Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[Soupie]

Damn, I sketched up a ridiculous drawing to illustrate (literally) what I mean by "the mind is X." Instead of green, I used blue for @smcder sake. But it turns out he can't see blue either. Sorry! (But perhaps this just hammers the point home?) No, I don't really believe that the phenomenal field hovers above someone's head in a thought bubble. I wasn't sure where to put it in the picture. I'm not sure where it exists in relation spatially to physically reality; I do believe the phenomenal field exists and is part of reality though.

The dots are subatomic particles.

 

[Soupie]

... the distinction between the mental self and experience, can you find that quote - where I said that? Is it me or is it me quoting another source ... I try to be clear when I'm quoting but I think there have been several times you've attributed something I've quoted to "my view". It will be helpful if you can quote what I've said.

I don't know if you support the idea or not, but my phrase "the mind is X" is in response to it regardless.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3 | Page 26 | The Paracast Community Forums

The core `I' of subjectivity is different from any content because it turns out to be that which witnesses — not that which is observed.

The `I' can be experienced, but it cannot be `seen'. `I' is the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content.​

 

[smcder]

Pigliucci is a case in point of blinkered reductiveness. All empty claims for physicalist-objectivist answers to life as we experience it with promissory notes that one day Science will explain ourselves and the world to us. Not unless Science expands the phenomena it investigates. Next . . .

Science is that on which we can agree ... anything else is philosophy!

Another difference in science and philosophy - besides unbounded inquiry - is the role of collaboration.

Science is the domain in which collaboration can occur - we can build on the results because of a common understanding and language, wheras philosophy is an individual pursuit. Empiricism is exactly that upon which we can agree. (someone will disagree with me on this point) When scientists disagree it's on matters of interpretation, which may be philosophical differences, not on empirical ones. This then means the field of scientific inquiry is limited. Another way to say this is its limited because it's not subject to unbounded inquiry.

Philosophy as Ideality (Chapter 10)

Argues that's what a philosophical text is, an individual pursuit and it's incomplete without a reader, without interpretation - so the reader today can still be a collaborator with I Kant. That chapter for me hovers between the sublime and the obvious (oblime / subvious) ... but I think it deserves a re-reading. You get the image of great philosophers and all they didn't and couldn't say through the centuries... our discussion on this forum shows how once we get past a few points of agreement (empirical) we talk past each other to some degree on everything else, this is how two people can be married for years and yet one day come to find out something amazing about the other person that they never knew.

We are the ultimate philosophical (and unscientific) "objects". ;-)

 

[smcder]

I don't know if you support the idea or not, but my phrase "the mind is X" is in response to it regardless.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3 | Page 26 | The Paracast Community Forums

The core `I' of subjectivity is different from any content because it turns out to be that which witnesses — not that which is observed.

The `I' can be experienced, but it cannot be `seen'. `I' is the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content.​

Yes, that is a quote, not my statement. What I said at the time was that was what it was like for me - when I followed the instuctions I had an experience that could be described in that way. The I is witness not that which is observed made sense to me during that experience and it seems that if it were otherwise you would be able to see yourself and then what was doing the seeing would not be the self and that would led to an oxymoron.

I the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content to me sounds a lot like "the mind is green", you don't distinguish between self and mind or self and experience ... self is experience ...

 

[Soupie]

In the cosmic explosion that gave birth to the universe,consciousness co-emerged with matter and co-evolves with it. As matter became moredifferentiated and developed in complexity, consciousness became correspondinglydifferentiated and complex. The emergence of carbon-based life forms developed into creatures with sensory systems that had associated sensory “qualia.”

No one else has really wanted to go here with me, which is fine. I want to do some reading on this.

If the 1st person, phenomenal field (mental contents) has no causal effect on 3rd person processes, why does there seem to be some strong correlation between phenomenal qualities and physical qualities?

For example, getting bitten by a lion hurts? Why should it? Most people would report that the pain from being bitten by a lion would be uncomfortable (to say the least). But why? If phenomenal qualities have no causal influence on running away, why shouldn't being bitten by a lion feel like having yogurt spilt on your neck/shoulder whereabouts?

Why shouldn't sex feel like having your crotch smashed by a hammer?

Now, we know that some people don't feel pain, ever, and do feel discomfort during physical processes that result in phenomenal pleasure for others. Why?

