Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

[Constance]

Chirimutta points out that "Color points out to the world of objects, and at the same time it draws us inward to examine the perceptual subject."

What's disclosed thereby is the interpenetration of subjectivity and objectivity in the world as we can and do experience it, an interpenetration explicated in phenomenological analysis, not just by philosophers but by we ourselves when, if, we reflect on the nature of our experience.

The world we live in is real, actual, and the consciousness we bear into it discloses this world partially, perspectivally, temporally -- in the changing natural affordances of light enabling us to perceive things in the world moment-by-moment and from various perspectives we achieve by walking around the objects that we encounter.

Objects are real; they are not to be confused in their actual, if temporal, existence with the quantum activity that appears to be the substrate of the physically evolved world in which we live. We come closer to understanding the actual nature of the objects we encounter by multiplying our own perspectives upon them, and more fully by combining our individual perspectives and resulting descriptions with those achieved by others.

An adequate ontological description of the world we live in and disclose, to the extent(s) that we can, is a work in progress that our species (no doubt like other species of life elsewhere in the universe) engage in collectively and pluralistically in order to achieve maximum access to and 'grip' on 'what-is'. All reductive presuppositions [such as, most dominantly, the objectivist presuppositions of modern science] are the enemies of progress in our understanding of the complex nature of reality.

Science has long avoided, indeed ignored, the evidence of the subjectivity of human perception, experience, and mind. Neurophenomenology is the best hope for a correction of that error, now that consciousness has finally become the subject of interdisciplinary research.

 

[Constance]

What Chirimutta writes next exemplifies the way in which grammatical systems of established languages can limit the range of what we find thinkable.

"Indeed, I argue, colors are not properties of minds (visual experiences), objects or lights, but of perceptual processes—interactions that involve all three terms. According to this theory, which I call “color adverbialism,” colors are not properties of things, as they first appear. Instead, colors are ways that stimuli appear to certain kinds of individuals, and at the same time, ways that individuals perceive certain kinds of stimuli. The “adverbialism”comes in because colors are said to be properties of processes rather than things. So instead of treating color words as adjectives (which describe things), we should treat them as adverbs (which describe activities). I eat hurriedly, walk gracelessly, and on a fine day I see the sky bluely!"

 

[Constance]

Note on Moonlight

The one moonlight, in the simple-colored night,
Like a plain poet revolving in his mind
The sameness of his various universe,
Shines on the mere objectiveness of things.

It is as if being was to be observed,
As if, among the possible purposes
Of what one sees, the purpose that comes first,
The surface, is the purpose to be seen,

The property of the moon, what it evokes.
It is to disclose the essential presence, say,
Of a mountain, expanded and elevated almost
Into a sense, an object the less; or else

To disclose in the figure waiting on the road
An object the more, an undetermined form
Between the slouchings of a gunman and a lover,
A gesture in the dark, a fear one feels

In the great vistas of night air, that takes this form,
In the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star.
So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietude
Is active with a power, an inherent life,

In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,
Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking-glass,
A change of color in the plain poet's mind,
Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound,

The one moonlight, the various universe, intended
So much just to be seen -- a purpose, empty
Perhaps, absurd perhaps, but at least a purpose,
Certain and ever more fresh. Ah! Certain, for sure . . .

~~Wallace Stevens, The Rock (1954).

 

[Constance]

Or, expressed more plainly by the same poet:

The last island and its inhabitant,
The two alike, distinguish blues,
Until the difference between air
And sea exists by grace alone,
As white this, white that.

from Wallace Stevens, "Variations on a Summer Day"

 

[Constance]

One more. . .

The Poems of Our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens

 

[Randall]

No one here or in contemporary consciousness studies as a whole questions the existence of "neural correlates of consciousness." But as you know, or ought to know, in science and philosophy correlation is not -- does not equate to -- causation.

Just like the word "proof" the correlation/causation argument is a red herring, and I'll put this into perspective here for the benefit of anyone who might be interested. While correlation does not equate in the strictest sense to causation, correlation is used in science to give us reasonable grounds to believe theoretical causes are probably true, and as mentioned earlier, this evidence will be enough for some people to consider a claim to be proven, while for others, it may not. My position is that the overwhelming evidence indicating a direct correlation between the brain and consciousness is more than sufficient to give us reasonable grounds to believe that the brain is the cause, and therefore that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the brain gives rise to consciousness.

Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation « Science-Based Medicine

What evidence or reasoning? Your belief that the brain produces consciousness is, unfortunately, both philosophically and scientifically naive. One way to remedy that would be to follow the discussions we've had here based on hundreds of philosophical and scientific studies of aspects of consciousness linked and quoted in the thread. Another would be to crack a list of major books concerning consciousness published in the last several decades, since the inception of consciousness studies as an interdisciplinary effort.

