Philosophy, Science, & The Unexplained - Main Thread

[trainedobserver]

It seems to me that what you are calling, "The mind's representation of matter ...", is an essential part of the mind itself, and this is what we're focused on here. What exactly is that "representation" made of. It's certainly not made of the same material as what the brain material is made of. So what is it?

The same stuff your brain is made of, food. I'm saying the mind isn't a separate entity from the brain itself. It isn't an energetic field standing alone somehow generated from brain activity. It is the brain activity, which are chemical changes within a network. It just seems like a 3D simulation "rendered" somewhere, it isn't be rendered as such.

 

[Jeff Davis]

Obviously! Only now her world is just a little bluer . . .

The appropriate evaluation of the knowledge argument remains controversial. The acceptability of its second premise P2 (Mary lacks factual knowledge before release) and of the inferences from P1 (Mary has complete physical knowledge before release) to C1 (Mary knows all the physical facts) and from P2 to C2 (Mary does not know some facts before release) depend on quite technical and controversial issues about (a) the appropriate theory of property concepts and their relation to the properties they express and (b) the appropriate theory of belief content. It is therefore safe to predict that the discussion about the knowledge argument will not come to an end in the near future.

I'm glad you two have it all worked out though . . . ;-)

Here's a few more papers on the subject if you want to go a little deeper:

Online papers on consciousness

and you can contact Chalmers at the e-mail on the bottom of this page:

David Chalmers

smcder,
Just wanted to specifically give you a sincere thank you for all the effort in providing all these EXCELLENT links. There is so much stuff I have learned about in the last few weeks, only perriferally of course at this time, but since you joined the cause here, the databases have really been growing. What a lot of GREAT material!

The Qualia Knowledge Argument, as well as the, "Zen & The Brain" book, are where I am starting at this point.

 

[smcder]

smcder,
Just wanted to specifically give you a sincere thank you for all the effort in providing all these EXCELLENT links. There is so much stuff I have learned about in the last few weeks, only perriferally of course at this time, but since you joined the cause here, the databases have really been growing. What a lot of GREAT material!

The Qualia Knowledge Argument, as well as the, "Zen & The Brain" book, are where I am starting at this point.

You are welcome! It has been so long since I got into this - these are some of the links I remember kind of splashing about in years ago, some sites have really grown like Chalmers' . . . Zen & The Brain is an enormous work and my guess is not much read. I didn't keep up with my copy - so I may have to get another one for reference. I'd love to hear what you think about any and all of it!

 

[smcder]

The same stuff your brain is made of, food. I'm saying the mind isn't a separate entity from the brain itself. It isn't an energetic field standing alone somehow generated from brain activity. It is the brain activity, which are chemical changes within a network. It just seems like a 3D simulation "rendered" somewhere, it isn't be rendered as such.

Meat

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

you might like this one too, if you don't know it already (PK Dick)

Beyond Lies the Wub by Philip K. Dick - Free Ebook

 

[Randall]

The same stuff your brain is made of, food. I'm saying the mind isn't a separate entity from the brain itself. It isn't an energetic field standing alone somehow generated from brain activity. It is the brain activity, which are chemical changes within a network. It just seems like a 3D simulation "rendered" somewhere, it isn't be rendered as such.

So returning to our imaginary visualization of a red Ferrari, does that image reside in what you think of as your mind, or something else?

 

[trainedobserver]

So returning to our imaginary visualization of a red Ferrari, does that image reside in what you think of as your mind, or something else?

It doesn't exist anywhere except as chemical reactions occurring in your synapses. I don't think there is really an image being rendered somewhere, but if it were it would be happening in the visual cortex at the back of our brains. Think of a graphics engine crunching the code of a red car and not using it to drive a display. The red car exists for other code to reference and use intelligently although no image of the car is produced. It's a poor analogy, but the only one I have at the moment.

 

[Randall]

It doesn't exist anywhere except as chemical reactions occurring in your synapses. I don't think there is really an image being rendered somewhere, but if it were it would be happening in the visual cortex at the back of our brains.

Hmm, perhaps I'm making an assumption that you are capable of rendering an image in your imagination. I've actually talked to people who claim they can't and that it's impossible. Perhaps they're robots or something. I don't know. So are you saying you're not able to render objects in your imagination ( visualize things )?

Think of a graphics engine crunching the code of a red car and not using it to drive a display. The red car exists for other code to reference and use intelligently although no image of the car is produced. It's a poor analogy, but the only one I have at the moment.

