Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

[Constance]

@Constance I agree that the orthodoxy on representation is problematic—"as contained in neurological information and somehow realized".

I think the term/concept 'representation' has been a long-standing problem in philosophy, made more acutely problematic in the contemporary influence of 'information theory' in neuroscience. Fortunately, neuroscience is not one-dimensional; there are neuroscientists, beginning with Varela, who recognize the difference between 'information' as processed neurologically and what conscious (and protoconscious) entities actually experience in the world, which is the means by which consciousness and thinking evolve in living organisms..

I think the orthodoxy's problem relates to getting meaning into the equation... how to get quality into the representational model and how to negate the dichotomy of the object and the object-as-represented gulf.

I think that's exactly right. If we receive 'representations' already constituted in our neurons, constituted as if by a homunculus, we do not need to exist bodily and mentally in the world and respond to and contemplate the world and our relationship with it. We might then as well be zombies. But we are not zombies. We are open to the temporal world as we experience it in our own temporality -- we find and continually add meaning to 'what-is', producing historical sedimentations of that meaning from which we also 'stand out' in our present situations and responses to them. We respond deeply, at the level of feeling rising even in prereflective experience and gradually at the level of thinking, of conceptualizing the relationship between mind and world that is constituted in consciousness.

Of course, I would argue that HCT succeeds in virtue of the hierarchy.
Your desciption of direct presentation reminds me of Searle's naive realist stance. I have argued why his position is problematic.

Merleau-Ponty referred to the empiricists of his time as "naive realists" and critiqued their approach alongside his critique of the 'intellectualists' who thought they could describe what-is from a purely mental perspective outside of and beyond experience. I'll do some reading of Searle's position; what text do you recommend?

Quoting the rest of Pharoah's post:

@Soupie
"Do you consider the terms "phenomenal quality" and "qualitative representation" to be equivalent?"
no.

"According to HCT, are the following two statements true or false?
(1) Qualitative, phenomenal representations do not exist before the emergence of organisms with 'innate biochemical ... environmental correspondence.'
(2) Qualitative, phenomenal representations do exist after the emergence of organisms with 'innate biochemical ... environmental correspondences.' "

1. true
2. qualitative representations... true; phenomenal representations... false
(To qualify, I don't think I have every used the phrase "phenomenal representations" because it is problematic... it might get you thinking in identity terms. The quality is represented. The phenomenon, is the quality as experienced—as a dynamic changing landscape). Interestingly, what does become relatively fixed, in an organism that possesses phenomenal experience, is their "understanding" of the qualitative relevancy of their experience. This I equate to 'that which is learnt' about the qualitative nature of the environment as represented. This 'understanding' that an organism possess of its individuated experience as it relates to the world, is the transcendent feature of phenomenally experiencing organisms.

hope that helps[/QUOTE]

I think what you write there is very clarifying, Pharoah.

 

[Pharoah]

I'm confusing you, haha!?

You say "phenomenal blue is a qualitatively relevant representation."

I think I understand what you think better than you think I understand what you think.

The question I (and @smcder) are patiently, painstakingly trying to get you to address is how do phenomenal qualities (representations in your terminology) come into existence in the first place.

Before they can be "qualitatively relevant" and before they can be "evaluated" they have to exist.

If they don't exist before sufficiently complex organisms exist, and they do exist after sufficiently complex organisms exist, the question is: by what means/processes/whatever do they exist.

Above you listed a dozen or more postulates that HCT makes. I can't penetrate the first two! That's discouraging.

re propositions 1 and 2. I don't know what the problem might be in understanding them.
I'm raising my glass to confusion tonight... down zee hatch.
Oh... replication: because with replicqtion, qualitatively relevant survival improvements can be transmitted from generation to generation, transcending the life of individaul structures. Leqding to growth and evolutin of qualitatively relevant mechanisms. It aint complicated soupie

 

[Soupie]

Oh... replication: because with replicqtion, qualitatively relevant survival improvements can be transmitted from generation to generation, transcending the life of individaul structures. Leqding to growth and evolutin of qualitatively relevant mechanisms. It aint complicated soupie

Qualitatively relevant mechanisms? You just said the representations were the things that were qualitatively relevant.