I dispute your contention that my belief that the brain produces consciousness is naïve, and again refer you to the overwhelming evidence in the form of billions of cases that reflect a direct correlation between the brain and consciousness, and the evidence in the previous videos where very learned and hardly naïve people believe the same thing based on their understanding of the science. As Harris put it, damage one part of the brain and you lose subjectivity ..." (1:25), which is the state in which a person is constantly aware of his or her self as well as outside factors, and is considered by myself ( at least ) to be the essential component of consciousness. Then in the Stephen Laurey TED Talk at 7:37, we hear him say, "You don't need your whole brain to be aware ..." and goes on to identify the critical brain network responsible for self awareness ( screen capture below ).

'My position' has developed and become more complex through the 300+ pages of this thread, a discussion produced for the most part by four minds coming from different positions with all of us evolving our positions as a result of what we've read, contemplated, and posted here together. All of us are still doing that. If you want to catch up with where we're coming from, you'll need to read the thread. Unless one of the other three members of this online seminar wants to provide you with an outline and summary of all that has been developed here.

Refusing to identify where the flaw is in my position and state it clearly with references, and instead simply throwing hundreds of pages of informal discussion at me, the vast majority of which I've already perused, is not a reasonable response. You must have a key rationale upon which your present position rests, and which you believe is sufficient to reject the idea that the brain is responsible for consciousness. Refusing to engage on that level in a logical step by step fashion is nothing but evasiveness. What it appears to me that you're doing, is simply rejecting the overwhelming evidence in favor of the brain-consciousness position in order to focus on the shreds of evidence that offer an alternative position. Those alternatives are interesting to contemplate for the sake of discussion, but again, IMO aren't as substantial as my present position with respect to the essential question here.

It seems clear to me that you want a limited debate based on limited understanding of the subject of consciousness rather than an extended colloquium on the developing insights achieved in interdisciplinaryconsciousness studies that reveal the complexity of consciousness and our distance from an understanding of what it is. You want to simplify what is one of the most complex subjects being pursued in our time. I'm not interested in what comes of that.

I'm fine with you guys discussing whatever makes you happy, and as I said before, if you want to engage me on whatever is in your mind a "less-limited" understanding of the subject matter, all you need to do is be specific about the issue you want to discuss and include a reference to some key information ( rather than volumes and volumes ) that we can use as a starting point. If I see something there that is substantial enough to alter my present position, I'd be very interested in discussing it.

 

[smcder]

Just like the word "proof" the correlation/causation argument is a red herring, and I'll put this into perspective here for the benefit of anyone who might be interested. While correlation does not equate in the strictest sense to causation, correlation is used in science to give us reasonable grounds to believe theoretical causes are probably true, and as mentioned earlier, this evidence will be enough for some people to consider a claim to be proven, while for others, it may not. My position is that the overwhelming evidence indicating a direct correlation between the brain and consciousness is more than sufficient to give us reasonable grounds to believe that the brain is the cause, and therefore that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the brain gives rise to consciousness.

Evidence in Medicine: Correlation and Causation « Science-Based Medicine

I dispute your contention that my belief that the brain produces consciousness is naïve, and again refer you to the overwhelming evidence in the form of billions of cases that reflect a direct correlation between the brain and consciousness, and the evidence in the previous videos where very learned and hardly naïve people believe the same thing based on their understanding of the science. As Harris put it, damage one part of the brain and you lose subjectivity ..." (1:25), which is the state in which a person is constantly aware of his or her self as well as outside factors, and is considered by myself ( at least ) to be the essential component of consciousness. Then in the Stephen Laurey TED Talk at 7:37, we hear him say, "You don't need your whole brain to be aware ..." and goes on to identify the critical brain network responsible for self awareness ( screen capture below ).




Refusing to identify where the flaw is in my position and state it clearly with references, and instead simply throwing hundreds of pages of informal discussion at me, the vast majority of which I've already perused, is not a reasonable response. You must have a key rationale upon which your present position rests, and which you believe is sufficient to reject the idea that the brain is responsible for consciousness. Refusing to engage on that level in a logical step by step fashion is nothing but evasiveness. What it appears to me that you're doing, is simply rejecting the overwhelming evidence in favor of the brain-consciousness position in order to focus on the shreds of evidence that offer an alternative position. Those alternatives are interesting to contemplate for the sake of discussion, but again, IMO aren't as substantial as my present position with respect to the essential question here.

I'm fine with you guys discussing whatever makes you happy, and as I said before, if you want to engage me on whatever is in your mind a "less-limited" understanding of the subject matter, all you need to do is be specific about the issue you want to discuss and include a reference to some key information ( rather than volumes and volumes ) that we can use as a starting point. If I see something there that is substantial enough to alter my present position, I'd be very interested in discussing it.

I'm fine with you guys discussing whatever makes you happy, and as I said before, if you want to engage me on whatever is in your mind a "less-limited" understanding of the subject matter, all you need to do is be specific about the issue you want to discuss and include a reference to some key information ( rather than volumes and volumes ) that we can use as a starting point. If I see something there that is substantial enough to alter my present position, I'd be very interested in discussing it.

It is good to have your imprimatur! And now that we know how we will certainly engage you if necessary! ;-)

What it appears to me that you're doing, is simply rejecting the overwhelming evidence in favor of the brain-consciousness position in order to focus on the shreds of evidence that offer an alternative position. Those alternatives are interesting to contemplate for the sake of discussion, but again, IMO aren't as substantial as my present position with respect to the essential question here.