Either the phenomenal field is truly arbitrary and appraisals like comfortable/uncomfortable are entirely learned (and they may be?), or the phenomenal field is not arbitrary and what-its-like is directly related to 3rd person processes. By why the phenomenal field should be directly related to objective reality I don't think can be accounted for in 3rd person terms, no? Or maybe it's just perceptions that are related and conceptual appraisals that are arbitrary?

 

[Soupie]

I the observer, the experiencer, prior to all conscious content to me sounds a lot like "the mind is green", you don't distinguish between self and mind or self and experience ... self is experience ...

More on this later, but while yes, "green" and "sense of self" are both experience, they are differentiated. So, they are both experience, but they are different/differentiated from one another.

 

[smcder]

No one else has really wanted to go here with me, which is fine. I want to do some reading on this.

If the 1st person, phenomenal field (mental contents) has no causal effect on 3rd person processes, why does there seem to be some strong correlation between phenomenal qualities and physical qualities?

For example, getting bitten by a lion hurts? Why should it? Most people would report that the pain from being bitten by a lion would be uncomfortable (to say the least). But why? If phenomenal qualities have no causal influence on running away, why shouldn't being bitten by a lion feel like having yogurt spilt on your neck/shoulder whereabouts?

Why shouldn't sex feel like having your crotch smashed by a hammer?

Now, we know that some people don't feel pain, ever, and do feel discomfort during physical processes that result in phenomenal pleasure for others. Why?

Either the phenomenal field is truly arbitrary and appraisals like comfortable/uncomfortable are entirely learned (and they may be?), or the phenomenal field is not arbitrary and what-its-like is directly related to 3rd person processes. By why the phenomenal field should be directly related to objective reality I don't think can be accounted for in 3rd person terms, no? Or maybe it's just perceptions that are related and conceptual appraisals that are arbitrary?

I think we have gone there ...

The standard explanation is emergence and epiphenomenalism - the phenomenal effects are byproducts - there's been a lot written on this ...

it seems to be most people who argue this accept a kind of unidirectional flow:

neurons firing -----> action
neurons firing ----> (emergence) phenomenal feeling

but no direct interaction between action and phenomenal feeling ...

where they get uncomfortable is

neurons firing -----> (emergence) phenomenal feeling -----> (de-emergence) physical causation

etc etc

As for the arbitrary nature of the phenomenal field, there are people with diagnosed conditions where "pain" causes pleasure, even orgasm - this can obviously be a serious condition - and presumably evolution sets limits on this but allows it to occur ocassionally or it may serve some benefit at the community level if not the indiovidual organism

more commonly humiliation or other unpleasant things or even neutral things cause arousal - this is simply a "fetish" - it's not clear if any of this is physical or psychological (assuming you accept a difference in the two) you could say the person is mis-wired whether from birth or some experience in life where you "learned" and this of course is just a case of the body re-wiring itself ... isn't that what the mind is green would say?

 

[smcder]

More on this later, but while yes, "green" and "sense of self" are both experience, they are differentiated. So, they are both experience, but they are different/differentiated from one another.

This brings home @Constance point about reductionistic approaches

You can afford to have only two objects body and mind, when one of them is really

body = mind = experience

and experience can be further differentiated ...

 

[Pharoah]

The Hard Problem - in its own words

I'm going to let this represent those who deny that there is a hard problem ... there's not necessarily one line to sumhis position up, but the article is short.

First, this definition of philosophy:

It’s just inquiry, unbounded (in principle at least) by any fixed assumptions. While scientific and religious endeavors can be self-questioning as well, there’s a limit to that self-questioning; you have to grant some foundational principles as true (e.g. about natural laws or the existence of God) as true before you can get far enough into your inquiry to figure out what questions are still to be answered. The same is true, of course, of particular philosophic inquiries (arguably, particular sciences are just more narrowly focussed, empirical strains of philosophy; that’s certainly how the creation of sciences has played out historically), but for philosophy as a whole, nothing is off limits to questioning.

Which is to say I think this article is science, not philosophy. And so Pigliucci has no choice but to see the issue as he does ... I'm skeptical that Nagel and Chalmers would make a simple category mistake.

What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

Pigliucci says some interesting things:

1. the consciousness he refers to has its appearance "in a certain lineage of hominids" - it's not clear if this means he thinks the hard problem is about self consciousness or if he thinks consciounsess in general doesn't occur in other animals - or something else?

2. consciousness is "metabolically expensive" - but he doesn't say how he knows this

3. and therefore is plays an important role in cognition - but again he doesn't say how he knows this or even how subjective experience could have an effect on cognition

1 -3 reinforce this as a science article, not a piece of philosophy.

