Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

[Soupie]

Is there something you want a response to specifically?

Im struggling with terminology used here, i found this article below - is it a good definition of the terms as you use them or ...?

Information processing, computation, and cognition

mputation and information processing are among the most fundamental notions in cognitive science. They are also among the most imprecisely discussed. Many cognitive scientists take it for granted that cognition involves computation, information processing, or both – although others disagree vehemently. Yet different cognitive scientists use ‘computation’ and ‘information processing’ to mean different things, sometimes without realizing that they do. In addition, computation and information processing are surrounded by several myths; first and foremost, that they are the same thing. In this paper, we address this unsatisfactory state of affairs by presenting a general and theory-neutral account of computation and information processing. We also apply our framework by analyzing the relations between computation and information processing on one hand and classicism, connectionism, and computational neuroscience on the other. We defend the relevance to cognitive science of both computation, at least in a generic sense, and information processing, in three important senses of the term. Our account advances several foundational debates in cognitive science by untangling some of their conceptualknots in a theory-neutral way. By leveling the playing field, we pave the way for the future resolution of the debates’ empirical aspects.

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

When I use the phrase information processing, I don't have a specific type of information processing in mind. I've been reading as much about information processing, neurology, cognition, and consciousness as I can.

I still havent been able to find a paper devoted to a complex systems approach to brain function. (Maybe you could find one for me. )

What I mean by information processing is pretty wide-open: i think of the body and brain as dynamic systems (as described in the video on embodied spirituality, for example). The body-brain system, or organism, interacts with the wider system, or environment.

I dont use the term "system" to sound fancy. I use it to help myself--and whoever Im talking with--view the interactions from an objective perspective. Organisms and environments are dynamic, systems constantly in a state of flux. I think this is forgotten when we just say "person" and "environment."

A person and an environment are, again like described in the video you shared, more like whirlpools in the ocean than static, unchanging things.

A person and the environment are constantly physically interacting. (From one perspective, we could say they arent even distinct processes.) Stimuli in the environment create perturbations in the person (this is easier to conceptualize if we recognize a person is a dynamic system).

These perturbations—i believe—inform the system/person, allowing it to move/behave accordingly.

It is my "hypothesis" that this process of being informed is the substrate of consciousness.

Whether the perturbations within the systems are computational or not, i dont know. From the book "mind in life," neurophenomenology seems to take a dynamic systems approach to brain function, which i think would not be computational in nature. However, i think—and could be very wrong—that the pertubrations within the system can still be conceptualized as an information process.

Like I said, I havent been able to find any articles describing how the brain might react to the environment and guide behavior by way of being a dynamic system.

Thank you for the article shared here.

 

[Constance]

Carman . . . "Far from showing that there is no difference in general between seeing and judging, Kolers’s experiment shows only that our ordinary notions of seeing and judging break down with appearances on such a small scale. An interesting result, but hardly a reason to deny the existence of qualitative sensory experience as distinct from judgment wholesale, as Dennett does. Denying that
there is any distinction at all between phenomenal seemings and cognitive judgings is a drastic conclusion to draw from the evidence. We should not infer from a few ambiguous cases in highly artificial conditions that there is never a difference between how things seem to me and how I judge them to be, or indeed how I judge them to seem, as if those distinctions were just conceptual or verbal confusions, like the distinction between pain and the feeling of pain."

 

[Randall]

@ufology
@Soupie

Would it be possible to discuss some issues of terminology/jargon?

The way I think of the discussion, we are working "idiosyncratically" - by that I mean without consistent reference to an established body of thought - so we don't have access to a common source of word definitions/meanings and context. The individual using a particular term idiosyncratically knows exactly what they mean but this may not convey to the reader who may have other associations with the terms used.

example Let's say we were all phenomenologists - if there is a question about a term, we could then point back to an established body of thought and texts in order to help resolve what words and concepts mean. This can be very difficult even in such circumstances of course - but when we work idiosyncratically we need to be particularly careful because the meanings aren't established and widely available.

Here's an example:

@ufology you write:
On the issue of embodiment, there are two distinct contexts. I'm not sure which you're referring to e.g. embodied cognition, or embodied imagination, but in any case, you may recall that I have often used the phrase brain-body system ( BBS ), and that is because in the context of our material selves, the body plays a crucial role in identity and appears to directly influences the mind via a chain of biological processes.

