Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

[Constance]

One can of course reject these various attempts at resolving the HP, however, they are still attempts. In regards to HCT, I don’t see how it attempts to resolve the HP.

I think the approaches you've identified have actually been attempts to eliminate the HP rather than to 'resolve' it. Each of them fails in the first place to recognize the natural depth of the HP and its consequences. Colin McGinn has recognized the challenges posed by 'the hard problem of consciousness' and decided that it is beyond us to understand consciousness in light of the HP; he refers to his position as 'mysterianism'.

Phenomenology has long recognized the HP and does not see consciousness as 'mysterious' but rather in need of complex and subtle analyses of its phenomenal nature, which calls for an understanding of the phenomenal nature of experience itself {experience being the ground from which consciousness evolves -- develops its grasp of what it means to sense one's being-in-the-world and then to reflect on that condition as the premise from which we think and act in the cultural worlds we construct upon the earth}.

 

[Constance]

Question (HP): Why is it that physiological representations give rise to phenomenal representations?

That question might express the HP as materialist/physicalist science approaches it, but it is, obviously, already theory-laden, presuppositional, in its conviction that everything that is arises from physical processes alone. That premise in itself is not proved.

 

[Constance]

Steve wrote↑
"I know I am missing something, but nothing in the above explanation tells me why "qualitatively relevant" has to feel like anything. All of the above could happen without there being anyone home, so to speak."

Soupie added: "Yes, that's my conclusion as well."


If the world's 'qualitative relevance' for us as beings-in-the-world never 'felt like anything', we would be zombies, as Chalmers characterized zombies. But we are not zombies because the character of the experience of living organisms is to sense, which is to feel, their own existence, at first inchoately but in the evolution of species to feel the 'self's own existence' with increasing awareness, eventuating in the development of reflective consciousness in some highly evolved species.

@Pharoah emailed me several papers by Panksepp and quoted an email he received from Panksepp with those papers. Panksepp used a phrase in that email -- "affective sentience" -- that points toward the origin of consciousess in the 'affectivity' of living organisms as in itself a germinal form of sentience. In other words, to sense or feel X is to begin to know X. And X is primordially not only the sense of the reality of an actual world extending beyond the organism's apperception, but increasing in evolution the sense of the relatedness of the 'self' and the world in which the organism or animal finds itself existing.

I think we have to bracket our own sensual contacts with the palpable world (and our interpretations of what-is as developed through reflection on our own experience) in order to imagine the earliest condition or state of affectivity experienced by primordial organisms lacking our evolved sensorium and evolved neural equipment . . . and then think evolution in terms of the evolution of consciousness as well as of physical species from those germinal beginnings of prereflectively lived experience. For that experienced being is the ultimate ground of whatever we can eventually learn and 'know'. We can never escape 'our bond with all that flesh,' in MP's words -- 'flesh' being the term that designates his developed concept of that which fundamentally unites consciousness/mind with nature.

 

[Soupie]

I recently came across the phrase "Embodied Functionalism," which was described as a leading approach to mind. That was news to me. I did some Google searching but haven't been able to find a nice summary of this approach.

I did do a little more reading about embodied, extended, and enactive approaches to mind. As always, I come away confused. It seems that these approaches are not standardized in any agreed way. The main takeaway seems to be that they are anti-representational.

I found this article which looks interesting and which I hope to read shortly:

https://ezequieldipaolo.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kyselo_dipaolo.pdf

Locked-in syndrome: a challenge for embodied cognitive science

"Abstract Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodi- ment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked- in syndrome (LIS). LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS."

My hope for the paper is that it will simply explain these approaches in concrete terms someone more familiar with representationalism can comprehend.

 

[Soupie]

pan en psychism

I'd like to hear more about this approach. "All-in-consciousness"? How does this differ from Idealism?

I think my preferred approach—dual aspect monism—could be construed in this manner. Ie mind and body are two sides of the same coin—exerting equal influence on another—but either side can only infer the existence of the other. That is, the view from nowhere (objective science) can only infer the existence of consciousness, and consciousness can only infer the existence of an objective, external world.

