Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Constance]

I listened to Does Consciousness Exist? this morning

audio here: LibriVox
text here: Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James - Free Ebook

(quoting James)But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. “All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity,” they will say, “but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join what God has put asunder.”

My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in[24] but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are. . . .

… looks like James met the Buddha on the road but forgot to kill him! ;-)

Indeed. The passages I found most interesting, even riveting, in that first essay/lecture were these:

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its ‘terms’ becomes the subject of bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known.

Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of
10
an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups
simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective, both at once.

The dualism connoted by such double-barrelled terms as 'experience,' 'phenomenon,' 'datum,' '_Vorfindung_' -- terms which, in philosophy
at any rate, tend more and more to replace the single-barrelled terms of 'thought' and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preserved in this account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and elusive, it becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined.

The entering wedge for this more concrete way of understanding the dualism was fashioned by Locke when he made the word 'idea' stand indifferently for thing and thought, and by Berkeley when he said that what common sense means by realities is exactly what the
philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke
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nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect clearness, but it seems to me that the conception I am defending does little more than consistently carry out the 'pragmatic' method which they were the first to use. If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so called, of a physical object, his actual field of
vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its centre; and let him for the present treat this complex object in the common-
sense way as being 'really' what it seems to be, namely, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing world of other physical
things with which these physical things have actual or potential relations. Now at the same time it is just _those_self-same_things_ which his mind, as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time downwards has just been one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality
should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind.

 

[Constance]

@Soupie, before I respond to your most recent post, would you state whether you intended to cross out that short paragraph concerning the explanatory gap?

 

[smcder]

Interesting review of Phi
A Brick o’ Qualia: Tononi, Phi, and the Neural Armchair | Three Pound Brain

"Now I think this analogy fails in a number of other respects, but what gensyms do is allow us to see the apparent inexplicability of qualia as an important clue, as a positive feature possessing functional consequences. Qualia qua qualia are informatically impoverished, ‘introspectively opaque,’ so much so you might almost think they belonged to a system that was not designed to cognize them as qualia – which, as it turns out, is precisely the case. (Generally speaking, theoretical reflection on experience is not something that will get you laid). So in a sense, the first response to the ‘problem of qualia’ should be, Go figure. Given the exhorbitant metabolic cost of neural processing, we should expect qualia to be largely inscrutable to introspection."

... this should make you think of McGinn ...

"So what explains the ‘redness’ of red, the raw, ineffable feel of pain? This is where qualiaphiles will likely want to jump ship. From Tononi’s Q-space perspective, a given space (heuristic configuration) simply is what it is – ‘irreducible,’ as he puts it. Thanks to evolution, we inherited a wild variety of differentiating shapes, or qualia, by happenstance. If you want to understand what makes red red, let me refer you to the anthropic principle. It’s part of basic cable. These are simply the channels available when cable first got up and running."

"It’s a question of informatic ‘perspective.’ With qualia we are trapped in our neural armchair. The information available to System 2 deliberation (reflection) is simply too scant (and likely too mismatched to the heuristic demands of environmental cognition) to do anything but rhapsodize or opine. Red is too greased and cognition too frostbitten to do the juggling that knowledge requires. (Where science is in the business of economizing excesses of information, phenomenology, you could say, is in the business of larding its shortage).

But this doesn’t mean that qualia can’t be naturalistically explained. I just offered an outline of a possible explanation above. It just means that qualia are fundamentals of our cognitive system in a manner perhaps similar to the way the laws of physics are fundamentals of the universe. (And it doesn’t mean that an attenuated ‘posthuman’ brain couldn’t be a radical game changer, providing our global configuration with cognitive resources required to get out of our neural armchair and ‘scientifically’ experiment with qualia). The qualification ‘our cognitive system’ above is an important one. What qualia share in common with the laws of physics has to do with encapsulation, which is to say, constraints on information availability. What qualia and the laws of physics share is certain informatic inscrutability, an epistemological profile rather than an ontological priority. The same way we can’t get out of our neural armchair to see the backside of red, we can’t step outside the universe to see the backside of the Standard Model.*

...

In fact, it’s quite understandable given the explanation I’ve given above. Rather than arising as an artifact of the radical (and quite unexplained) disjunct between mechanistic and phenomenal conceptualities as most seem to assume, the problem rather lies with the neural armchair. The thing to realize (and this is the insight that BBT generalizes) is that qualia are as much defined by their informatic simplicity as they are by the information they provide. Once again, qualia are baseline heuristics (prerepresentations): like gensyms, they are defined by the information they lack. Qualia are those elements of conscious experience that lack a backside. Since the province of explanation is to provide information, to show the backside, as it were, there is a strange sense in which we should expect our explanations will jar with our phenomenal intuitions."

