then - when you say you are done discussing "it" here ... "it" = IIT, correct?

it = IIT - more specifically with me trying to point out why it is meaningless to Soupie...
which brings me onto Chalmers support for it. Of course Chalmers would like an account of this kind. An irreductive panpsychist account is right up his street. I must read his stance on IIT as I would be eager to attempt to shred it.

 

[smcder]

it = IIT - more specifically with me trying to point out why it is meaningless to Soupie...
which brings me onto Chalmers support for it. Of course Chalmers would like an account of this kind. An irreductive panpsychist account is right up his street. I must read his stance on IIT as I would be eager to attempt to shred it.

lol

 

[smcder]

it = IIT - more specifically with me trying to point out why it is meaningless to Soupie...
which brings me onto Chalmers support for it. Of course Chalmers would like an account of this kind. An irreductive panpsychist account is right up his street. I must read his stance on IIT as I would be eager to attempt to shred it.

you are on the warpath ... criticism is easy, no one is ever completely right or completely wrong and there is something absurd in every argument, I've noticed, or at least it can be put in an absurd way - I doubt ITT is "meaningless" ... and I don't think "irreductive (?) panpyshcist" is giving ... wait ... irreductive? I have to look that up ... is giving Chalmers his due ... but why spend your energy tearing down other's arguments?

You said you are working on a clean statement of HCT's answer to the hard problem ... when that's finooshed, send it off to Chalmers. I suspect he's smart enough to know if you have something in it. And you've corresponded with Dennett, it seems he would at least be fair in allowing it's merits?

 

[Pharoah]

you are on the warpath ... criticism is easy, no one is ever completely right or completely wrong and there is something absurd in every argument, I've noticed, or at least it can be put in an absurd way - I doubt ITT is "meaningless" ... and I don't think "irreductive (?) panpyshcist" is giving ... wait ... irreductive? I have to look that up ... is giving Chalmers his due ... but why spend your energy tearing down other's arguments?

You said you are working on a clean statement of HCT's answer to the hard problem ... when that's finooshed, send it off to Chalmers. I suspect he's smart enough to know if you have something in it. And you've corresponded with Dennett, it seems he would at least be fair in allowing it's merits?

Analytical criticism is not easy at all.
I have corresponded with Chalmers a few times.
Why tear down an argument? well if someone as smart as Chalmers is saying it is the best theory out there I find that rather disappointing. And besides, if I am putting my thoughts about IIT down, I need to reference other views where possible. Furthermore, it is through critiquing work that one learns how better to articulate one's own ideas.

 

[Pharoah]

Heidegger: we must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case my own.
Sartre: all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their “being-in-itself”
@Constance... I would quite like you to interpret this for me so that I better understand. I have an idea but your thoughts might be helpful.
I am moving onto the Varela and Thompson next

 

[smcder]

Analytical criticism is not easy at all.
I have corresponded with Chalmers a few times.
Why tear down an argument? well if someone as smart as Chalmers is saying it is the best theory out there I find that rather disappointing. And besides, if I am putting my thoughts about IIT down, I need to reference other views where possible. Furthermore, it is through critiquing work that one learns how better to articulate one's own ideas.

Good answer ... the classic three good reasons and it comes across better than "shred" ;-) I guess to say you are going to "shred" an argument by Chalmers seems a bit cheeky to me ... but carry on!

This is what Chalmers says ... I haven't listened to the TedTalk because I am on "country internet" ...

But also, he goes on, a simple way to link consciousness to fundamental laws is to link it to information processing. It’s possible that wherever information is being processed, there is some consciousness. Chalmers put that idea forward about twenty years ago, but at the time it wasn’t well developed. Now a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has created a measure, phi, that counts the amount of information integration. In a human, there is a lot information integration. In a mouse, still quite a lot. As you go down to worms, microbes and photons it falls off rapidly, but never goes to zero. “I don’t know if this is right, but right now it’s the leading theory.”

