Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

[Constance]

Someone in the skeptico discussion also linked to this critique of Hoffman's hypothesis here:

Kooky history of the quantum mind: reviving realism

The author of the critique is Artem Kaznatcheev, author of the blog where it appears. The whole page where this critique appears is fascinating and informative concerning the quantum physics context within which Hoffman's hypothesis was introduced, so it might be best to read page from the top. Very good conversations, as also at the skeptico discussion of Hoffman.

Kooky history of the quantum mind: reviving realism

 

[Constance]

This paper by Hoffman might provide the clearest pathway into the categories of his thinking:

The Interface Theory of Perception: Natural Selection Drives True Perception To Swift Extinction

Abstract: A goal of perception is to estimate true properties of the world. A goal of categorization is to classify its structure. Aeons of evolution have shaped our senses to this end. These three assumptions motivate much work on human perception. I here argue, on evolutionary grounds, that all three are false. Instead, our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PC’s interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. This interface theory of perception offers a framework, motivated by evolution, to guide research in object categorization. This framework informs a new class of evolutionary games, called interface games, in which pithy perceptions often drive true perceptions to extinction."

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

 

[Constance]

This paper is the most detailed presentation of Hoffman's hypothesis that I've come across:

Objects of consciousness
Donald D. Hoffman and Chetan Prakash

Objects of consciousness

 

[Constance]

I am now leaving Wonderland.

 

[Constance]

Not quite out of Wonderland yet. Can't resist posting this exchange from the skeptico discussion:

Sciborg_S_Patel said:

"Personally I don't quite get the idea combining the Simulation Hypothesis with Idealism though I know some intellectuals have posited this metaphysics. If Mind is all there is, what's the necessity of creating the simulation within it's own thoughts? Is it to preserve consistency - what some might call the 'laws of nature'?

But what is it about the Mind of God that requires the need for a programmed reality within its own thought/dream/whatever?

I suspect there's just the Real, that it isn't "mental" or "physical" as usually defined."



David Bailey replied:

"Well we plunge into the depths of speculation here!

I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion that what is going on is something like this:

Mental beings started by creating a very simple pretend physical home, with some simple rules about how it worked. Those responsible for maintaining this illusion, worked fairly hard, but the rules were comfortably inexact - some people thrived, others were sickly, some were robust mentally, others went mad.

Then people started to explore this space, and made things a bit tougher for the maintainers - they started measuring things, and the maintainers decided these measurements should show consistency - they postulated the existence of atoms, and pushed the maintainers into adding a layer of complexity called atoms and molecules. Then they started to study the properties of these atoms and their components - such as electrons - and conceived of these things running rather like solar systems but with electrostatic attraction. This created a whole slew of problems for the maintainers, whose desire was always to keep things consistent. One of the biggest problems was that every carbon atom (say) would have slightly different properties depending on the energy of the electrons in orbit - so chemistry would be the chemistry of a sort of undifferentiated sludge! This really made the maintainers think, and they realised that only a wave structure for the electron would solve this - because waves naturally form into discrete sets - as sound waves in an organ pipe.

Thus perhaps we are pushing the whole simulation process beyond what it can stand - so one solution is for the maintainers to crudely paint the parts of the universe that we can't explore in minute detail.

Remember that if someone decides to set up a quantum experiment (or whatever) they will give their intentions away to the maintainers in time for them to simulate a few particles in extreme detail, while maybe not even bothering with the atomic structure of the desk holding the apparatus."

(OK, maybe I have probably read SKEPTIKO for too long!)

David

Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception

 

[Soupie]

Interesting from a conceptual and abstract perspective, but in the end Conscious Realism and Subjective Idealism amount to pretty much the same thing, and both are total nonsense, if for no other reason than all reliable science tells us that the universe has been around far longer than humans have been around to perceive it.

Here is how Hoffman responds to this problem:

"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."