So which is it, @Pharoah?

 

[Constance]

You say "phenomenal blue is a qualitatively relevant representation."

I think I understand what you think better than you think I understand what you think.

The question I (and @smcder) are patiently, painstakingly trying to get you to address is how do phenomenal qualities (representations in your terminology) come into existence in the first place.

Before they can be "qualitatively relevant" and before they can be "evaluated" they have to exist.

If they don't exist before sufficiently complex organisms exist, and they do exist after sufficiently complex organisms exist, the question is: by what means/processes/whatever do they exist.

Above you listed a dozen or more postulates that HCT makes. I can't penetrate the first two! That's discouraging.

I think Pharoah is pointing to the apparent fact that protoconscious and conscious organisms develop the capacity to form their own representations of their environments out of sensory 'gifts of nature' -- the capability of feeling and eventually seeing, hearing, tasting the world and thus sensing, even prereflectively, their situation in that world as an individual relationship to the world. My only disagreement with HCT at this point is, as it was in earlier versions, that it does not recognize the implicitly felt 'knowledge' existing in organisms even before the development of the sensory organs of direct perception of their environment. I think we need to recognize that that primordial level of 'knowing' remains significant even in humans equipped with reflective thinking and conceptual thinking. It's difficult to talk about it as 'knowing' since in the history of both our philosophy and our science we have disregarded the question both of what consciousness is and the conditions in which it begins to exist.

Perhaps it helps to think of the seed of consciousness as first expressed in 'affectivity' {Panksepp's definition} as being similar to the early development of the fertilized egg in the womb. In its ontogeny, the developing foetus passes through physical forms that developed during the evolution of species. The developing foetus also becomes increasingly 'aware' of its environment (not only within the womb but in later weeks of pregnancy of sounds heard and feelings of others sensed outside the womb). The foetus feels those feelings expressed by others. It is on the way to being outside the womb, where it will see and hear and feel the reality of others and itself more fully and in its early years develop the capacity to think about what and who it is as an existing being in a complex, changing, and never fully understood 'world'.

In the earliest awakenings of consciousness in the primordial organism, it feels that it is ‘there’ without understanding what or where ‘there’ is. That is a kind of yet-inchoate knowledge that we have yet to recognize as real and productive in the development of consciousness and mind.

 

[Soupie]

It ain't complicated soupie

You're exactly right, @Pharoah. It's not. @smcder and I have tried to comprehend HCT. We've read all your papers and engaged you in direct 1:1 questioning. You have articulated your theory, and it simply does not provide the answers that you claim it does.

HCT does not close the explanatory gap; it does not provide a bridge between subjectivity and objectivity.

It's a specialized version of TENS, with consciousness stapled to the back of it. I'm sorry to be so harsh my friend, but after hours of reading your material and engaging you in simple, straightforward questioning, the answers simply are not there.

I wish you well with your model!

 

[Pharoah]

@Soupie, at its inception, very few people understood QM and it has taken time for its implications to be more fully understood. It is a different way of thinking. QM is complicated.
One day you wll get HcT. You will wake up one morning and it will dawn on you what HCT is about. The answers are there; you are just not seeing the wood for the trees atm... that is what I mean by it not being complicated.
Thanks for the feedback. Do revisit HCT sometime. It is the right model (i'm 99% certain)

 

[Constance]

HCT does not close the explanatory gap; it does not provide a bridge between subjectivity and objectivity.

