Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Constance]

Soupie asked:

Why do you want it to be true that qualia are not composed of matter/energy?

and Steve (smcder) responded:

Well, what makes you think I do?? ;-) Do you want me to argue it the other way for a while? It's an interesting, mind-bending concept and right now we seem stuck with physical intuitions, so if we say qualia is fundamental, we still turn around and want to treat it like some kind of matter. That's where some of this confusion comes in, I think. Subjectivity seems another matter still. But may also be a confusion.

I just alway tend to suspect more basic motivations behind philosophical stances - biography and physiology play a role and we are what we think. Like I said in the previous posts – there are already other fundamental elements – and you have to have rules, are the rules made of matter and energy? The fundamental constants? Is the speed of light made up of matter? So already we need more than matter. We have to have forces at least and rules. And that’s Nagel’s point about subjectivity - it’s not a literal thing that could be made of matter and energy. Either there is no such thing as subjectivity, it's an illusion or meaningless (and this is the folk psychology of eliminative materialism) or if we take subjectivity as obvious - then it's not a thing made of matter and energy, it's a basic feature of the world - but we don't look for it, it's where we stand.

So well said: "it's where we stand," in a temporal existence achieving only partial perspectives on the world around us, and desiring more. We can pretend that this is not our situation, but to do so is a pretense. The pretense requires a "forgetfulness of being" in Heidegger's identification -- forgetfulness of our be-ing and of the world's be-ing and their concidence {better: their confluence} in what we have of the world in our phenomenal experience in it and of it. We do not and cannot know things-in-themselves objectively but only through their phenomenal appearances. To gain what we call knowledge of the world in its 'objectivity', we need, as Merleau-Ponty saw, to multiply our own perspectives on each 'object' or 'thing' we investigate and add these to the perspectives of others. Thus we gain as a species, a collective, on the project of increasing our understanding of what-is. We need both science and philosophy to accomplish this increase, applied to both the objective and subjective poles of what we can adequately describe as 'reality' from where we stand.

Soupie wrote: "Tim's experience of the smell of burning tires in the fall of 2025 is floating around somewhere waiting for him to experience it."

Steve replied: "It kind of is in a material/deterministic universe too, right?"

Who still says that the world we live in is one in which everything that happens is "determined"? Determined by what? Tim will experience the smell of burning tires in the fall of 2025 only if he is in the vicinity of the smoke at the time it is formed. He might be elsewhere at the time.

soupie wrote:

Chalmer's says:
there must be ontologically fundamental features of the world over and above the features characterized by physical theory.
Why are anti-materialists and anti-monists so pleased with this concept?[/quote]

I think it's because we know we have to account for the consciousness and mind out of which we reflect on the nature of experience and being, the nature of what-is.

soupie added:

How does this concept preserve the magic and majesty of experience? It doesn't. The magic, mystery, and majesty of the wonder of being that some are nostalgic for was not "destroyed" by the materialists. It was destroyed by self-awareness: awareness that the self is distinct from the rest of nature.[/quote]

It seems to me, rather, that consciousness, in evolving to the extent that we possess it (to the point at which we become aware of our selves as feeling, thinking, beings standing in a certain position relative to the Being of all that is), enables us especially to appreciate the wonder of being, including our own. What is our position in the being of all that is when we recognize the uniqueness of our position in this local, perhaps limited, part of the world we find ourselves existing in? In Being and Time, Heidegger used the German forestry term 'Lichtung' to describe it metaphorically. A lichtung is a space cleared in the midst of a thickly grown or overgrown forest to admit light into it, both encouraging new growth and improving the vigor of the trees surrounding it. This position he also described with the term 'ek-stase' -- a standing out from being despite our standing in it. Thus we are not fully 'at home' in the world; we know it to a certain extent only, and yet we are 'natives of this world', born out of the same nature that has produced all else that is given in the natural world.

Qualia being fundamentally different from matter doesn't change our awareness/feeling of being tiny islands in the ocean of reality.

True. Qualia reveal our consciousness to us and inform us of the reality and conditions of our existence, but I don't think most of feel a constant anxiety about our personally being conscious, nor necessarily feel that each of us is a 'tiny island in the ocean of reality'. In fact, the qualia we experience in our being present to the world and to others like us, and also our consciousness of the complexity of the world's being, are the ties that bind us to the actuality of our local temporal habitation in many ways -- sensually, emotionally, aesthetically, reflectively, and intellectually. In my personal view, the contemporary theory that the universe is fundamentally composed/constructed of information, the interconnectedness of the quantum substrate in the major phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and the holographic representations of quantum entanglement in the universe (Bohm) and in the human brain (Pribram) suggest that we are integrated with and 'enformed' by information whose nature and structure we have yet to fully appreciate.