That is, there is indeed something that has existed far longer than humans, however this something is much more complex and rich than the universe our limited perceptual system discloses to us.

 

[Constance]

I have some questions and observations following the day I spent yesterday reading texts by Hoffman.

Hoffman sets aside what we (think we) know of nature and our experience within it and postulates an intentional (mental? informational?) process initiated and/or shaped by unknown higher consciousnesses generating our experience in the world {what 'world'?} from the q substrate. Have they also generated the q substrate? and as an actuality or as an illusion? For some reason [?] these postulated consciousnesses do not enable us with access to understanding of the being?/Being? they have ostensibly produced, but rather have programmed us to operate out of limited 'survival' motives in the illusionary world in which they have placed us. Our concepts of nature are illusions and so is our entire sense of ‘reality’. Both science and philosophy – indeed reason itself -- become irrelevant in this imagined scenario.

What Hoffman offers us as an alternative to the use of human reason is a ‘leap of faith’ (similar to that recommended by Kierkegaard) that the world in which we think we exist ‘makes sense’ from a point of view inaccessible to us. For Kierkegaard, that inaccessible point of view was God’s, a point of view we could conceive as possible on the basis of both our native aptitudes for reason and the ambiguities present within the range of our existential experiences {i.e., our ‘lived reality’} . In Hoffman’s hypothesis, by contrast, we can learn almost nothing through applications of our capacity for reason or through examinations of our experience. I wonder who finds Hoffman’s hypothetical ontology to be persuasive and why. In particular -- beyond the question ‘how’ H’s hyperconscious entities could engineer a world in which sentient and increasingly intelligent beings could not make progress in understanding the nature and conditions of their existence and being – I ask the question ‘why’ they would do so. Does Hoffman provide or even suggest answers to these questions?


In what feels like another universe of discourse (and one that for me is grounded) I refer back to the NDPR review of Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, which I posted yesterday in post 108.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

Here is a helpful extract:

“… As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).

We can now state the objection that phenomenology makes to the methodological component of scientific naturalism. Phenomenology charges that scientific naturalism is oblivious to the priority of the world as the space of meaning and does not recognize the need for specifically philosophical methods, especially transcendental and existential phenomenological ones, for investigating and understanding it.

Many of the essays take this phenomenological charge against naturalism as the background against which to consider whether there may be ways to revise phenomenology and naturalism in order to make them compatible or somehow reconcilable. Central to these discussions is the problem of consciousness. One approach, known as the "naturalizing phenomenology" project (Petitot et al. 1999; Roy et al. 1999), seeks to absorb phenomenological analyses of consciousness into some kind of naturalistic framework. Another approach, "phenomenologizing nature," uses phenomenology to enrich our understanding of nature, especially living being and the body, in order to do justice to consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Ultimately, both strategies are necessary and must be pursued in a complementary and mutually supporting way, if phenomenology is not to be reduced to or eliminated in favor of scientific naturalism, and if naturalism is not to be rejected in favor of metaphysically dualist or idealist forms of phenomenology.”

 

[Constance]

I also want to call attention to the paper by David Morris entitled "From the nature of meaning to the phenomenological reconfiguring of nature," which is included in Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature and described as follows in the review:

"David Morris pursues a more radical approach, which he calls the "phenomenological reconfiguring of nature." He follows Merleau-Ponty in using phenomenology to trace the emergence of meaning from the body, while using contemporary evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") to show how life-regulation processes generate forms of meaning or sense-making that underlie and motivate human conceptual cognition. For Morris, life is a "transcendental field" prior to reflective consciousness, and is both causally enabling and constitutive of mind and consciousness."

Here is a direct link to that paper, which I was not able to locate until last night:

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf

 

[Randall]

... 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 ...

That even sounds more nonsensical. It reminds me of the argument creationists use to explain fossil evidence. To paraphrase: "God put it there to test our faith". But let's forget that and stick to some sheer logic.

