Philosophy, Science, & The Unexplained - Main Thread

[Constance]

Ufology may be nuts - but doesn't that makes the rest of us crackers?? (I'm KIDDING!) I think he does a magnificent job in his role and in the particulars, he is right . . . now, he does have an irrational distrust of philosophy but hey, we all have our little quirks. ;-) And, if you give him room - he pretty well will show you that he is open-minded, don't miss that bit.

I did try not to be harsh. Actually, ufology and I carried on a very lengthy private discussion concerning consciousness when I posted here earlier this year. No one won.

 

[Constance]

Jeff, I will indeed watch that video with Robert Mays tonight. He's a remarkable consciousness researcher.

ps: I know what's it like to be the only person in a forum supporting the viewpoint we share. Glad to be here as a back-up to your efforts.

 

[smcder]

LOL.

Your parents and their different skills and interests seem to have provided you with an education over many years through their dialogues and discussions in your presence. That apparently set you up very well to make maximum use of all you studied in what sounds like an outstanding university. Reading Nietzsche one on one with your professor -- we should all be so lucky.

Dad had a fundamentalist mindset - all was particles and the immutable laws of physics, of course his father was a fundamentalist of a more traditional stripe - mom broke out and got into every sort of new and interesting philosophy and movement that was available at the time . . . so it did make for very stimulating discussions, I found out early on to bend their ears separately. My professor was a brilliant man, Rhodes Scholar (Oxford) and the only way to get a word in edge-wise in our sessions was to figure out where he was going, get there first, then, in the ensuing moment ( a brief one) of confusion, insert your point while making it seem like it was his all along . . . we read Nietzsche at a break-neck pace and produced a paper I took to an undergraduate research conference in San Antonio. After I gave my presentation on the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, some gal came up and actually gave me her room key . . . you never know what some people are into!

 

[smcder]

If you get a chance to view this presentation by Robert Mays, you'll see why very shortly into his presentation I was reminded of the details contained in your experience. Thank you again for your intelligent perspective.

I copied the URL - what I usually do is run KeepVid and turn it into an .mp3 then listen to it on my player while I work.

 

[Constance]

Steve, wanted to comment further on this:

"Oh and I did manage to get a amount of mathematics in there (Cal, Abstract, Linear, Differential Eq), along with the music and languages and theatre and art and philosophy and history and psychology. An inch deep and a mile wide is a good way to characterize a liberal arts degree."

The math doesn't sound an inch deep, and I doubt the rest of it was either. I am lost in mathematics, but fascinated by quantum physics, especially q. entanglement. I gave up trying to read the equations and decided to take it on faith that the mathematics was sound. Here's a website made to order for people like me: Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics | Simons Foundation

 

[Randall]

I like the phrase "an informational plenum." The subconscious mind, also fed by the collective unconscious, seems to function like an archive that has stored the information our species and our forebears in evolution have received in living in and experiencing the world. It can't 'make stuff up' ...

Perhaps we're getting into the finer details of what is meant by "make stuff up". Sure, our subconscious mind doesn't "conjure" material objects up, and it would be pointless to claim that it can't make up things that are impossible to make up. So it should be obvious that what I mean is that the subconscious mind is capable of creating its own subjective environment filled with it's own sight's and sounds and sensations. That alone is sufficient to claim it can "make stuff up". One might try to claim that those sights and sounds and sensations are simply composites of stored memories pulled like samples from a clip library and pasted together in a collage like manner, but even that is "making stuff up", and as someone who took art in university for 5 years, I think it also goes much deeper.

I submit that the subconscious mind has access to the most fundamental building blocks of perception and can create a virtually infinite number of unique combinations of sights, sounds, and sensations. My past experience as an artist and musician made this abundantly clear to me. There were times I would contemplate a work for days, often before falling asleep, and eventually it would come to me. Plus there seems to be plenty of evidence to show that the brain uses about the same amount of energy while sleeping as it does while it's awake, and that we resolve problems subconsciously while sleeping. This is the brain not simply "making stuff up" at random either, but creating new thoughts, new ideas, new visualizations. It's totally ridiculous to think that the subconscious mind doesn't "make stuff up".

 

[smcder]

Steve, wanted to comment further on this:

"Oh and I did manage to get a amount of mathematics in there (Cal, Abstract, Linear, Differential Eq), along with the music and languages and theatre and art and philosophy and history and psychology. An inch deep and a mile wide is a good way to characterize a liberal arts degree."