My use of the word "embodiment" was unclear, so you responded with two possible contexts: "embodied cognition" and "embodied imagination". I had to look up "embodied imagination" - what I found is that it is a form of dream work developed by Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak. As far as I can tell, that has nothing to do with the discussion, so now I would have to go back and look at my original post to see what I meant and if it matches "embodied cognition" or some other term.

A good goal then, would be to either use every day meanings or phrases or to mark any questionable term with a source or to provide context or definition at each use so that the terms in every post are clear. Post by post clarity as a goal so that a reader doesn't have to look to multiple posts for clarity. Obviously this is an ideal. But maybe this will help having to go back through multiple posts to see what is being referred to - even in established bodies of thought, word meanings are contested (see the article I posted above on "information processing").

@ufology you continue:
"you may recall that I have often used the phrase brain-body system ( BBS ), and that is because in the context of our material selves, the body plays a
crucial role in identity and appears to directly influences the mind via a chain of biological processes."

Two things here, I have seen you, @Soupie, use something like this term - but otherwise I don't find a clear defintion of "brain-body system" by doing a search. You could well say the meaning is clear ... but again, this may be a case where you know exactly what you mean but it's not clear to the reader. We also have an appearance of another red flag: the acronym. You do provide context for the phrase in the sentence above: "the body plays a crucial role in identity ... " but could we just use this phrase or something like it to convey precise meaning rather than rely on brain-body system to convey a range of meanings?

@ufology this isn't an issue of vocabulary, but it's a source of confusion:

The above is entirely expected and logical when considered in the context of the BBS as the source of speech. This reminds me that I should rewind a bit, because if I recall correctly, at some point when I mentioned how I create music, you suggested ( to paraphrase ) that if I create the work as a whole in my mind, then the outcome could be looked at simply as brain function, not unlike a tape recorder, and therefore consciousness isn't really necessary, or is just along for the ride. It's not quite that simple. The work doesn't just appear in a flash as a completed work.

When I see the phrase "if I recall correctly" I prepare myself to go look for the intial instance of what's being recalled ... what makes the thread/discussion format so difficult for me is that I so often don't recall correctly. You probably do - but as in the example above, I don't and so I still need to go back and check my memory - because looking at your paraphrase I remember the post but not exactly, I remember a dream and a song by Bruce Cochran (and this was about the time I had a dream with music in it) and I remember some other discussion but I can't confirm that your paraphrase gets at what I meant exactly without hunting down the reference - so if possible, provide quotes or links to things that other people said. This can be hard in the flow of a discussion and for me it feels like it slows me down, but once confusion enters the discussion comes to a stop anyway.

So vocabulary, sourcing or quoting and finally, post in small bits - I am terrible at this, but in the discussion format - it's so easy to get confused ... so instead of dealing with multiple concepts in one post, can we do one question or concept at a time? Or, what might work better, if you want to soar and post a lot of thoughts and ideas, that is great, but at the end, if you want a specific response, post a single question or concept you want to be addressed?

I'm open to all feedback on this and any other ideas to make the discussion more productive.

Everything you're saying above makes perfect sense and it's one of the things about philosophy that IMO amounts to bloat rather than insight. I refer to all the philosophical jargon and minutiae associated with who said what as "philosophese". It's great as a form of shorthand during discussion for those who have a penchant for memorizing phone books and other trivia. But simply because a philosophy major can recite "so and so" during a discussion doesn't mean they're making any relevant point.

I've mentioned it before. It might be great as a mental workout, but in what way does it advance the issue at hand? Responses that then involve some sort of flippant remark and/or the throwing of another few phone books worth of material at the questioner are IMO the same as hand waving. They might as well say, "I don't know, go look it up yourself". At one time I used to attend a cool little meeting they called Philosophy Café. We'd meet once a week and discuss most of the same issues we've been discussing here.

A couple of the participants ( names escape me at the moment ) were introduced as retired professors and from time to time they'd go off on an exchange along some branch of the philosophical tree, and I'd be lost. But when they got to the resolution, they would always bring it back to the issue at hand and were happy to summarize in layman's language. Sometimes I'd still have to go off and look things up and reflect and come back the next week, but the point is that they made a real effort not to be academic elitists. Philosophy mattered to them on a personal level that I could relate to.

