Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

[smcder]

That should be a challenge. I guess you've chosen to accept that impossible mission. I always wondered why the spies in that television program never declined the missions described to them, even though the last line of the mission outline specified "should you choose to accept it."

What specifically is the mission impossible?

 

[Soupie]

In the videos @Michael Allen posted re Metzinger's PSM theory, Metzinger referred to the case of a woman who was born without arms and legs. However, the woman had the phenomenal experience of fully intact arms and legs.

One odd thing he noted was that she only identified having 3 toes. Her big toe, pinky toe, and middle toe. (My assumption is that our core PSM is ancient and the three-toed hind feet are a carry over from an ancestor in our deep past.)

Anyhow, in light of that, I found the following study pretty interesting. I would assume the others of the following study are familiar with the former.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-09-piggy.html

"Do you know where each of your toes are? This may seem a bizarre question, but a surprising study Monday suggests you may not.

To test it: go home, recline with your eyes closed, ask someone to prod your toes one by one, and guess which one is which.

Don't be surprised if you falter—just under half of people in a trial group were unable to tell which was their second toe (the one next to the big one), researchers reported in the journal Perception.

"The average proportion of correct responses for the second, third and fourth toes in healthy humans is lower than expected" at 57, 60 and 79 percent respectively, study co-author Nela Cicmil of the University of Oxford told AFP.

The same test with fingers yielded an accuracy of 99 percent, while the big and small toes were correctly identified in 94 percent of cases."

 

[smcder]

In the videos @Michael Allen posted re Metzinger's PSM theory, Metzinger referred to the case of a woman who was born without arms and legs. However, the woman had the phenomenal experience of fully intact arms and legs.

One odd thing he noted was that she only identified having 3 toes. Her big toe, pinky toe, and middle toe. (My assumption is that our core PSM is ancient and the three-toed hind feet are a carry over from an ancestor in our deep past.)

Anyhow, in light of that, I found the following study pretty interesting. I would assume the others of the following study are familiar with the former.

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-09-piggy.html

"Do you know where each of your toes are? This may seem a bizarre question, but a surprising study Monday suggests you may not.

To test it: go home, recline with your eyes closed, ask someone to prod your toes one by one, and guess which one is which.

Don't be surprised if you falter—just under half of people in a trial group were unable to tell which was their second toe (the one next to the big one), researchers reported in the journal Perception.

"The average proportion of correct responses for the second, third and fourth toes in healthy humans is lower than expected" at 57, 60 and 79 percent respectively, study co-author Nela Cicmil of the University of Oxford told AFP.

The same test with fingers yielded an accuracy of 99 percent, while the big and small toes were correctly identified in 94 percent of cases."

What was the expected proportion?

What is PSM?

 

[Soupie]

@Pharoah

I'm going to begin reading your paper tonight. Here are the questions I'm expecting it to address and answer.

(1) What is phenomenal consciousness?

(2) How and why do humans possess it?

And as a bonus, (3) how and why are we only phenomenally conscious of some of the physical stimuli interacting with and influencing our bodies (and behavior) at any given moment?

Are those fair questions?

 

[Soupie]

What was the expected proportion?

What is PSM?

Fingers were all 99% and big/small toes were 94%, so I'd guess mid/upper 90s? Havent looked for full study.

Phenomenal self-model

 

[Constance]

What specifically is the mission impossible?

Compressing 'what you believe' into 500 words, even if you were restricted only to the subject of consciousness, seems to me to be impossible given all that you've written in this two-year-old thread.

 

[Constance]

Speaking of Metzinger's 'phenomenal self-model', I've just read a very good paper on the phenomenological self-model in prereflective experience as first explicated by Merleau-Ponty and further in research by other phenomenologists, such as this paper reports. [ETA: I've extracted the last three paragraphs of the paper as an orientation, but one needs to read the whole paper to appreciate the significance of the research it reports and thus to begin to comprehend what prereflective consciousness is.]

Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: On Being Bodily in the World

Dorothée Legrand CREA—Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée

" . . . Self-relative information is not information about the self, but information about the world relative to the self. At the sensori-motor level, this self-relativity is given by the reciprocal modulation of perceptual afference and motor efference. This provides the basis for the functioning of the body schema, and, this is the proposal here, for pre-reflective bodily consciousness.

Mostly for the same reason, the position proposed here also differs importantly from any proposal which would try to conceive of the “sense of self par excellence” as mostly afferent or mostly efferent. Beyond their dispute, these two positions share the same conception of bodily self-consciousness in that they both tackle exclusively observational self-conscious-ness: they investigate only self-specific information, that is, information about the self (here the body). This might appear as conceptually obvious and methodologically the easiest way to follow when one wants to tackle self-consciousness. However, the fundamental form of self-consciousness, pre-reflective self-consciousness, cannot rely on self-specific information. It rather relies on self-relative information, information about the world that is relative to the self/body. The present proposal is thus that a foundational bodily experience is pre-reflective and rooted in sensori-motor integration,16 rather than primarily on afference or primarily on efference. Importantly, the reason why it is so is not contingent. Rather, it coheres with a crucial claim that remains mostly misunderstood but that this paper intended to clarify: “it seems not to be necessary, if a subject is to think about himself self-consciously, that he actually have any information about himself” (Evans 1982, p.215). This coheres with the view that pre-reflective self-consciousness is grounded on self-relative information processing.