It's not an entirely poor analogy. It's just not complete. There is no image produced by the graphics engine. There are only signals that are sent to a monitor which produces light, which is picked up by our eyes and relayed to our brain, and that's where the image is constructed. But we don't know exactly how or what the image is made of. The material biochemical/electrical workings of the brain are separate from the image itself. So no matter how many neurons and other bits and pieces of brain material you choose to look at, you'll never see what the observer sees. You'll only see neurons and other bits and pieces of the brain. This is the problem we're discussing.

 

[trainedobserver]

The same would be true for something you imagined or saw with your eyes. They are not "images" being "viewed" by something else. It's all you. The cars (imagined and seen) are just models encoded in your synaptic activity which the observer bit of code uses. Its relationships and connections within a living neural network and not an "image" projected somewhere. I don't know how many ways I can say the same thing.

"There is no spoon." Er, uh, red car.

 

[smcder]

Hmm, perhaps I'm making an assumption that you are capable of rendering an image in your imagination. I've actually talked to people who claim they can't and that it's impossible. Perhaps they're robots or something. I don't know. So are you saying you're not able to render objects in your imagination ( visualize things )?

like a Voight-Kampf test . . . I've heard of folks who can't and I'm fascinated by the details of "inner life" in the people around me and literature and how it may have changed in history (Breakdown of Conciousness in the Bicameral Mind and many subsequent commentators) - and how little it is really conveyed in every day life. I have not tackled Proust's work but I understand he gives fullliterary expression to an inner life. The most clear light I have seen, the most clear images (recently anyway, as I have aged) have been in a kind of cultivated hypnagogic state - I can pretty freely bring up any image I want (visual and tactile - can't do much with smell or taste or hearing, though hearing is good in dream states - but not smell or taste that I remember) and the quality is better than my "real" eyes can now render, especially the quality of light.

off topic but . . . interesting

 

[Randall]

like a Voight-Kampf test . . . I've heard of folks who can't and I'm fascinated by the details of "inner life" in the people around me and literature and how it may have changed in history (Breakdown of Conciousness in the Bicameral Mind and many subsequent commentators) - and how little it is really conveyed in every day life.

Interesting idea. A test based on the ability visualize. I guess the problem would be how to tell unless they admitted such up-front. Back to the so-called hard problem. Yet there may also be ways to do it with scanners. Here's an out there idea: Suppose the ability to visualize actually is unique to humans and they, the aliens or androids or MIB or whatever they are just don't get it and refuse to believe it because they can't imagine how such a thing is possible, so they have no problem simply denying it. Maybe we really have been infiltrated somehow with beings that have no real consciousness. In reality the only explanation I can think of for claims by people who say they can't visualize is that they're lying. I just don't see how any normal person can't do it.

I have not tackled Proust's work but I understand he gives fullliterary expression to an inner life. The most clear light I have seen, the most clear images (recently anyway, as I have aged) have been in a kind of cultivated hypnagogic state - I can pretty freely bring up any image I want (visual and tactile - can't do much with smell or taste or hearing, though hearing is good in dream states - but not smell or taste that I remember) and the quality is better than my "real" eyes can now render, especially the quality of light.

off topic but . . . interesting

Not really so far off topic. I think the ability to visualize is the purest essence of consciousness because it involves no external stimulus response. It's a pure thought form. Smalls and tastes I'm not so good with, but objects are less of a problem. I took fine arts in university and can stand in a studio and visualize a completed sculpture standing right before me. Also, having been a musician, I can compose entire songs in my head, including adding or subtracting instruments and effects, as if I were in a recording studio. I think these abilities are common in those who culture and sharpen them. I'm certainly not the only musician here on the forum, so maybe someone else can weigh in. But when everything is really cut loose is when, like you, during dream states or a sort of lucid unconsciousness kicks in.

By lucid unconscious I mean that one time my buddy and I way back in our late teens got into some honey oil and a bottle of ouzo and we both were sitting in the living room listening to an LP and when it was over another one started, and we both thought the other person had put the new one on, but in fact neither of us had, and we were actually listening to two entirely different albums in our heads. It sounded so perfect and crystal clear to me that it was like being in the studio. My buddy relayed the same experience to me. Sure enough we checked the turntable and it was the same album I'd put on in the first place, and I didn't even own the one he thought I'd put on. That was a long time ago now, and I've not smoked-up or gotten liquored up in decades now ( for that matter I don't even think anyone makes honey oil anymore ). But it just shows the power of the brain under the right conditions.

 

[Randall]

The same would be true for something you imagined or saw with your eyes. They are not "images" being "viewed" by something else. It's all you.

