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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

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I'm going to have to read this book in its entirety and will probably also be using interlibrary loan. It might, however, be on the shelf in the university library here.

Wiesing refers several times to Richard Shusterman's paper "Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism," which I read last night. Here's a link and some notes and extracts from it:

"Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism" | Richard Shusterman - Academia.edu
_
See esp. pp. 190-192*=>193 “…apart from the non-linguistic understandings and experiences of which we are aware, there are more basic experiences or understandings of which we are not even conscious, but whose successful translation provides the necessary background selection and organization of our field which enables consciousness to have a focus and emerge as a foreground. We typically experience our verticality and direction of gaze without being aware of them, but without our experiencing them we could not be conscious of or focused on what we are in fact aware of; our perceptual field would be very different. As Dewey insisted, there is a difference between not knowing an experience and not having it. 'Consciousness … is only a very small and shifting part of experience,' and relies on 'a context which is non-cognitive,' a 'universe of non-reflectional experience'.” n22

“We can never talk (or explicitly think) about things existing without their being somehow linguistically mediated,” but this “does not mean that we can never experience them non-linguistically or that they cannot exist for us meaningfully but not in language. …Neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of pre-reflective, nonlinguistic experience and understanding. n23 Hermeneutic holism thus fails in its argument that interpretation is the only game in town because language is the only game in town. For there is both uninterpreted linguistic understanding and meaningful experience that is nonlinguistic."

Shusterman goes on in Section IV of his paper to detail "three reasons for maintaining some distinction between understanding and interpretation" in the ways in which we make sense of the world in which we are embedded.

I'm torn, as I'd like to read Wiesing, but may not be able to get ahold of him ... I can't find any writings on line and our ILL holds are for two weeks, so I could only digest a small part. In the meantime I've been looking at Zizek too ... not necessarily on consciousness, but he is brilliant, reminds me somehow of Nietzsche, I'm not sure how ... as wise as a serpent, as gentle as a dove ... as gentle as a serpent, as wise as a dove ... maybe he recombines into a chimera, a dovpent or a serpove ... a flying snake, at any rate.

Appropos, I've been listening this afternoon to Zizek's "Why Only An Atheist Can Believe" - a talk given to a Christian orgnaization ... I also like the critique of Sam Harris he offers in the talk.


Published on Feb 19, 2015
From Zizek's Book, "The Fragile Absolute" - http://bit.ly/1LexRKl

For some time now, Slavoj Žižek has been showing up as an author and editor of theology texts alongside orthodox thinkers whose ideas he thoroughly naturalizes and reads through his Marxist lens. Take, for example, an essay titled, after the Catholic G.K. Chesterton, “The ‘Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy'” in the 2005 volume, partly edited by Žižek, Theology and the Political: The New Debate. In Chesterton’s defense of Christian orthodoxy, Žižek sees “the elementary matrix of the Hegelian dialectical process.” While “the pseudo-revolutionary critics of religion” eventually sacrifice their very freedom for “the atheist radical universe, deprived of religious reference… the gray universe of egalitarian terror and tyranny,” the same paradox holds for the fundamentalists. Those “fanatical defenders of religion started with ferociously attacking the contemporary secular culture and ended up forsaking religion itself (losing any meaningful religious experience).”

For Žižek, a middle way between these two extremes emerges, but it is not Chesterton’s way. Through his method of teasing paradox and allegory from the cultural artifacts produced by Western religious and secular ideologies—supplementing dry Marxist analysis with the juicy voyeurism of psychoanalysis—Žižek finds that Christianity subverts the very theology its interpreters espouse. He draws a conclusion that is very Chestertonian in its ironical reversal: “The only way to be an atheist is through Christianity.” This is the argument Žižek makes in his latest film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. In the clip above, over footage from Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, Žižek claims:

Christianity is much more atheist than the usual atheism, which can claim there is no God and so on, but nonetheless it retains a certain trust into the Big Other. This Big Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to a position within the harmonious whole of evolution, whatever, but the difficult thing to accept is again that there is no Big Other, no point of reference which guarantees meaning.