We can only relieve the anxiety of self-awareness by temporarily experiencing the oneness of reality, and we do that by temporarily shedding the ego from time to time. Or all the time if one is a Brahman. (But that then becomes a different type of isolation.)

Perhaps we should understand the ancient insights of Eastern philosophy, the practice of meditation, and the historical persistence of spiritual practices among humans as indications that some consciousnesses have sensed the underlying holistic reality in which we too are entangled.

 

[smcder]

Thanks. I didn't mean to imply that I couldn't find this myself; it's just a matter of finding time to watch.

If I recall correctly, he made a list of the ways AI+ will come about, and he felt via evolutionary simulations would be the most likely to work seeing as how "dumb" evolution had already succeeded at creating intelligence. He then talked about attempting to make this simulation leak proof.

Well, what makes you think I don't?

Hmm, I've always believed that the fundamental constants emerged from the interactions of the primal elements. Similar to the way water emerges from the interaction of H2O molecules. I've always assumed the mind was similar: it emerged from the brain's interaction with the world.

Would a similar idea apply to qualia/experiences: that they emerge from the interaction of the brain with the world? See, if that is the case, I don't consider that a fundamental constant... I also don't consider that non-material.

To me, that's like saying the concept of "fun" is not made of matter and energy. What is fun? It's a concept. What is a concept? It's a symbol. Meh.

The point I was trying to make is that experiences are a product of the brain interacting with the world. To argue that experiences/qualia are just "out there" floating around disconnected from the brain seems ludicrous to me.

Nostalgia is probably not the word I was looking for... it's more of a disgust or disappointment some have with the way others view reality. I sense that some people feel that reality must have or exist for some ultimate meaning, while others - such as myself - are content to think reality just is because it can.

I've really learned a lot via this discussion. Thanks to everyone, and especially you, Smcder! I've been waiting for an opportunity to bring the paranormal back into the discussion, but we can't seem to get past the topic of consciousness.

I never doubted your Googling skills . . . I did have it all to hand though. One of the more interesting questions about AI/conciousness is "personhood" and rights. Although I can't prove you are conscious, I can't show any physical difference in us on which to doubt it (under current assumptions). So we might end up needing to be able to prove Zombies are metaphysically impossible after all . . . of course if it's AI+ or ++, we probably won't have to worry about giving them rights.

Hmm, I've always believed that the fundamental constants emerged from the interactions of the primal elements. Similar to the way water emerges from the interaction of H2O molecules. I've always assumed the mind was similar: it emerged from the brain's interaction with the world.

What is it like to be a bat?

Nagel talks about this right out of the gate:

"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.1 But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H2O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored."

To me, that's like saying the concept of "fun" is not made of matter and energy. What is fun? It's a concept. What is a concept? It's a symbol. Meh.

But you get all of this: "fun", concepts, symbols and Meh with subjectivity, getting subjectivity is the hard problem.

The point I was trying to make is that experiences are a product of the brain interacting with the world. To argue that experiences/qualia are just "out there" floating around disconnected from the brain seems ludicrous to me.

The radio/receiver theory maybe tries to make some sense of this although it still seemes to require the brain as receiver to have the experience.

I've been waiting for an opportunity to bring the paranormal back into the discussion, but we can't seem to get past the topic of consciousness.

Please do! I would just say that until we know what consciousness is - it seems a good topic for the paranormal.

 

[Constance]

I've always believed that the fundamental constants emerged from the interactions of the primal elements. Similar to the way water emerges from the interaction of H2O molecules. I've always assumed the mind was similar: it emerged from the brain's interaction with the world.

Those are reasonable propositions in my view.

Would a similar idea apply to qualia/experiences: that they emerge from the interaction of the brain with the world? See, if that is the case, I don't consider that a fundamental constant... I also don't consider that non-material.