 

[smcder]

Psychopathology in the light of emergent trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenology

Psychopathology in the light of emergent trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenology

Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz
Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Corresponding author: Aaron L. Mishara, 6SAPP PO Box 819, Busch Campus, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08855-0819, USA
Current Opinion in Psychiatry 1997, 10:383-389
© Rapid Science Publishers
ISSN 0951-7367

A controversy rages in philosophical approaches to mind that goes to the core of the mind/body problem in psychiatry: how is it possible that a physical system, no matter complex, can give rise to the subjective experience of consciousness? Taking this irreducibility of consciousness into account, philosophical approaches to cognitive neuroscience and psychopathology, as well as the rapid evolving cognitive neuropsychiatry, have been forcing new resolutions to the mind/body problem and other traditional dualisms which plague the older psychiatric explanatory models.

Attempts to operationalize subjectivity in psychiatric research, however, are more concordant with the present trend to unburden clinical decision making by algorithmic formulas (as dictated by the pressures of managed care and operationalized research) than engaging and developing the skills of the clinician in terms of his or her total potential.

Such dilemmas require a renewed reading of classical psychiatrists who have attempted to take account of the subjective experience of consciousness in their seminal psychopathologies.

 

[smcder]

Recent interdisciplinary efforts connecting the fields of philosophy, psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience appear to be moving sometimes unwittingly, sometimes explicitly, towards an anticipated cooperation that will be enriching for all sides.

Despite ongoing disputes and boundary skirmishes, the Anglo-American philosophy' of mind and its adjunct sub-discipline philosophical psychopathology are converging with the continental phenomenological approach to embodied consciousness and subjectivity in mental disorder.

In the past year, both approaches have been concerned with embodied cognition, especially in cognitive neuroscience [1**,2*] and also in psychiatric disorders [3*]. Moreover, we are in complete agreement with the urgency expressed by Parnas and Bovet [3-] who wrote that unless such attempts are made to overcome the present objectivitistic, operationalizitic epistemology in psychiatry, 'aetiological research' will be seriously impeded (not to mention the effects of this research on treatment).

 

[Burnt State]

Psychopathology in the light of emergent trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenology

Psychopathology in the light of emergent trends in the philosophy of consciousness, neuropsychiatry and phenomenology

Aaron L. Mishara and Michael A. Schwartz
Department of Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Corresponding author: Aaron L. Mishara, 6SAPP PO Box 819, Busch Campus, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08855-0819, USA
Current Opinion in Psychiatry 1997, 10:383-389
© Rapid Science Publishers
ISSN 0951-7367

From the same article: (In validating such discourses, it also opens up a forum in which consumers are able to explore and develop their own collective identities, due to their struggle with common issues!)

I'm curious, as i'm a big fan of people speaking their story, but what do you do with people whose story has been inverted over time and come to subjectively assess themselves and their reality from a highly unique & self-destructive position such as the anorectic. when they speak their story they loathe themselves when they are eating and doing things that will get them healthy, and love themselves when they are punishing themselves by denying food and getting even thinner. the source of this narrative is deep within and the famine within equals self-love.

how do you approach storytelling as a means of healing when the belief in the inverted and damaging narrative is the one that they identify with, logic be damned?

 

[Constance]

In therapy developed to treat people suffering from eating disorders the goal is to undo deeply damaged self-concepts developed from exposure to extreme social representations of what one needs to 'look like' to be found lovable or even acceptable in the very sick culture we live in. It isn't the case that anorexics or bulimics 'love themselves' when they're fainting, bedridden, and starving, or vomiting after every meal they take in. They are trapped in their self-destructive behaviors and they hate the compulsion by which they're driven to repeat them.

 

[smcder]

From the same article: (In validating such discourses, it also opens up a forum in which consumers are able to explore and develop their own collective identities, due to their struggle with common issues!)

I'm curious, as i'm a big fan of people speaking their story, but what do you do with people whose story has been inverted over time and come to subjectively assess themselves and their reality from a highly unique & self-destructive position such as the anorectic. when they speak their story they loathe themselves when they are eating and doing things that will get them healthy, and love themselves when they are punishing themselves by denying food and getting even thinner. the source of this narrative is deep within and the famine within equals self-love.

how do you approach storytelling as a means of healing when the belief in the inverted and damaging narrative is the one that they identify with, logic be damned?

The trouble may lie in the assumption that storytelling is a means of healing.

 

[smcder]

The chips are down for Moore’s law

 

[Constance]

The trouble may lie in the assumption that storytelling is a means of healing.

