Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

[Soupie]

Is this in agreement with how you are using the term NR?

Naïve realism, also known as direct realismor common sense realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses.

The following definition is the one I have in mind when I use the term Naive Realism:

the definition of naive realism (Dictionary.com)

"1. the theory that the world is perceived exactly as it is."

And, no, I'm not sure what your point is, other than playing the Trickster role that you often fall into. And I do appreciate it.

I'm not suggesting that approaching the MBP from the perspective of Critical Realism and consciousness as fundamental somehow solves all the problems associated with understanding the relationship between mind and body. But it certainly provides a fresh set of possibilities that Naive Realism and matter as fundamental do not.

Yes, all the typical warnings and cautions certainly apply.

 

[Constance]

... it seems that they are moving from the actual relationship to the mathematics and then not coming back, but instead looking for further relationships strictly in the mathematics ... we also do that ... we say if Eq1 says this and Eq2 says that ... then we should expect Eq3 ... but we then of looking for that and sometimes its confirmed and sometimes it isn't and then we go back and re-write Eq1 and Eq2 ... we don't expect reality to conform to the mathematics per se.

Isn't that 'expectation' a reaction to Godel's Incompleteness Theorums and others named in the wikipedia article that have recognized the limitations of our tendency toward formalist thinking based in reified concepts of that which is experienced? Kafatos attempts to move us beyond that tendency.

["Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system containing basic arithmetic.[1] These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible.

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. For any such formal system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.

Employing a diagonal argument, Gödel's incompleteness theorems were the first of several closely related theorems on the limitations of formal systems. They were followed by Tarski's undefinability theorem on the formal undefinability of truth, Church's proof that Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem is unsolvable, and Turing's theorem that there is no algorithm to solve the halting problem."

Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia]


Steve's post continues:

The point of an equation is not to have any qualitative content ... force equals mass times velocity squared applies to dancers and line backers equally ... but what it seems they do in this paper then is take E=MC(2) and make a series of moves from that. Thought experiments admittedly ...

I'm impressed to learn that Feynman broached the qualitativeness behind/beneath mathematical expression [where most mathematicians and physicists evidently have not]. From the paper Steve linked we can follow the notes to read more of what Feynman said on that occasion.

Thought experiments are apparently all we have to work with at this point, having come up against the incompleteness of our understanding in both physics and mathematics and also regarding the nature of consciousness. But the prospects for more comprehensive thought experiments undertaken by Kafatos and the author of the paper linked by @Soupie are most promising. As often, Wallace Stevens provides a phrase that bubbles up for me from thirty years ago providing a sense of the scope of our inquiry at this point, in which we are sensing our approach to "the outlines of Being and its expressings."

@Soupie wrote in his first post today:

"If consciousness is fundamental and continuous (as we've been discussing), then we still need to understand how the structure of the organism/brain shapes consciousness into specific contents of consciousness. And if all processes are fundamentally conscious, why does it seem that some processes are conscious and some are not?"

What we need to explore is the spectrum of evolution/increasing complexity of living organisms developed from original 'awareness' to prereflective consciousness and the nature of subconscious mind that arises within it, as the phenomenologists have been arguing.

I'll be reading with interest both the paper @Soupie linked today and this additional Kafatos paper linked by Steve as soon as I finish reading the rest of the new posts in the thread today. It feels, to me, like we are now coming to the edge of a desert in our attempts to understand consciousness/mind and confronting an ontological mountain we will need to scale in order to understand more about the nature of 'reality'/what-is. It looks like there will five of us making the climb now that @william has joined us and @Pharoah has told me that he is rejoining the thread. Happy days.

 

[Soupie]

http://web.mit.edu/philosophy/mbpa/papers/fish.pdf

NAÏVE REALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

[In which the author suggests NR could lead to a materialist solution to the HP.]

"With this in mind, in the present paper I want to develop an alternative motivation for naïve realism that is closely related to this phenomenological motivation: that a naïve realist conception of phenomenal character / phenomenal properties can give us new
insights into some of the problems that beset the materialist about phenomenal consciousness. For example, one reason to be interested in the question of whether naïve realism is a defensible thesis turns on the fact that, if it is, problems such as Chalmers’s “Hard Problem” of consciousness (1995; 1997) look more tractable from within a materialist framework.