The math doesn't sound an inch deep, and I doubt the rest of it was either. I am lost in mathematics, but fascinated by quantum physics, especially q. entanglement. I gave up trying to read the equations and decided to take it on faith that the mathematics was sound. Here's a website made to order for people like me: Physicists Discover Geometry Underlying Particle Physics | Simons Foundation

Try this one from Lakoff:

Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being: George Lakoff, Rafael Nuñez: 9780465037711: Amazon.com: Books

he will get you all the way to "Euler's Identity" and do it beautifully! John Allen Paulos' books on Innumeracy are excellent too - most folks have a lot more math understanding than the educational process allowed them to realize . . . I took and dropped out of Cal 1 twice, then I read Boyer's History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development - he gives you the historical development, both Newton and Leibniz, in context: (briefly, here: No. 1375: Newton vs. Leibniz) and once that clicked, I took Cal 1,2,3 and kept going.

 

[smcder]

An extremely brief outline of the central argument in Nagel's latest work:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=0

we started this thread with Nagel's seminal paper: "What It's Like to Be a Bat" on the hard problem of consciousness - and it's very interesting to check in and see where he's gone in the last forty years . . . .

 

[Randall]

we started this thread with Nagel's seminal paper: "What It's Like to Be a Bat" on the hard problem of consciousness - and it's very interesting to check in and see where he's gone in the last forty years . . . .

I keep hearing this claim:

"The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view."
​

How Animals See The World

Apparently we can get a pretty good idea.​

 

[trainedobserver]

If I recall the line of thought you're referring to correctly, it comes out of a computationally based theory in which sufficient complexity in the wiring of the brain produces a 'global workspace', unifying the many operations in which the brain is engaged continually. And then 'a miracle occurs': the brain becomes conscious.

Yes, something like that. (cough, cough) Look, what's that over there? (walks to window, slides behind the curtain)

But of what? Surely of the world in which the being with a brain finds itself living and acting, rather than of itself operating inside the being's skull.

A-ha! Surely not. The world that the brain finds itself in is in fact itself representing a model of the outside world as it is presented to the senses. Along with the bit that provides us an observational perspective, that is the part of us we consider the "real us" that is watching all of this happen from some spot behind our eyes. It is the living brain's physical configuration of neurons, chemistry, and electrochemical processes constituting a biological "workspace" (that's a good way to put it) realized as consciousness. To be conscious of consciousness is to realize this is happening at this very moment. The first time this happened to me it enlisted peals of laughter and what I can only describe as an altered state of consciousness. All while driving down the road first thing in the morning I might add.

I think the best analysis of consciousness has been produced by phenomenological philosophers, especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom consciousness must be understood primarily as embodied, its embodiment providing the means by which it understands itself as embodied and connected with the rest of nature.

I'm unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty. I'll take a look.

What do you think would constitute 'valid evidence' of the nature of consciousness as something more than the brain, requiring more than the brain in order to develop?

A disembodied consciousness that communicates and interacts with human beings in a reproducible manner.

 

[smcder]

I keep hearing this claim:

"The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view."
​

How Animals See The World


Apparently we can get a pretty good idea.​

This seems to show me more how I might see the world if my eyes operated like certain animal's . . . but it doesn't convey to me what it is like to be that animal . . . I haven't learned anything about what it is like to be a dog . . . and that's what Nagel is talking about.

 

[smcder]

I keep hearing this claim:

"The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view."
​

How Animals See The World

Apparently we can get a pretty good idea.​

I thought we sort of understood what the "hard problem" was, what was meant by it - whether or not we embraced or even took it as valid, I at least thought we pretty well were on the same page as to what the idea was . . . ?

If I were to look out through tiny cameras in the corners of your eyes would I know what it is like to be you? Yes, I'd probably have a better idea, via empathy ("mirror neurons") than I did from that video, granted . . . b/c we're both human (as far as you know, anyway . . . ;-) but you get the point.

And to make the point at all, you have to assume my subjective experience in the first place . . . (you wouldn't show this to your cat to make a point would you? By the way, do you have a cat?) so what am I missing here?

 

[smcder]

To be conscious of consciousness is to realize this is happening at this very moment. The first time this happened to me it enlisted peals of laughter and what I can only describe as an altered state of consciousness. All while driving down the road first thing in the morning I might add.