It might be (and I think it likely is the case) that we in our present state of evolution cannot close the explanatory gap. As @smcder pointed out several sections back in the thread, this is the position taken and represented in Colin McGinn's 'new mysterianism'. I hope Steve will summarize McGinn's position for us and cite again the texts we need to read to understand it. I have to say that I don't think Pharoah's HCT can 'close' the explanatory gap, but it certainly brings us closer to understanding what that gap is in biological and evolutionary terms. In my view this is in itself a significant accomplishment. We now recognize the terrain we must navigate to recognize the distinction that makes a profound difference in what-is with the evolving presence of living, aware, and eventually thinking beings.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie, at its inception, very few people understood QM and it has taken time for its implications to be more fully understood. It is a different way of thinking. QM is complicated.
One day you wll get HcT. You will wake up one morning and it will dawn on you what HCT is about. The answers are there; you are just not seeing the wood for the trees atm... that is what I mean by it not being complicated.
Thanks for the feedback. Do revisit HCT sometime. It is the right model (i'm 99% certain)

What?

People didn't understand QM. Now they do. It's complicated.

People don't understand HCT. Some day they will. It's... not complicated?

This is doublespeak, Pharoah.

I gave you the opportunity to introduce a new concept. I was waiting anxiously for you to introduce a new concept.

Instead you said my questions confused you...

If it's not emergence. If it's not identity. If it's not physical. If it's not duality. ...

You had your opportunity to introduce "the new QM" and instead you got your terms bungled, double spoke, became confused.

And again, this was just postulates 1 and 2. I didn't even get to my concerns with the other postulates.

 

[Constance]

What?

People didn't understand QM. Now they do. It's complicated.

People don't understand HCT. Some day they will. It's... not complicated?

This is doublespeak, Pharoah.

I gave you the opportunity to introduce a new concept. I was waiting anxiously for you to introduce a new concept.

Instead you said my questions confused you...

If it's not emergence. If it's not identity. If it's not physical. If it's not duality. ...

You had your opportunity to introduce "the new QM" and instead you got your terms bungled, double spoke, became confused.

And again, this was just postulates 1 and 2. I didn't even get to my concerns with the other postulates.

@Soupie, this discussion has become overheated enough in the last week to suggest that we all need to lower the temperature if we are to have any meeting of minds on the core issues presented in the hard problem.. Communication is never easy, but it's especially difficult in subjects as complex as consciousness. Why don't we attempt to work on the terms we use that yet remain ambiguous and misleading?

 

[Constance]

Or in other words, let's not let the explanatory gap defeat us by the challenges it presents to our understanding of ourselves and the nature of reality. Indeed, we live in -- our lives and our thinking take place within -- the explanatory gap. .

 

[Pharoah]

yea @Soupie put the handbag down!!!

 

[Constance]

yea @Soupie put the handbag down!!!

Three years in a UK forum introduced me to the phrase "it's all handbags." Among other apt British-isms. This one, if I have it right, refers to typical arguments evolving in discussions among women drinking together in pubs and their eventually striking out at one another with their handbags. The same thing happens of course among men in pubs, but they don't have handbags so I suppose they use their fists or darts. In the end the arguments are forgotten and it's best to reduce any lingering effects with a light-hearted phrase: thus "it's all handbags."

I'm going to have a drink, just one, to calm my nerves.

 

[Constance]

If it's not emergence. If it's not identity. If it's not physical. If it's not duality. ...

. . . then it's something that can't be understood within those concepts. It's something new that comes into being with life and can only be fully understood in the experience of it.

 

[Pharoah]

We don't have guns in the Uk (about 10 gun related deaths per year in the country). We think of the US as having a lot of guns. So it was a parody on 'put the gun down' Also, handbag fighting for the combatants is very serious but in a monty python sort of way is very funny from the outside.

 

[Pharoah]

I can say till I am blue in the face that it involves emergence and evolution.
If I could strap the words to a rocket and shoot them up the proverbial, I doubt it would make any difference.

 

[Pharoah]

@Constance Searle: Intentionality (a book I'm not convinced you will like) and all his lecturing can be accessed as podcasts on itunes U

 

[Constance]

@Pharoah, I'm beginning to see your point of view about the 'emergence' (and needless to say, the evolution) of consciousness. Clearly the capability of awareness and subsequent protoconsciousness and consciousness are afforded by nature. The difference of opinion we've seen here seems to me to concern the question of 'what' is afforded, what is provided by nature, in physical evolution that enables the development of awareness in the first place and its development of consciousness as we understand it in homo sapiens.