@smcder
I had a wonderful dialogue with Massimo Pigliucci on the subject of knowledge. I recommend you have a look at the transcript (see link below). He responded with a lot of confidence:
www.mind-phronesis.co.uk/what-is-knowledge-dialogue.pdf

 

[Soupie]

I think we have gone there ...

The standard explanation is emergence and epiphenomenalism - the phenomenal effects are byproducts - there's been a lot written on this ...

it seems to be most people who argue this accept a kind of unidirectional flow:

neurons firing -----> action
neurons firing ----> (emergence) phenomenal feeling

but no direct interaction between action and phenomenal feeling ...

where they get uncomfortable is

neurons firing -----> (emergence) phenomenal feeling -----> (de-emergence) physical causation

etc etc

As for the arbitrary nature of the phenomenal field, there are people with diagnosed conditions where "pain" causes pleasure, even orgasm - this can obviously be a serious condition - and presumably evolution sets limits on this but allows it to occur ocassionally or it may serve some benefit at the community level if not the indiovidual organism

more commonly humiliation or other unpleasant things or even neutral things cause arousal - this is simply a "fetish" - it's not clear if any of this is physical or psychological (assuming you accept a difference in the two) you could say the person is mis-wired whether from birth or some experience in life where you "learned" and this of course is just a case of the body re-wiring itself ... isn't that what the mind is green would say?

Even if one derives pleasure from pain, they might still agree that the pain is uncomfortable.

For example, rotten meat has a particular smell. Most people with "typical" physiology would agree that the phenomenal smell is disgusting. Perhaps some people would find the disgusting smell pleasurable. But it's still a disgusting smell.

Perhaps people w/ non-typical physiology would experience a sweet fragrance?

From an evolutionary perspective, rotting meat is bad for humans; so is that why it smells disgusting? Or is the smell neutral and disgusting a learned appraisal?

The mind is green "says" there is a dualism, but I'm not sure what the "causal" consequences of the dualism are. I need to approach an understanding of how 3rd person processes are related to 1st person experiences. That's what I'm doing now.

The "dualism" may only be of the 1st and "3rd" person perspectives.

 

[Soupie]

This brings home @Constance point about reductionistic approaches

You can afford to have only two objects body and mind, when one of them is really

body = mind = experience

and experience can be further differentiated ...

I don't follow.

 

[smcder]

Even if one derives pleasure from pain, they might still agree that the pain is uncomfortable.

For example, rotten meat has a particular smell. Most people with "typical" physiology would agree that the phenomenal smell is disgusting. Perhaps some people would find the disgusting smell pleasurable. But it's still a disgusting smell.

Perhaps people w/ non-typical physiology would experience a sweet fragrance?

From an evolutionary perspective, rotting meat is bad for humans; so is that why it smells disgusting? Or is the smell neutral and disgusting a learned appraisal?

The mind is green "says" there is a dualism, but I'm not sure what the "causal" consequences of the dualism are. I need to approach an understanding of how 3rd person processes are related to 1st person experiences. That's what I'm doing now.

What is the dualism in the "mind is green"?

When I was in Haiti at the Iron Market, in the summer in hot weather, the merchants had strung goats up to sell outdoors - if you wanted to examined the quality of the meat, they would take a machete and slap the side of the meat and the flies would buzz off to reveal the carcass. They sold a lot of goats.

There was also a story about a man who figured out that rotting "cultured" meat was good for a particular health condition he had ... and Japanese sushi masters now the best fish has some, but not too many, parasites ... still, yes there is a basic tendency to nudge us in the right direction ... too strong and we would never have discovered penicilin (but in the old Taoist story of "what is good?" - antibiotics may be our undoing ... nature isn't all-wise) ... in terms of phobias, spiders and snakes will condition to a strong avoidance or even a phobia almost immediately, whereas one might undergo a horrific experience involving a three legged pig and not develop a phobia of trichotomous pigs ... so simple evolutionary "just so" stories don't cover it ...

And not just for us ... it's said there is a rabbit that will claw up the base of a cactus and then return several days or a week later to eat the rotting flesh ... and get high.

 

[smcder]

I don't follow.

Nail soup ... ! ;-)

Everything can be explained in terms of mind and body.
I can make soup from a nail.

Just grant me a few conditions:
Just loan me a pail:

mind = experience
mind = self
self = experience

and I am allowed to differentiate some experiences "green" and "sense of self" for example but not others "pain"/"red" ...