I question above where you go from reasonable to beyond a reasonable doubt (cf the legal system and standards of proof). I'll expand on that if you don't see it.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions - outline

This is a key text IMO.

Basically, focusing on the shreds is part of science ... this may also be @burntstate's idea of "binary thinking" - we need creativity, we need to notice the shreds, the things that don't fit - this may or may not lead to revolution. In this case, your position is the status quo - and access to the arguments of the status quo are, by definition, every where so there isn't a particular need to be reminded of them. In fact, the members of the thread generally are responding out of a sense that this position isn't adequate - one reason is that there is, as yet, no mechanism by which the brain can be seen to produce consciousness. That's not a minor problem.

In a speculative thread like the C&P - the whole point is to look for alternatives. Because the members take different positions, the thread tends to be self-limiting, that is, members have no hesitation in challenging one another's positions - that's one reason it has been viable as long as it has and why it continues to renew itself. It neither soars off completely into the clouds, nor does it tend to spiral down to the ground based on what we only know now. The members continually look to what we might know in the future and speculate, reasonably, on that. In fact, it's inspired a number of short stories for me, including one about McGinn-Bridges where children's are modified to understand the hard problem of consciousness and the consequences that follow - in my opinion, IMHO - fiction is a great place to explore these ideas.

In general your interest seems to be to use critical thinking to come to consensus and maintain a reasonable belief. That's certainly necessary but it may also be why you are so vexed with this thread. Still, I hope you will hang around and maybe even try some speculation ... you offered a field theory of consciousness at one point ... any other such ideas?

 

[Smokingpug]

This thread is a continuation of the thread "Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3" originally posted by Gene Steinberg.

Please remember to watch this thread if you were watching the previous one.

This thread is a continuation of the thread "Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3" originally posted by Gene Steinberg.

Please remember to watch this thread if you were watching the previous one.

Having a really hard time understanding about the death of Cecil the Lion.

 

[smcder]

@ufology

Another analogy is chess ... good chess players recognize key positions, they have a vocabulary of positions that is acquired with extensive practice. In any human endeavor in which "expertise" can be acquired, the determinant seems to be hours spent in that field, hours of good practice, deliberate practice. Of course this requires a degree of intelligence, but beyond that, IQ or other cognitive abilities don't seem to correlate highly with performance. The smartest person in the world would be easily defeated by an expert chess player with an average IQ. That is one of the limitations of critical thinking.

One way in which you might be perceived, is to come in to a thread hundreds of pages long and presume to put it right with critical thinking. The term "naive" I think can be fairly applied - just as above the person with the highest IQ would be naive in chess.

No doubt this person would quickly perceive it ... but would still need thousands of hours of practice to acquire expertise. (chess prodgy Bobby Fischer learned to play chess at age six and became a grandmaster at age 15 years, six months - just about the ten years required to attain expertise in any field Google 10,000 hour rule, but see also: New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Rule - Business Insider which questions this rule outside of "super stable structures") - I think an argument can be made that IQ and critical thinking aren't enough to approach the thread effectively and get a positive response. The thread has wondered down many avenues and considered many approaches - it's hit many dead ends but has come back from them.

"Institutional knowledge" is the knowledge, tacit, acquired about a particular instance of a work place - in this case, the "institutional knowledge" of this thread is born by those who have been in the thread from the get go and is not completely articulated in the thread itself but some of it exists only in the heads of those persons - you could do a "black box" analysis but not being in the heat of the moment, you won't have the context to go back and read the thread and get all of that unspoken knowledge.

Now, that knowledge is not the be-all end all and in fact, if the thread is to continue then it obviously has to continue to grow and breathe and bring in new ideas ... and it has to be willing to forget some things and forgive others - so that requires acceptance from the inside and respect (to a degree) from those entering from the outside. These kinds of discussions can be fragile.

The position you seem to take of mind/brain identity, as I said, is well understood here and is, in fact, the very starting point - for me the glaring problem is lack of a mechanism ... I don't think there will be much interest in going back through all of that - if I never engage in a debate about the hard problem, for example, it will be too soon ... I just hope Nietzsche's wrong about the eternal recurrence!

(although let me just note that Nagel's argument is rhetorical, so proving it logically incoherent is just the very point he is trying to make ... your attempt to use predicate logic to do so is a paradigm example of sophisticated naivety! ;-)

... although I think to make a fair response to you, you are right, needs a pointing to the counter-arguments ... I have great sympathy with simply saying go back and read the thread because this is one of the main ideas which we are all questioning - so it would be fair to simply acknowledge the strengths of that position but say we are more interested in seeing what alternatives exist and you may have to live with that as an answer.

 

[smcder]

Having a really hard time understanding about the death of Cecil the Lion.

Is this where the American dentist shoots the lion that was collared for a university study? He claims that he was relying on the knowledge of the hunting guides and had no knowledge of the animal prior to shooting it - that he was following the rules at the time.