Actually, seeing something with your eyes what's called a stimulus response and occurs as a result of photons hitting your retina where a signal is generated. Visualization is a different process, though the visual cortex is still used, the signals are relayed from other parts of the brain, not an external stimulus.

Also the question of whether or not "it's all you" isn't the issue. Like you, I am of the opinion that what we visualize is a part of who we are as persons and not something separate. However visualizations aren't material. Yet they exist anyway, just like a magnet and it's magnetic field both exist. Think of the magnet as the material and the magnetic field as the non-material. Both belong to the magnet, but no matter how closely we look at the magnet we can never see the field itself. In the brain, we can measure field strength and frequency with EEG meters, but they don't produce images of what the observer sees. Perhaps someday they will. I can even think of a couple of interesting experiments to try along these lines.

The cars (imagined and seen) are just models encoded in your synaptic activity which the observer bit of code uses. Its relationships and connections within a living neural network and not an "image" projected somewhere. I don't know how many ways I can say the same thing.

"There is no spoon." Er, uh, red car.

There is however an image of a red Ferrari. Therefore the image is real. It exists. Yet it is not made of the material of the brain. It may be made by the material of the brain. But those two things are entirely different concepts. Are we on the same page now?

 

[trainedobserver]

Actually, seeing something with your eyes what's called a stimulus response and occurs as a result of photons hitting your retina where a signal is generated. Visualization is a different process, though the visual cortex is still used, the signals are relayed from other parts of the brain, not an external stimulus.

Photons don't get past your retinas of course. After that its all chemistry.

There is however an image of a red Ferrari. Therefore the image is real. It exists.

No, the car does not exist in some location as an "image." Its part of the information being processed inside your brain circuitry. You aren't experiencing a light image of a car, you are processing a "red Ferrari" and processing the experience of seeing it. All of this occurs "virtually" in the complex chemical exchanges going on in your brain pretty much non-stop.

 

[Randall]

Photons don't get past your retinas of course. After that its all chemistry.

Right ( well sort of anyway ). Electrochemistry would be a bit more accurate, and biochemistry more accurate again.

No, the car does not exist in some location as an "image."

Of course images in our mind exist. The problem is where exactly the mind is located. It's obviously not in the material of the brain. So where is it?

Its part of the information being processed inside your brain circuitry.

Information is a subjective term based on things that relay meaning to a consciousness. In an objective sense, there's no "information" being processed inside the brain's circuitry. The circuitry just exchanges chemicals, generates electrical potentials, and produces low level EM fields. The result is a consciousness that somehow thinks this all equates to "information".

You aren't experiencing a light image of a car, you are processing a "red Ferrari" and processing the experience of seeing it. All of this occurs "virtually" in the complex chemical exchanges going on in your brain pretty much non-stop.

OK. We agree on the part about "virtually", but it's not a VR simulation like a hologram, and it's not a VR simulation like 3D television. Those things take up observable space. But there's no observable space in the brain where we can find this "virtual" image. Yet the image exists. So if it's not part of the material brain, then it must be part of the non-material brain. This gives rise to the idea of the consciousness field that we've been discussing. The idea is that the brain produces this field like a magnet produces a magnetic field, and that is where this "virtual" experience you mention resides.

 

[trainedobserver]

If you don't like information, substitute signals instead.

The truth is there is no need for a field. It is all happening within the activity of the brain itself. It is the living brain creating a subjective experience. There is no actual 3d image in a location, it is virtual, yet it is created through chemical changes in living tissue.

The illustration below (from Watching the brain in action) of an MRI showing the parts of the brain activated by viewing an image. The person is "experiencing" his brain activity/processes and not the spinning target in front of him. Note that this gives you a physical location for the activity, yet there is no spinning target. There is no motion or light.

That is something to ponder. Imagine your red Ferrari driving down the highway. Is your consciousnesses field in motion? The spinning target below, is it in motion in the brain? I would say it could no more be in motion that a simulation running inside a computer.

 

[smcder]

If you don't like information, substitute signals instead.

The truth is there is no need for a field. It is all happening within the activity of the brain itself. It is the living brain creating a subjective experience. There is no actual 3d image in a location, it is virtual, yet it is created through chemical changes in living tissue.

The illustration below (from Watching the brain in action) of an MRI showing the parts of the brain activated by viewing an image. The person is "experiencing" his brain activity/processes and not the spinning target in front of him. Note that this gives you a physical location for the activity, yet there is no spinning target. There is no motion or light.