If we think of information as fundamental in constituting the universe as we see it or think we see it now, we are pressed to ask how information functions in the evolution of nature in this universe. It seems obvious that information must function through interaction and increasing entanglement in the development of systems. Can information originating in the quantum substrate have qualitative aspects and/or effects? When physical systems interact, generating temporary chaos in their mutual responses to their impingement on one another, and gradually readjusting to order or equilibrium (and so forth sequentially), it's clear that they have exchanged information and that their informational relationship also changes. {Caveat: I obtained my idea of the above by reading a paper some years ago by the quantum gravity specialist Carlo Rovelli, well above my head as a nonphysicist, so I might have misunderstood what he wrote.} My question is, if physical systems exchange information and respond to it, might this process be understood as a primitive form of 'protoconsciousness', parallel to the protoconsciousness recognized by Maturana and Varela in their study of the behaviors of single-celled organisms? Might everything that exists be due to a process of information exchange and interaction -- an integration -- that begins in the quantum relationships that proliferate throughout the universe, ultimately (in our case) eventuating in the development of minds that can conceive of such conceptualizations? If so, the emergence of qualia {more exactly, the capacity to experience qualia} that you refer to in your underscored sentence is not necessarily unique in the human brain and might even be understood to be sensed in some way in older regions of the brain or in the collective unconscious. We're very focused in discussions in this forum on the relationship between the 'brain' and the world beyond the brain (including notions that our entire sense of the reality of the world beyond the brain originates, ready-made and fully programmed, in the brain itself). Much of this thinking seems to emerge from computer science and cognitive science committed to viewing the brain as isolated from the experienced world and generating only what it's somehow already programmed to think. I sense something like that in your initial, underscored sentence. Perhaps you can clarify what you mean. Qualia do not issue from the brain but are experienced by the brain and the body in our interaction with a present-at-hand, palpable world to which we are sensorily attuned and open, like the other animals we share the planet with.

The point I was trying to make is that experiences are a product of the brain interacting with the world. To argue that experiences/qualia are just "out there" floating around disconnected from the brain seems ludicrous to me.

Who says that? Not Chalmers, not Nagel.

Btw, Chalmers is very good on the subject of protoconsciousness. If no one has linked to any of his writing on this yet, I'll look for a link.

 

[Constance]

Here is a link to an interview with Chalmers that clarifies his positions on a number of issues we've discussed so far, including protoconsciousness and protophenomenological properties. Here are several extracts:

Chrucky: Your name is being identified with the distinction between an easy and a hard problem of consciousness. Herbert Feigl made a related distinction in his long essay "The Mental and the Physical". In his "Postscript after Ten Years", he writes: "Some philosophers feel that the central issue of mind-body problems is that of intentionality (sapience); others see it in the problem of sentience; and still others in the puzzles of selfhood. Although I have focused my attention primarily on the sentience problem, I regard the others as equally important. But I must confess that, as before, the sapience and selfhood issues have vexed me less severely than those of sentience." He and his colleague, Wilfrid Sellars, couched it as the 'intentionality-body problem' (the easy problem) and the 'sensorium (or sentience)-body problem' (the hard problem). Did you formulate your distinction independently? Are you making the same sort of distinction in your problems?

Chalmers: There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem. When I said this, I was stating the obvious. The context was a big interdisciplinary conference on consciousness, with people from all sorts of areas talking about the topics in all sorts of different ways. At this sort of event, one often finds people making big claims for a theory or model of "consciousness" that doesn't touch the deepest issues. The trouble is that the word "consciousness" is deeply ambiguous, so there's not just one problem of consciousness. So I found it useful, for purposes of clarity, to make the obvious distinction between the "easy" problems of consciousness, which involve such functional matters as discrimination, integration, and verbal report, and the "hard" problem of subjective experience. I never expected this to catch on in the way it did! Of course similar observations have been made by any number of people, and the distinction is obvious to anyone who thinks about the subject a little. All I introduced was a catchy name. I'm glad it has caught on, though, because it's made it much harder for people to just ignore the problem in the way they often did before.

There's no question that Feigl recognized the difficulty of the problem. His problem of "sentience" is of course just the problem I'm concerned with. "The Mental and the Physical" is a marvelous and intricate piece of work which more people ought to read. He grapples with the problem very seriously, and tries his hardest to reconcile the existence of consciousness with what we know of science. Feigl is often assimilated with the early identity theorists such as Place and Smart, but I think this is a mistake. His view is much more radical. Rather than "reducing" consciousness to what we know of the physical, Feigl wants to flesh out our view of the physical so that it can accommodate consciousness. It's not unlike a view put forward by Russell a few decades earlier, on which consciousness provides the intrinsic nature of certain physical states that science characterizes only from the outside. Leopold Stubenberg has a nice paper distinguishing the "Australian" and "Austrian" versions of the identity theory. Although I'm Australian, I find myself much more in sympathy with the Austrian version!

Sellars is also someone who took the problem of consciousness very seriously. His critique of the "myth of the given" is sometimes cited as a sort of demolition of the intuitions that give rise to the problem, but it's clear that Sellars himself didn't see it this way. In his Carus lectures, late in his career, he does some serious metaphysics to try to deal with the problem of the "sensorium". Like Feigl, he seems to want to expand our view of the physical, though in a slightly different way. I think he might be best seen as a sort of emergentist, who holds that new fundamental "physical" principles come into play in systems of a certain complexity, and these principles may account for consciousness.