Maybe some day soon he can say the same thing of HCT and I can say "I knew him when." (don't forget the little people ...;-)

A while back you were on to something about kinds of explanations, I think ... and my question is what kind of answer will we get from HCT about the hard problem? I've thought about this a lot - my metaphor of "a physics of consciousness" what I mean by that is what we really want I think, ok, what I want ... is a kind of explanation that is like classical physics or like a kind of ... not sure what the right word is ... but maybe axiomatic ... self evident, I want to be able to look at it and go "oh, so that is how matter makes mind, of course!" in at least the same gut feeling way I can come to understand the three laws of motion ... or ... "so that's why the hard problem doesn't make any sense!" ... one thing people do miss is that the hard problem is only a hard problem for physicalists ... and that brings me to ask you about your statement that you only argue from a physicalist position but you aren't a physicalist yourself? Ja?

So the kinds of "answers" to the hard problem I've seen aren't that satisfying ... it's a rhetorical move and basically you can't answer it on strictly physicalist terms because to do so is to provide an objective accounting of the subjective, which is what the author above I think is saying about Tononi missing the weight of Nagel's argument. Panpsyhcism is kind of satsfying and I don't see why we need to object to adding consciousness to the list of fundamentals in the universe or does that feel like cheating to you? What do you make of the fields argument on this? We don't try to do without Maxwell in explaning the universe ... so why not consciousness?

On the other hand, if I back up and dig down and think about it ... what about the hard problem of materialism? How very silly! Everything is made of matter but then everything comes to us through the subjective ... we can only subjectively be objective. So this is why monism doesn't make sense to me, the one can't be one without the two, this is what I think we call in the West a paradox and in the East is called "ho-hum" at the end of the video above the doc advocates new kinds of logic and language ... we're in salvage mode for the western tradition.

In other words, as @Soupie says matter is quite ethereal. Matter is the weird stuff - I think we've been lulled into giving up the direct way of knowing and instead say that abstraction is objective! (yes I am playing with words - but I am methodical in my madness) The reason you all lose me when you get into the nitty gritty of HCT and IIT is that I think we are in a pre-theoretical stage where consciouness is concerned, the idea keeps slipping in on us that consciousness is an entity and it may be but it's study appears to be balkanizing and with no way currently to know if it's an elephant or a pair of rhinos or really is a tree and a vine and a palm leaf ... we may be calling the Many One.

I think until we dig down further into the assumptions we are each and alltogether making, including the language and the logic - ... we are about a fool's errand. History here comes in handy to understand how the church restricted study of the mind and if we can stop thinking about science as Science as an objective step-wise move unto What Is and see it as a human, all too human activity - we can get healthier about compulsive theorizing before all the facts are in. The interesting work to me never gets done around here - what is consciousness? what isn't consciousness? I think because it's like hanging out at the lip of a black hole ... to quell our anxiety, our fear of the dark, we start telling stories. Someone needs to go out there in the dark and see what's making all the noise ...

volunteers?

One more time, what are the classical answers to Kelly's problems? Or are you just asserting there will be some?

 

[smcder]

Heidegger: we must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in the activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case my own.
Sartre: all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their “being-in-itself”
@Constance... I would quite like you to interpret this for me so that I better understand. I have an idea but your thoughts might be helpful.
I am moving onto the Varela and Thompson next

Do I recognize something from the first part of Being and Time?

No where is the poet more apt:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

But drinking deeply isn't the remedy .... Heideggerean Baptism is full immersion (in a Heraclitian river) ...

Constance is more articulate in these matters than I - if it were up to me, I'd give you no thing until you'd read at least BT 1, especially since you appear to be reading selectively, no doubt for shreddable materials! ;-) (es gibt viel von das, dort)

 

[Pharoah]

Do I recognize something from the first part of Being and Time?

No where is the poet more apt:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

But drinking deeply isn't the remedy .... Heideggerean Baptism is full immersion (in a Heraclitian river) ...

Constance is more articulate in these matters than I - if it were up to me, I'd give you no thing until you'd read at least BT 1, especially since you appear to be reading selectively, no doubt for shreddable materials! ;-) (es gibt viel von das, dort)

lol - I feel drunk on the fumes already

 

[smcder]

lol - I feel drunk on the fumes already

I think Heidegger would want a comparison to a good, dark German beer ... come to think of it, fumes could be such a comparison!