The charge that Christianity is a kind of atheism is not new, of course. It was levied against the early members of the sect by Romans, who also used the word as a term of abuse for Jews and others who did not believe their pagan pantheon. But Žižek means something entirely different. Rather than using atheism as a term of abuse or making a deliberate attempt to shock or inflame, Žižek attempts to show how Christianity differs from Judaism in its rejection of “the big other God” who hides his true desires and intentions, causing immense anxiety among his followers (illustrated, says Žižek, by the book of Job). This is then resolved by Christianity in an act of love, a “resolution of radical anxiety.”

And yet, says Žižek, this act—the crucifixion—does not reinstate the metaphysical certainties of ethical monotheism or populist paganism. “The death of Christ,” says Žižek, “is not any kind of redemption… it’s simply the disintegration of the God which guarantees the meaning of our lives.” It’s a provocative, if not particularly original, argument that many post-Nietzschean theologians have arrived at by other means. Žižek’s reading of Christianity in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology—alongside his copious writing and lecturing on the subject—constitutes a challenge not only to traditional theistic orthodoxies but also to secular humanism, with its quasi-religious faith in progress and empirical science. Of course, his critique of the vulgar certainties of orthodoxy should also apply to orthodox Marxism, something Žižek’s critics are always quick to point out. Whether or not he’s sufficiently critical of his communist vision of reality, or has anything coherent to say at all, is a point I leave you to debate.
 
I'm reading that discussion thread you posted, Soupie. It's outstanding. It raises all the issues. The so-called 'reasoning' behind the push for AI is exposed for what it is -- absurd -- in this extract from a post by 'FrankManic':

"Either we evolve into digital intelligences and leave this planet or some catastrophe or asteroid or climate change or whatever wipes us out and we cease to exist. And even leaving the planet is just buying time. Remember that under the current model the universe has an expiration date. In a few tens of trillions of years all the stars will have long since burnt out, entropy will reach it's maximum state, and time will effectively stop.

That's just how it falls out. Our lives are just tiny blips on that scale. No point losing sleep over a little robot take over."

No point if we are unable to come to terms with the natural limitations of our existence and still recognize and support the existence of life and experience as irreplaceable by machine intelligences. The most important sentence in that post is highlighted in blue. The question we need to ask ourselves as a species is: buying time for what? Only living beings and their consciousnesses can make temporality meaningful -- by spending time meaningfully. Our time as individuals and as a species is short. We need to learn to live with that reality and make constructive sense of it while we still have time to do so.

Can't wait to see this film, Soupie. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.


ps: FrankManic's reasoning reminds me of a remark made by a character in one of Samuel Beckett's absurdist plays: "If I don't kill that bug he'll die."
 
The movie Ex Machina, which is about strong AI and is in theaters now, is getting good reviews. I posted the trailer awhile back in the substrate independent minds thread.

Apparently the author slipped an Easter egg into the movie which seems to reveal a book which influenced his approach to consciousness.

Seems like a good book. In the same vein as Mind in Life. If so bodes well for how the movie handles consciousness and AI.

Secret code in Ex Machina : movies

Collective review of the book available here:

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I'm torn, as I'd like to read Wiesing, but may not be able to get ahold of him ... I can't find any writings on line and our ILL holds are for two weeks, so I could only digest a small part.

There's a considerable sample of Wiesing's book available to read at Google Books for the time being.

What I've done in a case or two in which I had only temporary ILL access to a book I needed to reflect on and use was to take it to kinko's and copy it out in entirety.
 
There's a considerable sample of Wiesing's book available to read at Google Books for the time being.

What I've done in a case or two in which I had only temporary ILL access to a book I needed to reflect on and use was to take it to kinko's and copy it out in entirety.

I'm working on the sample ... Ill see if I can get ILL first ... go back on Monday to work, will take a few days to run a search.
 
I'm working on the sample ... Ill see if I can get ILL first ... go back on Monday to work, will take a few days to run a search.

You mean a search for libraries where copies of the book are held and available for interlibrary loan? My impression has been that such searches are automated and don't take much time. Google Books used to provide a search for libraries where a given book can be found. Haven't noticed whether this is still provided.
 
You mean a search for libraries where copies of the book are held and available for interlibrary loan? My impression has been that such searches are automated and don't take much time. Google Books used to provide a search for libraries where a given book can be found. Haven't noticed whether this is still provided.

That may be the case in a large library in a large state ... ;-) Our processs involves some manual aspects and tends to take a bit of time ...
 