Hoffman himself explains how the universe around us is represented by the icons of our MUI, which he says are the result of the workings of the eye and how photons come into the eye and are turned into those icons by our mind. So if there's nothing "out there" then how can photons "come in" and instantiate any icons? Obviously there has to be something out there. In science this is called the stimulus response, and apart from hallucinations, the "icons" can't get made without it.

Other issues, like if there's nothing but mind as represented by icons in the "MUI", then what gives rise to the MUI? In Hoffman's analogy there is an objectively real processing unit that creates the UI and therefore whether it's the brain/body system or some other mystical mechanism that creates our MUI, it is still "out there" beyond the desktop and therefore the MUI cannot be all there is. More in the little info video below.

Anyway, I realize that the idea of the MUI is most likely for conceptualizing a way of dealing with conscious agents rather than something to be taken literally, but that also has some sticky spots. For example, his elements of conscious agency presume preexisting conditions such as experience, which does nothing to explain experience itself or how we would know that a candidate for conscious agency is experiencing anything.

But still, if somehow we were able to know these conditions exist in a system, then the relationships he maps out are very interesting to ponder, e.g. relationships between individual consciousness and collective consciousness ( hive minds ). So hypothetically, it could still have some practical application in some distant future when we know AIs have become conscious.

Subjective Idealism & Some Problems With It

​

 

[Soupie]

Hoffman himself explains how the universe around us is represented by the icons of our MUI, which he says are the result of the workings of the eye and how photons come into the eye and are turned into those icons by our mind. So if there's nothing "out there" then how can photons "come in" and instantiate any icons? Obviously there has to be something out there. In science this is called the stimulus response, and apart from hallucinations, the "icons" can't get made without it.

Just to be clear, Hoffman says there is something out there, it's just something different and much more complex than any of the objects that appear to us in experience, including atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, etc.

Each species has evolved a species-specific interface to guide their interaction with objective reality; however, these species-specific interfaces don't disclose objective reality to species veridically, just adaptively.

 

[Constance]

Here is a Quanta interview with Donald Hoffman. (Is there one Donald Hoffman or several versions? And are they all virtual?)

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions.

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality | Quanta Magazine

 

[Constance]

Also very interesting, a Quanta interview with Christopher Fuchs.

"QBism would say, it’s not that the world is built up from stuff on “the outside” as the Greeks would have had it. Nor is it built up from stuff on “the inside” as the idealists, like George Berkeley and Eddington, would have it. Rather, the stuff of the world is in the character of what each of us encounters every living moment — stuff that is neither inside nor outside, but prior to the very notion of a cut between the two at all."

A Private View of Quantum Reality | Quanta Magazine

 

[Randall]

Just to be clear, Hoffman says there is something out there, it's just something different and much more complex than any of the objects that appear to us in experience, including atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, etc.

Each species has evolved a species-specific interface to guide their interaction with objective reality; however, these species-specific interfaces don't disclose objective reality to species veridically, just adaptively.

If that's true then he's also self contradictory. He says ( around 9:50 ):

"What I'm proposing is along the lines of what Heny Stapp is talking about actually, that consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality."
​

And most definitively around 11:30 in what he calls the Conscious Realism Thesis:

"The world consists of conscious agents. So the idea is ... the proposal is, that what exists in reality is not spacetime and physical objects, the hard impenetrable particles that Henry Stapp was talking about. I agree with him. That's not the nature of reality. What instead exists are conscious agents and only conscious agents, and spacetime and particles and so-forth are just the user interface that some conscious agents to represent that use it to represent their interaction with other conscious agents."
​

You can see how Hoffman gets tripped up in his own attempt at coherently explaining the above, and it's no surprise because, again, it's total nonsense. BTW: A quick look at Stapp reveals that he seems to be misinterpreting quantum mechanics the same way the typical purveyors of quantum woo do when they claim that the observer effect means that consciousness has a direct impact on the behavior of subatomic particles to the extent that nothing exists until it is consciously observed, which is an entirely wrong interpretation of the experiments.