In a way I think it could be argued that philosophy is by its nature idiosyncratic, and therefore it's not surprising that the study of philosophy has become very idiosyncratic. But when it becomes more about who said what than why or how things are, I tend to lose interest. My personal idiosyncratic way of philosophizing involves less looking up other people's answers, and more of trying to think it through for myself, identifying where the sticky points are, and trying to figure them out. Sure that might involve doing some referencing. It's very useful at times, but when it gets to the point where one person is objecting to the ideas of another simply because they're thinking isn't aligned with some pre-fab methodology or mindset e.g. reductionism vs. non-reductionism, it doesn't help advance our understanding of the issue at hand.

Anyway, that's why I asked you to sum up your present position in a single paragraph in your own words that includes a mention of the key issues in support of it. If we all did that then we could deal with the key points of difference or uncertainty one-by-one in a manner that is relevant to each other's primary interest in the discussion. That would give me some idea of what it is you're trying to accomplish, if anything beyond merely having a discussion for discussion's sake, which BTW is fine too if that's your thing, but that also leaves us in the same position as before this post.

 

[Randall]

The last part of the neuroscience paper Steve linked last night and that I quoted from appeared in this post, where I provided a link to the paper itself so that others could read for themselves the discussion on 'information' of various types, some semantic and some not semantic, and discern further distinctions between expressions of 'natural' and 'unnatural' semantics with which conscious individuals must attempt to think. Here again is the link to the whole paper, where you can scroll down to that discussion:

Information processing, computation, and cognition

Just skip to this part and you'll get it right away ... LOL

 

[smcder]

Everything you're saying above makes perfect sense and it's one of the things about philosophy that IMO amounts to bloat rather than insight. I refer to all the philosophical jargon and minutiae associated with who said what as "philosophese". It's great as a form of shorthand during discussion for those who have a penchant for memorizing phone books and other trivia. But simply because a philosophy major can recite "so and so" during a discussion doesn't mean they're making any relevant point.

I've mentioned it before. It might be great as a mental workout, but in what way does it advance the issue at hand? Responses that then involve some sort of flippant remark and/or the throwing of another few phone books worth of material at the questioner are IMO the same as hand waving. They might as well say, "I don't know, go look it up yourself". At one time I used to attend a cool little meeting they called Philosophy Café. We'd meet once a week and discuss most of the same issues we've been discussing here.

A couple of the participants ( names escape me at the moment ) were introduced as retired professors and from time to time they'd go off on an exchange along some branch of the philosophical tree, and I'd be lost. But when they got to the resolution, they would always bring it back to the issue at hand and were happy to summarize in layman's language. Sometimes I'd still have to go off and look things up and reflect and come back the next week, but the point is that they made a real effort not to be academic elitists. Philosophy mattered to them on a personal level that I could relate to.

In a way I think it could be argued that philosophy is by its nature idiosyncratic, and therefore it's not surprising that the study of philosophy has become very idiosyncratic. But when it becomes more about who said what than why or how things are, I tend to lose interest. My personal idiosyncratic way of philosophizing involves less looking up other people's answers, and more of trying to think it through for myself, identifying where the sticky points are, and trying to figure them out. Sure that might involve doing some referencing. It's very useful at times, but when it gets to the point where one person is objecting to the ideas of another simply because they're thinking isn't aligned with some pre-fab methodology or mindset e.g. reductionism vs. non-reductionism, it doesn't help advance our understanding of the issue at hand.

Anyway, that's why I asked you to sum up your present position in a single paragraph in your own words that includes a mention of the key issues in support of it. If we all did that then we could deal with the key points of difference or uncertainty one-by-one in a manner that is relevant to each other's primary interest in the discussion. That would give me some idea of what it is you're trying to accomplish, if anything beyond merely having a discussion for discussion's sake, which BTW is fine too if that's your thing, but that also leaves us in the same position as before this post.

So you agree to the suggestions I made?

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

 

[Randall]

So you agree to the suggestions I made?

In principle, but that doesn't mean I won't post video, nor does it mean I'm going to start using formal citations, nor does it mean I won't editorialize or provide original content. If you want to quote my content on your new website, that's fine with me, but please link it back here if you do.

 

[Constance]

When I use the phrase information processing, I don't have a specific type of information processing in mind.

What type or types of information processing does Tononi write about currently and do they differ from what he thought in the first two issues of his IIT theory? In other words, have his references to 'information' expanded or changed since version 3 of his IIT theory, which we discussed here about a year ago?