Many tongues in many cheeks with what I said - but I do think Heidegger demands and deserves immersion and it helps to study the German words and various translations ... Hubert Dreyfus is very good on this, because it's very easy to misunderstand Heidegger - he invents new words and intends a different use of language overall, then factor in cultural and time differences ... it's all got to be in context or you're better off without it!

Much of Heidegger you already have - we all do, just like Shakespeare and Nietzsche, it's in our language and thought, inescapable more or less. Of course, and this is cheeky - I think Nietzsche belongs right after the book of Revelations as the last prophet of the Bible.

I am curious to see where it is you are going, with @Constance help, with those two quotes.

 

[smcder]

Yea whatever... as you will. But then, I don't understand why you bother contemplating the nature of consciousness at all. Pretty much any theory - so long as it is irreductive - is a theory that you might entertain as valid. "All the cards are left on the table" - they always will be - for there is no impulse to differentiate one from the other. Alternatively, I am only interested in explanation. I have tried the Varela and Thompson. I have absolutely no patience for it. I can't stand reading it for it tells me nothing. I have issue with virtually every sentence.

smcder: I read all of the threads that you posted in succession a few days ago. I consider all the examples as being explainable in classical terms. I didn't think the authors got off to a good start my miss-stating what physicalism is and stating that it denies free will and the self. Am still hoping you will write that SEP entry on Paranormalism though.

I consider all the examples as being explainable in classical terms.

I'd like to see the explanations ... I can think of some possibilities myself but they aren't completely satisfying ... so what do you have?

 

[Pharoah]

I think Heidegger would want a comparison to a good, dark German beer ... come to think of it, fumes could be such a comparison!

Many tongues in many cheeks with what I said - but I do think Heidegger demands and deserves immersion and it helps to study the German words and various translations ... Hubert Dreyfus is very good on this, because it's very easy to misunderstand Heidegger - he invents new words and intends a different use of language overall, then factor in cultural and time differences ... it's all got to be in context or you're better off without it!

Much of Heidegger you already have - we all do, just like Shakespeare and Nietzsche, it's in our language and thought, inescapable more or less. Of course, and this is cheeky - I think Nietzsche belongs right after the book of Revelations as the last prophet of the Bible.

I am curious to see where it is you are going, with @Constance help, with those two quotes.

Well... just between you and me smcder shhh! aren't they saying what I said: "the problem of phenomenal consciousness is not the same as the problem of my phenomenal consciousness" that we approach phenomenology from our perspective and when we take that all away from ourselves we end up with being-in-itself

 

[Pharoah]

I consider all the examples as being explainable in classical terms.

I'd like to see the explanations ... I can think of some possibilities myself but they aren't completely satisfying ... so what do you have?

Well I would approach them as theoretically explainable. I cannot say they are explainable.
I would like to make suggestions, but I am up to the eyeballs at the moment with other stuff - and they would only be guesses from my ignorant perspective

 

[smcder]

Well I would approach them as theoretically explainable. I cannot say they are explainable.
I would like to make suggestions, but I am up to the eyeballs at the moment with other stuff - and they would only be guesses from my ignorant perspective

That's a much better answer! ;-) thank you ... here lately I am opening up to the wonders of ignorance and being wrong, I'm wondering why no one told me about them much earlier ... maybe they tried.

 

[smcder]

Well... just between you and me smcder shhh! aren't they saying what I said: "the problem of phenomenal consciousness is not the same as the problem of my phenomenal consciousness" that we approach phenomenology from our perspective and when we take that all away from ourselves we end up with being-in-itself

aren't they saying what I said: "the problem of phenomenal consciousness is not the same as the problem of my phenomenal consciousness" that we approach phenomenology from our perspective and when we take that all away from ourselves we end up with being-in-itself

see, now that's a good clear statement, go back and re-write HCT in that style! lol

it's also very interesting and maybe it's not just you saying it ... did I quote this already?

"Tononi’s fictional Galileo meets Nagel in a purgatorial region of his dream, complete with a scared (and scary) bat; as Nagel famously argued in his seminal essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” it is like something to be one. Tononi doesn’t think it much matters that we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat: bats have their qualia and we have ours. But he misses, or nearly misses, the force of Nagel’s critique. Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you. Objectively speaking, we could accept that there are many different conscious beings. But we don’t have the ghost of an idea of how there could be an objective explanation for the distribution of subjectivities among them. Why is my consciousness mine? Why isn’t your consciousness mine? The hard question of consciousness is less this question, “How can consciousness exist?” than the question of how there can be more than one. What is the principle of discrimination between them?"