Steve, using the url you provided I've reached the papers collected under the heading:
Collective Review of the Book: "Embodiment and the Inner Life – Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Mind" by Murray Shanahan, Oxford University Press, 2010

I can obtain one or more of those papers through my university library's computer system. Is there one of those papers in particular that you recommend I read?
 
If you want to become familiar with what goes on in your consciousness (most of us aren't), go to this Google Books link and put the phrase 'time and consciousness' into the search box. If you go to the first page linked and read as much as you can preceding and succeeding it and then click the 'next' arrow and continue this process through all the links, you will have scads of pages to read from a book that Lowe has described as "the best book on consciousness and time that has been written." I suggest doing this not just so as to be impressed with the book but to become more familiar with the full scope of that which is going on in your consciousness at any time and over the time of your existence. It's the most comprehensive description of human consciousness that I have seen in a single text, and no doubt much of it also applies to the consciousness of animals.

Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience - Barry Dainton - Google Books

Here's a link to the book at amazon:

Amazon.com: Stream of Consciousness: Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience (International Library of Philosophy) (9780415223829): Barry Dainton: Books
 
Steve, using the url you provided I've reached the papers collected under the heading:
Collective Review of the Book: "Embodiment and the Inner Life – Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Mind" by Murray Shanahan, Oxford University Press, 2010

I can obtain one or more of those papers through my university library's computer system. Is there one of those papers in particular that you recommend I read?

Here are the abstracts of the papers, some are available on the web - I've provided a link to the ones I found:

WORKSPACE THEORIES ARE ALIVE AND WELL
IGOR ALEKSANDER
I wasn't able to copy the abstract from the first review - but the gist is that Bernie Barr's
Global Workspace model is central to Shanahan's thinking:


"The easiest way to think about GWT is in terms of a "theater metaphor." In the "theater of consciousness" a "spotlight of selective attention" shines a bright spot on stage. The bright spot reveals the contents of consciousness, actors moving in and out, making speeches or interacting with each other. The audience is not lit up — it is in the dark (i.e., unconscious) watching the play.

Behind the scenes (also in the dark) are the director (executive processes), stage hands, script writers, script girl, scene designers, key grip, best boy, the woman who makes the coffee and the like. They shape the visible activities in the bright spot, but are themselves invisible. Baars argues that this is distinct from the concept of the "Cartesian Theater", since it is not based on the implicit dualistic assumption of "someone" viewing the theater, and is not located in a single place in the mind (in Blackmore, 2005)." Also, the Cartesian Theater closed in 2005 following several bad seasons and severe and influential criticism from Daniel Dennett.

THE DESIGNER STANCE TOWARDS SHANAHAN'S DYNAMIC NETWORK THEORY OF THE "CONSCIOUS CONDITION"
LUC PATRICK BEAUDOIN

Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1793843011000716
Shanahan expounds upon a creative and bold possibility, that concepts from dynamics and networks can be applied to Baars' [1988] global workspace architecture to explain fundamental biological and psychological phenomena. Shanahan proposes that the connective core is critical to cognitive and neuroscience. This review proposes to study the surrounding space of possible designs more systematically, with particular attention to purposive agency requirements and design assumptions which might resist the quantitative reduction Shanahan has attempted.

The Metaphysics of Embodiment
SHIMON EDELMAN
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

PDF here:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/~edelman/Edelman-on-Shanahan.pdf&ei=XZVYVd7KNYXMsAXV-YGgDA&usg=AFQjCNGlalFUIszpduiNgBT0O-iDhjkkhQ&bvm=bv.93564037,d.b2w

Shanahan's eloquently argued version of the global workspace theory fits well into the emerging understanding of consciousness as a computational phenomenon. His disinclination toward metaphysics notwithstanding, Shanahan's book can also be seen as supportive of a particular metaphysical stance on consciousness — the computational identity theory.

Keywords: Categorization; embodiment; metaphysics; identity theory; trajectories in representational space; computational phenomenology

What does "the emerging understanding of consciousness as a computational phenomena" mean?

computational identity theory - (metaphysics): Edelman only mentions this term once in the paper, but it's just what it says it is - the mind is the brain is computation ... he concludes by waxing downright editorial, poetical and paradoxical ... and invoking the Spanish Inquisition:

"Resorting to a more mundane example, the metaphysical identity stance on conscious experience that I profess is akin to

identifying dance with the ensemble of dancers in motion. What else could dance be?

