Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

[Soupie]

I'm intrigued by the idea that mental phenomena and physical phenomena share the property of structure, but I'm struggling with the idea that thinking and perceiving are of the same kind as singing and walking.

More specifically what it implies (?): That thoughts and perceptions are of the same kind as vocalizations and steps.

 

[Randall]

More specifically what it implies (?): That thoughts and perceptions are of the same kind as vocalizations and steps.

The two "kinds" you allude to ( above ) return us to the mind-body problem. Didn't we move past that way back in Part 1 someplace?

 

[smcder]

https://www.uibk.ac.at/philtheol/gasser/publ/gasser_hylomorphism06.06.2009.pdf


Conclusion

"I indicated some supposed advantages of an Aristotelian framework
and discussed its drawbacks. According to my understanding,
Descartes brought topics on the table of philosophical reflection that
are essential for any metaphysical reflection about ourselves and
other animals, such as subjectivity and the first-person perspective.

Of course, Post-Cartesian philosophy has problems of its own which
provoke the search for possible alternatives. My own opinion is that
the costs of the Aristotelian alternative are prohibitive, and I tried to
argue that this strategy is ultimately a failure. However, since many
philosophers are sympathetic with the general moves underlying

Aristotelian hylomorphism, I think it ought to have a rightful place
at the table in serious discussions about how to conceive material
objects, living beings and the human person."

 

[smcder]

The two "kinds" you allude to ( above ) return us to the mind-body problem. Didn't we move past that way back in Part 1 someplace?

lol ... pay attention Randal! ;-)

 

[Randall]

lol ... pay attention Randal! ;-)

You know I never pay attention. Why would I start now?

 

[Randall]

https://www.uibk.ac.at/philtheol/gasser/publ/gasser_hylomorphism06.06.2009.pdf

Yup, just like I said, back to the ole, mind/body problem. Hylomorphism is just another buzz word that deals with that issue. It seems valid to the extent that the physical nature of consciousness is "something fundamental", at least with respect to itself. That goes all the way back to when you introduced us to Chalmers, and I had already thinking along those lines when you did that.

 

[smcder]

Yup, just like I said, back to the ole, mind/body problem. Hylomorphism is just another buzz word that deals with that issue. It seems valid to the extent that the physical nature of consciousness is "something fundamental", at least with respect to itself. That goes all the way back to when you introduced us to Chalmers, and I had already thinking along those lines when you did that.

Of course you did, you smarty you!

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[Soupie]

Of course you did, you smarty you!

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(1) The Hard Problem is semantics!

(2) Consciousness is fundamental.

Smcder, it's pretty clear that (2) naturally follows from (1).

 

[smcder]

I read the Gasser paper on Hylomorphism - a couple times now.

It turns on structure as ontological or epistemological.

"I just presented several reasons in the light of which philosophers
prefer an Aristotelian over a Post-Cartesian framework for analyzing
the human person (as well as organisms). It has to be kept in mind, however, that every philosophical framework comes packaged with certain costs of its own. In the remaining part of my contribution I would like to address some costs resulting from the Aristotelian fra-mework. Indicating these costs shall help to determine whether a hylomorphic account truly is preferable over approaches influenced by Post-Cartesian reflections.

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[smcder]

(1) The Hard Problem is semantics!

(2) Consciousness is fundamental.

Smcder, it's pretty clear that (2) naturally follows from (1).

Nagel's Wiltbab is a rhetorical argument ... not sure if you and @ufology got that?

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[smcder]

"Nevertheless, it is commit-m
ted to a fundamental ontological dichotomy as well, namely between
living beings and non-living beings: "
So H trades on one duality for another ... The rest of the paper is a pretty good critique of H. At this point i don't find it compelling.

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[smcder]

What is it like to be a bat?

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[smcder]

The Gasser paper opens with three good quotes and then discusses the dichotomy and privileged access assumption, a good history lesson is had throughout the paper as he takes hylomorphism apart.

I wasn't impressed with Jaworski's blog posts or responses to comments. May have to go to the book for more detail. Let us know if you find anything more substantial - its an interesting idea.

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[smcder]

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@Constance - found it in the liberry ... Must be a donation for our sale, so I made it mine!