... and he ends with this:

* I personally don’t think qualia are the mystery everyone makes them out to be, but this doesn’t mean I think the hard problem is solved – far from it. The question of why we should have these informatically dumbmute qualia at all remains as much as burning mystery as ever.

... which baffles me a bit

 

[smcder]

Consciousness and the Paranormal
I can't speak for Tononi, but I would say that as soon as an organism begins producing/experiencing qualia - no matter how basic - they have a mental-self.
As noted above, I don't agree/see the need for such "stages of qualia."...

If others want to believe that "the experience of the color green" is not related to information processing, an illusion, or composed of an eternal, non-physical material/process, that's fine with me.

If others want to believe that "the experience of the color green" is not related to information processing, an illusion, or composed of an eternal, non-physical material/process, that's fine with me.

Who do you see as making those claims?

 

[Constance]

Interesting review of Phi
A Brick o’ Qualia: Tononi, Phi, and the Neural Armchair | Three Pound Brain

"Now I think this analogy fails in a number of other respects, but what gensyms do is allow us to see the apparent inexplicability of qualia as an important clue, as a positive feature possessing functional consequences. Qualia qua qualia are informatically impoverished, ‘introspectively opaque,’ so much so you might almost think they belonged to a system that was not designed to cognize them as qualia – which, as it turns out, is precisely the case. (Generally speaking, theoretical reflection on experience is not something that will get you laid). So in a sense, the first response to the ‘problem of qualia’ should be, Go figure. Given the exhorbitant metabolic cost of neural processing, we should expect qualia to be largely inscrutable to introspection."

... this should make you think of McGinn ...

"So what explains the ‘redness’ of red, the raw, ineffable feel of pain? This is where qualiaphiles will likely want to jump ship. From Tononi’s Q-space perspective, a given space (heuristic configuration) simply is what it is – ‘irreducible,’ as he puts it. Thanks to evolution, we inherited a wild variety of differentiating shapes, or qualia, by happenstance. If you want to understand what makes red red, let me refer you to the anthropic principle. It’s part of basic cable. These are simply the channels available when cable first got up and running."

"It’s a question of informatic ‘perspective.’ With qualia we are trapped in our neural armchair. The information available to System 2 deliberation (reflection) is simply too scant (and likely too mismatched to the heuristic demands of environmental cognition) to do anything but rhapsodize or opine. Red is too greased and cognition too frostbitten to do the juggling that knowledge requires. (Where science is in the business of economizing excesses of information, phenomenology, you could say, is in the business of larding its shortage).

But this doesn’t mean that qualia can’t be naturalistically explained. I just offered an outline of a possible explanation above. It just means that qualia are fundamentals of our cognitive system in a manner perhaps similar to the way the laws of physics are fundamentals of the universe. (And it doesn’t mean that an attenuated ‘posthuman’ brain couldn’t be a radical game changer, providing our global configuration with cognitive resources required to get out of our neural armchair and ‘scientifically’ experiment with qualia). The qualification ‘our cognitive system’ above is an important one. What qualia share in common with the laws of physics has to do with encapsulation, which is to say, constraints on information availability. What qualia and the laws of physics share is certain informatic inscrutability, an epistemological profile rather than an ontological priority. The same way we can’t get out of our neural armchair to see the backside of red, we can’t step outside the universe to see the backside of the Standard Model.*

...

In fact, it’s quite understandable given the explanation I’ve given above. Rather than arising as an artifact of the radical (and quite unexplained) disjunct between mechanistic and phenomenal conceptualities as most seem to assume, the problem rather lies with the neural armchair. The thing to realize (and this is the insight that BBT generalizes) is that qualia are as much defined by their informatic simplicity as they are by the information they provide. Once again, qualia are baseline heuristics (prerepresentations): like gensyms, they are defined by the information they lack. Qualia are those elements of conscious experience that lack a backside. Since the province of explanation is to provide information, to show the backside, as it were, there is a strange sense in which we should expect our explanations will jar with our phenomenal intuitions."

... and he ends with this:

* I personally don’t think qualia are the mystery everyone makes them out to be, but this doesn’t mean I think the hard problem is solved – far from it. The question of why we should have these informatically dumbmute qualia at all remains as much as burning mystery as ever.