I still havent been able to find a paper devoted to a complex systems approach to brain function. (Maybe you could find one for me. )

Didn't Thompson's Mind in Life explore this question? And doesn't Tononi?

I dont use the term "system" to sound fancy. I use it to help myself--and whoever Im talking with--view the interactions from an objective perspective.

Does that mean that you continue to doubt the reality of subjective experience/consciousness?

Whether the perturbations within the systems are computational or not, i dont know. From the book "mind in life," neurophenomenology seems to take a dynamic systems approach to brain function, which i think would not be computational in nature. However, i think—and could be very wrong—that the pertubrations within the system can still be conceptualized as an information process.

I still do not understand what you mean by "an information process." Has reading the paper Steve posted raised any new questions for you concerning what is meant by various neuroscientists who use the term information freely without defining it and those who object to this?

 

[Constance]

from Taylor Carman, "On the Inescapability of Phenomenology":

"What are ‘sensorimotor contingencies’, after all, and what is it to ‘know’, ‘grasp’, or ‘master’ them? They are, according to O’Regan and Noë, ‘the structure of the rules governing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001: 941). There is, they continue, ‘a lawful relation of dependence between visual stimulation and what we do’, and ‘our brains have extracted such laws’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001: 944). Again, O’Regan and Noë do not mean that we, or any other animals for that matter, have a theoretical grasp of rules or laws explicitly articulated in the form of propositions, but that ‘the animal, or its brain, must be “tuned to” these laws of sensorimotor contingencies. That is, the animal must be actively exercising its mastery of these laws’ (O’Regan and Noë 2001: 943).

I take it that, notwithstanding their talk of rules ‘governing’ sensorimotor interactions, O’Regan and Noë mean by ‘rule’ and ‘law’ something more like causal pattern or regularity. But this is crucial, for once we understand that the laws in question are mere regularities, and not intelligible forms or structures of experience with normative import for the agent, we see that, although the organism’s ‘mastery’ of them may be practical and nonpropositional, as opposed to theoretical and explicit, nevertheless what an agent thereby grasps is just a complex web of causal relations.

In this respect, I want to argue, the account is wrong—wrong phenomenologically, and so too therefore wrong at the personal level of description. The theory might be correct as an account of the neurological and ecological conditions that make perceptual experience possible. What it cannot account for, however, is the intentionality of perception, including above all the intentional aspects of our proprioceptive sense of ourselves and our bodies. Indeed, O’Regan and Noë might themselves be guilty of conflating the personal and the subpersonal, or the phenomenological and the neurological. Is it, after all, ‘the animal’ or ‘its brain’ that must be ‘tuned to’ the laws of sensorimotor contingency? If it is the brain or nervous system, then what O’Regan and Noë call its ‘grasp’ of those laws looks less like a form of understanding than simply an additional set of emerging regularities, namely the neurological processes induced or generated by the organism’s interaction with its environment. This is ‘understanding’ in an attenuated Humean sense, at best. If, however, it is the animal or agent as a whole that is supposed to respond to the sensorimotor contingencies, then it seems to me O’Regan and Noë have misdescribed the character of that responsiveness. More precisely, they describe it in such a way as to eliminate the normativity, hence the intentionality that, as I said at the outset, characterizes our grasp of the structures and contents of our own experience. . . .

". . . the kind of motivation suited to an account of the bodily structure of perception must be neither fully rational nor merely causal, but rather something intermediary between the two.¹⁶ Merleau-Ponty writes,

'the phenomenological notion of motivation is one of those ‘fluid’ concepts that must be formed if we want to get back to the phenomena. One phenomenon releases another, not by some objective efficacy, like that which links events in nature, but by the meaning it offers—there is a raison d’être that orients the flux of phenomena without being explicitly posited in any one of them, a sort of operant reason. (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 57)'" (pp.83-84)

 

[Constance]

further extract from the Carman paper:

. . . "The sensorimotor integration belonging to embodied perception is thus constituted not by causal contingencies, but by motivational necessities. When I understand myself as perceptually oriented in a world, I am not merely accustomed to the fact that if I turn my head, I will see the tree. Rather, I know that in order to see the tree, I need to turn my head. Seeing the tree requires that I turn to look at it. It is not just that the environment presents me with sensory input that I know as a matter of fact to be correlated in various ways with the movements of my body, even granting that I master that fact in a skillful way without calculating or thinking about it propositionally. Rather, insofar as my environment is not just a structured domain of objects and relations with which I skillfully interact, but an intelligible world that I inhabit, it always confronts me with a field of possibilities and likewise imposes demands on me. A world qua world affords, invites, and facilitates, just as it obtrudes, resists, thwarts, eludes, and coerces. Things present themselves to me with positive and negative valence of all kinds, primordially and inextricably fused with my own bodily needs and capacities.¹⁷