Refusing to commit in this matter—as in saying instead “I don’t know what dance is, but here’s how you can tell if the event that’s unfolding in front of you is it”—seems both unreasonable and counterproductive.

We may guess where such reluctance comes from. Resistance to the metaphysical identity stance on the part of many brain/mind scientists, which often stems from their general aversion to metaphysics, is an unfortunate legacy of the historical tendency of the latter to play the role of Spanish Inquisition to science’s free thinking. In the words of McCulloch (1965),

Our adventure is actually a great heresy. We are about to conceive of the knower as a computing machine. That is not a new heresy. It has already been prejudged by Dryden in The Hind and the Panther, when he says

And if they think at all, ’tis sure no higher
Than matter, set in motion, may aspire.​

I believe that he is correct, but I am not sure that that may not be high enough. double negative For my part, I am quite sure that the ongoing dynamics of a properly structured complex of activity-space trajectories is all there is to experience, and that therefore my inner life is the activity of my brain (cf.Metzinger, 2003, pp.58-59; Spivey, 2006, p.305; Edelman, 2008, p.488). Shanahan’s book provides a useful characterization of the computational properties of this activity that make the realized experience more poignant— conscious— or less so.

blech
 
Collective Review of the Book: "Embodiment and the Inner Life – Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Mind" by Murray Shanahan, Oxford University Press, 2010

continuing
my comments in
italics

GLOBAL WORKSPACE THEORY, SHANAHAN, AND LIDA
Stan Franklin, Department of Computer Science, Institute for Intelligent Systems, The University of Memphis, Memphis TN 38152, USA

Following a brief review of Shanahan's so many, and so important, contributions to global workspace theory, as presented in his Embodiment and the Inner Life, we attempt to interpret, and flesh out, Shanahan's top-down account of GWT from a bottom-up perspective guided by our LIDA model of consciousness and cognition.

blah
OPEN QUESTIONS ON SHANAHAN'S WORKSPACE
Pentti O. Haikonen

PENTTI O. HAIKONEN
Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Springfield
No abstract - opening paragraph:

workspace.png

@Constance - this next one looks interesting
@Soupie - might be interesting to you, too

PDF here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/271843/1/harnad-shanahan.pdf&ei=l6dYVauMD8ftsAXTj4OwAg&usg=AFQjCNHSEdJCm8ELUJo69H_C7D6NMlicpw&bvm=bv.93564037,d.b2w

ZEN AND THE ART OF EXPLAINING THE MIND
STEVAN HARNAD
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK

The "global workspace" model would explain our performance capacity if it could actually be shown to generate our performance capacity. (So far, it is still just a promissory note.) That would solve the "easy" problem. But that still would not explain how and why it generates consciousness (if it does). That is a rather harder problem.

I downloaded the PDF, here are some samples:

"Shanahan does indeed address the conscious/unconscious distinction, mostly through phenomenology, thought experiments, and analogies, but I would not say he “operationalizes” it – if by “operationalize” we mean finding a set of empirical manipulations and observations that can then stand in for consciousness. The observations and manipulations are correlates of consciousness (sometimes reliable, sometimes not), so they can give us a good idea of whether or not a capacity or performance is likely to be executed consciously, but they are not the same thing as consciousness itself, nor do they explain it."
"But before we go on, let us challenge Shanahan’s contention that consciousness is:

“an amorphous something or other that no one can define clearly in the first place.”

Here’s a definition:
To be conscious is to feel.

To do something consciously is to feel you are doing it. To be unconscious is not to feel anything. To do something unconsciously is to do it without feeling you are doing it. In other words, the conscious/unconscious distinction is the felt/unfelt distinction – and although I can be unsure about whether or not I have been injured, there is nothing amorphous or unclear about whether it feels painful (if/when it does feel painful); I can be unsure about whether or not I was touched, but I know I felt a touch; unsure about whether I moved, but felt I moved; unsure about whether I moved deliberately, but felt I moved deliberately; unsure about whether I understood, but felt I understood; unsure about whether I could do X, but felt I could do X; unsure about how I was doing X, but felt I was doing X."

sorry for the long quote, but this next one is particularly clear on ...

(soto voce ... the hard problem of consciousness ... looks about furtively)

"All of us know exactly what it means to feel, and that’s exactly what it means to be conscious. We also know exactly what (we think) is lacking in a stone, or a toaster, or a (contemporary) robot when we say it is unconscious: It does not feel anything. And feeling anything at all is what consciousness, and the problem of consciousness, is about.