Last, the position defended here differs fundamentally from the conception of the body schema as anonymous17 and of action representations as neutral (Jeannerod and Pacherie 2004). Rather, the present proposal is that integrative sensori-motor processes constituting the functional body anchor a form of bodily pre-reflective self-consciousness (Legrand, 2007a). The latter lies between the “invisible body” (absent from the experience) and the “opaque body” (taken as an intentional object of consciousness) and has been described here as both the “performative body” (the pre-reflective experience of the body itself) and the “transparent body” (the pre-reflective bodily experience of the world).

http://www.janushead.org/9-2/Legrand.pdf

 

[smcder]

Compressing 'what you believe' into 500 words, even if you were restricted only to the subject of consciousness, seems to me to be impossible given all that you've written in this two-year-old thread.

 

[Soupie]

But I would remind you of the point you make in RQM, that even the correlation between two systems is only definable from the standpoint of a third system.

An interesting nugget from Johnson in his reply to Rovelli, taken from the exchanges Constance recently posted.

 

[Constance]

Johnson to Rovelli: "But I would remind you of the point you make in RQM, that even the correlation between two systems is only definable from the standpoint of a third system."

An interesting nugget from Johnson in his reply to Rovelli, taken from the exchanges Constance recently posted.

Would you flesh out the relevance of that quote in terms of the thread today, or to something you or someone else has posted in it? The connection or context is not clear to me at the moment. Thanks.

 

[smcder]

That should be a challenge. I guess you've chosen to accept that impossible mission. I always wondered why the spies in that television program never declined the missions described to them, even though the last line of the mission outline specified "should you choose to accept it."

I caught that too, clearly they had no real choice in the matter. I think a few missed the mission for being injured by the exploding tape ...

 

[smcder]

@smcder :
"the world we reconstruct (if we can) will be the world for which EDNA is pefectly adapted which will not be the world as it exists"
Yes. In fact, the world as it is has killed her and all other species on the planet. There is a correspondence between all levels of knowledge and reality. That correspondence is justified but never completely.
Very interesting line of thought.

Your comments may be the same, but they will reflect your particular bias in thought about the ideas as they come up.

I thought it was damn clever, but you are probably used to that sort of thing from me by now.

I have no discernible bias in my thinking. Here is a diagrammatic construct of my position in terms of an objective prepropositional stance:

0
t
/\*
-------
objectivity

*What the diagram does not show is my three toed PSM.

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah - what is the new icon? I drew my own.

 

[smcder]

Yes, I thought I'd butt in here and agree with the definition of 'clocked' in this context. It jumped out at me because it is an expression I use day to day but I'm now wondering where it originated? I would guess to 'clock' something came from the action of glancing at a clock and noting the time, so when used elsewhere, it just means that one takes a quick mental note of a meaning or state etc.

Am I stating the blindingly obvious? I think it's the first time I wondered about the origin of 'clocked' like this....

Here in the rural, deep south of the United States we have many colorful sayings ... a buddy of mine used to generate them on the spot, I am sure there is an online Southern expression generator, some of the key terms and phrases are:

'possum
critter
bless his heart
y'all
yonder
road kill
purt near
fixin' to
reckon

As in:

Y'all I reckon that 'possum critter, bless his heart, is fixin' to reckon whether to cross the road purt near yonder intersection ... if'n he does, he's road kill and then he's mine and maws for a cook up.

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah

moving ahead with section 3 on Berrybug - I think I will see if I can write this in to my own words

 

[smcder]

the e coli is that the organism makes changes as it moves through the digestive tract (track?), right? and then you can fool it in the lab by making certain stimuli to think its moving along that tract (and I assume they make meds to do this in order to kill the bacteria?)

 

[smcder]

thinking allowed - @Constance you mentioned Toscanini humming while he directed, Glenn Gould did this for his piano playing and you can hear it on some recordings for example the Goldbug Variations ... @Pharoah have either of you seen 32 short films about Glenn Gould with Colm Fiore (sp?)

OK so this is a redux of 2 (knowledge) for representation - the same logic ...

The philosophical orthodoxy on representation does not normally extend to biochemical and neurological mechanisms, typically confining representation to semantically evaluable mental objects, such as concepts, ideas, impressions, percepts, rules and thoughts. The alternative here, indicates that physiological mechanisms must be representational.

 

[smcder]

Bam! there it is

This idea qualifies the second expansionist parameter, viz., there is a qualitative representational correspondence between a species’ physiologies and the world.

and here:

Whilst it is true that physiologies do not represent what things are—namely, in this example, the qualitative colors of objects out there in the world—they do represent what environmental features have come to mean for the survival of any given species.

the light dawns ...!

 

[smcder]

the web makes the oddest connections ...

Do we see reality as it is? That was the title of TED talk by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman in March, 2015, where he brilliantly explains that natural selection does not select perception of reality as it is but a species specific perception for survival. He shows evolution is a mathematically precise theory and displays equations and an interesting diagram to display the results of his computer generated simulations of many worlds. Here is part of his talk.

So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins?

Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor vertical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct.

 

[smcder]

Does natural selection favor veridical perceptions, those that more accurately depict the objective environment? Students of perception often claim that it does. But this claim, though influential, has not been adequately tested. Here we formalize the claim and a few alternatives. To test them, we introduce ‘‘interface games,’’ a class of evolutionary games in which perceptual strategies compete. We explore, in closed-form solutions and Monte Carlo simulations, some simpler games that assume frequency- dependent selection and complete mixing in infinite populations. We find that veridical perceptions can be driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies that are tuned to utility rather than objective reality. This suggests that natural selection need not favor veridical perceptions, and that the effects of selection on sensory perception deserve further study.