That said, I have a hard time understanding any such hunt. I am not a hunter but I respect those who hunt (I live in a rural state and wake up with deer in my front yard) not merely for sport but for meat and who use all parts of the animal. At this time in my state, if hunters didn't hunt the deer population would over-run and the animals would die from starvation and disease. Arguably a clean kill is a better death.

 

[Soupie]

The questions I haven't answered... I look at your questions and think, 'answered them' so... I don't know what to say...

So you are suggesting HCT bridges the explanatory gap? That is is quite an assertion, Pharoah. I don't think you have. I'll post comments/questions on your latest paper asap. Spoiler: My comments will be very similar to comments I've made in the past regarding HCT and the EG.

there is no cause to feeling/phenomenal consc...

or

there is no causal function to feeling/phen consc

Which is correct?

Intuitively, we want to say that both statements are false. The problem is that we have no models to support these intuitive feelings.

We pull our hand away from the flame because it hurts, right? The feeling of love causes more offspring to be born, right?

Those sound right. The problem is, there is no model of subjective, mental reality (pain, love) having causal influence in this way over objective, physical reality.

I don't disagree for one second that intuitively, it seems right. Which is why I have an affinity for Nagel's call for expantionism. But the reality is that there is currently no expantionist model.

I think your logic flawed.

Okay, but it's not my logic. It's an ancient problem.

Mental Causation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

If you think HCT closes the explanatory gap and (therefore) solves the problem of mental causation, then you sir have made quite the contribution to philosophy and human knowledge. I think you're on the right path but have not accomplished either yet.

What if mental causes lead to physical effects that do not directly impact on those same mental causes? eg many of my behaviours do not have a direct impact on the evolution of humans, but, as a member of the human race, individual human behaviours (like mine) do have an impact on the evolution of the species. So there is an apparent causal gap between my behaviour and the evolution of the human species.

Similarly, I might feel something specific but the effects of those feelings might not have a direct, but rather an indirect bearing on physical effects. Once again, there is an apparent causal gap but phen conscious creates a non-specific modal effect that is reflected in an individuals behavioural responses to the world as felt... maybe...

My god... I think you just solved the problem of mental causation! Get these two paragraphs published stat!

Haha, sorry, just being an ass. As noted, I do think you're on to something, but still fail to articulate a bridge between the objective and subjective poles. I'll quote and comment in the future.

 

[smcder]

The fifth option (or what momma knew)

When human minds interact with philosophical problems, especially those of the form 'How is X possible?', they are apt to go into one of four possible states.

either (i) they try to domesticate the object of puzzlement by providing a reductive or explanatory theory of it;*

or (ii) they declare it irreducible and hence not open to any levelling account;

or (iii) they succumb to a magical story or image of what seems so puzzling;**

or (iv) they simply eliminate the source of trouble for fear of ontological embarrassment...

The topics on which it imprints itself, and which I have discussed in some diagnostic detail in the aforementioned book, include:


consciousness and the mind-body problem, the nature and identity of the self, the foundations of meaning, the possibility of free will, the availability of a priori and empirical knowledge... (these are "aporia")

Basically what we find, quite generally, is the threat of magic or elimination in the face of the theoretical obduracy of the phenomenon that invites philosophical attention. The phenomenon presents initial problems of possibility... Free will, for instance, looks upon early inspection to be impossible, so we try to find some conception of it that permits its existence, but this conception always turns out to be dubiously reductive and distorting, leaving us with the unpalatable options of magic, elimination or quietism... so we hop unhappily from one unsatisfactory option to the next; or dig our heels (squintingly) into a position that seems the least intellectually unconscionable of the bunch...

Science, then, might be aptly characterised as that set of questions that does not attract [these] options – where our cognitive faculties allow us to form the necessary concepts and theories.

The distinction between science and philosophy is, on this view, at root a reflection of the cognitive powers we happen to possess or lack, and is therefore creature-relative: it does not correspond to any interesting real division within objective reality... It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that our brains would have to be made of something other than neurons in order for us to have the kinds of cognitive powers needed to solve the problems philosophy poses; at any rate, this is the sort of diagnosis [transcendental naturalism] offers for our philosophical retardation... The hardness of philosophy is thus an upshot of the particular way that natural selection has built our thinking organ, not an objective trait of the subject-matter of philosophical questions.[2]

—Colin McGinn, "Problems in Philosophy" in Philosophical Studies

*how do you read the phrase "reductive or explanatory"? Is the "or" inclusive?
**note: "succumb" (all four sentences use a parallel structure with "domesticate", "declare" and "simply eliminate" in the position of "succumb")

 

[smcder]

And now my point is just this: large parts of what is called 'philosophy' exemplify the above general description, so that the hypothesis of cognitive transcendence is at least a reasonable conjecture.(12) If this hypothesis were right, then the search for philosophical knowledge would be an attempt to do with our epistemic capacities what cannot be done with them. Our minds would be to philosophical truth what our bodies are to flying: wrongly designed and structured for the task in question.