It seems to me that it is not 'information' interacting with information off-stage in the background of life [inside the neurons] that can describe or account for the activity, the seeking behavior, the felt texture of existence, and the semiotic systems expressed from it out of which individuals and species take their stage of consciousness as far as it can go.

And it certainly does not seem possible that what happens in life and consciousness of varying degrees is foreordained, predetermined, by 'informational' exchanges and structures in the brain in itself. It happens out of the awareness of the living organism which marks its sense of its presence in and dependence on its surrounding environment, visibly marked in its affectivity {per Panksepp}. That which neurologically and bodily prepares us for awareness of and openness to the environment is not itself, cannot be, that awareness and openness. Neither neurons nor information have or know experience in and of the world and from that experience eventually think what can be done with and in and for the world by conscious beings. Neurons can only enable that which consciousness itself comes to know and think and do in the world.

What I've said does not match, to my knowledge, the meaning of 'emergence' as the term has been used by the self-designated 'evolutionary biologists' of fifteen years ago or cognitive neuroscientists and information theorists today. I don't think that what you've laid out in HCT does either. Is that correct?

 

[Randall]

Subjectivity and objectivity (if we assume such a thing truly exists) may be two aspects of one reality.

I've been saying that all along ... LOL .

 

[Pharoah]

@Pharoah, I'm beginning to see your point of view about the 'emergence' (and needless to say, the evolution) of consciousness. Clearly the capability of awareness and subsequent protoconsciousness and consciousness are afforded by nature. The difference of opinion we've seen here seems to me to concern the question of 'what' is afforded, what is provided by nature, in physical evolution that enables the development of awareness in the first place and its development of consciousness as we understand it in homo sapiens.

It seems to me that it is not 'information' interacting with information off-stage in the background of life [inside the neurons] that can describe or account for the activity, the seeking behavior, the felt texture of existence, and the semiotic systems expressed from it out of which individuals and species take their stage of consciousness as far as it can go.

And it certainly does not seem possible that what happens in life and consciousness of varying degrees is foreordained, predetermined, by 'informational' exchanges and structures in the brain in itself. It happens out of the awareness of the living organism which marks its sense of its presence in and dependence on its surrounding environment, visibly marked in its affectivity {per Panksepp}. That which neurologically and bodily prepares us for awareness of and openness to the environment is not itself, cannot be, that awareness and openness. Neither neurons nor information have or know experience in and of the world and from that experience eventually think what can be done with and in and for the world by conscious beings. Neurons can only enable that which consciousness itself comes to know and think and do in the world.

What I've said does not match, to my knowledge, the meaning of 'emergence' as the term has been used by the self-designated 'evolutionary biologists' of fifteen years ago or cognitive neuroscientists and information theorists today. I don't think that what you've laid out in HCT does either. Is that correct?

@Constance you ask
"what is provided by nature, in physical evolution that enables the development of awareness in the first place"

Answering this question is how I originally came up with HCT. The explanation is abstract and then entails extrapolation of the abstract idea. HCT, in its infancy, was very abstract. I am not sure you would like my sterile way of talking about it.

 

[Soupie]

Qualitatively relevant mechanisms? You just said the representations were the things that were qualitatively relevant.

So which is it, @Pharoah?

Hm, I was really hoping you would attempt to answer this Pharoah. However, the reality is that no one has yet been able to.

Your problem Pharoah—and thus the problem with HCT—is that you equate these two things. However, one is objective and physical (mechanisms) and the other is subjective and phenomenal (representations).

This is where HCT gets stuck. (But it's where every model gets stuck, of course. It's the explanatory gap.)

Until a model of consciousness can bridge this gap, we must needs keep looking.

It's not clear to me Pharoah, that you fully understand this. That's not an insult, just an observation.

To bridge this gap, we need more experience/observation of the world and perhaps new concepts to explain these experiences/observations.