Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[smcder]

Okay.

It seems that both you and Smcder are very open to the idea that "consciousness" is not something that brains do or "produce," but is rather some thing/stuff that exists independent of organisms; which nevertheless and somehow becomes connected to an organism.

Based on your comment about neurons enabling consciousness (or enabling individual minds to form from consciousness?), perhaps you conceive of consciousness being some field, substance, or something that exists in a neutral, formless way which is then shaped by neurons? Otherwise, if consciousness is some thing that exists independent of neurons, how could their action "enable" it to exist?

This is not how I conceive consciousness at all. I wish both you and @smcder, since you have these unconventional views of consciousness, would speculate more about the origin/nature of consciousness as you conceive it.


See above. You and Constance — best I can gather — seem to view consciousness as some contentless field, substance, or thing. This is quite the opposite to how I conceive it.

When I use the word "consciousness," I mean it in the sense that individual organisms — and only individual organisms (systems) — do consciousness. That is, consciousness does not exist independent of organisms. Similar, but different of course, to saying that organisms have, say, breath. That is, breath isn't some formless field, substance, stuff, or thing that fills the universe, rather it is something organisms do.

Since the three of us apparently — as best I can gather — conceive of consciousness so differently, we will all pursue and reject different approaches to the relationship between mind and body.

I feel like I have made my position clear, while your conceptions and "positions" have remained vague and confusing. Smcder, I understand that you don't feel that any current theories/models begin to explain consciousness, but I don't feel that need restrict you from fully expressing your conception of what consciousness is.

And ultimately its fine if both of you choose to refrain from speculation, etc. However, I find it very hard to have a discussion under these circumstances.

I certainly understand if the discussion doesn't feel productive to you.

From their comments - I think @Constance and @Pharoah continue to benefit and I know I learn from and enjoy the discussion and plan to stick around to see what develops.

Please do whatever is best for you - perhaps starting another thread and specifying your requirements for discussion would be more productive for you at this point.

 

[Soupie]

Introspection reveals that the core of subjectivity — the `I' —is identical to awareness. This `I' should be differentiated from the various aspects of the physical person and its mental contents which form the `self'. Most discussions of consciousness confuse the `I' and the `self'. In fact, our experience is fundamentally dualistic — not the dualism of mind and matter — but that of the `I' and that which is observed. The identity of awareness and the `I' means that we know awareness by being it, thus solving the problem of the infinite regress of observers. It follows that whatever our ontology of awareness may be, it must also be the same for `I'.

Very interesting to read this.

My own view is that experience preceeds awareness of experience. I view introspection as essentially metacognition, or as I've often phrased it, awareness of awareness or meta-awareness.

It is the phenomenon I am most interested in, but I think understanding meta-awareness is contingent on understanding phenomenal awareness.

My current avatar is of an Ouroboros, a serpent eating its tail. This, to me, represents this meta-awareness, the structure of the "I."

Once an organism is able to distinguish between (their) awareness and that which they are aware, the seperation (and isolation) from what-is begins.

The body (self)
The mental self (awareness)
The meta-mental self (meta-awareness)

I think it's one thing to purposefully introspect on the contents of our awareness; but it's quite another to lose the ego in a moment of pure awareness.

Regarding awareness or consciousness not being "about something." Awareness that awarness is distinct from its contents is still an awareness about something, namely awareness. Self-awareness.

 

[Soupie]

All machine and no ghost?


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We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist.​

Which position does phenomenology inform us is the most likely to be fruitful at explaining consciousness?

My view, according to the author, falls within the eliminativist position, a deflationary position.

My view is that the structure and dynamic states of the body-brain embody patterns of information that constitute the mind of the body-brain.

 

[smcder]

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist.​

Which position does phenomenology inform us is the most likely to be fruitful at explaining consciousness?

My view, according to the author, falls within the eliminativist position, a deflationary position.