Let me emphasise that this is a hypothesis: it is to be viewed as the most plausible explanation of the data, compared to other proposed explanations, and it fits our best picture of the kind of thing the knowing organism is. Like any hypothesis of comparable scope and generality it might, of course, be mistaken; but I suggest that it is worth taking seriously and examining on its merits. After all, it simply applies to the so-called 'higher cognitive functions' what is acknowledged to be the general condition of our various faculties, bodily and psychological.

now this part is very interesting, we've not discussed this before:

It competes, say, with the hypothesis (never to my knowledge advanced) that in fact humans do have a natural adaptation towards philosophical understanding, comparable to their innate expertise in language, but that this adaptiveness operates only during a 'sensitive period', say from five to eight years old, in which great strides would be made in philosophical inquiry if only we exposed our children to an intensive course in philosophical training during that period. We just don't get them early enough!

Presumably this hypothesis, though implausible in the extreme (but why exactly is that? )*, is not logically excluded, and has never been empirically tested in any systematic way. It is at least among the range of hypotheses about human knowledge that we have learned to take seriously, at least as to its form. Well, my competing hypothesis asserts, not that we are missing a sensitive period for solving philosophical problems, but rather that the human cognitive system is just not set up for dealing with problems of this general type.

This does not exclude the possibility that a differently organised intelligence might relate to philosophy as we do to physics, **or indeed to language or commonsense psychology. For all I know, there are forms of intelligence out there that do go through a sensitive period for solving the problems of philosophy: if you miss it, you never pick up what your conspecifics take for granted - a thorough understanding of the phenomena that so perplex our earthly philosophers. According to my hypothesis, however, humans are constitutionally insensitive where philosophical problems (of a certain kind) are concerned. In the rest of this paper I shall consider the prospects for this hypothesis.

smcder *I think McGinn's question "why exactly is that" is at least as interesting as any other he is asking here ... why is it implausible in the extreme?
smcder**and why is that? I've heard it said that acquiring the grammar of a language is as difficult as advanced phsyics but its largely a subconscious task, because we are "wired" for it ... so physics here is an interesting comparison

 

[smcder]

The McGinn Bridge ... (or what momma knew)

(1)

Daddy was sitting around, whistling "Dixie", as he called it. Me and Sis were playing. Dad always had a book and some papers and he sat in the chair by the window. We lived in the country on a little hill and had the stars all around us. I live in the city now. We asked Dad a hundred questions an hour and a hundred times he put his book down and pushed his paper aside, took his pencil up to his lips and thought before he gave us the best possible answer, an answer filled with maybes and with more questions.

Momma was in the kitchen "working". Momma's work was a great mystery to us - it seemed mainly to involve having a headache - closing her eyes and wrinkling her brow. She didn't have any books and only sometimes a piece of paper and a pencil. I say that, but we didn't go in the kitchen at those times, so maybe that's just an image in my head. Sometimes I think that's the image momma gave us.

McGinn would have said we were "constitutionally insensitive" to her work.

It was a tiny house ... but Dad made it the whole world and he did this by keeping us close. Of dad didn't have a place to work - the stereo, a 1964 Panasonic cabinet style, was community property, and mostly tuned to KAAY the oldies station - that, besides the questions.

Dad was far more tolerant, probably far more loving, I know he was, than I am as a parent. Sissy never got to have kids. What space we had, they had, Dad protected for momma, I see now how much he deferred to her in so many ways - no, how much he protected her. And even from us ... in a way.

Mom said it took a lot of mental effort and sometimes she did get a headache. Of course, eventually she had the headaches all the time.

A lot of the imagery of my childhood is drawn by Joe Mugnaini, the illustrator of Ray Bradbury's short stories and novels. Bradbury himself said the drawings captured his vision ... how that might happen is something momma could know but to us it was a wonderful mystery and the two men were linked in my mind - they worked together and the stories and the images on the paper and in my head were one thing. Dad read to us and it's his voice I still hear when I read Bradbury. It's how I talk to my father now.

The two stories I think of the most are "Powerhouse" and "The Happiness Machine". I read Powerhouse over and over in the last few weeks - I felt like momma was that force going in and out of the houses ...

'Whenever a Light Blinked Out, Life Threw Another Switch; Rooms Were Illumined Afresh'

... but it was "The Happiness Machine" that I think about now the most. In the story a man invents a machine - a kind of virtual reality booth that lets you live out any fanstasy you want.

It's a story about wants and wisdom and I thought of momma a lot, she was Lena Auffmann and the inventors of the McGinn bridge were Leo Auffmann. Dad was a sad, wise figure caught in between. Dad was always in between, in between us and his work, us and momma, us and all the forces outside of us. My Dad was always in front of us.

 

[Randall]

I question above where you go from reasonable to beyond a reasonable doubt (cf the legal system and standards of proof). I'll expand on that if you don't see it.

I use the phrase, "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a descriptive term for the sake of convenience to impart the idea that the evidence is so substantial, that it far outweighs any competing evidence to the contrary. I am not using it in a legal sense.