 

[Soupie]

"Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George W. Bush’s science adviser, observes that “in the Copenhagen interpretation of microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles”, but then frames his remarks in terms of a non-existent“ underlying stuff ”. He points out that it is not true that matter “sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle... The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles.”

The following is radical, but the mbp calls for radical. As stated in the following paper, with which none of us would disagree: "In short, the scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness." And I think we would agree there are no conclusive philosophical models either. So approach the following with an open mind.

http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf

"I reject HFD, the hypothesis that a goal of perception is to match or approximate properties of an objective physical world. Instead I propose the hypothesis of multimode user interfaces (MUI): The conscious percep- tual experiences of an agent are a multimodal user interface between that agent and an objective world. ...

Of course tables, chairs and the moon are just our icons, and exist only in our conscious experiences. But what’s new ? Physicists have long told us that the apparent solidity of a table is an illusion. It is mostly empty space with quarks and leptons darting about. Our perception of a table’s surface approximates the envelope of this activity, and in this sense HFD is correct: There are no objective tables, just objective particles.

The mistake here is analogous to a computer user who admits that file icons on the display are just conventional symbols, not the actual files, but then puts a magnifying glass over an icon, sees its pixels, and concludes that these pixels are the actual file. File icons are indeed composed of pixels, but these pixels are part of the interface, not elements of the file. Similarly, tables are indeed composed of quarks and leptons, but quarks and leptons are part of the MUI, not elements of the objective world. The MUI may be hierarchically organized, but different levels of this hierarchy are part of the MUI, not of the objective world.

Placing subatomic particles in the MUI rather than in the objective world is compatible with quantum theory. Indeed, the Copenhagen inter- pretation of quantum theory asserts that the dynamical properties of such particles have real values only in the act of observation (see, e.g., Albert 1992, Wheeler and Zurek 1983, Zurek 1989). That is, they are part of the observer’s MUI. Quantum physics does not contradict MUI theory. ... [Soupie: see quotation above]

Conscious realism is a non-physicalist monism. What exists in the objective world, independent of my perceptions, is a world of conscious agents, not a world of unconscious particles and fields. Those particles and fields are icons in the MUIs of conscious agents, but are not themselves fundamental denizens of the objective world. Consciousness is fundamen- tal. It is not a latecomer in the evolutionary history of the universe, arising from complex interactions of unconscious matter and fields. Conscious- ness is first; matter and fields depend on it for their very existence. So the terms “matter” and “consciousness” function differently for the conscious realist than they do for the physicalist. For the physicalist, matter and other physical properties are ontologically fundamental; consciousness is derivative, arising from or identified with complex interactions of mat- ter. For the conscious realist, consciousness is ontologically fundamental; matter is derivative, and among the symbols constructed by conscious agents. ...

Exegesis of Kant is notoriously difficult and controversial. The standard interpretation has him claiming, as Strawson (1966, p. 38) puts it, that “reality is supersensible and that we can have no knowledge of it”. We cannot know or describe objects as they are in themselves, the noume- nal objects, we can only know objects as they appear to us, the phenome- nal objects (see also Prichard 1909). This interpretation of Kant precludes any science of the noumenal, for if we cannot describe the noumenal then we cannot build scientific theories of it. Conscious realism, by contrast, offers a scientific theory of the noumenal, viz., a mathematical formula- tion of conscious agents and their dynamical interactions. This difference between Kant and conscious realism is, for the scientist, fundamental. It is the difference between doing science and not doing science. This fun- damental difference also holds for other interpretations of Kant, such as that of Allison (1983).

Many interpretations of Kant have him claiming that the sun and planets, tables and chairs, are not mind-independent, but depend for their existence on our perception. With this claim of Kant, conscious realism and MUI theory agree. Of course many current theorists disagree. For instance, Stroud (2000, p. 196), discussing Kant, says:

It is not easy to accept, or even to understand, this philosophical theory. Accepting it presumably means believing that the sun and the planets and the mountains on earth and everything else that has been here so much longer than we have are nonetheless in some way or other dependent on the possibility of human thought and experience. What we thought was an independent world would turn out on this view not to be fully independent after all. It is difficult, to say the least, to understand a way in which that could be true.