That is something to ponder. Imagine your red Ferrari driving down the highway. Is your consciousnesses field in motion? The spinning target below, is it in motion in the brain? I would say it could no more be in motion that a simulation running inside a computer.

The truth is there is no need for a field.

In my experience, this problem splits people into the two views or intuitions that you have here - one a computer metaphor (and I wonder if something like that intuition was present before computers . . . ) and one that is the sense that images in consciousness, qualia, have to exist somewhere . . . and both have their problems. To me it's back to the duck/rabbit optical illusion - so is one aspect of the hard problem a cognitive illusion that sorts out people into a few ways of dealing with something that is in the end uncognizable?

Insisting that imagery has to exist somewhere, for me leads to circularity - the old homonculus problem - and an infinite regress, once we posit a field that's responsible for the imagery and we get inside that field, so to speak - how do we account for qualia there? We still have the issue of subjectivity and down we have to go another explanatory level.

On the other hand, the computer simulation and its variants or consequent positions: eliminative materialist/epiphenomenalism ignore the very real sense that images in the mind exist. Zombies and the question of what is consciousness for may soon follow - or do "in" my head (wherever that may be).


http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

 

[trainedobserver]

Here is a movie showing the relationship between visual stimulation and brain activity using MRIs. What you get is a picture of the living brain creating the "image." Note: The visualization of this using the MRI, program, and monitor is just that, a visualization of brain activity.

 

[trainedobserver]

S,

I think the answer is that the brain is a living computer (a loaded term, but nonetheless) whose "programs" (another awkward term) consist of chemical transformations within a living and constantly growing network of highly specialized tissues. All these things play to manufacture unique experience, but it is the living brain itself that is changing and doing the experiencing.

 

[Randall]

Here is a movie showing the relationship between visual stimulation and brain activity using MRIs. What you get is a picture of the living brain creating the "image." Note: The visualization of this using the MRI, program, and monitor is just that, a visualization of brain activity.

In the case of the demonstration above, there seems to be some evidence of exactly what I've been trying to get across because an fMRI procedure is similar to MRI but uses the change in magnetization between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood as its basic measure. Notice the keyword magnetization. The fMRI machine isn't detecting the blood itself. It's detecting changes in the magnetic fields associated with the blood. The electrochemical processes in the neurons and synapses also create fields, and there was also the paper that smcder linked us to theorizing the connection between virtual photons and consciousness. This is just more evidence that the material of the brain produces measurable fields that seem to be associated with imagery, not that images reside in the blood cells. So the theory is that the fields produced by the brain interact in a feedback loop with the material of the brain in a frame by frame fashion to produce the experience we call consciousness.

 

[Jeff Davis]

The truth is there is no need for a field.

In my experience, this problem splits people into the two views or intuitions that you have here - one a computer metaphor (and I wonder if something like that intuition was present before computers . . . ) and one that is the sense that images in consciousness, qualia, have to exist somewhere . . . and both have their problems. To me it's back to the duck/rabbit optical illusion - so is one aspect of the hard problem a cognitive illusion that sorts out people into a few ways of dealing with something that is in the end uncognizable?

Insisting that imagery has to exist somewhere, for me leads to circularity - the old homonculus problem - and an infinite regress, once we posit a field that's responsible for the imagery and we get inside that field, so to speak - how do we account for qualia there? We still have the issue of subjectivity and down we have to go another explanatory level.

On the other hand, the computer simulation and its variants or consequent positions: eliminative materialist/epiphenomenalism ignore the very real sense that images in the mind exist. Zombies and the question of what is consciousness for may soon follow - or do "in" my head (wherever that may be).


http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

IMO, according to my own intuition, the corresponding activity in the brain does not create anything. It's an interpreter for that which already is.

Upon witnessing events, this measured simultaneous activity in the brain is a post experience reflective/interpretive process, certainly not one that ocurrs simultaneous with experience. Can we show electro chemical activity within a known/understood natural process giving rise to sentient experience? I do not believe we can. Therefore the brain is doing what is referred to as "reactivity", and certainly not what some have forwarded here as "responsibility".

At any one time, the mind (the product of the brain's environmentally specialized interpretive response to consciousness) represents the physical progressive state of humankind's evolutionary status. To best understand how key this evolution is by comparison to any of the animal human's other central areas of development, here is something to take a look at. The Archaeology News Network: Study finds humans still evolving, and quickly

Whether consciousness is a field, or an environmental medium that we are substantively yet familiar with, it is not the mind/brain in the least. If consciousness were the brain, we would certainly expect to find a measurable difference in the manner we experience reality as the brain itself physically morphs via the evolutionary beckoning of nature.