To explain how naïve realism can offer new insights into these areas, I will begin by outlining the hard problem and the closely related claim that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical / functional facts and facts about phenomenal consciousness (Levine 1983; 2001). I will then go on to briefly consider extant responses to these issues in order to isolate just what criteria the proponent of the hard problem / explanatory gap contends that an adequate explanation ought to meet, before showing how naïve realism offers the kind of framework which provides reason for optimism that just such an explanation could be provided."

However:

"Unlike the representationalist, however, the naïve realist does not claim that the experience represents that the elements of this presentational character are instantiated, but rather that, in having the experience, the subject is acquainted with the elements of the presentational character, where the holding of this relation requires that the elements that constitute the presentational character actually exist and / or are instantiated in the part of the environment at which the subject is looking. So according to the naïve realist, the phenomenal character – the property of the experience that types the experience by what it is like to have it – is the property of acquainting the subject with such-and-such a presentational character."

But what this author doesn't account for are the myriad of physiological/neurological processes taking place between "the environment" and the subjects experience of the environment.

Despite the authors failure to address these problems, I'm curious to read how NR could provide a model of consciousness arising from physical processes.

 

[Constance]

I think I'll leave the paper for you all to read and see if you have the same sense of the logic used ... one thing I'll note is that literature that purports to be maverick or outside of the box, very interestingly, tends to have some very similar rhetoric and even begins to pick up a kind of orthodoxy ... well, that's kind of obvious, in this case I wonder if all of this hasn't condensed around the Chopra foundation, which provides money but also would tend to steer the results and possibly even a lot of the rhetoric and writing, I'll post something by the biologist Jerry Coyne about why he doesn't accept the very lucrative invitations the Chopra Foundation makes to him.

I hope you will bear in mind the widespread attacks on Chopra's ideas for years now coming from scientists and philosophers wedded to the presuppositional materialist/objectivist paradigm. What they have really objected to are the developments in the thinking of other scientists and philosophers who have recognized that a great deal of human experience lies "outside of the box" constructed by the objectivist paradiam and have dared to propose a unification of science and consciousness/mind/spirituality. It's been far easier for them to attack Chopra than to argue against the ideas expressed by the mavericks among their scientific and philosophical peers. And the consequence of the contempt they've expressed toward Chopra has trickled down to the general reading public and to popular internet blogs and discussions of the major issues and problems before science and philosophy, placing Chopra and traditional Eastern philosophies 'beyond the pale' for those who cling to the dominant objectivist paradigm. At this level, real scientific issues are reduced to ideology. One of the devices of anti-spiritual ideologists is exemplifed in what you say here: "I wonder if all of this hasn't condensed around the Chopra foundation, which provides money but also would tend to steer the results and possibly even a lot of the rhetoric and writing," I personally cannot believe that a scientist and theorist such as Kafatos would compromise the integrity of his own mind and his comprehensive knowledge base in exchange for money from the Chopra Foundation. Nor do I think it is fair to assume that the Chopra Foundation would attempt to coopt physicists to its educational program. I'm actually surprised that you in particular would take this unsubstantiated charge seriously.

 

[smcder]

The following definition is the one I have in mind when I use the term Naive Realism:

the definition of naive realism (Dictionary.com)

"1. the theory that the world is perceived exactly as it is."

And, no, I'm not sure what your point is, other than playing the Trickster role that you often fall into. And I do appreciate it.

I'm not suggesting that approaching the MBP from the perspective of Critical Realism and consciousness as fundamental somehow solves all the problems associated with understanding the relationship between mind and body. But it certainly provides a fresh set of possibilities that Naive Realism and matter as fundamental do not.

Yes, all the typical warnings and cautions certainly apply.

No, I'm telling you what I think. How do you appreciate it if you don't know what my point is?

What are the typical warnings and cautions?

 

[Soupie]

No, I'm telling you what I think. How do you appreciate it if you don't know what my point is?

What are the typical warnings and cautions?

I appreciate your role as the trickster.

The typical warnings and cautions is that our knowledge is limited. We're not working with all the variables. We're attamepting to put the puzzle together without having all the pieces. Etc.