But it is straightforward to understand a way in which that could be true. There is indeed something that has been here so much longer than we have. But that something is not the sun and the planets and the mountains on earth. It is dynamical systems of interacting conscious agents. The sun and planets and mountains are simply icons of our MUI that we are triggered to construct when we interact with these dynamical systems. The sun you see is a momentary icon, constructed on the fly each time you experience it. Your sun icon does not match or approximate the objective reality that triggers you to construct a sun icon. It is a species-specific adaptation, a quick and dirty guide, not an insight into the objective nature of the world. ...

Another objection notes that there seems to be a difference when I meet an object and when I meet someone else. If I meet an object (or whatever it is, since by the MUI hypothesis, we cannot know), a simplified version of it is created by my super-user interface. If I meet another conscious agent, we both see each other and we both interact together. However, the other conscious agent should be equally inaccessible to me, like the noumenic object. How do we get outside of our epistemic jail, the super-user interface ?

To answer this, consider what you see when you look into a mirror. All you see is skin, hair, eyes, lips. But as you stand there, looking at yourself, you know first hand that the face you see in the mirror shows little of who you really are. It does not show your hopes, fears, beliefs, or desires. It does not show your consciousness. It does not show that you are suffering a migraine or savoring a melody. All you see, and all that the user interfaces of others can see, is literally skin deep. Other people see a face, not the conscious agent that is your deeper reality. They can, of course, infer properties of you as a conscious agent from your facial expressions and your words; a smile and a laugh suggest certain conscious states, a frown and a cry others. Such inferences are the way we avoid an epistemic jail, but all such inferences are unavoidably fallible. When we look at a rock, rather than a face, we get much less information about the conscious agents that triggered us to construct the rock. This is no surprise. The universe is complex, perhaps infinitely so. Thus our user interfaces, with their endogenous limits, necessarily give us less insight into some interactions with that universe, and more into others. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see first hand the limitations of our user interface and the presence, behind that interface, of a conscious agent. ...

Second, according to conscious realism it simply is not true that con- sciousness is a latecomer in the history of the universe. Consciousness has always been fundamental, and matter derivative. The picture of an evolving unconscious universe of space-time, matter and fields that, over billions of years, fitfully gives birth first to life, then to consciousness, is false. The great psychological plausibility of this false picture derives from our penchant to commit a reification fallacy, to assume that the icons we create are in fact objects independent of us and fundamental in the uni- verse. We embrace this fallacy because our MUI successfully informs our behavior and has ostensible objectivity, because we construct the icons of our MUI so quickly and efficiently that most of us never discover that we in fact construct them, and because we first commit the fallacy in infancy and are rarely, if ever, encouraged to challenge it. The illusion of object permanence starts by nine months, and does not go easy.

Third, standard evolutionary theory itself undercuts the reification fallacy that underlies HFD. Natural selection prunes perceptual systems that do not usefully guide behavior for survival, but natural selection does not prune perceptual systems because they do not approximate objective reality (see, e.g., Radnitzky and Bartley 1987). The perceptual systems of roaches, we suspect, give little insight into the complexities of objective reality. The same for lice, maggots, nematodes and an endless list of
creatures that thrived long before the first hominoid appeared and will probably endure long after the last expires. Perceptual systems arise without justification from random mutations and, for 99 percent of all species that have sojourned the earth, without justification they have disappeared in extinction. The perceptual icons of a creature must quickly and successfully guide its behavior in its niche, but they need not give truth. The race is to the swift, not to the correct. As Pinker (1997, p. 561) puts it:

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness. . .

[Multimodal User Interface] theory asserts, instead, that the physical world, the world of space-time, objects, matter and so on, is itself a sensory user interface that is observer-dependent. This might be counter- intuitive to a physicalist, but it is not logically self-contradictory. It can be made mathematically precise, and is consistent with quantum theory.

With these provisos, we can now address the main question of this objection, which is why criteria of efficiency and usefulness should control the user interface. The reason is that, according to conscious realism, there is a reality independent of any particular observer, and to interact intelligently or appropriately with that reality one’s sensory perceptions must be a useful and efficient guide to that reality. Conscious realism is not solipsism. There is a reality independent of my perceptions, and my perceptions must be a useful guide to that reality. This reality consists of dynamical systems of conscious agents, not dynamical systems of unconscious matter. Moreover, this reality is quite complex. So if my sensory systems are to be efficient, they must dramatically simplify this complexity, and yet still provide a useful guide. ...