It's a giddy feeling . . . I used to look in the mirror and repeat my name (turns out that's an old technique) - here lately consciousness seems to bear down on me as a kind of unbearable point of concentration and that's not so much fun.

 

[Randall]

This seems to show me more how I might see the world if my eyes operated like certain animal's . . . but it doesn't convey to me what it is like to be that animal . . . I haven't learned anything about what it is like to be a dog . . . and that's what Nagel is talking about.

That post was a response to a specific statement in the article, to quote: "how the world appears to their different particular points of view". The title of the video is "How Animals See The World" and it's based on a scientific understanding of optics and biology, so the video is actually in all probability, a reasonably accurate representation of that statement. But if one wants to wiggle it around by fudging what we mean by the word "like", then all we have to do is ask ourselves exactly what that word means ( again ).

We've already been over the ground someplace back there, and if I recall correctly, in your view it doesn't mean the same thing what it is to be bat, but merely what it's "like", and that word implies analogy by way of similarity, and I'd say that based on a knowledge of optics and biology, then that is exactly what the video does. What it's like to be something is sufficiently similar to what it's like to perceive the world the way that something does. Why? Because what it would be like to be a bat is substantially similar to knowing what it would be like to perceive the world the way a bat does.

So if that were possible, it would be plenty "bat like" enough to claim similarity without actually being a bat. Or are we going to fudge the meaning back around to "What it is to be a bat" rather than just what it's like? How do we clear up this issue?

 

[Constance]

The world that the brain finds itself in is in fact itself representing a model of the outside world as it is presented to the senses.

So do you feel that you exist at one or several removes from the local environment in which you are living your life? Also, do you doubt the reality of that environment, or the reality of the world, universe, cosmos as a whole?

You continued: "To be conscious of consciousness is to realize this is happening at this very moment. The first time this happened to me it enlisted peals of laughter and what I can only describe as an altered state of consciousness. All while driving down the road first thing in the morning I might add."

Yes, the discovery of one's consciousness is a trip. It troubled me at first, apparently, for I found myself compulsively counting through series of numbers whenever I was not focused on some task. That went on for a month or more as I recall and then passed. Still I did not pursue an informed understanding of consciousness. But a year or two later I began to do that while editing my then-husband's dissertation on the concept of freedom in Schiller and Sartre.


You also wrote: "I'm unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty. I'll take a look."

Do. You will see the world in technicolor and gradually realize how embedded you are in it, how filled with it, except for the considerable margin of reflective thought in which you process your experiences and eventually enter, with MP, into an existential ontology.

I also asked you: "What do you think would constitute 'valid evidence' of the nature of consciousness as something more than the brain, requiring more than the brain in order to develop?," and you wrote:

"A disembodied consciousness that communicates and interacts with human beings in a reproducible manner."

Many people have had that experience repeatedly. I will agree that that is the most stunning evidence of the larger structure of reality within which we have our current, radically temporal existences. But it's not the only evidence available to us here and now of the nonlocality of consciousness.

 

[Constance]

Thanks for the Nagel blog, Steve. I agree with his prognosis: ". . .a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature." The paradigm change is under way but will probably take many decades.

 

[Tyger]

The evidence of millennia is not enough - backing into the barn with blinders on....

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

LINK: Listen to a choir of crickets slowed down to 'human' pace | Earth Touch Web TV

It's not about thinking. Using the lower mind will get one no where except in a circle. It's about experience.

 

[Randall]

I did try not to be harsh. Actually, ufology and I carried on a very lengthy private discussion concerning consciousness when I posted here earlier this year. No one won.

I thought my interpretation of the poetry was rather good actually .

 

[Constance]

ufology wrote: "What it's like to be something is sufficiently similar to what it's like to perceive the world the way that something does."

I don't think so, though perception (visual as well as auditory, tactile, olfactory, etc.) is primary for all animals as they orient themselves in their environment after birth. But taking cats, for example, all cats -- wild ones, homeless domestic strays, and well cared-for, well-loved pets -- likely perceive the sights and sounds and tastes of the physical world in much the same way, but the qualities of their experience in/of the world, the satisfactions they find in being in the world, vary dramatically. You see the point. Much more than sense-data affects consciousness.

 

[Constance]

I thought my interpretation of the poetry was rather good actually .

It wasn't bad, but it would have been better if you had had an opportunity to read much more of that poet. Actually, I was referring to where our dialogue on consciousness went when I said 'nobody won'. Except perhaps the poet.