This fusion is what Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, calls our ‘being in the world’ (être au monde). It is what he would later more colorfully describe as the ‘intertwining’ (entrelacs) or ‘chiasm’ of body and world, which always belong to one and the same ‘flesh’ (chair) (Merleau-Ponty 1968: ch. 4). The crucial point here is that our intertwinedness with the world is not just a ‘coupling’ of discrete things, say, sensory stimuli and bodily movements. Moreover, the difference is a phenomenological difference. That is, although the causal relation between our sensory systems and the environment may well involve precisely the sort of interconnections O’Regan and Noë describe, our intentional orientation in a meaningful world does not show up for us as a merely contingent interdependence of formally discrete elements. We experience our embeddedness in the world not as contingent but as necessary, indeed as definitive of us, for it constitutes not just what we can do and what will happen, but moreover what we need, hence what we must do."

 

[Michael Allen]

After reading all of the literature and comments posted here, I feel that my head is swimming in a miasma of ideas about our own generator of the same that may be throwing us off track...and I suspect there is great utility in our own brain throwing us off track...so here goes.

Taking the shortest path I will assert something that will seem odd but yet the strangest utterance that can be made by any being that has sentience or recursive-being-ness....the world recursively folding itself into something that resembles the division made ...and is something in the world that can partition the world and take ownership of...the concept of ownership emerges at the same time as the thing that can "understand" the concept ...coeval like Dasein and World...

[Purple]
Phenomenal qualia...so ineffable...so foundationless and obvious...the closest and furthest concept from human understanding...so close to human understanding that it cannot turn on itself without destroying the very relations and connections between entities that bear its existence...

Ok lets just say that we can recover the logical source of existence by checking our deworlded objects against a function instantiated by the virtual machine running itself into paths based on the relations between its lower level automata, sensory relays, somatic processes, mechanical reflexes....its can push all of the information from those activities into a scratchpad of synchronized neurons...mind is to model entropy and see changes in order....without the progressing of order to disorder there would be no background for which activities and goals could be synchronized...therefore regardless of the perceived conflict or paradox between PSM and determinism conflict from an de-worlded view free-will (as we feel and experience it) requires determinism...reductio ad absurdum for a universe that is not deterministic and yet has self-modelling portions of itself working out spatial and temporal relations between ...all components that eventually allow it to create a sharp demarcation dividing itself from the world and actively supporting a fertile fallacy of itself as ontologically separate from the world.

(view from no dasein or goal oriented being)....there can be no phenomenal experience of free "will" in a universe which is not determistic from the deworlded perspective (existential analytic places our concept into the correct slot....but this is even saying too much...because the very observation or direction of this very sentence actually throws dasein off the real path to understanding...this is due to an overflow caused by self-referentiality...we cannot create too many scaffolds to encompass the region of dasein's focus on its own creation without changing the very connections that alter its history, spatiality, temporality, etc...)

[/purple]

Basically what I am saying is that we cannot allow our own concepts of our own systems of understanding to take over for their own existence ( definition ). If to understand consciousness is to destroy it (I don't know this)...then our attempts may be repeatedly thwarted by memes that are captured and released over thousands...if not millions...of years.

 

[Michael Allen]

And...brw...I have not desire or interest in feeding the troll...so I will refrain from any unsolicited comments.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[TheBitterOne]

I believe all consistent participants in this discussion have been sincere. Have we often presented contradictory and confusing explanations of our approach to and understanding of the origin and nature of consciousness? Yes.

Is that surprising considering there is no consensus regarding the origin and nature of consciousness among the world's leading philosophers and scientists? No.

I'm not insulting anyone; just throwing a different viewpoint into the mix.

Complexity manifests from simplicity in the same way that thoughts arise within the space of conscious awareness (anyone who doubts the latter point need only gain a rudimentary familiarity with meditation to have it confirmed).

Increasing complexity in an attempt to understand or apprehend the essence of simplicity is a futile approach, as is trying to arrive at the root of consciousness by generating more and more branches of thought.

It might be an interesting or stimulating exercise, but it is searching in the wrong direction entirely.

