Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

[smcder]

Another Way to Put It:

"T.H. Huxley famously said “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp”.

"We do not see how to explain a state of consciousness in terms of its neurological basis. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness." - Ned Block

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[smcder]

A Little History

Thomas Nagel ( `What is it like to be a bat?' Philosophical Review 83: 435-450, 1974).

Joe Levine introduced the “explanatory gap” terminology (Joe Levine, `Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap,' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 1983:354-361) to be used later.

David Chalmers and Galen Strawson distinguished between the hard problem and various “easy problems” of how consciousness functions. (David Chalmers,The Conscious Mind. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996, pp xxii-xxiii. GalenStrawson, Mental Reality. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994,pp. 93-96.)

- foootnotes from Ned Block
The Harder Problem of Consciousness

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[smcder]

From the same source - very helpful at this point:

"Before I go on, I must make a terminological comment. Imagine two persons both of whom are in pain, but only one of whom is introspecting his pain state and is in that sense conscious of it. One could say that only one of the two has a conscious pain. This is not the sense of ‘conscious’ used here. In the sense of ‘conscious’ used here, just in virtue of having pain, both have conscious states. To avoid verbal disputes, we could call the sense of ‘consciousness’ used here phenomenally. Pains are intrinsically phenomenal and in that sense are intrinsically conscious. In that sense—but not in some other senses—there cannot be an unconscious pain."

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[smcder]

http://faculty.fullerton.edu/jeelooliu/490_folder/490_(6)_Block_concepts_of_consciousness.pd

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[Pharoah]

That's an example of emergentism.

There might be a few simple rules that govern each individual's reaction to the feedback, then taken together it looks as if the ants intelligently coordinated their actions ... flocks of birds are another example, an early computer program called "boids" used three rules to replicate flocking behavior. (of course there probably is intelligence going on in both ants and birds - but the point is a good simulation can be made by a few simple rules ... cf. two dudes moving a couch)

Epiphenomenalism is a phenomena that runs parallel to a primary one ... epiphenomenal theories of mind say that physiological processes underlie both the behavior of the organism and the phenomenal feel of being that organism but that the phenomenal feel, the what it is like to be that organism doesn't feed back into the system - it's merely an effect of physical processes.

The way I presented it here on the thread was as a counterargument to non-reductive physicalist accounts of mind. See Jaegwon Kim's argument for the assumptions/premises ... causal closure and causal exclusion both of which Kim felt were reasonably acceptable to physicalists.

I think the thing @ufology didn't understand about causal exclusion (and may have since cleared up - I'm not caught up on the thread yet) is it doesn't mean one cause per effect, it means once you have sufficient cause (in total) then additional cause is a case of over-determination ... so a physicalist says all the causes are physical, one of the effects is the mental, the phenomenal feel ... what it is like ... etc but the mental is not itself a cause because we can explain all the behaviors with physical effects.

An example of over-determination on these terms would be if someone put the 8 ball in the cornet pocket and said "did you see that? how the ball curved over like that into the pocket? I used my mind to move it in that direction" - you would say no, the sum of the forces imparted by the cue put the ball in the pocket, in exactly the same way the epiphenomenalist would say it's not your experience of willing your hand to move, that was all physical processes - neuronal, chemical, muscular, etc etc - @ufology's example of not being consciously aware until after a decision is made comes into play in such an argument.

Another way that I understand the hard problem ... and I think this is Nagel's point in WILTBAB ... if I provide a recipe for the universe - all of the objective, physical information needed to create a world and run it through a computer fabricator - a computerized reality generator, then presumably there will be consciousness but the "what it is like to be" is not included in that recipe, isn't contained in the objective description ... that was Nagel's modest critique of physicalism which at the time claimed to completely describe the universe - he said no, because you leave out "what it is like".

Chalmers took it from there and labelled it the "hard problem" and love it or hate it - the rest is history.

@smcder thanks for this... don't really get it though. With the ants: If the ants are neurons, the waving leaf phenomenal experience, and the direction the leaf takes (i.e. A to B) the resulting end behaviour, then, absolutely, the waving leaf does influence the ants and the end result... but in different unconnected ways. How does this relate or not relate to epiphen and where is the emergence as you interpret it @smcder.