On the various problems defined by Feigl and Sellars, I think their "sentience" and "sensorium" problems map nicely onto the "hard" problem. It's not quite so clear that the "intentionality", "sapience", and "selfhood" problems map onto the "easy" problems. I define the easy problems in terms of functioning. Some aspects of intentionality, sapience, and selfhood might be explainable in terms of functioning, but there may be other parts that go beyond this, such as the phenomenological components of intentionality and the self, which I think are absolutely central. So these problems may have a foot in both the "hard" and "easy" camps.

Chrucky: Describing qualia as nonphysical leaves room for a kind of distinction Sellars and Meehl made in their paper, "The Concept of Emergence", in which they distinguish two senses of 'physical': a 'physical-2' which refers to properties of matter prior to the emergence of life (the properties studied by physics), and 'physical-1' which refers to the properties of living things containing sentience. As I understand Sellars, anything which is physical must be in space, in time, and have causal properties. When you say that qualia are nonphysical, you could mean that they are 'physical-1'. Qualia would not be physical-1 (nor physical-2) if they were epiphenomena (i.e. qualia lacking causal powers). What is your position relative to this distinction?

Chalmers: Well, I take materialism, or physicalism, to be the thesis that the only fundamental properties and laws in nature are those characterized by physics: space, time, mass, charge, and so on, and the various laws governing them. To speak metaphorically, we might say that after God had created all of physics and had set up the boundary conditions, everything else came along for free. My central claim is that this is false. One needs further fundamental properties to accommodate consciousness -- experiential properties, or proto-experiential properties. This is roughly to say that one needs new fundamental properties which are not physical-2 in Sellars' sense.

Sellars is suggesting, in effect, that they could be "physical" in a broader sense. I think that issue is largely terminological, but if people want to use the terms that way, they can. What's important is to get the shape of the view right, not what to call it. Personally, I think using "physical" in this weaker sense (Sellars' 'physical-1') empties "physicalism" of much of its content. For example, consider the sort of view in quantum mechanics on which consciousness alone is exempt from the Schrodinger rules of wave evolution, and on which it somehow acts to collapse the wave function. This view might count as "physicalist" in Sellars' weaker sense, but I think it is best seen as a sort of dualism -- at least a property dualism, with two deeply different classes of properties entering into different sorts of laws. But if someone wants to call this sort of view physicalist, they can. I've always wanted to be a physicalist!

There are lots of subtle gradations of views in the vicinity, of course. Some of them are closer to "physicalism" than others. For example, a property dualism is closer than a Cartesian dualism with two kinds of substance. It may also make a difference whether the new properties play a causal role with respect to the original microphysical properties. And there is the very interesting view on which the novel properties somehow make up the "inside" of the entities characterized by physics. This last view may well deserve to be called materialist in some sense. But the real point is that on any of these views, one needs to introduce experiential or proto-experiential properties as fundamental.

I see the options as falling into three classes. There is epiphenomenalism, on which the new properties don't play a causal role, so I suppose they can't be physical-1 in Sellars' sense. There is interactionism, on which they do play a causal role, so they might or might not be physical-1, depending on whether they are located in spacetime. And there is "panprotopsychism", the last view on which the novel properties are somehow inside the microphysical network from the start. I am perhaps most sympathetic with the last view, which is beautiful and elegant if the details can be worked out. But I have days when each of them seems attractive. It all depends on how a detailed fundamental theory shapes up, sometime in the future.

Chrucky: Am I correct in saying that you hold that the phenomena of physics, chemistry, and biology can be logically deduced from the laws of physics, but that the phenomenon of consciousness cannot? The first thesis seems to be in contradiction with Broad's position. According to Broad, the properties of chemical compounds cannot be deduced from the properties of their components in isolation, or from their properties in other compounds. For example, the properties of water cannot be deduced from the properties of hydrogen or oxygen in isolation, or from their properties in other chemical compounds. Could you explain your position vis-a-vis Broad's belief.

Chalmers: That's approximately right. I hold that most phenomena can be logically deduced from the facts of physics. But the facts here should be taken to include more than the laws. They include for example the distribution of every particle and field throughout space and time. These facts probably can't all be deduced from the laws of physics, if only because of the role of boundary conditions and indeterminism, so we need to include them directly. Once we are given this sort of complete microphysical information, I think that Laplace's demon, who models the whole universe at lightning speed, could infer the facts of chemistry, the facts of biology, and so on. But he couldn't infer the facts of consciousness.