Rather,IMO, like is the case with all our vital organs, it's function is specific to a combination of human environmental necessity and the processing of those environmental necessities integral in relationship to our existence. Consciousness to the brain is no different than the atmospheric nutrition that the lung's harvest to facilitate the body specific.

Consciousness is metabolized by the brain much like oxygen is by the lungs. The difference being that this intake occurs based on reception that each person's mind is matched/tuned to via it's initial field signature at birth. This is also what creates sentience by establishing a unique reference point in consciousness. The outputted information via this metabolic process is stored direct to an informational memory bank. Experience is perceptively identified and actuated post this initial storage process. It is the retrieval process from this storage receptacle that renders experiences in temporal unity and provides the ever present notion of time itself.

 

[Randall]

The truth is there is no need for a field.

I don't think we can be so sure of that. The evidence seems to be mounting that the fields we measure that are produced by the brain are an integral part of brain function, and that it is the brain that gives rise to consciousness. Therefore saying it's true that there is no need for a field is highly premature. In fact the idea of a field seems to be the at the leading edge of exploration into this subject.

In my experience, this problem splits people into the two views or intuitions that you have here - one a computer metaphor (and I wonder if something like that intuition was present before computers . . . ) and one that is the sense that images in consciousness, qualia, have to exist somewhere . . . and both have their problems. To me it's back to the duck/rabbit optical illusion - so is one aspect of the hard problem a cognitive illusion that sorts out people into a few ways of dealing with something that is in the end uncognizable?

Pattern recognition is a separate issue from seeing the pattern in the first place.

Insisting that imagery has to exist somewhere, for me leads to circularity - the old homonculus problem - and an infinite regress, once we posit a field that's responsible for the imagery and we get inside that field, so to speak - how do we account for qualia there? We still have the issue of subjectivity and down we have to go another explanatory level.

Recursion is a more complex problem, and indeed I would say that the most salient point of McGinn's paper is his comment, to quote: "I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand it much better than we do." The best I can manage at this time with the problem of recursion is that it's not that we have to "go down another explanatory level", but consider the problem in the context of real time as opposed to bullet time. If I can get this across, you'll see that in reality, the recursion problem is a conceptual problem and not a real problem because it assumes a perfect set of mirrors for consciousness to continuously reflect upon itself. But that's not how it actually works. Try it. We just can't do it. We can perhaps make it a few levels in and the whole thing collapses. Why?

To answer the above, I suggest that the recursion problem as you describe it is in a practical sense ( when you actually try it ) the result of freezing a state of consciousness like bullet time ( e.g. Matrix ) at which point we suddenly find ourselves imagining ourselves looking at the scene from an omniscient perspective. This first level is easy to maintain, but iterate it just one level by imagining looking at ourselves looking at the first level. You'll notice that the more levels you go, the less the perceptual experience can be maintained, and only for a short period, certainly not infinitely. So while it's easy to conceptualize the idea of infinite recursion as an intellectual principle. The reality of it is that it just doesn't happen in real life experience. It is limited in scope.

I propose that the reason for this limitation is that the fields produced by the brain work in a recursive fashion in that we have two hemispheres and multiple fields in each at different locations and strengths depending on what's going on, and in the context of real time, the process is a mix of feedback loops, so as one field forms, it generates a response in the brain that causes another field to form, which in turn interacts with the first field in a frame by frame by fashion.

So it's not as if there is something else outside all this watching it all happen. Rather we are literally watching ourselves, and that is why we have self-awareness. There is even some evidence of this frame-by-frame nature of consciousness by way of measuring our perceptual limits so as to arrive at how fast the frame rate is. The most obvious examples we experience on a nearly daily basis are video and spinning wheels. The point at which we can no longer discern the individual rotations of a wheel or single frames in a video is the maximum frame rate our brains can operate at.

On the other hand, the computer simulation and its variants or consequent positions: eliminative materialist/epiphenomenalism ignore the very real sense that images in the mind exist. Zombies and the question of what is consciousness for may soon follow - or do "in" my head (wherever that may be).

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html

The last part above I would agree that we are entirely certain about. And another good link too. Another point about McGinn's paper is his idea that when it comes to the idea of consciousness and space, we need to think of space differently. On this topic I submit that the idea of virtual space is appropriate. We have only so much physical space in which to create our imagery, but that imagery can be resized in relation to that space to give the impression of very small or very large spaces. It's an interesting exercise to visualize zooming in and out on things to get a grasp of how resolution works.