@Constance. HP: Here's the thing, it is as if DC said what his favourite 80s hit was and why... and everyone says "oh yea!.... but my favourite 80s hit was ----" That's why everyone loves the HP. because everyone has their idea of what it is. If DC sticks a flag on the moon and calls it Dave, it becomes a little tiresome when everybody chirps in by saying where else they think he should have put the flag and why it should have been called Fred instead.
My rule of thumb... if you don't know why someone as smart as DC wrote something, don't try to reinterpret what he wrote. Why did he write the HP paper? Don't know.
I know you like Varela, but I lost my patience with his work... but I have forgotten why.

 

[smcder]

@smcder thanks for this... don't really get it though. With the ants: If the ants are neurons, the waving leaf phenomenal experience, and the direction the leaf takes (i.e. A to B) the resulting end behaviour, then, absolutely, the waving leaf does influence the ants and the end result... but in different unconnected ways. How does this relate or not relate to epiphen and where is the emergence as you interpret it @smcder.

@Constance. HP: Here's the thing, it is as if DC said what his favourite 80s hit was and why... and everyone says "oh yea!.... but my favourite 80s hit was ----" That's why everyone loves the HP. because everyone has their idea of what it is. If DC sticks a flag on the moon and calls it Dave, it becomes a little tiresome when everybody chirps in by saying where else they think he should have put the flag and why it should have been called Fred instead.
My rule of thumb... if you don't know why someone as smart as DC wrote something, don't try to reinterpret what he wrote. Why did he write the HP paper? Don't know.
I know you like Varela, but I lost my patience with his work... but I have forgotten why.

The difference with the ant metaphor is that everything can be explained in terms of known physical laws ... that's where Nagel calls for a psycho-physical nexus to account for the relationship between neuron and experience.

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[Pharoah]

A Little History

Thomas Nagel ( `What is it like to be a bat?' Philosophical Review 83: 435-450, 1974).

Joe Levine introduced the “explanatory gap” terminology (Joe Levine, `Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap,' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 1983:354-361) to be used later.

David Chalmers and Galen Strawson distinguished between the hard problem and various “easy problems” of how consciousness functions. (David Chalmers,The Conscious Mind. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996, pp xxii-xxiii. GalenStrawson, Mental Reality. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994,pp. 93-96.)

- foootnotes from Ned Block
The Harder Problem of Consciousness

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And then apeman began to walk upright... maybe

@smcder On Nagel's psychophysical nexus: (ouch nasty!... shouldsee a doctor about that!) The PPN is his wide stance on expansionism

Nagel (http://philosophy fas nyu edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving pdf) calls for an expansionist programme for bridging the objective–subjective divide. Expansionism might be interpreted in either a wide or narrow sense. In its wide sense, one might think of expansionism as an alternative and emphatic rejection of the reductionist’s and eliminativist’s aspirations, looking instead to an entirely new science or discipline of thought. In this sense, a solution would not relate to our current models of reality. Rather, a solution would require expansion into another realm, perhaps equivalent to or more fundamentally transformative than the discoveries that might be required to understanding, v.g., dark energy and its relation to matter and dark matter. In its wide context therefore, one might have sympathy with Nagel’s sentiment that an objective–subjective bridge will take centuries to construct. Alternatively, one might think of expansionism in its narrow sense. This entails taking what is now known and extrapolating beyond current boundaries of interpretation. Under this guise, given their central role in our attempts at understanding the mind, the existing orthodoxy regarding knowledge, information, representation and intentionality would have to be transformed by extension; a much less ominous task.

I think Nagel takes the wide view because he cannot conceive or does not want to conceive of an alternative... which is understandable.

 

[smcder]

The evolution of consciousness

"And there is also plenty of scope for enquiry as to the likely course of the evolution of access-consciousness. (In my 1996a, for example, I speculated that a form of higher-order access to our own thought-processes would have conferred decisive advantages in terms of flexibility and adaptability in thinking and reasoning.)

But what almost everyone is also agreed on, is that it is p-consciousness which is philosophically most problematic. It is by no means easy to understand how the properties distinctive of p-consciousness – phenomenal feel, or what-it-is-likeness – could be realised in the neural processes of the brain; and nor is it easy to see how these properties could ever have evolved. Indeed, when people talk about the ‘problem of consciousness’ it is really the problem of p-consciousness which they have in mind.

*My strategy in this chapter will be to consider a variety of proposals concerning the nature of p-consciousness from an evolutionary standpoint, hoping to obtain some adjudication between them."