I think you're right, Steve. What's healing is digging down to the sources of the story one becomes accustomed to telling oneself, and often the help of a skillful therapist is required to uncover the sources of one's self-destructive behaviors or ideations, which continue to affect us subconsciously. Negative, neurotic, or even just incompetent parenting are most often the root causes of the psychic wounds, fears, lack of self-esteem and self-efficacy that lead to dysfunctional behavior in adulthood. The isolation of nuclear families increases the risks that parental dysfunction will seed dysfunctional thinking and self-destructive behavior [and/or destructiveness toward others] in young and growing children. Tribal settings minimize the damage that can be done to children by one or both birth parents since other adults are nearby to prevent domestic violence [emotional as well as physical abuse] and provide other nurturing opportunities for children as well as additional role models.

 

[Soupie]

The trouble may lie in the assumption that storytelling is a means of healing.

So many different facets to this question.

What does the brain do? How does it do it? What is the mind? How does it relate to the body? How does it relate to the environment? What is mental illness? What causes it? What should we do about it? What can we do about it?

I don't even know how to characterize the fields of psychiatry and psychology. They're not young and they're not coherent.

Study after study has indicated that the relationship is the most therapeutic aspect of the counseling/therapy process. However, I think a big part of that relationship is sharing one's story—past and current—and making sense of it together.

But the notion of healing a 'mental illness' is contingent on what the 'mental illness' is. The environment-body-mind nexus is little understood and thus trying to manipulate it in any precise, surgical way is not available to us.

 

[smcder]

So many different facets to this question.

What does the brain do? How does it do it? What is the mind? How does it relate to the body? How does it relate to the environment? What is mental illness? What causes it? What should we do about it? What can we do about it?

I don't even know how to characterize the fields of psychiatry and psychology. They're not young and they're not coherent.

Study after study has indicated that the relationship is the most therapeutic aspect of the counseling/therapy process. However, I think a big part of that relationship is sharing one's story—past and current—and making sense of it together.

But the notion of healing a 'mental illness' is contingent on what the 'mental illness' is. The environment-body-mind nexus is little understood and thus trying to manipulate it in any precise, surgical way is not available to us.

That's a very complicated story!

I'd like to hear more from @Burnt State about telling our stories as a means of healing.

 

[smcder]

I recently came across the phrase "Embodied Functionalism," which was described as a leading approach to mind. That was news to me. I did some Google searching but haven't been able to find a nice summary of this approach.

I did do a little more reading about embodied, extended, and enactive approaches to mind. As always, I come away confused. It seems that these approaches are not standardized in any agreed way. The main takeaway seems to be that they are anti-representational.

I found this article which looks interesting and which I hope to read shortly:

https://ezequieldipaolo.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/kyselo_dipaolo.pdf

Locked-in syndrome: a challenge for embodied cognitive science

"Abstract Embodied approaches in cognitive science hold that the body is crucial for cognition. What this claim amounts to, however, still remains unclear. This paper contributes to its clarification by confronting three ways of understanding embodi- ment—the sensorimotor approach, extended cognition and enactivism—with Locked- in syndrome (LIS). LIS is a case of severe global paralysis in which patients are unable to move and yet largely remain cognitively intact. We propose that LIS poses a challenge to embodied approaches to cognition requiring them to make explicit the notion of embodiment they defend and its role for cognition. We argue that the sensorimotor and the extended functionalist approaches either fall short of accounting for cognition in LIS from an embodied perspective or do it too broadly by relegating the body only to a historical role. Enactivism conceives of the body as autonomous system and of cognition as sense-making. From this perspective embodiment is not equated with bodily movement but with forms of agency that do not disappear with body paralysis. Enactivism offers a clarifying perspective on embodiment and thus currently appears to be the framework in embodied cognition best suited to address the challenge posed by LIS."

My hope for the paper is that it will simply explain these approaches in concrete terms someone more familiar with representationalism can comprehend.

What is representationalism? My sense is that it is where you keep a picture of reality in your head that you work from.

I've seen you post on LIS before, a couple of questions:

1. I presume this (LIS) happened to someone at some point in their lives - so that they had some time as a fully embodied person? so in the same way that someone is not blind from birth ... you see where that is going

2. the senses are still intact or not?