My view is that the structure and dynamic states of the body-brain embody patterns of information that constitute the mind of the body-brain.

I plan to continue to duel with the dualist, challenge the ideals of the idealist, pan the panpsychists, attempt to solve the mysteries of the mysterians and most particularly, to eliminate the eliminativists ... until one or the other or something else entirely can withstand my best efforts - at which time I'll embrace that position with a whole-hearted tenativeness, the likes of which are rarely seen.

 

[smcder]

@smcder.
Thanks for the comments about the comments. And I do so like straight talk! v helpful.
I have been reading up again on the abiliity hypothesis and trying to assimilate philosophical terms. I have opinions about the AH and can incorporate it... but I do not see it as necessary anymore than it would be necessary to incorporate any other theories really - on the face of it, HCT does seem to relate to AH. I could do an extensive wordy comparative analysis(? but why). Similarly, I do understand the referee's reservations about terms but from my understanding, there are opposing and much debated interpretatins of what these terms mean. Is there really a standard interpretation?
Interestingly, Searle says the most misused word in the history of philosophy is 'representation'... which either means a lot of philsophers are applying the word incorrectly (how it gets past the referee's beats me), or his understanding is a little idiosyncratic.
I have been reading up on SEP with regard facts, propositions, and information. Can't say I am any the wiser as to what standardisation could possibly be. I can but try...

At some point I will get on to the subjective nature of experience, Varela, Thompson et al... Redoing paper and getting something together on information first.
Btw, Lewis in "What experience Teaches" has an interesting take on parapsychology in relation to Knowedge Argument if anyone is interested.

I downloaded the paper by Lewis and will try to read it this week for discussion ... sounds interesting! I also want to talk about the Noumenal and get back to your submission to JCS. When do you plan to submit?

 

[Randall]

I plan to continue to duel with the dualist, challenge the ideals of the idealist, pan the panpsychists, attempt to solve the mysteries of the mysterians and most particularly, to eliminate the eliminativists ... until one or the other or something else entirely can withstand my best efforts - at which time I'll embrace that position with a whole-hearted tenativeness, the likes of which are rarely seen.

I do enjoy your wit. Ultimately I think your best efforts will lead you to conclude that the whole business is all in our heads .

 

[Constance]

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist.​

Which position does phenomenology inform us is the most likely to be fruitful at explaining consciousness?

None of the above.

 

[Constance]

Based on your comment about neurons enabling consciousness (or enabling individual minds to form from consciousness?), perhaps you conceive of consciousness being some field, substance, or something that exists in a neutral, formless way which is then shaped by neurons?

I think there are probably field-like aspects of consciousness reaching across individuals in a single species and also across species. I don't think consciousness is a substance or a thing but rather an evolving capability of living organisms, supported by enabling neurological connections and networks in the brain, additional
bodily interactions, and probably quantum activity in the brain and resulting quantum entanglement.

Otherwise, if consciousness is some thing that exists independent of neurons, how could their action "enable" it to exist?

Consciousness might continue to exist in unified and intentional form independent of physical embodiment and neurological structures necessary to support it in life. I have personal reasons to think it does, but I won't go into them here.

 

[Constance]

Dermot Moran's Introduction to Phenomenology is regarded by contemporary phenomenologists as a major achievement in clarifying phenomenological philosophy for analytical philosophers and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Steve provided a link a day or two ago to the online text of the entire work, which I post again below for anyone who wants to understand what this philosophy is.

http://www2.arnes.si/~jlozar2/6 FENOMENOLOGIJA D BOLONJSKI PROGRAM/MORAN.pdf

 

[Constance]

This article, "The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism," will probably be of interest to this company:

Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

[Pharoah]

I downloaded the paper by Lewis and will try to read it this week for discussion ... sounds interesting! I also want to talk about the Noumenal and get back to your submission to JCS. When do you plan to submit?

I will find the relevant page number in the Lewis.
My Noumenal paper written quite a long time ago...
Not anytime soon. Major new references going into it about info, concepts, knowledge, AH.