The position with respect to Broad is tricky. Broad held, in effect, that there are "emergent laws" governing the behavior of matter in certain configurations, and that these laws are irreducible. So when particles assemble themselves into certain chemical configurations, for example, the laws governing their evolution can't be inferred from the standard laws that govern those particles in isolation. I think that Broad was probably wrong about that. What we know now about physics and chemistry suggests that the laws of chemistry are probably a consequence of the laws of physics, although we certainly don't know all the details yet. But even if Broad was right about this, it might not threaten my claim. If he is right, the facts of chemistry aren't deducible from microphysical laws, but they might still be deducible from the totality of microphysical facts. The microphysical facts would tell us just how the particles are behaving when they are in certain configurations, for example, and from there one could figure out the behavior of various chemicals. Something similar holds for biology, I think.

So even accepting Broad's view of biology and chemistry, the situation there will be different from the situation involving consciousness. Where consciousness is involved, one doesn't just have new patterns of evolution of existing qualities. One has wholly new qualities involved. These two different sorts of "emergence" weren't always distinguished by the British emergentists, but I think they need to be kept separate.

Interview with Chalmers

 

[Constance]

Can you tell us more about this poem, Constance?

I'll give it a shot tomorrow, if you mean tell you how I read it and why I read it that way, but my response is likely to become a long essay, too long for a forum thread. I do think that this one speaks rather clearly for itself, though (with several re-readings ).

 

[Constance]

Conclusion of a recent paper by Rovelli:

V. REALITY AND INFORMATION

It seems to me that this ensemble of considerations
conspire towards a picture where the fog begins a bit to
dissipate over the intriguing role of information at the
foundation of physics.

Information that physical systems have about one an-
other, in the sense of Shannon, is ubiquitous in the uni-
verse. It has the consequence that on top of the micro-
state of a system we have also the informational state
that a second system O has about any system S.
.
The universe is not just the position of all its Dem-
ocritean atoms. It is also the net of information that all
systems have about one another. Objects are not just
aggregate of atoms. They are configurations of atoms
singled out because of the manner a given other system
interacts with them. An object is only such with respect
to an observer interacting with it.

Among all systems, living ones are those that selec-
tion has led to persist and reproduce by, in particular,
making use of the information they have about the ex-
terior world. This is why we can understand them in
terms of finality and intentionality. They are those that
have persisted thanks to the finality in their structure.
Thus, it is not finality that drives structure, but selected
structures define finality. Since the interaction with the
world is described by information, it is by dealing with
information that these systems most effectively persist.
This is why we have DNA code, immune systems, sen-
sory organs, neural systems, memory, complex brains,
language, books, MAC's and the ArXives. To maximize
the management of information.

The statue that Aristotle wants made of more than
atoms, is made by more than atoms: it is something that
pertains to the interaction between the stone and brain
of Aristotle, or ours. It is something that pertains to
the stone, the goddess represented, Phidias, a woman he
met, our education, and else. The atoms of that statue
talk to us precisely in the same manner in which a white
ball in my hand "says" that the ball in your hand is also
white, if the two are correlated. By carrying information.
This is why, I think, from the basis of genetics, to the
foundation of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics,
all the way to sociology and quantum gravity, the notion
of information has a pervasive and unifying role. The
world is not just a blind wind of atoms, or general covari-
ant quantum fields. It is also the infinite game of mirrors
reflecting one another formed [by?]the correlations among the
structures made by the elementary objects. To go back to
Democritus metaphor: atoms are like an alphabet, but
an immense alphabet so rich to be capable of reading
itself and thinking itself. In Democritus words:
"The Universe is change, life is opinion that adapt it-
self."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0054.pdf

 

[Soupie]

In my personal view, the contemporary theory that the universe is fundamentally composed/constructed of information, the interconnectedness of the quantum substrate in the major phenomenon of quantum entanglement, and the holographic representations of quantum entanglement in the universe (Bohm) and in the human brain (Pribram) suggest that we are integrated with and 'enformed' by information whose nature and structure we have yet to fully appreciate. ...

Might everything that exists be due to a process of information exchange and interaction -- an integration -- that begins in the quantum relationships that proliferate throughout the universe, ultimately (in our case) eventuating in the development of minds that can conceive of such conceptualizations? If so, the emergence of qualia {more exactly, the capacity to experience qualia} that you refer to in your underscored sentence is not necessarily unique in the human brain and might even be understood to be sensed in some way in older regions of the brain or in the collective unconscious.

This is an idea that appeals to me and which I'd like to explore further.

We're very focused in discussions in this forum on the relationship between the 'brain' and the world beyond the brain (including notions that our entire sense of the reality of the world beyond the brain originates, ready-made and fully programmed, in the brain itself). Much of this thinking seems to emerge from computer science and cognitive science committed to viewing the brain as isolated from the experienced world and generating only what it's somehow already programmed to think. I sense something like that in your initial, underscored sentence. Perhaps you can clarify what you mean. Qualia do not issue from the brain but are experienced by the brain and the body in our interaction with a present-at-hand, palpable world to which we are sensorily attuned and open, like the other animals we share the planet with.