 

[smcder]

I hope you will bear in mind the widespread attacks on Chopra's ideas for years now coming from scientists and philosophers wedded to the presuppositional materialist/objectivist paradigm. What they have really objected to are the developments in the thinking of other scientists and philosophers who have recognized that a great deal of human experience lies "outside of the box" constructed by the objectivist paradiam and have dared to propose a unification of science and consciousness/mind/spirituality. It's been far easier for them to attack Chopra than to argue against the ideas expressed by the mavericks among their scientific and philosophical peers. And the consequence of the contempt they've expressed toward Chopra has trickled down to the general reading public and to popular internet blogs and discussions of the major issues and problems before science and philosophy, placing Chopra and traditional Eastern philosophies 'beyond the pale' for those who cling to the dominant objectivist paradigm. At this level, real scientific issues are reduced to ideology. One of the devices of anti-spiritual ideologists is exemplifed in what you say here: "I wonder if all of this hasn't condensed around the Chopra foundation, which provides money but also would tend to steer the results and possibly even a lot of the rhetoric and writing," I personally cannot believe that a scientist and theorist such as Kafatos would compromise the integrity of his own mind and his comprehensive knowledge base in exchange for money from the Chopra Foundation. Nor do I think it is fair to assume that the Chopra Foundation would attempt to coopt physicists to its educational program. I'm actually surprised that you in particular would take this unsubstantiated charge seriously.

I think I'll leave the paper for you all to read and see if you have the same sense of the logic used ... one thing I'll note is that literature that purports to be maverick or outside of the box, very interestingly, tends to have some very similar rhetoric and even begins to pick up a kind of orthodoxy ... well, that's kind of obvious, in this case I wonder if all of this hasn't condensed around the Chopra foundation, which provides money but also would tend to steer the results and possibly even a lot of the rhetoric and writing, I'll post something by the biologist Jerry Coyne about why he doesn't accept the very lucrative invitations the Chopra Foundation makes to him.

My concern is that the money offered by Chopra's foundation or the Templeton Prize or others has the "TED" effect of incentivizing research. I'm not making specific statements about Chopra or Kafatos. Coyne is aggressive and has an agenda as is obvious here:

Chopra tries to buy me out

My problems with the logic in Kafatos's paper are what I state above.

 

[smcder]

My latest roNot (not a robot) a "Solar Singer" ... based on a 74HC14 IC that takes the input from a tiny solar cell and outputs a happy, chaotic singing song! (as long as there is light available)

 

[smcder]

Here's the back of the Solarbotics solar cell with MSE "solar engine" circuit printed on the back ... with just a few components soldered on, you get an efficient little solar motor ... it takes the input, a few milliAmps of current from the solar cell and stores it in a capacitor until it reaches a certain level - the circuit then triggers the cap to dump all the current at once and it drives a little motor or does other work. This way a small cell can collect up enough energy to produce a working robot and functions even in very low light.

 

[Constance]

My concern is that the money offered by Chopra's foundation or the Templeton Prize or others has the "TED" effect of incentivizing research. I'm not making specific statements about Chopra or Kafatos. Coyne is aggressive and has an agenda as is obvious here:

Chopra tries to buy me out

Yes, I've never seen a more blatant (or desperate) examplar of the closed-mindedness ingrained by the objectivist/reductivist paradigm. The new paradigm that challenges the reductive paradigm terrifies Coyne to the extent that he has to shout "SHAME ON HIM/HER" in response to name after name listed in the conference's list of speakers. This is plainly neurotic behavior expressed by a psychologically rigid personality.

My problems with the logic in Kafatos's paper are what I state above.

We will have to examine the basis of the problems you sense in Kafatos's logic. I hope you will be more explicit about your scepticism regarding his theory.

Coming back to your first statement: "My concern is that the money offered by Chopra's foundation or the Templeton Prize or others has the "TED" effect of incentivizing research."

Shouldn't research into significant gaps in human understanding concerning the nature of reality and consciousness be 'incentivized'? The Chopra Foundation is one of many private foundations established to encourage research and dialogue among scholars concerning major issues and differing perspectives on them. To this end these foundations hold conferences in which individual authors are invited to read papers and to participate in panel discussions in which different approaches to a given issue or problem can be discussed, better understood, and perhaps reconciled to some degree, enabling better communication among scholarly communities and disciplines. This Chopra Foundation conference, like others sponsored by other educational foundations, is structured exactly like university-sponsored academic conferences held yearly in all major academic disciplines in this country and others. In both academically and privately sponsored conferences it is customary for academics to receive financial support for travel expenses and sometimes for lodging and per diem expenses from either the conference organizers or their own institutions. Private educational foundations have increased in numbers in the last several decades to supplement the decreasing funds available to public universities for conferences and other forms of support for research.

 

[smcder]

Yes, I've never seen a more blatant (or desperate) examplar of the closed-mindedness ingrained by the objectivist/reductivist paradigm. The new paradigm that challenges the reductive paradigm terrifies Coyne to the extent that he has to shout "SHAME ON HIM/HER" in response to name after name listed in the conference's list of speakers. This is plainly neurotic behavior expressed by a psychologically rigid personality.