 

[Pharoah]

I think there are probably field-like aspects of consciousness reaching across individuals in a single species and also across species. I don't think consciousness is a substance or a thing but rather an evolving capability of living organisms, supported by enabling neurological connections and networks in the brain, additional
bodily interactions, and probably quantum activity in the brain and resulting quantum entanglement.

Consciousness might continue to exist in unified and intentional form independent of physical embodiment and neurological structures necessary to support it in life. I have personal reasons to think it does, but I won't go into them here.

Well this is clear. And I am curious.
Of course, it is difficult to both critique these kinds of views or to substantiate them by tying them together

 

[smcder]

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist.​

Which position does phenomenology inform us is the most likely to be fruitful at explaining consciousness?

My view, according to the author, falls within the eliminativist position, a deflationary position.

My view is that the structure and dynamic states of the body-brain embody patterns of information that constitute the mind of the body-brain.

My view, according to the author, falls within the eliminativist position, a deflationary position.

Here is what the author says about the eliminatavist position:

The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion.

Is that correct?

 

[smcder]

Okay.

It seems that both you and Smcder are very open to the idea that "consciousness" is not something that brains do or "produce," but is rather some thing/stuff that exists independent of organisms; which nevertheless and somehow becomes connected to an organism.

Based on your comment about neurons enabling consciousness (or enabling individual minds to form from consciousness?), perhaps you conceive of consciousness being some field, substance, or something that exists in a neutral, formless way which is then shaped by neurons? Otherwise, if consciousness is some thing that exists independent of neurons, how could their action "enable" it to exist?

This is not how I conceive consciousness at all. I wish both you and @smcder, since you have these unconventional views of consciousness, would speculate more about the origin/nature of consciousness as you conceive it.


See above. You and Constance — best I can gather — seem to view consciousness as some contentless field, substance, or thing. This is quite the opposite to how I conceive it.

When I use the word "consciousness," I mean it in the sense that individual organisms — and only individual organisms (systems) — do consciousness. That is, consciousness does not exist independent of organisms. Similar, but different of course, to saying that organisms have, say, breath. That is, breath isn't some formless field, substance, stuff, or thing that fills the universe, rather it is something organisms do.

Since the three of us apparently — as best I can gather — conceive of consciousness so differently, we will all pursue and reject different approaches to the relationship between mind and body.

I feel like I have made my position clear, while your conceptions and "positions" have remained vague and confusing. Smcder, I understand that you don't feel that any current theories/models begin to explain consciousness, but I don't feel that need restrict you from fully expressing your conception of what consciousness is.

And ultimately its fine if both of you choose to refrain from speculation, etc. However, I find it very hard to have a discussion under these circumstances.

The problem I have with "doing" consciousness is

Emergence

Strong emergence (of novel properties) ... the strongest of which may be the subjective from the objective ... is problematic.

Otherwise what I see life "doing" is capitalizing on existing properties of, for example, carbon and water ... But not producing something novel.


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[smcder]

What I want from a solution to the hard problem is a step wise progression from what I know about matter to what I know about mind.

In the same way I can "see" Hydrogen and Oxygen going to water or even the way we can derive classical physics from the three laws ... permitting something like Maxwell's fields if necessary ... though I'd like that sort of thing kept to a minimum.


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[Constance]

@smcder : I think this next sentence, underlined just below ... goes to your point about the Noumenal being the hard problem?
Those studying consciousness, who can see the necessity for according consciousness a different ontological status than the physical, tend not to extend their conclusions to `I'. Yet, it is the identity `I' = awareness that makes the study of consciousness so difficult.

Yes.
I am not sure that I appreciate exactly what some of the quotes you have cited are saying, but I feel that they are addressing the 'elephant in the room'
All I say, is that phenomenal experience is not actually the hard problem - as stated by Chalmers. I my stance is supported by the quotes

All I say, is that phenomenal experience is not actually the hard problem - as stated by Chalmers. I my stance is supported by the quotes.