Basically, focusing on the shreds is part of science ... this may also be @burntstate's idea of "binary thinking" - we need creativity, we need to notice the shreds, the things that don't fit - this may or may not lead to revolution. In this case, your position is the status quo - and access to the arguments of the status quo are, by definition, every where so there isn't a particular need to be reminded of them. In fact, the members of the thread generally are responding out of a sense that this position isn't adequate - one reason is that there is, as yet, no mechanism by which the brain can be seen to produce consciousness. That's not a minor problem.

That all depends on what you mean by the words "seen" and "mechanism". Sure, simply looking at the physical material that makes up the brain doesn't allow one to "see" consciousness, but that's also not relevant. Specific parts of the brain responsible for subjectivity have been identified and their workings studied in some detail using scientific tools and analysis. IMO this means that the "mechanism" has been identified. It is the brain, and the studies that lead us to this understanding are is what allows us to "see" this.

In a speculative thread like the C&P - the whole point is to look for alternatives. Because the members take different positions, the thread tends to be self-limiting, that is, members have no hesitation in challenging one another's positions - that's one reason it has been viable as long as it has and why it continues to renew itself. It neither soars off completely into the clouds, nor does it tend to spiral down to the ground based on what we only know now. The members continually look to what we might know in the future and speculate, reasonably, on that. In fact, it's inspired a number of short stories for me, including one about McGinn-Bridges where children's are modified to understand the hard problem of consciousness and the consequences that follow - in my opinion, IMHO - fiction is a great place to explore these ideas.

Sure, like I said, discuss whatever piques your interest and gives you enjoyment. If you find anything that is substantial enough to change the "status quo" or default position, the "null hypothesis" so to speak, by all means please try to get my attention so that I might consider it.

In general your interest seems to be to use critical thinking to come to consensus and maintain a reasonable belief. That's certainly necessary but it may also be why you are so vexed with this thread. Still, I hope you will hang around and maybe even try some speculation ... you offered a field theory of consciousness at one point ... any other such ideas?

I haven't seen sufficient evidence to speculate beyond the idea that consciousness itself, from an external objective viewpoint, is composed of a physical field of some sort emanated by the brain. This field I would suggest is intimately linked with the energy output of the brain as seen in scans and which can be observed and measured scientifically. I have submitted for consideration in the past that this field is analogous to the magnetic field produced by electrical windings around iron cores. Within such fields information can be stored and manipulated. A simple example is a speaker crossover which stores the energy from audio signals inside a magnetic field, and then releases it again as electrical signals filtered to specific frequencies. Nowhere in the coil or the core can we "see" the music, or the magnetic field, and we don't understand with certainty what the root cause of a magnetic field is. Nevertheless we still assign the cause of the field to the crossover because it's obvious that's where it's coming from.

Although this theory is my best guess at what's going on, it's far from proven. But there have been attempts to figure it out, and we have even been able to get crude images of what someone sees by interpolating the readouts from brain scans: New brain scanning technique can visualize your imagination | ExtremeTech

So using an MRI we are actually getting a significant correlation between measurable magnetic fields and visual images. I strongly suspect that further research would eventually allow us to observe our internal visualizations with increasing clarity, perhaps someday to the same extent that we can map larger and simpler fields with great resolution.

 

[Constance]

New book by McGinn, available August 15:


Review by McGinn of a book by Ramachandran:
Can the Brain Explain Your Mind? by Colin McGinn | The New York Review of Books


Ramachandran's response and a further response by McGinn:
‘The Tell-Tale Brain’: An Exchange by V.S. Ramachandran | The New York Review of Books

 

[smcder]

I use the phrase, "beyond a reasonable doubt" as a descriptive term for the sake of convenience to impart the idea that the evidence is so substantial, that it far outweighs any competing evidence to the contrary. I am not using it in a legal sense.

That all depends on what you mean by the words "seen" and "mechanism". Sure, simply looking at the physical material that makes up the brain doesn't allow one to "see" consciousness, but that's also not relevant. Specific parts of the brain responsible for subjectivity have been identified and their workings studied in some detail using scientific tools and analysis. IMO this means that the "mechanism" has been identified. It is the brain, and the studies that lead us to this understanding are is what allows us to "see" this.

Sure, like I said, discuss whatever piques your interest and gives you enjoyment. If you find anything that is substantial enough to change the "status quo" or default position, the "null hypothesis" so to speak, by all means please try to get my attention so that I might consider it.

I haven't seen sufficient evidence to speculate beyond the idea that consciousness itself, from an external objective viewpoint, is composed of a physical field of some sort emanated by the brain. This field I would suggest is intimately linked with the energy output of the brain as seen in scans and which can be observed and measured scientifically. I have submitted for consideration in the past that this field is analogous to the magnetic field produced by electrical windings around iron cores. Within such fields information can be stored and manipulated. A simple example is a speaker crossover which stores the energy from audio signals inside a magnetic field, and then releases it again as electrical signals filtered to specific frequencies. Nowhere in the coil or the core can we "see" the music, or the magnetic field, and we don't understand with certainty what the root cause of a magnetic field is. Nevertheless we still assign the cause of the field to the crossover because it's obvious that's where it's coming from.