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[smcder]

And then apeman began to walk upright... maybe

@smcder On Nagel's psychophysical nexus: (ouch nasty!... shouldsee a doctor about that!) The PPN is his wide stance on expansionism

Nagel (http://philosophy fas nyu edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving pdf) calls for an expansionist programme for bridging the objective–subjective divide. Expansionism might be interpreted in either a wide or narrow sense. In its wide sense, one might think of expansionism as an alternative and emphatic rejection of the reductionist’s and eliminativist’s aspirations, looking instead to an entirely new science or discipline of thought. In this sense, a solution would not relate to our current models of reality. Rather, a solution would require expansion into another realm, perhaps equivalent to or more fundamentally transformative than the discoveries that might be required to understanding, v.g., dark energy and its relation to matter and dark matter. In its wide context therefore, one might have sympathy with Nagel’s sentiment that an objective–subjective bridge will take centuries to construct. Alternatively, one might think of expansionism in its narrow sense. This entails taking what is now known and extrapolating beyond current boundaries of interpretation. Under this guise, given their central role in our attempts at understanding the mind, the existing orthodoxy regarding knowledge, information, representation and intentionality would have to be transformed by extension; a much less ominous task.

I think Nagel takes the wide view because he cannot conceive or does not want to conceive of an alternative... which is understandable.

How do you see Nagels current view (Mind and Cosmos) in relationship to his view there in "Conceiving the Impossible"?

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[smcder]

The evolution of consciousness

5. The Evolution of Hoes

"As a way of reinforcing the point, notice that any inner scanner would have to be a physical device (just as the visual system itself is) which depends upon the detection of those physical events in the brain which are the output of the various sensory systems (just as the visual system is a physical device which depends upon detection of physical properties of surfaces via the reflection of light). It is hard to see how any inner scanner could detect the presence of an experience qua experience. Rather, it would have to detect the physical realisations of experiences in the human brain, and construct the requisite representation of the experiences which those physical events realise, on the basis of that physical-information input. This makes is seem inevitable, surely, that the scanning device which supposedly generates higher-order experiences (HOEs) of visual experience would have to be almost as sophisticated and complex as the visual system itself.

Now one might think that HOE theory’s commitment to this degree of complexity, all of which is devoted to the creation of p-conscious states, is itself a reason to reject it, provided that some other alternative is available. This may well be so – indeed, I would urge that it is. But for present purposes, the point is that mechanisms of inner sense would need to have evolved. The complexity of those mechanisms makes it almost inevitable that the devices in question will have evolved, in stages, under some steady selectional pressure or pressures."

...

"I conclude this section, then, by claiming that ‘inner sense’ accounts of p-consciousness are highly implausible, on evolutionary (and other) grounds. The take-home message is: we would never have evolved higher-order experiences (HOEs) unless we already had higher-order thoughts (HOTs); and if we already had HOTs then we did not need HOEs.

Upshot: if we are to defend any form of higher-order representation (HOR) theory, then it should be some sort of HOT theory (or perhaps a higher-order description, or ‘HOD’, theory), rather than a HOE theory

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[Pharoah]

How do you see Nagels current view (Mind and Cosmos) in relationship to his view there in "Conceiving the Impossible"?

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Haven't read it. Should I?

 

[smcder]

And then apeman began to walk upright... maybe

@smcder On Nagel's psychophysical nexus: (ouch nasty!... shouldsee a doctor about that!) The PPN is his wide stance on expansionism

Nagel (http://philosophy fas nyu edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving pdf) calls for an expansionist programme for bridging the objective–subjective divide. Expansionism might be interpreted in either a wide or narrow sense. In its wide sense, one might think of expansionism as an alternative and emphatic rejection of the reductionist’s and eliminativist’s aspirations, looking instead to an entirely new science or discipline of thought. In this sense, a solution would not relate to our current models of reality. Rather, a solution would require expansion into another realm, perhaps equivalent to or more fundamentally transformative than the discoveries that might be required to understanding, v.g., dark energy and its relation to matter and dark matter. In its wide context therefore, one might have sympathy with Nagel’s sentiment that an objective–subjective bridge will take centuries to construct. Alternatively, one might think of expansionism in its narrow sense. This entails taking what is now known and extrapolating beyond current boundaries of interpretation. Under this guise, given their central role in our attempts at understanding the mind, the existing orthodoxy regarding knowledge, information, representation and intentionality would have to be transformed by extension; a much less ominous task.