 

[smcder]

I'm not insulting anyone; just throwing a different viewpoint into the mix.

Complexity manifests from simplicity in the same way that thoughts arise within the space of conscious awareness (anyone who doubts the latter point need only gain a rudimentary familiarity with meditation to have it confirmed).

Increasing complexity in an attempt to understand or apprehend the essence of simplicity is a futile approach, as is looking for the root of consciousness by generating more and more thoughts.

It might be an interesting or stimulating exercise, but it is searching in the wrong direction entirely.

Practicing simplicity and tuning into the nature of consciousness are inextricably related.

You keep editing and adding words to your post.

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

 

[TheBitterOne]

You keep editing and adding words to your post.

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

Yeah, a little anal retentive here - didn't think anyone was watching.

Sorry!

 

[smcder]

Yeah, a little anal retentive here - didn't think anyone was watching.

Sorry!

"papañca" as anyone with a rudimentary familiarity of Buddhism will know.

;-)

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

 

[TheBitterOne]

"papañca" as anyone with a rudimentary familiarity of Buddhism will know.

;-)

Maybe, but the word "papañca" doesn't really mean anything to most people (or anyone), does it?

It's a good example of the difference between simplification and obfuscation.

 

[smcder]

Maybe, but the word "papañca" doesn't really mean anything to most people (or anyone), does it?

It's a good example of the difference between simplification and obfuscation.

"conceptual proliferation"




Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk

 

[Constance]

Basically what I am saying is that we cannot allow our own concepts of our own systems of understanding to take over for their own existence ( definition ). If to understand consciousness is to destroy it (I don't know this)...then our attempts may be repeatedly thwarted by memes that are captured and released over thousands...if not millions...of years.

How could our attempts "to understand consciousness . . . destroy it"? You seem to be arguing that consciousness is nothing more than an effect of an immense system that might eventually be understood in purely objective physicalist and deterministic terms. But whether that is or is not the case, we are conscious, and there are consequences in our lives of our being conscious. We experience the transitory, temporal nature of our existence as awareness of and being-in the classically described world we inhabit. This world is the one we exist in. Though there might be elaborate quantum and subquantum 'machinery' beneath what we experience, we live in and through our actual experience with the possibilities and demands it reveals to us as our 'situation'. The experiential conditions of this existence are what existential phenomenology describes as the ground of the meaning we find and also generate in existing at this point in our temporal evolution -- and can't not find and generate at a certain level of personal maturation. [ETA: Not to recogize the degrees of our freedom and consequent responsibility in this situation -- this 'world' -- is to live an inauthentic existence, to live, as Sartre expressed it, in "bad faith."]

Quoting again this sentence from Merleau-Ponty in the extracts I posted above from Taylor Carman's paper, "We experience our embeddedness in the world not as contingent but as necessary, indeed as definitive of us, for it constitutes not just what we can do and what will happen, but moreover what we need, hence what we must do."

 

[Constance]

Here is a book by an established neuroscientist that we should all probably read:

Paul Nunez, Brain, Mind and the Structure of Reality, published in 2010 by the Oxford University Press.

At this page furnished by Oxford UP you will find a general overview of the book and descriptions of each chapter:

Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality - Oxford Scholarship

 

[Constance]

The abstract for the Nunez book as a whole:

"Does the brain create the mind, or is some external entity involved? In addressing this hard problem of consciousness, we face a central human challenge: what do we really know and how do we know it? Tentative answers in this book follow from a synthesis of profound ideas, borrowed from philosophy, religion, politics, economics, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and cosmology, the knowledge structures supporting our meager grasp of reality. This search for new links in the web of human knowledge extends in many directions: the shadows of our thought processes revealed by brain imagining, brains treated as complex adaptive systems that reveal fractal-like behavior in the brain's nested hierarchy, resonant interactions facilitating functional connections in brain tissue, probability and entropy as measures of human ignorance, fundamental limits on human knowledge, and the central role played by information in both brains and physical systems. The author discusses the possibility of deep connections between relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and consciousness; all entities involved with fundamental information barriers. This study elaborates on possible new links in this nested web of human knowledge that may tell us something new about the nature and origins of consciousness. In the end, does the brain create the mind? Or is the mind already out there?"

Follow the above with a reading of the descriptions provided at the Oxford link for each chapter of Nunez's book for a fuller orientation to the scope and grounds of his thinking about consciousness.