I think I follow your reasoning here (correct me if I misunderstand). You are seeing the deep states of consciousness Steve has cited -- in which the 'egoic self' dissolves to disclose an experience of being that is not shaped by that self -- as the place where a 'noumenal self' replaces the egoic, biographical, historically situated ego. That might be the case, but, if it is, that 'noumenal self' is not, from available descriptions of it, taken to be exclusive to or idiosyncratic in the individual having the experience. The sense of 'self' virtually disappears in such experiences to reveal an apparently universal level of being beneath the existential level (in which consciousness first finds itself standing apart from that which surrounds it in the local environment and having to negotiate its existence within that environment.)

Re: your statement in blue above, it seems to me that 'phenomenal experience' is the term necessary to define fully in discussions of embodied life. The feeling of 'what it is like' -- that overly reductive characterization of the HP offered by Chalmers and worked with by Nagel -- is not adequate to account for the relation between experience in/of the world and consequent thinking about that relation which occurs when reflective consciousness arises out of prereflective experience. This seems to be the core difference between the ways in which analytic and phenomenological philosophers of mind understand mind and the consciousness out of which it develops in temporal embodied life. You could address this fundamental difference in your paper, Pharoah, and defining it would make the paper much more significant for the readers at the journal to which you plan to offer the revised paper.

If you explain phenomenal experience, part of that explanation says that an entity with phenomenal experience will then possess a first-person perspective. A first-person perspective becomes a 'something that they are', which is embedded experientially. The something that they are, is not the same as the something anybody else is (when you take away all experience). It is this "something" which is hard (impossible) to explain because it is - by appearance, and therefore we assume - not replicated physically ever.

The phenomenological approach to experience and consciousness reveals them as present together, arising together, in embodied life. In phenomenological philosophy and analysis, from Husserl forward, there is no experience without awareness of experience. This connection/interaction is what Panksepp recognizes as germinal in the 'affectivity' demonstrated even in primordial organisms that lack brains, what Maturana and Varela recognized as the autopoietic nature of the primitive cell. While it is true that the replication of an organism passes along a genetic inheritance to its offspring, that genetic inheritance does not condition all the subsequent experiences of the offspring, which take place in its own individual encounters and adventures in its ‘lifeworld’, its ‘lived world’. This connects, of course, with the perennial nature-nurture problem in biology but goes farther. So that the "something" an organism is at the inception of its life is not the 'same thing' that it becomes in and through its particular interactions with necessary others in its environmental niche and with everything else that happens to the individual in its environment over the passage of time. What an individual is is never exhausted by its "first-person perspective." That perspective is part of the equipment with which an individual organism negotiates its being within its temporal embodied existence -- a part that is essential in the evolutionary [and in humans the personal] development of consciousness.



You write: "The something that they are, is not the same as the something anybody else is (when you take away all experience)." But that's just the point: you can't "take away all experience" without reducing any living organism to a pure abstraction. What an organism is cannot be fully understood outside of the conditions of its existence and the experiences (including learning) that make it what it is at any and every lived moment of its life. An organism is continually becoming, changing, in a world that is also continually becoming, changing.

Let's return to your idea that a unique 'noumenal self' is/or might be discovered by humans practicing mental disciplines taking them to a level of consciousness of being they describe as "selfless," a level of awareness that is deeper than their normally egoic, existentially lived consciousnesses permit. I'm intensely interested in this question of what kind of 'self' could be disclosed there, where it is 'selflessness' that is described?

 

[Pharoah]

All I say, is that phenomenal experience is not actually the hard problem - as stated by Chalmers. I my stance is supported by the quotes.