Heh, I'll try.

My current view of the mind is that it "emerges" from the interaction of a brain/nervous system with the surrounding environment (stimuli). Thus, a "mind" would cease to exist if there were 1) no brain/nervous system and 2) no stimuli.

I think qualia = mind.

In other words, it's not: brain/mind > qualia, but rather: brain/stimuli > qualia (mind).

In other, other words, the mind doesn't experience qualia, the mind is qualia. It's the brain that produces qualia (information) by way of interacting with the surrounding environment (which may include itself (memories and symbols) and the body).

So what I'm suggesting is that minds emerge from systems that process information. System = brain, information = qualia/mind. In this case, the system would be the object, and the information would be the subject.

One system (brain) wouldn't be able to know what it's like to be a different system (brain).

@Soupie To argue that experiences/qualia are just "out there" floating around disconnected from the brain seems ludicrous to me.

@Constance Who says that? Not Chalmers, not Nagel.

Okay. I was trying to determine what was meant by the concept that qualia are irreducible. Still not sure I understand Chalmers/Nagels view. I need to read/watch more.

 

[Tyger]

@Constance Breaking up the prose into smaller bits - smaller paragraphs - makes for easier reading. Just saying. It's an internet thing, I believe. Long unbroken reading passages are hard on the eyes - or maybe my eyes.

 

[smcder]

I'm just downloading this now - will get to it tonight or tomorrow . . . looks good, Alex is pretty vigorous in terms of asking questions, so the shows are lively. Food for thought I bet and possible thread fodder! ;-)

http://www.skeptiko.com/240-david-lane-patricia-churchland-part-2/

Interview with Dr. David Lane reexamines Dr. Patricia Churchland’s Skeptiko interview, and the implications of near-death experience science for academia.
Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Mt. San Antonio College Professor of Philosophy, Dr. David Lane. During the interview Lane offers a different perspective on Dr. Churchland’s materialistic explanation of the mind:
Alex Tsakiris: I am having an interview with her to expose how ridiculous it is for this person to be writing books on consciousness. To be teaching our children these ridiculous ideas that she can’t defend in the most basic way. I am just calling, “the emperor has no clothes” on the entire idea that consciousness is an illusion. It is just silliness that gets perpetuated and never gets challenged in any meaningful way.
Dr. David Lane: And that’s fine, that’s fair game. But, when I go to the dentist do I want him to think that the pain that I have from my wisdom tooth is part and parcel with my brain? Or part of my peripheral nervous system? The answer is yes. So on one level, here’s a different way of putting this — if we are matter, what is the matter? My point being is what is the problem if we are just the brain? Physics itself, like matter itself, is more mysterious in a weird way than spirit even describes.

 

[smcder]

I'll give it a shot tomorrow, if you mean tell you how I read it and why I read it that way, but my response is likely to become a long essay, too long for a forum thread. I do think that this one speaks rather clearly for itself, though (with several re-readings ).

Das Gedicht als Ding an sich, nicht wahr? ;-)

 

[Soupie]

Perhaps you can clarify what you mean.

Apparently, I'm a reflexive monist, haha:

Reflexive monism is a philosophical position developed by Max Velmans, in his book Understanding Consciousness (2000), to address the problem of consciousness. It is a modern version of an ancient view that the basic stuff of the universe manifests itself both physically and as conscious experience (a dual-aspect theory in the tradition of Spinoza).[1] The argument is that the universe is psycho-physical.[2]

Monism is the view that the universe, at the deepest level of analysis, is composed of one fundamental kind of stuff. This is usually contrasted with substance dualism, the view found in the writings of Plato and Descartes that the universe is composed of two kinds of stuff, the physical and the stuff of soul, mind or consciousness.

Reflexive monism maintains that, in its evolution from some primal undifferentiated state, the universe differentiates into distinguishable physical entities, at least some of which have the potential for conscious experience, such as human beings. While remaining embedded within and dependent on the surrounding universe and composed of the same fundamental stuff, each human, equipped with perceptual and cognitive systems, has an individual perspective on, or view of, the rest of the universe and him or her self. In this sense, each human participates in a process whereby the universe differentiates into parts and becomes conscious of itself, making the process reflexive. Donald Price and James Barrell write that, according to reflexive monism, experience and matter are two complementary sides of the same reality, and neither can be reduced to the other. That brain states are causes and correlates of consciousness, they write, does not mean that they are ontologically identical to it.[2]

A similar combination of monism and reflexivity is found in later Vedic writings such as the Upanishads.[3] Via Wiki

 

[Constance]

Das Gedicht als Ding an sich, nicht wahr? ;-)