I think Nagel takes the wide view because he cannot conceive or does not want to conceive of an alternative... which is understandable.

Is an alternative being proposed? If so, what is the alternative?

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[smcder]

Haven't read it. Should I?

I'm wondering whether your above critique applies to Nagel's current thought?

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[smcder]

From wiki "animal consciousnes"

African Grey Parrott: possess the ability to associate simple human words with meanings, and to intelligently apply the abstract concepts of shape, colour, number, zero-sense, etc. According to Pepperberg and other scientists, they perform many cognitive tasks at the level of dolphins, chimpanzees, and even human toddlers."

"N'kisi in 2004 was said to have a vocabulary of over 950 words which she used in creative ways. For example, when Jane Goodall visited N'kisi in his New York home, he greeted her with "Got a chimp?" because he had seen pictures of her with chimpanzees in Africa."

... trying to come up with a N'kisi test for humans ... what would it take for a human to convince N'kisi of parrot-like intelligence?

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[Constance]

This paper by Lowe should also be included in the basic texts required for orientation to the hard problem:

There Are No Easy Problems of Consciousness

E. J. Lowe Department of Philosophy, University of Durham,
Durham, UK

Abstract: "This paper challenges David Chalmers’ proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the ‘easy’ ones and the ‘hard’ one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential ‘qualia’ resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby neglecting a vitally important insight of Kant. From a Kantian perspective, our capacity for conceptual thought is so inextricably bound up with our capacity for phenomenal consciousness that it is an illusion to imagine that there are any ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, resolvable within the computational or neural paradigms."

http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf

 

[Constance]

For example, when Jane Goodall visited N'kisi in his New York home, he greeted her with "Got a chimp?" because he had seen pictures of her with chimpanzees in Africa."

The parrot thinks. We need to get used to it.

 

[Constance]

Haven't read it. Should I?

Hi Pharoah. Of course you should read it, and also MP and Varela, Thompson/Maturana/Panksepp if you want to follow developments in consciousness studies.

 

[Constance]

This entails taking what is now known and extrapolating beyond current boundaries of interpretation. Under this guise, given their central role in our attempts at understanding the mind, the existing orthodoxy regarding knowledge, information, representation and intentionality would have to be transformed by extension; a much less ominous task.

Like walking up the down escalator. The "current boundaries of interpretation," aka "the existing orthodoxy," are obstacles and forces constituting pressure against examining human experience without presuppositions that the world can be described objectively from points of view arising inside it.

 

[Constance]

Examining consciousness requires thinking outside the box in which we place ourselves when we accept the objectivist paradigm of reality, of what-is.

 

[Constance]

@Constance . . . My rule of thumb... if you don't know why someone as smart as DC wrote something, don't try to reinterpret what he wrote. Why did he write the HP paper? Don't know.
I know you like Varela, but I lost my patience with his work... but I have forgotten why.

He obviously wrote the initial paper on the HP to point to a distinction that makes a qualitative difference given with the activity of human consciousness, to understand which we need to investigate the evolutionary grounds of that activity [ETA: as well as the complex interactive nature of that activity vis a vis objects, other existential subjects, and ideas and their contexts encountered in the sociocultural world].* Unfortunately, his analysis went no deeper than 'qualia' defined as 'what it feels like'. See Lowe and others for necessary critiques of C's short-circuited thinking.

Re your rule of thumb highlighted in blue above, you don't seem to have realized that all reading is interpretation -- yours, mine, everyone else's. We pull the meaning of any text out of it by interpreting what the author has written {and significantly, there is more to be derived from any written text than that which the author intended to put there}. Derrida and others made this fact unambiguously clear by exemplifying the ambiguity of meaning contained in the language to which texts are reduced. It's the reason why we need to work through various interpretations of texts hermeneutically to reach any mutual understanding of them, just as we have to multiply our own perspectives and entertain the perspectives of others if we are to clarify what is expressed and not expressed, given and not given, in our perceptions of things in the world around us as well as in our perceptions of the meanings expressed in texts.

*Note: He did write a paper in which he attempted to deal with the phenomenology of consciousness, which I linked here sometime during the last year. I want to read it again and will also post it.