... which baffles me a bit

Yeah, I read that page a while ago and also found the author to be less than clear in some of his statements. Best paragraph is one that he quotes:

The reason he passes on IITC is that he thinks qualia obviously involves something over and above ‘mere information,’ what he calls the ‘reality’ of the experience. This is a version of a common complaint you find levelled against Tononi and IITC, the notion that information and experience are obviously two different things - otherwise, as Peter says, “reading the label on a bottle of wine would be as enjoyable as drinking it.” Something else has to be going on.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie, before I respond to your most recent post, would you state whether you intended to cross out that short paragraph concerning the explanatory gap?

Yes. The concept of "beauty" is subjective, but I wanted to keep the focus on subjective experience, not cognition per se.

(Been painfully busy lately. Hope to engage more soon.)

 

[Soupie]

I clicked on the link and had a little surprise...

Mathematical Model Of Consciousness Proves Human Experience Cannot Be Modelled On A Computer

A new mathematical model of consciousness implies that your PC will never be conscious in the way you are

The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people enjoy genuinely [integrated] consciousness or that brain processes can be modelled computationally,” say Maguire and co. ...

 

[smcder]

I clicked on the link and had a little surprise...

what was the surprise?



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[Constance]

"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."

(from "The Well-Dressed Man with a Beard," by Wallace Stevens)

 

[Constance]

Wallace Stevens
Poem Written At Morning

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

 

[smcder]

Wallace Stevens
Poem Written At Morning

A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

men of ice!

I'd never heard of Poussin ...

Poussin ... Poisson (the distribution) ... papanca ... from the Sanskrit

prapanca

prapañca — material; SB 2.9.5
prapañca-racana — there is the cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 20.254
prapañca — the total material energy; CC Madhya 25.110
prapañca — the cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 25.111
prākṛta prapañca — the material cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 25.112
prapañca — manifestation; MM 23


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[Soupie]

what was the surprise?

That the article was about Tononi and IIT. I haven't encountered IIT anywhere other than via links in this thread. I didn't search that article out; it showed up in my news feed.

 

[Soupie]

Who do you see as making those claims?

People other than myself.

 

[Constance]

Yes. The concept of "beauty" is subjective, but I wanted to keep the focus on subjective experience, not cognition per se.

Can we divide what we think from what we feel? The world's beauty as given to our eyes in nature draws us toward the world, which exists at once beyond us and inside our consciousness of it -- as James said, existing in two places at once. This is our core condition, the situation in which we discover our own being as indivisibly part of the being of all that is (but always partial in the existentiality, the temporality, of our perceptions).

 

[Constance]

That the article was about Tononi and IIT. I haven't encountered IIT anywhere other than via links in this thread. I didn't search that article out; it showed up in my news feed.

It seems that the internet will search out our interests and connect us to them even if we don't search them out deliberately. This is both wonderful and a little scary. Thanks for bringing that article here, Soupie.

 

[Constance]

men of ice!

I'd never heard of Poussin ...

Poussin ... Poisson (the distribution) ... papanca ... from the Sanskrit

prapanca

prapañca — material; SB 2.9.5
prapañca-racana — there is the cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 20.254
prapañca — the total material energy; CC Madhya 25.110
prapañca — the cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 25.111
prākṛta prapañca — the material cosmic manifestation; CC Madhya 25.112
prapañca — manifestation; MM 23

Fascinating. I think Jung would call it synchronicity.

 

[Constance]

Background to the following post:

Soupie wrote: If others want to believe that "the experience of the color green" is not related to information processing, an illusion, or composed of an eternal, non-physical material/process, that's fine with me.

Steve: Who do you see as making those claims?

People other than myself.

Given what we all know about visual processing as a whole and processing of color specifically, I don't think anyone here doubts that information processing is involved in generating the greens (not to mention the blues, purples, etc.) that we see. The way we respond to them is something entirely other than information processing.

 

[smcder]

That the article was about Tononi and IIT. I haven't encountered IIT anywhere other than via links in this thread. I didn't search that article out; it showed up in my news feed.

cool ... I've seen both the articles but through or on posts on this thread ...


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[Soupie]

I've been re-reading the Chalmers article @smcder posted weeks ago about the different categories of belief/theories of consciousness and it's much easier to read now. His handle on the subject is incredible. I'll post some sections soon with questions and comments. I need to learn more about proto-phenenal consciousness.

 

[smcder]

I've been re-reading the Chalmers article @smcder posted weeks ago about the different categories of belief/theories of consciousness and it's much easier to read now. His handle on the subject is incredible. I'll post some sections soon with questions and comments. I need to learn more about proto-phenenal consciousness.

I admire this in him too - I don't know that he has a grasp of some of the newer theories but they haven't fully emerged yet, I sense - so he's the go to guy for now and the next in line to Searle and Nagel as grand old man in the field ...



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