The poem as a thing in itself? Not in Stevens's poetry or theory of poetry, or in most poetry it seems to me. Maybe concrete poetry could be seen in that way, but that was a minor experiment. Stevens's poetry is meditative poetry expressing the interaction of consciousness and mind with the world, seeking an understanding of what can be called 'reality' and how we are involved in what-is. He's a phenomenological poet pursuing phenomenological questions, often contemplating several different possible answers in a single poem, moving in the development of his entire oeuvre toward an existential-phenomenological understanding of reality. In the poem I posted yesterday he characterizes the attempt of a mind unlike his own to think away the qualia experienced in the world in order to reach 'a single colorless primitive', hoping to account for the world in a purely abstract, objective way. It helps to read that poem alongside another Stevens poem that I'll copy here.

Looking Across the Fields and
Watching the Birds Fly

Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.

~~Wallace Stevens

 

[Constance]

I just noticed how this poem might be read to accord with Rovelli's concluding statements in the paper I quoted last night in this thread. Rovelli restricts himself, however, to the way in which protophenomenological processes can be understood to exist deep in nature, as protoconsciousness. He remains beneath the level of recognizing what the mind, building upon human consciousness, produces in taking things 'as far as they can go' in the world we find ourselves inhabiting -- the mind as a lamp rather than a mirror, in the terms of the literary critic M. H. Abrams.

 

[Constance]

@Constance Breaking up the prose into smaller bits - smaller paragraphs - makes for easier reading. Just saying. It's an internet thing, I believe. Long unbroken reading passages are hard on the eyes - or maybe my eyes.

Sorry Tyger; I'll try to comply with your request.

 

[smcder]

Apparently, I'm a reflexive monist, haha:

Reflexive monism is a philosophical position developed by Max Velmans, in his book Understanding Consciousness (2000), to address the problem of consciousness. It is a modern version of an ancient view that the basic stuff of the universe manifests itself both physically and as conscious experience (a dual-aspect theory in the tradition of Spinoza).[1] The argument is that the universe is psycho-physical.[2]

Monism is the view that the universe, at the deepest level of analysis, is composed of one fundamental kind of stuff. This is usually contrasted with substance dualism, the view found in the writings of Plato and Descartes that the universe is composed of two kinds of stuff, the physical and the stuff of soul, mind or consciousness.

Reflexive monism maintains that, in its evolution from some primal undifferentiated state, the universe differentiates into distinguishable physical entities, at least some of which have the potential for conscious experience, such as human beings. While remaining embedded within and dependent on the surrounding universe and composed of the same fundamental stuff, each human, equipped with perceptual and cognitive systems, has an individual perspective on, or view of, the rest of the universe and him or her self. In this sense, each human participates in a process whereby the universe differentiates into parts and becomes conscious of itself, making the process reflexive. Donald Price and James Barrell write that, according to reflexive monism, experience and matter are two complementary sides of the same reality, and neither can be reduced to the other. That brain states are causes and correlates of consciousness, they write, does not mean that they are ontologically identical to it.[2]

A similar combination of monism and reflexivity is found in later Vedic writings such as the Upanishads.[3] Via Wiki

Another good resource - this is a very enjoyable podcast and the website is full of good resources:

Episode 21: What Is the Mind? (Turing, et al) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

We introduce the mind/body problem and the wackiness that it engenders by breezing through several articles, which you may read along with us:
1. Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”
2. A chapter of Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind called “Descartes’ Myth.”
3. Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
4. John Searle’s Chinese Room argument, discussed in a 1980 piece, “Minds, Brains and Programs.”
5. Daniel C. Dennett’s “Quining Qualia.”
Some additional resources that we talk about: David Chalmers’s “Consciousness and its Place in Nature, “ Frank Jackson’s “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness,

Jerry Fodor’s “The Mind-Body Problem,” Zoltan Torey’s The Crucible of Consciousness,

and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s long entry on the Chinese Room argument.

 

[smcder]

We finally got the burn ban lifted and I'm catching up on my burning and downloading podcasts on my oh so slow internet connection . . . so here's one more:

Partially Examined Life Ep. 68 David Chalmers Interview | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

On his book Constructing the World (2012).
On his book Constructing the World (2012).
How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. What sort of base? Well, there may be many principles bases, and what’s important for Chalmers is not the details of which is picked but of the scrutability framework as a whole. The base he discusses the most in the book is PQTI, for Physical, Qualia (mental), “That’s all,” and Indexical (like “I’m here now). Being able to derive the rest of reality from PQTI has implications, Chalmers thinks, for the philosophy of language, mind, and metaphysics.