Hoffman then goes on to draw relationships between the world, experiences, and actions, but because the Conscious Realism Thesis holds that "the World" consists only of conscious agents, the logic seems coherent, but in fact, it's only circular, and that raises the problem of: If what exists out there in the World beyond the self consists only of other conscious agents, how do we know they're not also just manifestations of our own consciousness, and if they're not, then what is the environment that all these independent conscious agents exist within?

Basically, everything was fine until Conscious Realism entered the picture. After that it's a huge mess. But the approach is still useful for modelling hypothetical relationships between conscious agents. Just discard the nonsense and the rest has potential use in real-world applications.

 

[Soupie]

If that's true then he's also self contradictory. He says ( around 9:50 ):

"What I'm proposing is along the lines of what Heny Stapp is talking about actually, that consciousness is the fundamental nature of reality."
And most definitively around 11:30 in what he calls the Conscious Realism Thesis:

"The world consists of conscious agents. So the idea is ... the proposal is, that what exists in reality is not spacetime and physical objects, the hard impenetrable particles that Henry Stapp was talking about. I agree with him. That's not the nature of reality. What instead exists are conscious agents and only conscious agents, and spacetime and particles and so-forth are just the user interface that some conscious agents to represent that use it to represent their interaction with other conscious agents."
You can see how Hoffman gets tripped up in his own attempt at coherently explaining the above, and it's no surprise because, again, it's total nonsense.

Hm, no, I'm not seeing where he gets tripped up. That is, I'm not seeing any logical inconsistency. Are you suggesting that conscious experience is not "something?" (Indeed a very good case can be made (is being made) that it's the ultimate something.)

(1) Objective Reality consists of systems of interacting Conscious Agents
(2) Evolved systems of Conscious Agents perceive Objective Reality (other Conscious Agents) via a User Interface.
(3) The human UI manifests phenomenal objects such as atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, etc.
(4) These phenomenal objects must be taken seriously, but not literally.
(5) Thus, it can be said that consciousness (Conscious Agents) is fundamental and matter (phenomenal objects) is derivative.

A quick look at Stapp reveals that he seems to be misinterpreting quantum mechanics the same way the typical purveyors of quantum woo do when they claim that the observer effect means that consciousness has a direct impact on the behavior of subatomic particles to the extent that nothing exists until it is consciously observed, which is an entirely wrong interpretation of the experiments.

I think we have to be very careful here. Yes, I agree that many people make the mistaken assertion "that consciousness has a direct impact on the behavior of subatomic particles to the extent that nothing exists until it is consciously observed." [This in the physicalist context in which matter is presupposed to be fundamental and consciousness derivative.]

However, there is a very real sense, according to QM, in which the very fundamental nature of physical systems is--and always remains--uncertain. This is the Uncertainty Principle.

Uncertainty principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused[5][6] with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems. Heisenberg offered such an observer effect at the quantum level (see below) as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty.[7] It has since become clear, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems,[8] and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems, and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology.[9] It must be emphasized that measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer.[10]"

So when people are discussing the above, they may be making a mistake about the Observer Effect or they may be referencing the Uncertainty Principle. The quantum substrate is inherently uncertain, but it does not appear uncertain to us, conscious observers.

Hoffman then goes on to draw relationships between the world, experiences, and actions, but because the Conscious Realism Thesis holds that "the World" consists only of conscious agents, the logic seems coherent, but in fact, it's only circular, and that raises the problem of: If what exists out there in the World beyond the self consists only of other conscious agents, how do we know they're not also just manifestations of our own consciousness, and if they're not, then what is the environment that all these independent conscious agents exist within?

Indeed, how do we know they're not just manifestations of our own consciousness?

Do these hypothesized agents have to exist within something? What Hoffman is saying is that human percepts and concepts such as spacetime need to be taken seriously but not literally. Thus, the logic of our world (subjective reality) need not apply to what-is (objective reality).

However, those are good questions. And @Constance asks good questions as well. I have questions too. This is after all a thesis, a model. We can thus say with great confidence that it is wrong or at least not completely right.

(1) Why do Conscious Agent(s) exist?
(2) Why do they interact?
(3) How do they interact?
(4) Does a system of Conscious Agents share one POV? Why or why not?
(5) Etc.

I've got my own thoughts and hypothetical answers to these questions.

One could argue we've just kicked the can down the road, but I disagree. In my own very limited time and effort thinking about the MBP, this is the most promising model I've encountered.

 

[smcder]

How do the essays do grappling with the concepts outlined on your alligator wrasslin note cards?

?

 

[smcder]

Haha. Seriously? Anyhow, they're strikingly similar idas. If you can grok Heidegger's "world" then you can grok Hoffman's MUI. And if you can grok the primacy of phenomenology over physicalism, then you can grok Conscious Realism.

A good place, not the worst, to start with Being and Time (it is at least attractively packaged):

Being and Time, part 1: Why Heidegger matters Simon Critchley

"As Heidegger makes clear from the untitled, opening page with which Being and Time begins, what is at stake in the book is the question of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in an untitled manuscript written 2500 years ago, but which became known at a later date as the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, there is a science that investigates what he calls "being as such", without regard to any specific realms of being, eg the being of living things (biology) or the being of the natural world (physics)."

Hubert Dreyfus commentary is helpful too and I think available online - at the least, DreyfussHeideggerean critique of AI (GOFAI) and it's grudging response is essential reading.

 

[smcder]

Why Read Heidegger

I'm a liberal democrat and a humanist who considers totalitarianism in general, and Nazism in particular, to be moral and political abominations. I believe in the truth of science, and I like many things about technological modernity. I accept logic as a valid means of determining many forms of truth. And I happily accept the vision of Being that has prevailed in the Western world since the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, I'm not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more "primordial" encounter with Being by subverting these and other aspects of our world. But what a breathtakingly exciting experience it is to be forced to think about and make a case for, rather than lazily accept as self-evident, our most fundamental assumptions about the world and ourselves!

 

[smcder]

Just getting to read the Hoffman paper:


It is from the scientists that we expect theories that go beyond statements


of conceptual possibilities, theories that predict, from first principles

and with quantitative precision, which neural activities or which

functional relations cause which conscious experiences. Scientists have

produced several theories of consciousness.

For instance, Crick and Koch (1990, cf. Crick 1994) proposed that certain

35-75 Hz neural oscillations in cerebral cortex are the biological basis

of consciousness. Subsequently Crick and Koch (2005) proposed that the

claustrum may be responsible for the unified nature of conscious experience.

Edelman and Tononi (2000, p. 144; cf. Tononi and Sporns 2003)

proposed that “a group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience

only if it is part of a distributed functional cluster that, through

reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration

in hundreds of milliseconds.” Baars (1988) proposed that consciousness

arises from the contents of a global workspace, a sort of blackboard

by which various unconscious processors communicate information

to the rest of the system. Hameroff and Penrose (1996, cf. Penrose 1994)

proposed that quantum coherence and quantum-gravity-induced collapses

of wave functions are essential for consciousness. Stapp (1993, 1996) proposed

that the brain evolves a superposition of action templates, and the

collapse of this superposition gives rise to conscious experience.

Again, this brief overview does not begin to explore these theories

90 Hoffman

and, for brevity, omits some. But the pattern that emerges is clear. The

theories so far proposed by scientists are, at best, hints about where to

look for a genuine scientific theory. None of them remotely approaches the

minimal explanatory power, quantitative precision, and novel predictive

capacity expected from a genuine scientific theory. We would expect, for

instance, that such a theory could explain, in principle, the difference in

experience between, e.g., the smell of a rose and the taste of garlic. How,

precisely, is the smell of a rose generated by a 40 Hz oscillation, a reentrant

thalamocortical circuit, information integration, a global-workspace entry,

the quantum state of microtubules, or the collapse of evolving templates ?