Is it in any way related?

 

[Pharoah]

aren't they saying what I said: "the problem of phenomenal consciousness is not the same as the problem of my phenomenal consciousness" that we approach phenomenology from our perspective and when we take that all away from ourselves we end up with being-in-itself

see, now that's a good clear statement, go back and re-write HCT in that style! lol

it's also very interesting and maybe it's not just you saying it ... did I quote this already?

"Tononi’s fictional Galileo meets Nagel in a purgatorial region of his dream, complete with a scared (and scary) bat; as Nagel famously argued in his seminal essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” it is like something to be one. Tononi doesn’t think it much matters that we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat: bats have their qualia and we have ours. But he misses, or nearly misses, the force of Nagel’s critique. Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you. Objectively speaking, we could accept that there are many different conscious beings. But we don’t have the ghost of an idea of how there could be an objective explanation for the distribution of subjectivities among them. Why is my consciousness mine? Why isn’t your consciousness mine? The hard question of consciousness is less this question, “How can consciousness exist?” than the question of how there can be more than one. What is the principle of discrimination between them?"

Is it in any way related?

This is nearly EXACTLY it: I think Nagel and Chalmers don't appreciate the stance I advocate, which is that one can reductively explain the why and how, and discriminatory nature (i.e. the first-person characteristic) of phenomenal experience (in general terms) - I claim HCT does this - but importantly this does not entail having to explain "why I am me and you are you". I see them as completely different problems (which is against philosophical orthodoxy). Phenomenal consciousness can be explained reductively, whereas my phenomenal consciousness cannot (this is why I bring noumenon into the equation - perhaps I could borrow the term 'being-in-itself', or 'thing-as-such' but that's another story).

 

[Constance]

On the other hand, if I back up and dig down and think about it ... what about the hard problem of materialism? How very silly! Everything is made of matter but then everything comes to us through the subjective ... we can only subjectively be objective. So this is why monism doesn't make sense to me, the one can't be one without the two, this is what I think we call in the West a paradox and in the East is called "ho-hum" at the end of the video above the doc advocates new kinds of logic and language ... we're in salvage mode for the western tradition.

I think we are in a pre-theoretical stage where consciouness is concerned, the idea keeps slipping in on us that consciousness is an entity and it may be but it's study appears to be balkanizing and with no way currently to know if it's an elephant or a pair of rhinos or really is a tree and a vine and a palm leaf ... we may be calling the Many One.

I think until we dig down further into the assumptions we are each and alltogether making, including the language and the logic - ... we are about a fool's errand. History here comes in handy to understand how the church restricted study of the mind and if we can stop thinking about science as Science as an objective step-wise move unto What Is and see it as a human, all too human activity - we can get healthier about compulsive theorizing before all the facts are in. The interesting work to me never gets done around here - what is consciousness? what isn't consciousness? I think because it's like hanging out at the lip of a black hole ... to quell our anxiety, our fear of the dark, we start telling stories. Someone needs to go out there in the dark and see what's making all the noise ...

I'm trying to quote this post but IE is preventing it, so just please read what Steve writes there.

I think it's in every way related. Nagel has put his finger on the problem that vexes Pharoah {let's call it problem B} as well as on the by-now-classic hard problem articulated by Chalmers {let's call it problem A}. And I'm now able, thanks to Steve, to see what Pharoah has been getting at in trying to sidestep Problem A by focusing on Problem B.

I think Problem B is step two following the recognition of Problem A (as I see it currently), though unquestionably Problem B has been present all along as we've 'thought' our way to Problem A. As Steve pointed out, these two problems have long been understood and accepted as part of 'what-is' in the East, and we in the West lag behind because we have too long tried to approach 'what-is' from presuppositional definitions -- received first from the Church of Rome [Council of Nicea] circa 400 AD, and subsequently with the founding of objectivist science in the Renaissance. Both have led us away from the ground of our conscious experience and reflection as a real source of insight into the nature of what is.[/QUOTE]