It is not particularly about feeling this or that; nor feeling this rather than that; nor even feeling this and not feeling that. It is about feeling anything at all. Explain how and why anything feels anything at all and you have solved the hard problem of consciousness.

1 Explain how and why something does something, and you are making inroads on the “easy” problem (E). But even if you point out – and sort out – the operational “correlates,” behavioral, neural and phenomenological, of felt and unfelt doings (the conscious/unconscious distinction), you have not explained anything about consciousness: We already knew we feel. The fact that we feel some things and not others, that we feel under some conditions and not others, that we feel we are doing some of the things we do and not others, that we feel we know how we are doing some of the things we do and not others – all this just increases the mystery of how and why we feel at all, rather than helping to dispel it. Doing – and whatever it takes to generate the doing – seems to be the only functional component at play, and the only one needed, causally.
Feeling floats along, correlated, and feeling as if it were causal; but its causal role is opaque.
Shanahan’s book tries to dispel the mystery by blaming it on “metaphysical tendencies” that Wittgenstein (and Zen) should help us to overcome. But there is nothing metaphysical about asking why and how some entities feel (and some don’t), and why and how some inputs and outputs are felt, and some are not.

The problem is not metaphysical, it is epistemic.

It is a causal explanation that is lacking, not a satori that dispels the sense that something real and important is being left unexplained."

two points to me are worth emphasizing

1. "it is a causal explanation that is lacking"

2. "Shanahan’s substitute for an explanation is an interpretation" -

I think 1 & 2 apply to every answer to the hard problem I've seen.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
review of Shanahannabobanabananafannafofanna's book
continued

this, my favorite title:
Exciting and Provocative Book, Starting with Chapter Two
Benjamin Kuipers
favorable review "lucid and illuminating" matches the author's (Kuiper) research interests

IS CONSCIOUSNESS JUST CONSCIOUS BEHAVIOR?
Riccardo Manzotti
Institute of Communication and Behavior, IULM University, Via Carlo Bo, 8, 20143 Milan, Italy

Shanahan's work admirably and convincingly supports Baars' global workspace by means of plausible and updated neural models. Yet little of his work is related with the issue of consciousness as phenomenal experience. He focuses his effort mostly on the behavioral correlates of consciousness like autonomy, flexibility, and information integration. Moreover, although the importance of embodiment and situated cognition is emphasized, most of the conceptual tools suggested (dynamic systems, complex networks, global workspace) require the external world only during their development. Leaving aside the issue of phenomenal experience, the book fleshes out a convincing and thought-provoking model for many aspects of conscious behaviour.

I think we can see a pattern emerging now as to the book's strengths and weaknesses ...
 

lol

I propose a new form of the Turing test, I call it the Ture-ing test ... "ture" is the best I can come up with as to how we pronounce this fella's name hyuh in the deep south ... so the test is simple (although many folks can't pass it, and by many I mean of course northerners, yankees that is ...)

Use the phrase "bless his/her heart" correctly in a sentence.

That's it.
 
The movie Ex Machina, which is about strong AI and is in theaters now, is getting good reviews. I posted the trailer awhile back in the substrate independent minds thread.

Apparently the author slipped an Easter egg into the movie which seems to reveal a book which influenced his approach to consciousness.

Seems like a good book. In the same vein as Mind in Life. If so bodes well for how the movie handles consciousness and AI.

Secret code in Ex Machina : movies

super strong AI, right?

Ex Machina has a very high aggregate rating, >90% on Rotten Tomatoes, over 100 critics weighing in ... I just wish Ebert was still around, my go to film critic, because he liked movies.

OK, let me make some guesses and a prediction:

The AI takes over by outsmarting the smartest person(s) in the movie (who will be men), through a combination of super robotic intelligence, femme fatale wiles and superhuman capacity for violence (the relationship between sex and sleek, anti-septic robots being an extension of the American love affair of the car, I predict a movie soon in which a man falls in love with his intelligent, self driving car - voiced by Scarley Johanssen)

Ex_Machina_3090727k.jpg

the good news is that robotic center-folds won't require air brushing:

imagesCA8K8K8A.jpg

Check out the chassis on that one!
 
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