I think I follow your reasoning here (correct me if I misunderstand). You are seeing the deep states of consciousness Steve has cited -- in which the 'egoic self' dissolves to disclose an experience of being that is not shaped by that self -- as the place where a 'noumenal self' replaces the egoic, biographical, historically situated ego. That might be the case, but, if it is, that 'noumenal self' is not, from available descriptions of it, exclusive to or idiosyncratic in the individual having the experience. The sense of 'self' virtually disappears in such experiences to reveal an apparently universal level of being beneath the existential level in which consciousness first finds itself standing apart from that which surrounds it in the local environment and having to negotiate its existence within that environment.

Re: your statement in blue above, it seems to me that 'phenomenal experience' is the term necessary to define fully. The feeling of 'what it is like' -- that overly reductive characterization of the HP offered by Chalmers and worked with by Nagel -- is not adequate to account for the relation between experience in/of the world and consequent thinking about that relation which occurs when reflective consciousness arises out of prereflective experience. This is the core difference between the ways in which analytic and phenomenological philosophers of mind understand mind and the consciousness out of which it develops. You could address this fundamental difference in your paper, Pharoah, and defining it would make the paper much more significant for the readers at the journal to which you plan to offer the revised paper.

The phenomenological approach to experience and consciousness reveals them as present together, arising together. In phenomenological philosophy and analysis, from Husserl forward, there is no experience without awareness of experience. This connection/interaction is what Panksepp recognizes as germinal in the 'affectivity' demonstrated even in primordial organisms that lack brains, what Maturana and Varela recognized as the autopoietic nature of the primitive cell. While it is true that the replication of an organism passes along a genetic inheritance to its offspring, that genetic inheritance does not condition all the subsequent experiences of the offspring, which take place in its own individual encounters and adventures in its ‘lifeworld’, its ‘lived world’. This connects, of course, with the perennial nature-nurture problem in biology but goes farther. So that the "something" an organism is at the inception of its life is not the 'same thing' that it becomes in and through its particular interactions with necessary others in its environmental niche and with everything else that happens to the individual in its environment over the passage of time. What an individual is is never exhausted by its "first-person perspective." That perspective is part of the equipment with which an individual organism negotiates its being within its temporal existence -- a part that is essential in the development of consciousness.

You write: "The something that they are, is not the same as the something anybody else is (when you take away all experience)." But that's just the point: you can't "take away all experience" without reducing any living organism to a pure abstraction. What an organism is cannot be fully understood outside of the conditions of its existence and the experiences (including learning) that make it what it is at any and every lived moment of its life. An organism is continually becoming, changing, in a world that is also continually becoming, changing.

Let's return to your idea that a unique 'noumenal self' is/or might be discovered by humans practicing mental disciplines taking them to a level of consciousness of being they describe as "selfless," a level of awareness that is deeper than their normally egoic, existential, consciousnesses permit. I'm intensely interested in this question of what kind of 'self' could be disclosed there, where it is 'selflessness' that is described?

I think I am understanding these perspectives fairly well now.
I do think differently however when thinking of nomenon. I do think of it as separate from the identity of personal phenomenal experience.
I was interested to read at the top, "...That might be the case, but, if it is, that 'noumenal self' is not, from available descriptions of it, exclusive to or idiosyncratic in the individual having the experience. The sense of 'self' virtually disappears in such experiences to reveal an apparently universal level of being beneath the existential level in which consciousness first finds itself standing apart from that which surrounds it in the local environment and having to negotiate its existence within that environment."
This universal level of being is one option on the table and is one that I have considered. Another option is to thinking solipstically (if there is such a word).
I don't like either of these alternatives although they are no less valid.
I prefer personal identity in the noumenon that is independent of phenomenal experience but linked... which is why I came up with my noumenon vs phenomenon paper which expresses a vector field stance for noumenon - it is utter fabrication but fun. It is the sense that there are an infinite of possibilities reduced by a probability which comes to define the 'I' and that the direction in life taken influences the direction of every other probability outcome.