We will have to examine the basis of the problems you sense in Kafatos's logic. I hope you will be more explicit about your scepticism regarding his theory.

Coming back to your first statement: "My concern is that the money offered by Chopra's foundation or the Templeton Prize or others has the "TED" effect of incentivizing research."

Shouldn't research into significant gaps in human understanding concerning the nature of reality and consciousness be 'incentivized'? The Chopra Foundation is one of many private foundations established to encourage research and dialogue among scholars concerning major issues and differing perspectives on them. To this end these foundations hold conferences in which individual authors are invited to read papers and to participate in panel discussions in which different approaches to a given issue or problem can be discussed, better understood, and perhaps reconciled to some degree, enabling better communication among scholarly communities and disciplines. This Chopra Foundation conference, like others sponsored by other educational foundations, is structured exactly like university-sponsored academic conferences held yearly in all major academic disciplines in this country and others. In both academically and privately sponsored conferences it is customary for academics to receive financial support for travel expenses and sometimes for lodging and per diem expenses from either the conference organizers or their own institutions. Private educational foundations have increased in numbers in the last several decades to supplement the decreasing funds available to public universities for conferences and other forms of support for research.

I'm not sure I have it all put together in my head .... I will try to post more but I also hope others would read the paper and see what they thought of the logic. Some of it is around the philosophy of mathematics and that's not something we've explored here.

 

[smcder]

This is a short paper contra the oft-heard "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics":

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March07/Wilczek/Wilczek.html

I found it when searching for the Feynman quote:

The next great awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot...Today, we cannot see whether Schrödinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality - or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.

Here is the context ...

To cement the case that selection of topics plays a major role in the perceived effectiveness of mathematics, let's examine its record of effectiveness at the more conventional kind of archery, where the bull's-eye gets drawn beforehand. There the score is much less impressive . Turbulence, friction, and protein folding, fox example, are technologically important and ubiquitous phenomena in the natural world, but despite much effort, they remain largely mathematical wilderness.

Richard Feynman expressed his yearning for a more effective mathematics:

The next great awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot...Today, we cannot see whether Schrödinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality - or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way. 3

Centuries earlier, in a similar vein, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz expressed the vision of a "universal characteristic". He wrote,

If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands, to sit down to the slates, and to say to each other (with a friend as witness, if they liked): Let us calculate. 4

Can mathematics be used to extract qualitative predictions from physical laws - or, for that matter, useful laws from data - automatically? Perhaps, but the omens aren't auspicious. With Gödel's theorem (the existence of true statements that can't be proved formally) and the concepts of computational complexity (the existence of many natural problems that can't be solved by practical algorithms) and chaos (the existence of natural equations that can't be solved systematically), mathematics has identified limits to its own power.

Paul Dirac once said that he considered he understood an equation when he could anticipate the properties of its solution without actually solving it. For better or worse, thanks to computational complexity and chaos, we now know many examples in which the solutions of innocuous-looking equations are either inaccessible or incapable of simple description.

Sitting on my porch in New Hampshire, I look out over a wind-rippled lake, a piney horizon, a cumulus-patched sky, and a pair of loons with their baby. Just what aspect of that scene can be derived from beautiful equations? To expose beautiful equations at work, we can't just look out from our porches at natural scenes. We must do extraordinary things such as building and operating engineering marvels like the Large Hadron Collider and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, and then working hard to cleanse their raw output of irrelevant complications, artifacts, and noise before interpreting the highly refined product as proper data.

The author concludes:

Eventual discovery of any or - as I expect - all of these new phenomena will be wonderful new confirmation of the effectiveness of mathematics in natural science. But those discoveries will constitute the pinnacle of reason, not an "unreasonable" anomaly.

 

[smcder]

@Constance the quotes on naive realism are from Wikipedia. I can't keep up with all the links either ... And think we should pick one text and focus on it.

 

[Constance]

@Constance the quotes on naive realism are from Wikipedia. I can't keep up with all the links either ... And think we should pick one text and focus on it.