What precise changes in these would transform experience from the smell

of a rose to the taste of garlic ? What quantitative principles account

for such transformations ? We are not asking about advanced features of

consciousness, such as self-consciousness, that are perhaps available to few

species. We are asking about an elementary feature available, presumably,

to a rat. But no current theory has tools to answer these questions and

none gives guidance to build such tools. None begins to dispel the mystery

of conscious experience. As Pinker (1997, p. 564) points out, “. . . how

a red-sensitive neuron gives rise to the subjective feel of redness is not

a whit less mysterious than how the whole brain gives rise to the entire

stream of consciousness.”

In short, the scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing

position of having no scientific theory of consciousness. This remarkable

situation provokes several responses. The first concludes that, although

consciousness arises naturalistically from brain activity, humans lack the

cognitive capacities required to formulate a scientific theory. As McGinn

(1989) puts it, “we know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness,

but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this

can be so.” Pinker (1997) agrees. After asking how conscious experience

arises from physical systems he answers (Pinker 1997, pp. 146–147):

Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of

how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does

anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight;

neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual

confusion of sentience with access and self-knowledge.

A second response concludes that we must keep experimenting until

we find the empirical fact that leads to a theoretical breakthrough. This

is a defensible position and, indeed, the position of most researchers in

the field.

A third response claims there is no mind-body problem, on at least

two different grounds: There is no mind to reduce to body, or no body to

which mind can be reduced. The first of these two arguments is sometimes

asserted by eliminative materialists, who claim that nothing in reality corConscious

Realism and the Mind-Body Problem 91

responds to our folk psychological notions of consciousness (Churchland

1981, Churchland 1986, Dennett 1978). As neuroscience progresses we

will not reduce such notions to neural activity; we will abandon them,

much as we abandoned phlogiston. We will instead adopt the language of

neurophysiology.

The second argument, that there is no body to which mind can be

reduced, is made most notably by Chomsky (1980, 2000), who argues

that there has been no coherent formulation of the mind-body problem

since Newton introduced action-at-a-distance and, thereby, destroyed any

principled demarcation between the physical and non-physical. Chomsky

concludes that consciousness is a property of organized matter, no more

reducible than rocks or electromagnetism (Chomsky 2000, p. 86). However,

what counts as matter is no clearer than what counts as physical.

And why should we expect, in the non-dualistic setting that Chomsky endorses,

that consciousness is a property of matter rather than vice versa ?

This is a natural point of departure for the theory developed here. The

dualistic formulation of the mind-body problem, in which consciousness

arises from non-conscious neurobiology or physics, has failed to produce

a scientific theory. But the search space of scientific theories is large, and

it is reasonable, given the failure of explorations in the dualistic region,

to explore elsewhere. That is the intent here: to explore a non-dualistic,

but mathematically rigorous, theory of the mind-body problem, one that

does not assume consciousness is a property of organized matter. To this

end, we first develop a non-dualistic theory of perception that questions

a key assumption of current perceptual theories.

 

[smcder]

From these comments it should be clear that the definition of a conscious


agent is quite broad in scope. Indeed, it plays the same role for the

field of consciousness that the notion of a Turing machine plays for the

field of computation (Bennett et al. 1989).

 

[smcder]

@Soupie: have you been able to follow up on these?


Here there is good news. We have substantial progress on the mindbody


problem under conscious realism, and there are real scientific theories.

We now have mathematically precise theories about how one type

of conscious agent, namely human observers, might construct the visual

shapes, colors, textures, and motions of objects (see, e.g., Hoffman 1998;

Knill and Richards 1996, Palmer 1999).