 

[Pharoah]

I downloaded the paper by Lewis and will try to read it this week for discussion ... sounds interesting! I also want to talk about the Noumenal and get back to your submission to JCS. When do you plan to submit?

Page 93

 

[Soupie]

My view, according to the author, falls within the eliminativist position, a deflationary position.

Here is what the author says about the eliminatavist position:

The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion.

Is that correct?

I don't consider my view eliminativist, no. But the author seems to. He had this to say as well:

More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse. They are collapsers rather than deniers. Though not avowedly eliminative, this kind of view is tacitly a rejection of the very existence of consciousness, because the brain processes held to constitute conscious experience consist of physical events that can exist in the absence of consciousness. Electricity in the brain correlates with mental activity but electricity in your TV presumably does not - so how can electrical processes be the essence of conscious experience? If there is nothing happening but electrochemical activity when I say, "My finger hurts," or, "I love her so," then there is nothing experiential going on when I say those things. So reduction is tantamount to elimination, despite the reductionist's intentions (it's like maintaining that people called "witches" are nothing but harmless old ladies – which is tantamount to saying that there are no witches).
​

The analogy I've used — which I know is a poor one for many reasons — is to think of the concept of "5."

On my view, the concept of 5 is immaterial, but in order to exist, it must be embodied in material.

The concept of 5 can be embodied in the word five, or the word cinco, or the numeral V, or presumably the firing of neurons, etc.

Five is definitely something, but it's not a physical something.

I conceive of minds/consciousness in a very similar way. Our minds are constituted of percepts and concepts that are embodied by physical processes of the body-brain.

So just as we wouldn't say that the concept of 5 is identical to the pixels on our screens which embody it, we also would not say that our minds are identical to the neurons in our brains which embody them.

 

[Constance]

I think I am understanding these perspectives fairly well now.
I do think differently, however, of noumenon. I think of it as separate from the identity of personal phenomenological experience.

It seems that in both Kant's and Husserl's thinking the noumenal arises in/for thought by virtue of the phenomenal nature of experience recognized as such. I think there is much we can learn by comparing the major ideas in Kant and Husserl as they influenced developments in philosophy into our time. Both Kant and Husserl have been influential in the development of phenomenological philosophy and disputations in phenomenology concerning some concepts in Husserl's writings. Similarly, it seem that analytic philosophy, generally taken to have been founded largely in Kant's writings, has moved through a lengthy series of disputations concerning significant aspects of Kant's philosophy.

I was interested to read at the top, "...That might be the case, but, if it is, that 'noumenal self' is not, from available descriptions of it, exclusive to or idiosyncratic in the individual having the experience. The sense of 'self' virtually disappears in such experiences to reveal an apparently universal level of being beneath the existential level in which consciousness first finds itself standing apart from that which surrounds it in the local environment and having to negotiate its existence within that environment."

This universal level of being is one option on the table and is one that I have considered. Another option is to thinking solipstically (if there is such a word).

Phenomenological analysis of the relationship between consciousness/mind and 'things' encountered in the world has ruled out solipsism as a viable philosophical position. Being is, of course, a central concern of phenomenology, and if you decide to entertain ontological questions of being/Being, we can also dip into Heidegger.

I don't like either of these alternatives although they are no less valid.

Is solipsism a viable alternative in analytic philosophy? If so, on what grounds?

I prefer personal identity in the noumenon that is independent of phenomenal experience but linked... which is why I came up with my noumenon vs phenomenon paper which expresses a vector field stance for noumenon - it is utter fabrication but fun. It is the sense that there are an infinite of possibilities reduced by a probability which comes to define the 'I' and that the direction in life taken influences the direction of every other probability outcome.

That's an interesting idea. I am reading your noumenon/phenomenon paper again now, so I should arrive at a better understanding of where your thinking has gone so far. At the universal level, possibility and probability present inescapable concerns/issues for scientists and cosmologists, and are also of course critical in the effort to comprehend the quantum level of physical reality and how it might function in consciousness.