And yes some water ... it would be nice if we could boil that water, a carrot would be a nice addition, but of course it's not necessary ....

;-)

 

[smcder]

@smcder
I had a wonderful dialogue with Massimo Pigliucci on the subject of knowledge. I recommend you have a look at the transcript (see link below). He responded with a lot of confidence:
www.mind-phronesis.co.uk/what-is-knowledge-dialogue.pdf

Reads like a Socratic dialogue!

When and where did the dialogue occur?

Nevermind, I found it

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

Deep Learning
How the Mind Overrides Experience

Deep Learning | Cognition | Cambridge University Press

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Rotten Meat

Although the ability to retain, process, and project prior experience onto future situations is indispensable, the human mind also possesses the ability to override experience and adapt to changing circumstances. Cognitive scientist Stellan Ohlsson analyzes three types of deep, non-monotonic cognitive change: creative insight, adaptation of cognitive skills by learning from errors, and conversion from one belief to another, incompatible belief. For each topic, Ohlsson summarizes past research, re-formulates the relevant research questions, and proposes information-processing mechanisms that answer those questions. The three theories are based on the principles of redistribution of activation, specialization of practical knowledge, and re-subsumption of declarative information. Ohlsson develops the implications of those mechanisms by scaling their effects with respect to time, complexity, and social interaction. The book ends with a unified theory of non-monotonic cognitive change that captures the abstract properties that the three types of change share.

• Focused on situations where people have to override prior experience in order to be successful, and is currently the only book to do so
• Proposes three novel scientific theories of creative insight, error correction, and belief revision
• Situates each theoretical contribution within a real-world context as well as within past academic research; e.g., there are discussions of art, technological invention, errors in large organizations, scientific discovery, and the laws of history

 

[Constance]

No worries ... and the "it" is noting how sensation is in our vocabulary but not in our experience:

The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4) The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.

I need to reread the Carman paper to make better sense of where he is going at this point. Besides contemplating issues about consciousness and experience, it is significant that he points out that we have a word, indeed words, in common usage that refer to sensation. How did they get into language if not on the basis of experienced reality? Equally important, do the ways in which some philosophers and scientists define and use the word 'sensation' subtract from or distort the nature of sensual experience itself? You later mention ch. 10 of Jere Surbur's What is Philosophy: Embodiment, Signification, Ideality, which you cite above as relevant to this present discussion in terms of differentiating fields of experience from fields of language. I haven’t reached that chapter yet but will read it now for the purposes of this discussion. This is a good time to say, as I’ve said before, that the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy has for the most part not clarified thinking, especially in analytical philosophy. This is a whole additional subject we need to explore in reading philosophy and science concerning consciousness. I’m assuming that Surbur, like the constructivists and phenomenologists, are in accord with what I’ve just said, but I’ll find out when I read Surbur’s ch.10.


You continue: "But this also raises another question:

[this is still Carman] Perception is essentially interwoven with the world we perceive, and each feature of the perceptual field is interwoven with others: Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. …The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a “field.” … The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4)The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.

He says that pure impression is not discoverable and is imperceptible and inconceivable as a moment of perception, that therefore sensation really doesn't occur in our actual experience."

{note: we need to clarify what Carman means there by “our actual experience.”}

"This is along the lines of the discussion of ideas in Chapter 10 of "What is Philosophy" - that ideas are similarly in a field, that what a philosopher says is subject to all the same kinds of things as sensation in the paragraph above, so a text, a philosophical text is just the words, but the ideas behind it, the philosophical activity has left much unsaid and even the text has much that can be developed that wasn't "there" - I will find a quote on this I posted above ... so we tend to take a philosophical text as an exact expression of the philosophers thought when it is really embedded in a field, the way sensations are above ... it's very hard to put this all into words ... but it's to say that for me, reductive explanations really fail - I fail to see myself in their descriptions of the mind ... with phenomenology, I may contest the experience or description, but I can understand where they are coming from in terms of personal experience.