What I get of extended cognition or models of the mind where some of cognition is "in" the environment and body ... is that:

for example

when I drive to work, the landscape looks familiar, not because I have an exact picture of it in my head - I think about how sometimes a major landmark is torn down or replaced and how hard it is to remember what things looked like even a short time later, right? ... or I don't have to do a lot of work to keep up with personalities of my co-workers, they keep all that information for me - often I think "oh yeagh, I forgot Joe could be that way! but I reacted just the same way to him without thinking" -

right now, I can close my eyes and see some parts of my workspace, but others I can't and much of it not with any real detail, but more a sense of orientation, I can get the sense of familiarity so that if I move into that space, it will all snap into my head - and often if someone asks me for something that we don't use all the time at the front desk - I can say "I know where that is, I'll be right back" but I'm moving that way before I could tell you where it is - and if I stop and am honest with myself, I wouldn't be able to just tell you where that is - I have to move toward it and as I do, I move through the middle office I know it's in the back office and only when I get in the back office do I know it's on this side of the room, etc.

So the environment acts like "pointers" in a database -

This gets at Dreyfus' Heideggerean critique of GOFAI. By offloading work to the environment, the brain cuts way down on its work load - (see the article on Moore's law above).

 

[Burnt State]

That's a very complicated story!

I'd like to hear more from @Burnt State about telling our stories as a means of healing.

OK, let's say we have people who are living through trauma - traumas past, traumas present, traumas unknown but guessed at, and these are taboo, unspeakable, and survivors can't put words to this for fear of judgment an isolation from the tribe. but in safe spaces, when they do put words to it, and can verbalize what actually happened, there is power in the telling, a claim to what actually happened to them as a first step towards healing - accepting that what happened was out of their control but hurt like hell. Like a victim impact statement following the rape, assault and murder court case, there is a need to make the telling - to not hide or have the experience labelled or even interpreted by Herr Doktor.

I once saw a young woman tell her tale of sexual abuse to her peers following a long slow buildup towards claiming that narrative over months and years and then sharing it publicly and feeling the acceptance of her peers was what began her own path towards moving past the trauma, and back into her own body. She was then able to write her own story. Once i saw a student share her narrative of the moment her father stabbed her mother to death and how that empty silence and her fear of his coming out of jail was something that she needed to represent through her voice, images and music - it let her claim her space, let her feel safe. Somehow in the telling we can speak ourselves into a better reality, into less stress and anxiety, into a space of acceptance from the tribe. This is profound when it happens in these very unique and intense anomalous human experiences.

But i have noticed for many years now that the proverb is true: You can't hate someone whose story you know. When you share your story you are located and you belong and this changes how the body feels in a dramatic way. This is not an instantaneous process nor always predictable to a fault but common enough that it strikes me as being very relevant in how people can work to negotiate their own personal conflicts - transactional analysis and all that sort of thing. It's really just about validation as opposed to everyone in the tribe thinking that to keep demons away from the village it's best to chop up the kid who is an albino in to tiny pieces and consume him. We can either name ourselves or be named, but the former seems to be so much more mentally and socially productive. And the very act of telling our story makes our mind and boy feel so much better.

 

[smcder]

OK, let's say we have people who are living through trauma - traumas past, traumas present, traumas unknown but guessed at, and these are taboo, unspeakable, and survivors can't put words to this for fear of judgment an isolation from the tribe. but in safe spaces, when they do put words to it, and can verbalize what actually happened, there is power in the telling, a claim to what actually happened to them as a first step towards healing - accepting that what happened was out of their control but hurt like hell. Like a victim impact statement following the rape, assault and murder court case, there is a need to make the telling - to not hide or have the experience labelled or even interpreted by Herr Doktor.

I once saw a young woman tell her tale of sexual abuse to her peers following a long slow buildup towards claiming that narrative over months and years and then sharing it publicly and feeling the acceptance of her peers was what began her own path towards moving past the trauma, and back into her own body. She was then able to write her own story. Once i saw a student share her narrative of the moment her father stabbed her mother to death and how that empty silence and her fear of his coming out of jail was something that she needed to represent through her voice, images and music - it let her claim her space, let her feel safe. Somehow in the telling we can speak ourselves into a better reality, into less stress and anxiety, into a space of acceptance from the tribe. This is profound when it happens in these very unique and intense anomalous human experiences.