Although this theory is my best guess at what's going on, it's far from proven. But there have been attempts to figure it out, and we have even been able to get crude images of what someone sees by interpolating the readouts from brain scans: New brain scanning technique can visualize your imagination | ExtremeTech

So using an MRI we are actually getting a significant correlation between measurable magnetic fields and visual images. I strongly suspect that further research will eventually allow us to observe our internal visualizations with increasing accuracy, perhaps someday to the same extent that we can map larger and simpler fields with great resolution.

I know you aren't using it in a legal sense




Read the thread ... ;-) Seriously, we have actually discussed all of the above ... and pretty early on too, if I remember correctly so you can find most of it in the first parts of the thread, am I right

@Constance @Soupie @Pharoah ?

... do any of you have specific places you'd like @ufology to go? Or specific responses to his statements?

I'm not sure there is going to be a lot of patience for this ... its unfortunate, but the thread/discussion has evolved mostly between a few die-hard participants, others have come and gone, so there's been a kind of "natural selection" at work ... and a lot of tacit knowledge - it would be a pain in the neck to catch someone up - as a consequence there may be more interest in pushing ahead at this point ... I may be wrong, looking back there might have been a way to archive or organize this in some way but I'm not sure - it's been so organic and that wasn't really the purpose, none of us has full time to devote to such a project, we post when we can amidst our other business ... Pharoah is submitting his work to professional journals and I suspect @Soupie has a book in him (he doesn't realize it yet) and I know @Constance does ... so I think you're kind of on your own. At this point the thread may not be very useful to anyone on the outside which is part of where some of the criticism has come in and I understand that.

The problem with the brain scanning stuff is that it requires consciousness in the first place, and as you know an explanation can't require the thing that is to be proven.

Does your watch tell time?
No, I have to look at it.

By mechanism I am looking for something like the way we can describe hydrogen and oxygen becoming water ... a "physics of consciousness" as I've put it before.

Here's Nagel:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...=daH4uwstFszGZH4JgRCR7w&bvm=bv.99028883,d.cWw
So I want to propose an alternative. In our present situation, when no one has a plausible answer to the mind-body problem, all we can really do is to try to develop various alternatives

smcder (I'm not aware of anyone who actually claims to have a plausible answer to the mind-body problem ... can you find a quote from someone who does? McGinn provides an answer (see above) in that we aren't equipped to have an answer - a pretty smart response, I think for which he earned the titled New Mysterian)
... one of which may prove in the long run to be an ancestor of a credible solution. This is a plea

for the project of searching for a solution that takes conscious points of view as logically

irreducible to, but nevertheless necessarily connected with, the physical properties of the

organisms whose points of view they are. Consciousness should be recognized as a conceptually

irreducible aspect of reality that is necessarily connected with other equally irreducible aspects --

as electromagnetic fields are irreducible to but necessarily connected with the behavior of

charged particles and gravitational fields with the behavior of masses, and vice versa. But the

task of conceiving how a necessary connection might hold between the subjective and the

physical cannot be accomplished by applying analogies from within physical science.

This is a new ballgame. Yet I believe it is not irrational to hope that some day, long after we are all dead,

people will be able to observe the operation of the brain and say, with true understanding,
Thats
what the experience of tasting chocolate looks like from the outside.

That's something brain scans can't do.

Sure, like I said, discuss whatever piques your interest and gives you enjoyment. If you find anything that is substantial enough to change the "status quo" or default position, the "null hypothesis" so to speak, by all means please try to get my attention so that I might consider it.

There are just too many good responses here to narrow it down to just one .... ;-)

 

[Randall]

I know you aren't using it in a legal sense

Then why did you ask me about it while alluding to it in that context?

@ufology
Another analogy is chess ... good chess players recognize key positions, they have a vocabulary of positions that is acquired with extensive practice. In any human endeavor in which "expertise" can be acquired, the determinant seems to be hours spent in that field, hours of good practice, deliberate practice. Of course this requires a degree of intelligence, but beyond that, IQ or other cognitive abilities don't seem to correlate highly with performance. The smartest person in the world would be easily defeated by an expert chess player with an average IQ. That is one of the limitations of critical thinking.

I don't find your comparison to be relevant. Critical thinking is a tool that is adaptable to a wide variety of situations, not merely to a fixed set of circumstances like chess. The only situations that seem to be exempt from critical thinking are those that involve instinct and intuition, but thankfully we can still use critical thinking to save ourselves from the pitfalls encountered by acting on those impulses alone.

One way in which you might be perceived, is to come in to a thread hundreds of pages long and presume to put it right with critical thinking. The term "naive" I think can be fairly applied - just as above the person with the highest IQ would be naive in chess.

To assume that my intent is to, "come in to a thread hundreds of pages long and presume to put it right", is entirely presumptuous. I'm doing no such thing.

No doubt this person would quickly perceive it ... but would still need thousands of hours of practice to acquire expertise. (chess prodgy Bobby Fischer learned to play chess at age six and became a grandmaster at age 15 years, six months - just about the ten years required to attain expertise in any field Google 10,000 hour rule, but see also: New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Rule - Business Insider which questions this rule outside of "super stable structures") - I think an argument can be made that IQ and critical thinking aren't enough to approach the thread effectively and get a positive response. The thread has wondered down many avenues and considered many approaches - it's hit many dead ends but has come back from them.

My motivation to post is driven by content that evoked a response. If those who have been participating for a long time consider themselves to be analogous to chess grandmasters, then they should have little problem dealing with specific issues one turn at a time and in doing so make a case far more substantial than what I'm seeing at the moment.

"Institutional knowledge" is the knowledge, tacit, acquired about a particular instance of a work place - in this case, the "institutional knowledge" of this thread is born by those who have been in the thread from the get go and is not completely articulated in the thread itself but some of it exists only in the heads of those persons - you could do a "black box" analysis but not being in the heat of the moment, you won't have the context to go back and read the thread and get all of that unspoken knowledge.

This is also a public thread and at any time someone new, with a fresh perspective, and no preconceptions or assumptions about by motivations, might arrive an find value in one of my posts, and perhaps even be brave enough to comment for themselves. If in the meantime, if the in-house crowd doesn't like what I have to say, they are always free to ignore it. I'm not forcing anything on anyone.

Now, that knowledge is not the be-all end all and in fact, if the thread is to continue then it obviously has to continue to grow and breathe and bring in new ideas ... and it has to be willing to forget some things and forgive others - so that requires acceptance from the inside and respect (to a degree) from those entering from the outside. These kinds of discussions can be fragile.

Whatever. I'm not to trying to break anything either.

The position you seem to take of mind/brain identity, as I said, is well understood here and is, in fact, the very starting point - for me the glaring problem is lack of a mechanism ... I don't think there will be much interest in going back through all of that - if I never engage in a debate about the hard problem, for example, it will be too soon ... I just hope Nietzsche's wrong about the eternal recurrence!

Well we've just been through it again anyway, and it seems that while the default position ( consciousness arises from the brain ) is recognized, it is not given the weight it deserves. However that might also be a false assumption on my part based on seeing resistance to the idea. So how about we tally things up with the participants @Soupie, @Constance, @Pharoah, and yourself ( I'm still ignoring Tyger until I'm provided with a good enough reason not to ). Do you all agree that the evidence is overwhelming by way of direct correlation, that the brain, as part of a normally functioning human brain/body system, is responsible for generating consciousness in humans? A simple "Yes" or "No" would suffice. This is the point where I raise my hand for "Yes".

 

[Constance]

No.

 

[smcder]

@ufology

I don't find your comparison to be relevant. Critical thinking is a tool that is adaptable to a wide variety of situations, not merely to a fixed set of circumstances like chess. The only situations that seem to be exempt from critical thinking are those that involve instinct and intuition, but thankfully we can still use critical thinking to save ourselves from the pitfalls encountered by acting on those impulses alone.

The chess comparison is about coming to the thread at this late stage.

To assume that my intent is to, "come in to a thread hundreds of pages long and presume to put it right", is entirely presumptuous. I'm doing no such thing.

I agree, I don't think you are ... that's why I said:

One way in which you might be perceived, is to come in to a thread hundreds of pages long and presume to put it right with critical thinking. The term "naive" I think can be fairly applied - just as above the person with the highest IQ would be naive in chess.

Note that in your quote of this line above, it's in all italics, so the italicization of the might is lost ... I want to be sure that's kept for the record.

One way in which you might be perceived ...

It's about providing feedback as to how you might be perceived, that's been valuable to me when others have provided that feedback, so my intention was to give the same courtesy.

My motivation to post is driven by content that evoked a response. If those who have been participating for a long time consider themselves to be analogous to chess grandmasters, then they should have little problem dealing with specific issues one turn at a time and in doing so make a case far more substantial than what I'm seeing at the moment.

I don't think participants do consider themselves to be analogous to chess grandmasters:

1. I don't speak for anyone else
2. the analogy to chess is that the thread has a lot of tacit knowledge and only those who have participated from the get-go have that full experience, so in terms of "expertise" of this thread - they will probably have a better handle on its overall content than someone who has just come in or dropped in from time to time

This is also a public thread and at any time someone new, with a fresh perspective, and no preconceptions or assumptions about by motivations, might arrive an find value in one of my posts, and perhaps even be brave enough to comment for themselves. If in the meantime, the house-crowd doesn't like what I have to say, they are always free to ignore it. I'm not forcing anything on anyone.

I agree! And although your points have been dealt with earlier in the thread, there is no harm in bringing them up again as they do represent the satus quo in a way, although I would not the thread is filled with references to published papers and books that disagree ... in terms of Kuhn's analysis, it appears we could be in for a paradigm shift against the backdrop of the normal science of brain scans, etc. I certainly hope it doesn't tke bravery for someone to comment ... certainly many have jumped right in along the way.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the weight it deserves" among us four (if so, who cares? we are just four people) or among the larger public? Or among physicists or among neurologists, psychologists, para-psychologists, the increasing number of cross-disciplinary investigators of consciousness studies?