I agree. I'd prefer that we work first through the paper by Kafatos and Theise that @Soupie linked last week, "Sentience Everywhere: Complexity Theory, Panpsychism & the Role of Sentience in Self-Organization of the Universe", available here as a downloadable offprint from the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research:

Sentience Everywhere: Complexity Theory, Panpsychism & the Role of Sentience in Self-Organization of the Universe | Theise | Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research


ETA: Actually the paper as published in the journal above is considerably shorter than that version @Soupie first linked, available here:

'http://www.menaskafatos.com/Theise Kafatos FINAL.pdf

 

[Constance]

I'm not sure I have it all put together in my head .... I will try to post more but I also hope others would read the paper and see what they thought of the logic. Some of it is around the philosophy of mathematics and that's not something we've explored here.

You're referring to the first linked Kafatos paper, right? (the one I linked just above)

 

[Randall]

"If consciousness is fundamental and continuous (as we've been discussing), then we still need to understand how the structure of the organism/brain shapes consciousness into specific contents of consciousness. And if all processes are fundamentally conscious, why does it seem that some processes are conscious and some are not?"

The above point was addressed specifically by the earlier post where it was suggested that the building blocks of consciousness might have been created at the beginning of the universe at the quantum level. For convenience, I'll reiterate that this would necessitate a consciousness particle. To my knowledge, no such thing exists in QM, nor has it been postulated to exist by quantum physicists. Neither has it been postulated by string theory. So in order for this particular idea to hold water, the expertise of those people is needed.

The closest I've seen anything come to the idea is to propose that there are interactions taking place at the quantum level between known particles within the brain that together add-up to the phenomena we experience as consciousness, which again returns us to the same position as before, which is that consciousness is a product of brain function and that it is physically composed of some type of field, the most promising candidate being those in the EM range, a number of which are produced by the brain, the specific structures of which are found primarily in the Thalamocortical Loop.

Speaking of loops, how many times are we going to continue scratching at our impossible to get dinner? There is no way for us to be able to explain the ultimate nature of the existence of anything, let alone consciousness. The best we can do is hope to replicate the phenomenon, and we do that reasonably well biologically. So maybe we should take a closer look at how that happens:

Prenatal Brain Development

 

[smcder]

You're referring to the first linked Kafatos paper, right? (the one I linked just above)

This one:

Exploring Consciousness Through the Qualitative Content of Equations | Narasimhan | Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy

I wanted to see what others think of the flow of logic ... not a focus area right now for us.

 

[smcder]

I agree. I'd prefer that we work first through the paper by Kafatos and Theise that @Soupie linked last week, "Sentience Everywhere: Complexity Theory, Panpsychism & the Role of Sentience in Self-Organization of the Universe", available here as a downloadable offprint from the Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research:

Sentience Everywhere: Complexity Theory, Panpsychism & the Role of Sentience in Self-Organization of the Universe | Theise | Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research


ETA: Actually the paper as published in the journal above is considerably shorter than that version @Soupie first linked, available here:

'http://www.menaskafatos.com/Theise Kafatos FINAL.pdf

We can read either one ... ? Which do you suggest?

 

[smcder]

Yes, I've never seen a more blatant (or desperate) examplar of the closed-mindedness ingrained by the objectivist/reductivist paradigm. The new paradigm that challenges the reductive paradigm terrifies Coyne to the extent that he has to shout "SHAME ON HIM/HER" in response to name after name listed in the conference's list of speakers. This is plainly neurotic behavior expressed by a psychologically rigid personality.



We will have to examine the basis of the problems you sense in Kafatos's logic. I hope you will be more explicit about your scepticism regarding his theory.

Coming back to your first statement: "My concern is that the money offered by Chopra's foundation or the Templeton Prize or others has the "TED" effect of incentivizing research."

Shouldn't research into significant gaps in human understanding concerning the nature of reality and consciousness be 'incentivized'? The Chopra Foundation is one of many private foundations established to encourage research and dialogue among scholars concerning major issues and differing perspectives on them. To this end these foundations hold conferences in which individual authors are invited to read papers and to participate in panel discussions in which different approaches to a given issue or problem can be discussed, better understood, and perhaps reconciled to some degree, enabling better communication among scholarly communities and disciplines. This Chopra Foundation conference, like others sponsored by other educational foundations, is structured exactly like university-sponsored academic conferences held yearly in all major academic disciplines in this country and others. In both academically and privately sponsored conferences it is customary for academics to receive financial support for travel expenses and sometimes for lodging and per diem expenses from either the conference organizers or their own institutions. Private educational foundations have increased in numbers in the last several decades to supplement the decreasing funds available to public universities for conferences and other forms of support for research.

I know, I kept cracking up every time I'd read SHAME ON HIM/HER ... I doubt it will keep any of them from attending ...

 

[smcder]

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