But i have noticed for many years now that the proverb is true: You can't hate someone whose story you know. When you share your story you are located and you belong and this changes how the body feels in a dramatic way. This is not an instantaneous process nor always predictable to a fault but common enough that it strikes me as being very relevant in how people can work to negotiate their own personal conflicts - transactional analysis and all that sort of thing. It's really just about validation as opposed to everyone in the tribe thinking that to keep demons away from the village it's best to chop up the kid who is an albino in to tiny pieces and consume him. We can either name ourselves or be named, but the former seems to be so much more mentally and socially productive. And the very act of telling our story makes our mind and boy feel so much better.

What happens next for the people above - who have named themselves and told their stories?

 

[Burnt State]

What happens next for the people above - who have named themselves and told their stories?

No real simple answer here as this type of sharing I see as an ongoing process in any group formation so that people get to know more and more about each other, to take strength from sharing their moments of weakness & pain and to feel a sense of belonging because now other people know their story. Next steps are always about community strength. But in the case of the two that I highlighted, because these stories were very complicated they had different journeys. For the sexual abuse survivor she was connected to an organization whose specific focus is on working with youth who are sexual abuse/assault survivors. She went there for a while. The court cases were a bust and despite repeated testimonies and personal exposure in a public and judging space there were no gains, only disbelief. Her cousin could not testify against her own father and the case fell apart. She moved on to post-secondary, found herself a boyfriend, wanted to put the past in the past, and continues to study in her chosen field. She continues to visit and share time with me and it seems that things are going in a positive direction. I know for her the experience of sharing her story, being believed and accepted by peers and adults, was fairly profound and healing for her.

The second story with the murder was really complicated. Our school staff actually teamed up with another organization to redo their home as since the murder 15 years earlier there had been no work done to the home. We raised money with our staff and volunteered to completely redo their home, get some employment and new starts for other family members and continued too support our student who was in her graduating year. Kids could not entirely relate to her story - it was very outside their normal experience. I continue to see her and is also working in post-secondary in her chosen profession. For her, getting this experience and her fear out in the open helped her to see it and it was in the first tellings of this fear to two teachers that started this whole event where our staff rallied around her and her siblings to try to give them a new start and opportunity as a way to defeat the fear and anxiety of their father coming out of jail the next year.

Generally speaking, these claims to first person narration are formative for young people, and I would gather, for anyone who is carrying the burden of an unspoken story, the story that is the definer but is too difficult to speak. But I will confess that after they leave here if they choose not to maintain the therapy with a professional i can not fully say what happens next as i often see them right on the edge of their leaving school and transitioning into post-secondary. I know that talking circles for kids who struggle with different part of their lives and have shared experiences of mental health issues, poverty, and especially grief, are very helpful spaces for personal progress.

 

[Soupie]

This was in my stream from January:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-therapy-storytelling-key-trauma-bullying.html

"Trauma is like a book on a shelf full of memories that a person has no control over in terms of when or how it is experienced," says Volpe, PhD, assistant professor in the UB School of Nursing. "Narrative exposure therapy helps reestablish the link between memories that were destroyed by trauma, allowing people to have more control over the book."

These links, says Volpe, are what holds together cold, or contextual, memory, such as people, places and events, and hot, or sensory, memory, which includes smells, images, sounds and more. The destruction of this link can cause people to relive a traumatic experience after being triggered by a specific sense, such as a war veteran experiencing PTSD symptoms after hearing exploding fireworks.

NET is a cognitive behavioral therapy that helps participants reconstruct fragmented, traumatic memories into a clear, personalized story. The brief therapy, which can be completed in 12-16 sessions, helps rebuild the memory by asking participants to recall details such as their age during the experience, the timeline of events, their hopes or fears and notable sounds, smells or other senses."

Note: Everything is considered CBT these days.

 

[Constance]

Somehow in the telling we can speak ourselves into a better reality, into less stress and anxiety, into a space of acceptance from the tribe. This is profound when it happens in these very unique and intense anomalous human experiences.

And also in cases of trauma not based in encounters with anomalous phenomena but rather in atrocities committed by other humans in our lived social realities. In all these cases individuals need to face and to share what they remember (with supportive psychological experts and others who have lived through the same or similar experiences) in order to reintegrate themselves emotionally -- and also gradually to trust others again.