Nobody explains everything. If you want to solve the mind-body prob- lem you can take the physical as given and explain the genesis of conscious experience, or take conscious experience as given and explain the gene- sis of the physical. Explaining the genesis of conscious experience from the physical has proved, so far, intractable. Explaining the genesis of the physical from conscious experience has proved quite feasible. This is good news: We do not need a mutation that endows a new conceptual appa- ratus to transform the mind-body problem from a mystery to a routine scientific subject, we just need a change in the direction in which we seek an explanation. We can start with a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents and their interactions. We can, according to the norms of methodological naturalism, devise and test theories of how conscious agents construct physical objects and their properties, even space and time themselves. In the process we need relinquish no method or result of physicalist science, but instead we aim to exhibit each such result as a special case in a more comprehensive, conscious realist, framework."

This approach will be unpalatable to many because of its rejection of (1) human perception as faithful description, and (2) physicalism.

The intuition that human perception is priviledged and gives us a faithful description of what-is is a product of anthropocentrism but also an assumption about evolution. We incorrectly assume that evolution favors perception that is faithful to what-is, but it turns out that a faithful description of what-is is not most adaptive.

In short, though it runs against our intuitions and assumptions, there are good reasons to question the HFD.

There are many good reasons to question physicalism as well, obviously the problem of consciousness being exhibit A.

 

[boomerang]

This thread is always so dynamically over my head. And yet I never have the good sense to just read and learn.

What we seem to see in observing brains at work in modeling and interacting with other "stuff", is a self-awareness emergent from protocols inherent in such stuff: the matter/energy of the universe embodied in the brain. What we miss, I think, in this model is twofold and probably more. What, other than neurophysiological filtering, distinguishes any one consciousness and the stuff from which it is supposedly emergent as individuated from a larger and more universal process ? I would say nothing. The brain's filters may thus themselves be illusion generators. Secondly, the relationship between consciousness and the matter/energy processes it models is as recursively interactive as linearly emergent. The mind is more than an isolated and independent algorithm. It is derived from and dependent on real time interaction with what would seem to be a larger order. That the universe itself is conscious and individuation an illusory subset of such, is hardly a new idea. But it seems (to me at least) to be almost inescapable. Individuated self-awareness is an inherent property arising under special circumstances of the universe, and just happens to be where we live.


And sends us back to the chicken or egg question of which is more fundamental: matter or consciousness? The question may in fact be a member of the "null" set. Incorporated within it are human notions of flow of time, cause and effect, and other things which may be a peculiar artifact of the human organism. Might we replace them both with some wider concept of "information"? (Don't ask me what.) A century of splitting matter into ever smaller particles which show themselves to be ghostly apparitions entangled with our own thoughts and behaviors, suggests a kind of a-causality with which the human brain is ill prepared to deal.

I throw out (hopefully) a thought teaser in the form of a question regarding the identity of a single electron. The musing was prompted by the fascinating work of Clifford Pickover. I emailed it to him with a smug but guarded hope that I might actually have been the first to propose it:

What differentiates any one fundamental particle--in this case an electron--from any other in the universe except information defining the speed and location of each? After all, a fundamental particle is a fundamental particle...etc. One cannot by definition be different from another. Might the notion that there is more than one in the universe therefore be a trick of human perception ?

Mr. Pickover very kindly responded to my email with a few observations and a link to articles on the web describing John Wheeler's "One-Electron Universe" theory brought to light in a telephone call to Richard Feynman in 1940. Darn! And I bet these guys were even able to to the math ! One-electron universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If there is a point here, it is that this may (or may not) be evidence that information is in some sense as fundamental as matter and energy.

 

[Constance]

The following is radical, but the mbp [mind-body problem] calls for radical.

The mind-body problem has driven many thinkers off the rails but none so hopelessly as the author of this paper. From the last paragraph in your extract:

"If you want to solve the mind-body problem you can take the physical as given and explain the genesis of conscious experience, or take conscious experience as given and explain the genesis of the physical. Explaining the genesis of conscious experience from the physical has proved, so far, intractable. . . ."

That inquiry is still in its early stages in biological and evolutionary science. Hoffman finds what he refers to as "the HFD [“hypothesis of faithful depiction”] to be frustrating because, qua Kant and the influence of subsequent phenomenological philosophy -- which I doubt he's read -- perception is widely recognized to be phenomenal -- i.e., to give us access to aspects of things on the basis of the affordances of what we are biologically able to perceive, reflect on, think about, and investigate experimentally. Our access to the 'objective' world [the world as it is 'in-itself'] is, as I have repeated for two years now, situational, perspectival, and cumulative over our temporal existence. Hoffman himself goes on to describe the 'HFD' in terms of "faithful perception or approximation." He desires, despite the progress of philosophy since Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, to identify objectively 'the thing in itself' and, failing that possibility seeks to dismiss from consideration human progress in understanding nature and consciousness. He dreams up a consciousness that merely projects images and concepts {from what basis in actuality, in actual experience in the world?} and claims to erase both world and consciousness as constituting inescapable elements of mind -- of what we think and why we think it.

It sounds to me as if you might be bringing Hoffman here as a last attempt to argue for an
'informational' source of consciousness, a hypothesis that, again, cannot provide either a definition of, or a demonstration of the origin of, this ostensible 'information'. Such 'thinking' invites fantasies of a 'Matrix' within which all reality is merely virtual -- nothing is real. What happens in a world in which a mass of humans uncritically accept such an ungrounded idea? That last is a question that philosophers ought to contemplate. Perhaps we should devote some time to it here.

 

[Soupie]

Our access to the 'objective' world [the world as it is 'in-itself'] is, as I have repeated for two years now, situational, perspectival, and cumulative over our temporal existence. Hoffman himself goes on to describe the 'HFD' in terms of "faithful perception or approximation." He desires, despite the progress of philosophy since Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, to identify objectively 'the thing in itself' and, failing that possibility seeks to dismiss from consideration human progress in understanding nature and consciousness.

I dont follow you here. What Hoffman seems to "desire" is a model for resolving the mind-body problem. He's probably got it wrong, but show me a model that has it right.

He dreams up a consciousness that merely projects images and concepts {from what basis in actuality, in actual experience in the world?} and claims to erase both world and consciousness as constituting inescapable elements of mind -- of what we think and why we think it.

No. There is no projecting. Yes, there is a perceived duality between what-is and our perception of what-is; but only in the sense that we are one small part of the whole of what-is. And as I have been saying, we are our perceptions. There is no duality between the "I" and the perceptions the "I" is having.

We are made of what-is, but we are not all of what-is; what we are of what-is, constitutes our perception of what-is. There is no projecting, just perceiving, just being.

Re Hoffman going off the rails. Chalmers has said that the HP entails that either our conception of matter or our conception of consciousness is wrong. So in order to right things, we will have to go off the rails, so far as the rails are considered straight here in 2016.

 

[Soupie]

Think of perception this way: Change of a dynamic system due to interaction with an "external" stimulus. Perception is change within a system coupled to its environment. The system and its environment are constituted of the same stuff, they are enmeshed, but a change in the environment (might) trigger a change in the system; if it does, then the system has perceived its environment. There is no projecting.

 

[Greers Meeting Planner]

Hi all, I recently watched a documentary series called 'the brain' presented by David eagleman. It's the best presentation I have seen on how our brain works to construct our conscious experience.

It's not got a paranormal discussion on that series but when you are familiar with paranormal topics (as we all are here) you will see how it links in to possible paranormal experiences.

The shows main benefit I found is to explain how our conscious experience is built by the brain. E.g. we have sensers on our body that react to the external environment (ears, eyes etc) that translate this interaction into electrical signals. These signals feed in the brain where these signals are constructed into an experience we understand day to day as reality. I'm aware most of you already know that part, however what it highlights is how in this amazing capability of our brains it is not flawless. We are prone to errors, lots of them, all the time. And in our complex circuitry we can perceive things our brain believes are completely real but are not upon closer inspection. It also helps to explain how memories of events can change but your recall of it feels real when re telling an event.

When we discuss paranormal or ufo experiences we are really discussing our brains best interpretation of what our bodies senses are telling it and how the memort of the event is stored and may change over time, to that point it really helps to understand the processes going as we experience and how frustrating and un reliable human experience is to interpret an event at its fundamental reality.

Really well worth a watch for anyone who is interested in trying to understand more on the science of the paranormal, less recommend for a believer who doesn't want their hypothesis tested.