These podcasts have the feel of college bull sessions, unfortunately when the guys don't agree with something, they don't seem to make much effort and one of them (he has noted it himself, so I'm not telling tales out of school) can make anything he disagrees with sound ridiculous and they do drop the f-word with alarming frequency - but when they focus on something it is worthwhile. I haven't heard this episode yet but Chalmers should make it worth while.

 

[Constance]

We finally got the burn ban lifted and I'm catching up on my burning and downloading podcasts on my oh so slow internet connection . . . so here's one more:

Partially Examined Life Ep. 68 David Chalmers Interview | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

On his book Constructing the World (2012).
On his book Constructing the World (2012).
How are all the various truths about the world related to each other? David Chalmers, famous for advocating a scientifically respectable form of brain-consciousness dualism, advocates a framework of scrutability: if one knew some set of base truths, then the rest would be knowable from them. What sort of base? Well, there may be many principles bases, and what’s important for Chalmers is not the details of which is picked but of the scrutability framework as a whole. The base he discusses the most in the book is PQTI, for Physical, Qualia (mental), “That’s all,” and Indexical (like “I’m here now). Being able to derive the rest of reality from PQTI has implications, Chalmers thinks, for the philosophy of language, mind, and metaphysics.

Sounds very promising and I'll read what's there tonight (and attempt to get my sound system back on so I can listen to the podcast).

In the underscored portion of the website's blurb quoted above I'd change the phrase 'scientifically respectable' to 'scientifically acceptable' and precede the latter with the adverb 'currently'. The webmaster's word choice belies a commitment to the continuing reductivism of most neuroscientific approaches to consciousness. In the interview with Chalmers I posted last night did you notice C's statement that he 'wishes he could be a materialist'? It's also noted there that he began his higher education in the sciences but ultimately left to pursue the investigation of consciousness in philosophy. All to the good since it all prepares him better to see the shortcomings in the dominant materialist thinking in science.

 

[Constance]

The 'partially examined life' website links to this description of more of what Chalmers deals with in this new book (and more about the philosophical contexts):

Topic for #68: Interviewing David Chalmers on Conceptual Analysis and Metaphysics | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

 

[smcder]

Sounds very promising and I'll read what's there tonight (and attempt to get my sound system back on so I can listen to the podcast).

In the underscored portion of the website's blurb quoted above I'd change the phrase 'scientifically respectable' to 'scientifically acceptable' and precede the latter with the adverb 'currently'. The webmaster's word choice belies a commitment to the continuing reductivism of most neuroscientific approaches to consciousness. In the interview with Chalmers I posted last night did you notice C's statement that he 'wishes he could be a materialist'? It's also noted there that he began his higher education in the sciences but ultimately left to pursue the investigation of consciousness in philosophy. All to the good since it all prepares him better to see the shortcomings in the dominant materialist thinking in science.

In the interview with Chalmers I posted last night did you notice C's statement that he 'wishes he could be a materialist'

If that was the video interview, I've not had time to convert it to .mp3 and listen. My connection here is too slow to stream, so I convert videos to .mp3 and listen to them on my player. But I'm not surprised he said that.

And I think the PEL guys would have that commitment, yes.

I've been listening to some lectures by Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

Nasr is an Islamic traditionalist - and refers often to Frijtof Schuon and the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of thought. He started off with a master's in science and then moved into history of science - he makes the explicit point that science isn't an objective project rooted somehow in itself, but is always grounded in a philosophy of nature. He states that he is the first to note an environmental crisis in the modern sense and is very critical of moden Islamic nations for giving up the traditional Islamic philosophy of nature - he says that classic Islamic cities blended in with the desert ecology due to being grounded on this philosophy.

So, what I am increasingly interested in is the -ism part of reduction-ism and Scient-ism. @Soupie put it well:

"However, this does not mean that all our symbols which represent distinct elements of reality actually are distinct elements of reality. Categories help us make sense of reality but are not to be confused with reality."

Confusing the map for the territory is reductionism. For Nasr, the following was a key experience:

His doubt was confirmed when the leading British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in a small group discussion with the students following a lecture he had given at M.I.T, stated that physics does not concern itself with the nature of physical reality per se but with mathematical structures related to pointer readings.

I refer to Bulkington a character in Moby Dick who can be seen as representing a "heroic nihilism" ... Nietzsche certainly took this stance, embodied it - with his philosophy of the cold heights - so that is an example of a consequence of reductionism and materialism, it provides (for some) a meaningful motivation, a pride to say they are looking into the howling infinite, manfully, looking into the abyss eye-to-eye without the crutches or religion or mystery.

The movie KPax touches on this idea - in terms of the Eternal Recurrence, it's very beautiful.

 

[boomerang]

I'm sorry, I'm sorry...just couldn't resist: