Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

[Randall]

I address the core problem by saying that my line of inquiry won't explain how consciousness is imparted onto the field. That problem is another discussion altogether.

Yes and that discussion is the one we are having here.

Not really. That's the discussion you think you're having. Consciousness is incidental to the larger metaphysical question of how the fundamental forces of nature are imparted onto our universe.

The discussion you want to have is a good one and is a subtopic here, I would suggest starting another thread, but:

I don't see much more room for discussion other than to watch for the latest scientific breakthroughs, or pursue less promising lines of inquiry simply for discussion's sake.

Indicates that such a thread would be just for posting such breakthroughs. The last half means your continuing participation here would either be to convince others of your POV (which is fine) or simply to participate for discussion's sake - which seems to me to be a waster of time.

I'm not out to convince anyone of anything. I'm just here to explore the issues with the hope of advancing my own understanding. In that sense Constance is correct that "it's all about me" LOL, and in some respects unless the lines of inquiry I'm on open up with some new discoveries, then I'm stuck waiting, unless, that is, I become actively involved in the research, which I neither have the funding nor the academic credentials for ( even if I am right ). Also, discussion for discussion's sake isn't necessarily a waste of time. I like to write and our diversion onto Free Will was engaging. So not everything has to be about progress, but at the same time, having come this far now, other things have also moved up on my priority list, so I'll probably go back to being a more passive observer for a while.

 

[smcder]

Not really. That's the discussion you think you're having. Consciousness is incidental to the larger metaphysical question of how the fundamental forces of nature are imparted onto our universe.



I'm not out to convince anyone of anything. I'm just here to explore the issues with the hope of advancing my own understanding. In that sense Constance is correct that "it's all about me" LOL, and in some respects unless the lines of inquiry I'm on open up with some new discoveries, then I'm stuck waiting, unless, that is, I become actively involved in the research, which I neither have the funding nor the academic credentials for ( even if I am right ). Also, discussion for discussion's sake isn't necessarily a waste of time. I like to write and our diversion onto Free Will was engaging. So not everything has to be about progress, but at the same time, having come this far now, other things have also moved up on my priority list, so I'll probably go back to being a more passive observer for a while.

Good! I'll get back to the discussion I think I'm having and the thoughts I think I'm thinking and the life I think I'm enjoying! ;-)

 

[Randall]

Good! I'll get back to the discussion I think I'm having and the thoughts I think I'm thinking and the life I think I'm enjoying! ;-)

LOL ... Fabulous . Please tag me if any scientific news on the detection of fields related to consciousness and the Thalamocortical system should come up, or if you think that some other line of inquiry has provided more promising and substantial evidence in favor of it. At this point I just don't see any.

 

[smcder]

LOL ... Fabulous . Please tag me if any scientific news on the detection of fields related to consciousness and the Thalamocortical system should come up, or if you think that some other line of inquiry has provided more promising and substantial evidence in favor of it. At this point I just don't see any.

No, that's not my job to do for you. I'm closing out this line of discussion - is there anything else you'd like to add before I go on to other things?

 

[Randall]

No, that's not my job to do for you. I'm closing out this line of discussion - is there anything else you'd like to add before I go on to other things?

Hey don't shoot me man, I'm just a graceful slow dancer. I'm just a dream here. I'm not real at all ...

How I spent My Fall Vacation - When The Leaves Come Falling Down

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[smcder]

Hey don't shoot me man, I'm just a graceful slow dancer. I'm just a dream here. I'm not real at all ...

How I spent My Fall Vacation - When The Leaves Come Falling Down

​

​

100% as predicted.

This is a classic example of passive aggressive behavior: provoke and withdraw "hey, come on now, you misunderstand me, I'm really the victim of that misunderstanding."

I knew when you started being "nice" a few posts back that we'd end up here ... again, as we always do.

You'll come back with more "humor" or defensive, in the victim role, and add me to your long list of folk who've done you wrong, who don't understand.

The pattern is crystal clear.

There's no response to passive - aggresive behavior except to avoid it.

So, with that, is there anything else you'd like to say before I put you on ignore?

 

[Constance]

I've caught up with the interesting discussion between Steve and Pharoah today, saving responses along the way in Word. I'll post some of those after I reread them to see if there is redundancy in them.

I see that Steve's last post preceding this one of mine must be to Ufology, so I'll un-ignore the posts by him in the last two pages of the thread to see what's up with that. As that's apparently a side issue, I'll look into it later.

On the whole the thread has evolved in most interesting and productive ways while I slept.

 

[smcder]

I've caught up with the interesting discussion between Steve and Pharoah today, saving responses along the way in Word. I'll post some of those after I reread them to see if there is redundancy in them.

I see that Steve's last post preceding this one of mine must be to Ufology, so I'll un-ignore the posts by him in the last two pages of the thread to see what's up with that. As that's apparently a side issue, I'll look into it later.

On the whole the thread has evolved in most interesting and productive ways while I slept.

I think I am making some progress understanding @Pharoah and in learning how to be helpful in my critique. An aspect of the zombie argument is clearer for me thanks to Nagel's 98 paper and Velmans paper and talk have helped me see two very distinct approaches - and to understand his approach as taking consciousness to be causally effective and to proceed with science using both first and third person methods.

 

[Pharoah]

@Pharoah

@ufology - your stance seems to me what @Pharoah calls a skeptical stance, a hard mysterianism:

The only place we have left to go is to figure out how the fundamental forces of nature are imparted onto our universe, and then consciousness becomes incidental. It's also a question science doesn't know how to answer with any certainty. It's the mystery of existence itself, and the only sense to be had of that is that our universe is some sort of simulation and the forces that we see imparted on it are therefore arbitrary variables of the construct. If that's true, then there are even more practical applications to be had if we can figure out how to interface with the system. But in the end, even that doesn't explain what's beyond whatever realm constructed this one, and so on in an infinite recursion. There's just no answer other than to look at it all as some sort of amazing adventure for whatever species can advance far enough to explore it.

@Pharaoh is that correct? I hope my approach can be differentiated from this at least on the level of being helpful to your efforts. In other words, I want to adopt a stance of helpful criticism within the scope of your paper.

@smcder
Your comments have been very helpful. I get a sense that section 6 is the first major stumbling block. I am not sure whether there is a misunderstanding or disagreement. not sure what the nature of the problem is yet with section 6...
I feel I need to emphasise that providing an obj-sub bridge is to explain from no viewpoint in particular—a view from nowhere. His chapter 4 is about the particular point of reference of oneself... and this distinction he made in his email to me when I queried him on it (after he wrote M&C) I think that you @smcder might be conflating the two in your expectations of a bridging account.
btw TENS is nothing like HCT

 

[Constance]

Responding back through the discussion today . . .

I have a hard time separating the effect on the argument whether its increasing complexity or the nature of the complexity ... and anyway tables, cities and cups of hot tea are probably less complex than the fruit fly brain, right? How would you even measure complexity? That seems to get into the area of IIT.

Tables and teacups are simple enough, but cities? They grow out of the complexity that resides in both the subjective and objective contributions to the reality we live in -- and from their integration in what we do. We will never be able to enumerate the numberless ways in which the complexity of both the physical world and the mind that copes with and changes it produce our present situation in the world, which is open-ended. The hope of contemporary reductive neuroscientists that we can account for all this on the sole basis of objective processes of 'information' is close to ludicrous imo.

It still comes down to emergence - the basic argument is make something complex enough in the right way and consciousness emerges but that doesn't address the how. It seems to me there comes to a point in your paper where you are taking the presence of consciousness for granted and start using it in your arguments.

We have to take consciousness for granted as part of what is. We might never understand what consciousness is. We certainly will not be able to do so by limiting our thinking to the reductivist presuppositions of physics and information science as they function today.

 

[Constance]

Ufology wrote {post: 232501, member: 2682}:

Not really. That's the discussion you think you're having. Consciousness is incidental to the larger metaphysical question of how the fundamental forces of nature are imparted onto our universe."

That is a global claim that lacks sufficient support. It is an expression of your own presupposition concerning the nature of reality -- of what-is -- in a world that includes consciousness and mind. I wouldn't even attempt to change your mind at this point.

 

[Constance]

Continuing my post to Steve above:

ETA: "It still comes down to emergence." Only if one insists at the outset that the subjective pole of experienced reality {our lived reality} must be explicable in terms of an objective description of reality – which as Nagel said will take a very long time to prove -- if it can be proved.

If and when such an account is demonstrated we will all be dust mingled with the earth, whereas the world as integrated and ‘realized’ in our intermingled (entangled) minds might have an extended existence beyond the place in which we’ve lived and thought and produced our interpretations of the world from more than its objective outlines. The mental might extend into a deeply extended ‘World’ in which our lived experience as captured by Mind {our minds and other minds suriving beyond the local world} continue in another state of being. We have no idea whether what we think and do continues in another worldly dimension in the cosmos where the holographic net of our connections with 'what-is' as lived extends into a different kind of existence.

Meanwhile we need to understand 'emergence' beyond its current reduction to theories based in physicality, objectivity. The emergence of consciousness from life has produced a world different from the pure physicality assumed to evolve from the moment of the 'Big Bang' -- a world in which the subjective, experienced, sense of being and reflections upon being add another, a further, dimension to what-is in the effort to comprehend what-is.

 

[Constance]

A poem from Stevens along these lines:

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.*

Wallace Stevens


We may say, 'no, that can't be', but like Stevens we don't know. I post this poem again especially for @Soupie who has asked how I can entertain ideas about the survival of consciousness while also recognizing the claims of the physical world upon us. If we take seriously our feelings about this physical world and the others we encounter in it, and if we take seriously the statements of many physicists that information is never lost but resides permanently in holographic integration in our universe or in the cosmos, it seems to follow that the information engendered, felt, lived in our own experience {the innumerable ties that bind us to this world and our past lives in it} is as real as the information maintained and generated in the quantum substrate which generates the evolution of the complex fields and forces of the physical world. We have only to take our experience seriously as a part of the world that is in our experience of it, of which our consciousness and minds are a necessary and distinguishable part. In Stevens words at the end of another, longer, later poem:

“. . . That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change. (443)


I'll stop with quotations from Stevens now, but my hope is that his poetry opens up the phenomenological base of the reality we live in as part of the being of the world that is.

ETA: Note that poetry as exemplified in Stevens's expression would be understood and appreciated by Heidegger given his later writings on poetry as "originary language," language that expresses the 'whereabouts' of our existence.

 

[Constance]

Steve wrote (I think in response to Ufology):

“Access consciousness emerging, OK. But phenomenal (or consciousness having a phenomenal aspect, if you dont think the two can be separated) just emerging - thats a hard story to sell.”

Agreed. Phenomenal consciousness (which must be recognized already at the prereflective level) is two in one -- two aspects of any phenomenon revealed in any and every experience on the way to and within reflective consciousness within which we work out our relationship to things and other conscious beings in the world.

We know what it is; we do not know its origin or its ontological significance {except, I would say, in the later work of Merleau-Ponty}. We will never comprehend this interrelatedness and integration of the subjective and objective aspects of embodied consciousness if we continue to look for possible explanations of it in objects, matter, physicality, physical information alone. We cannot hope to comprehend the equation that contains our being by restricting ourselves to the study of only half of it.

Phenomenological philosophy for the last century and more recognizes the whole equation as borne out of experience and mind. Reductivists, objectivists, do not like phenomenology and resist reading it. It seems obvious to me that they must walk down that path for some distance at least before they decide that all their answers will be found by exclusively pursuing the other path.

I would add that, given what we know about the limitations of what we can know, neither path alone promises to provide an answer that will suffice – so that we need to pursue both paths if we hope to come closer to sufficient understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world we live in.

 

[Constance]

The hypothesis that consciousness is ‘triggered’ into existence by increasing complexity in the brain’s physical organization is an article of faith that reductivist neuroscience has propagated. It remains an article of faith. I think that panpsychism is not the only alternative. Panksepp’s evolutionary research points in another direction, which too many people cannot conceive of – that life and lived experience in the world generate a distinction that makes a profound difference in how we can describe ‘reality’ because life instantiates awareness based in affectivity (a living response to the physical world which proceeds on a different basis, generates a different complex system out of that which is objectively ‘given’.

From affectivity to awareness to seeking behavior to protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind, life stands out from objectively describable physical processes, forces, materials {this is Heidegger’s ek-stasis} and, in humans (and possibly some other ‘higher animals), becomes in itself half of the ground upon which we construct a meaningful world on and out of the given materials of the earth and the universe.

Steve added:

“But the idea of emergence to me, whether or not it does develop is irrelevant [referring to Gould], says that consciousness is always an inherent possibility in a universe like ours. But that's unique --
the problem with comparing it with fields, is that fields are part of the basic furniture of the universe - they've always been there we just didnt discover them until recently - whats different about consciousness fields is that the idea is that the brain has to come along first, has to come along and get to a point where it can generate this new kind of field. . . . What else is like that in the universe?”

I think what you say in that paragraph is valid with the exception of the claim I've bolded. I think that what we observe in studying the evolution of consciousness is that field-like phenomena precede the development of the 'brain'. Panksepp writes in a paper I quoted near the end of Part 4 that it seems to him that the evolution of consciousness begins in the affectivity and seeking behavior of primordial organisms that do not yet possess neurons. No doubt this is a discussion that will continue in biological neuroscience and especially Panksepp's affective neuroscience.

Steve adds: “So if we are in a universe where utterly new things can pop out from appropriate levels of complexity and organization and consciousness is one of them, what else might be pop up that is novel from novel kinds of complexity and organization? Well, the answer is clearly X, right? By definition we would have no idea. And thats something I struggle with is how does this novel thing come into being - how do we think about a brain generating something new without thinking in terms of teleology or intention?”

Again, I think we have to think about and investigate consciousness in evoloutionary terms. Full-blown consciousness does not ‘pop out’ whole from primordial physical processes; it evolves, indeed, it is achieved, through the history of interactively lived experience in the palpable world as encountered in the classical reality in which we {like our forebears} have existed, continue to exist while alive.

 

[Pharoah]

@smcder
1.you say, "I have a hard time separating the effect on the argument whether its increasing complexity or the nature of the complexity"
Complexity does not have much of a home in HCT: subatomic particles are very complex, but that doesn't make them conscious (in my book anyway). However, the hierarchy is very important; each level exists—has meaning! of its type—because of its interactive engagement with environment. It is the meaning that come into existence... each layer evolving a different class.
2. you say, "It still comes down to emergence - the basic argument is make something complex enough in the right way and consciousness emerges but that doesn't address the how. It seems to me there comes to a point in your paper where you are taking the presence of consciousness for granted and start using it in your arguments."
I absolutely do address the how. I explain how qualitative meaning evolves in each hierarchical class, and I indicate why this evolution leads to the emergence of new hierarchical levels. Ultimately, it leads to meaning about meaning... the subjective reflection of the content of meaning, which just so happens to define the subjective.
3. Where have you got to in the paper?

@Constance
1. It strikes me that you are very anti reductionism. It is almost a passion for you, it seems to me. Why do you feel so strongly about this? I can't say that I am anti anything passionately.
2. in #912 there is a lot of blue underlined text. Is that your opinion/stance, or is it a quotation?

 

[Constance]

I think it's perhaps time to talk about the imaginative capacities of consciousness in our experience. MP wrote that “the imagination is present in the first human perception.” Nagel expresses the same recognition in one of the passages quoted above in this thread, which I'll have to relocate and specify.

Consciousness at the reflective level becomes aware of the horizonal limits of what we can see in our environment and sense in other ways -- what we hear, the sources of which we cannot always identify; what we taste and smell; the effects of touching and being touched by others and even the things around us; what we feel emotionally and also physically in the winds that blow across our bodies – what is the origin of the wind? What is the origin of all that we experience, the multiplicity of things and other beings that affect us? We are not the first creatures evolved on earth that have felt the wind, seen the changes of light and shadow on the things we encounter on the ground and in the sky, heard the expressed being of other creatures vocalizing in the distance. We alike are open to and part of all that experience of being-in-the-world.

The only difference is that we can reflect on, think about, and question the extent of the world we encounter within given horizons, and in time contemplate the many things in it that we cannot fully account for. Similarly, we receive less tangible senses and impressions of things, minds, perhaps beings, that we do not encounter in the local physical environment we move about in. Our capacity of imagination extends beyond the visible to the invisible [MP's terms] made mentally palpable as the other side of every thing we perceive in our ordinary walks through the phenomenally present local world. We learn early that we have to multiply our perspectives on things, walk around to their other sides to conceive more fully of what they are. This situation applies as well to the conceivable other side of the observable physical world, to what might exist beyond the horizons of what we can perceive.

 

[Pharoah]

@smcder. Constance quotes you as saying
1. "So if we are in a universe where utterly new things can pop out from appropriate levels of complexity and organization and consciousness is one of them, what else might be pop up that is novel from novel kinds of complexity and organization? Well, the answer is clearly X, right? By definition we would have no idea...."
HCT predicts that there has to be another hierarchical level that does not yet exist on earth.
and
2. "...And thats something I struggle with is how does this novel thing come into being - how do we think about a brain generating something new without thinking in terms of teleology or intention?”
We do think in terms of teleology and intention! Bingo

 

[Pharoah]

@Constance you are as obsessed about the view from somewhere, as I am of the view from nowhere in particular.

 

[Constance]

@Constance
1. It strikes me that you are very anti reductionism. It is almost a passion for you, it seems to me. Why do you feel so strongly about this? I can't say that I am anti anything passionately.
2. in #912 there is a lot of blue underlined text. Is that your opinion/stance, or is it a quotation?

Re point 2, sorry for the confusion. I usually put quotation marks and even links to material I quote. I was not quoting anyone in #912, just expressing, as you note, a convicted passion about what I was saying, so highlighting it in blue and underscoring it. .

Re point 1: "1. It strikes me that you are very anti reductionism. It is almost a passion for you, it seems to me. Why do you feel so strongly about this? I can't say that I am anti anything passionately."

All I can say is that I've been thinking in my anti-reductionist vein for a long time now, since I read phenomenological philosophy and first studied Stevens (wrote my diss. on his poetry from the insights of phenomenology) and then subsequently attempted to make sense of physicalist reductionism, qm, systems thinking, etc. You're correct to say that I am a passionate anti-reductionist.