Do I feel that a perceptual "something" is always in the middle of something else and that pure impresion is inconceivable as a moment of perception? "


This latter, bolded, comment of yours perhaps clarifies what Carman seemed to me to be saying in that paper, that it is not the case that we are completely unaware of our 'sensations' as they occur in our lived experience, but that we are not aware of what could be called a "pure impression" (Carman's phrase) of every (or perhaps any?) sensation, the reason for that being our continual openness to the surrounding environment in which we live moment by moment, which continually pours in upon the mind as well as upon the body with varieties of stimuli. There is too much happening successively in the center and in the margins and fringes of our perceptual openness to the world {therefore to all that ultimately affects us to some extent from without} to enable us to attend equally to that which we sense in the body [until intense pain or other feeling in the body takes our attention almost completely]. I personally do not experience my daytime, waking, consciousness as merely a stream of thoughts about either my environment or 'myself'. My experiential consciousness includes aesthetic and emotional as well as ideational connections realized in the personal awareness of the environing world that I carry about with me.

I think this is likely the case for most humans who are not forced to become overly vigilant to their surroundings in distressing situations (for example, in the middle of battle or bombing in wars, or distressed by danger or abuse in their homes or neighborhoods, or driven half out of their minds by grief or fear over the loss or potential loss of loved ones). Also in my experience, the full recognition/emotional registration of sensations and feelings sometimes arises later, in remembering and reflection forced upward from the subconscious mind, which seems to be attending to many of our lived experiences not fully realized because our attention was, or had to be, focused elsewhere. Related to this subconscious store of lived experience, Libet wrote about how instrumental probing of parts of the brains of his unanesthetized patients caused them to remember in rich phenomenological detail the events of their lives on given days many decades in the past. {The bottom line here seems to be that, while we are not immediately aware of all that we experience in the present and have experienced in the past we are nevertheless influenced by all of it that gets captured and laid down in our subconscious minds. And there is no doubt whatever that the subconscious mind continually influences consciousness and mind.}

The other day I quoted the psalm that begins "What is man that Thou are mindful of him?" In the context of this discussion I want to ask "what are each of us that we are so deeply mindful of ourselves in our experience of the world?" Further, given the evidence of the collective unconscious that we as human individuals carry about with us in our subconscious minds, what is the nature of consciousness that it should be demonstrably interconnected between and among other humans living in our present and in our past?

 

[Pharoah]

Reads like a Socratic dialogue!

When and where did the dialogue occur?

Nevermind, I found it

"Reads like a Socratic dialogue!" is that good, bad or boring? I was trying to pin the guy down. I think he likes writing about pseudoscience... not sure

 

[Soupie]

Nail soup ... ! ;-)

Everything can be explained in terms of mind and body.
I can make soup from a nail.

Just grant me a few conditions:
Just loan me a pail:

mind = experience
mind = self
self = experience

and I am allowed to differentiate some experiences "green" and "sense of self" for example but not others "pain"/"red" ...

And yes some water ... it would be nice if we could boil that water, a carrot would be a nice addition, but of course it's not necessary ....

;-)

Why cant you differentiate pain and red?

So youre not a monist or dualist, youre a polyist?

 

[Soupie]

What is the dualism in the "mind is green"?

When I was in Haiti at the Iron Market, in the summer in hot weather, the merchants had strung goats up to sell outdoors - if you wanted to examined the quality of the meat, they would take a machete and slap the side of the meat and the flies would buzz off to reveal the carcass. They sold a lot of goats.

There was also a story about a man who figured out that rotting "cultured" meat was good for a particular health condition he had ... and Japanese sushi masters now the best fish has some, but not too many, parasites ... still, yes there is a basic tendency to nudge us in the right direction ... too strong and we would never have discovered penicilin (but in the old Taoist story of "what is good?" - antibiotics may be our undoing ... nature isn't all-wise) ... in terms of phobias, spiders and snakes will condition to a strong avoidance or even a phobia almost immediately, whereas one might undergo a horrific experience involving a three legged pig and not develop a phobia of trichotomous pigs ... so simple evolutionary "just so" stories don't cover it ...

And not just for us ... it's said there is a rabbit that will claw up the base of a cactus and then return several days or a week later to eat the rotting flesh ... and get high.

The dualism is that the mind is not the body.

So phenomenal qualities such as colors, sounds, and smells have no innate positive or negative valence?

 

[smcder]

The dualism is that the mind is not the body.

So phenomenal qualities such as colors, sounds, and smells have no innate positive or negative valence?

It's just humor ... I respect what you are trying to do in terms of involving the least number of concepts or ideas ... nail soup seems to me a natural progression of thought, so let it happen. The alternative can be a kind of Procrusteanism.

The mind is not the body, but you have said the body is capable of experience and experience is the mind?

In order to answer the last question, please define positive and negative valence.