I thought suggesting Galileo is to blame for the state of neuroscience was a bit bizarre.
Those sensory qualities have come back to bite us, Goff writes. Galileos error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious.
In other words, Galileos scientific method required walling off the study of consciousness itself, which is why its perhaps not surprising that even centuries later, his methods inheritors still struggle to explain it.
Human brains are enormously complex, the technological challenges of gathering sufficient data to learn much are huge, and the ethical restrictions on how science can make progress in the field mean we should expect progress to be relatively slow. (Not saying I disapprove of the ethical restrictions.)
Reply to wonderer1 I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity.
It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved.
From the first-person perspective it is neural activity which is not observable. Science and phenomenology remain separate "magisteria" (Gould) , the first dealing with what can be observed in things via the senses and the second with how the experience of things seems, and what, on reflection can be said to be the common characteristics of all experience.
Reply to RogueAI Why would you say that approach doesn't seem to be working? Are you just referring to neuroscience, or the whole of science? Neuroscience may not have explained first person experience, but it has discovered plenty about the workings of the brain.
Reply to RogueAI I don't think the so-called "hard problem" is the main, or even a significant, focus of neuroscience. It's mostly the philosophers who worry about it.
I don't think the so-called "hard problem" is the main, or even a significant, focus of neuroscience. It's mostly the philosophers who worry about it.
I think there's more of a focus now than there was thirty years ago, don't you? Science seeks to explain phenomena, correct? So I ask again: what should we do if neuroscience still hasn't explained consciousness 1,000 years from now?
Reply to 180 Proof You can only paper over problems for so long. Eventually the shut up-and-calculate approach fails, and the hard problems become more and more embarrassing.
Reply to RogueAI Maybe there is more of focus now than thirty years ago...I don't really know. Maybe it's a category mistake to expect neuroscience to explain consciousness as we intuitively understand it. Maybe that understanding itself is due to reifications of linguistically generated ideas. I don't think it's a problem which really matters much to how we live our livesthere are far more pressing problems facing us right now.
Maybe there is more of focus now than thirty years ago...I don't really know. Maybe it's a category mistake to expect neuroscience to explain consciousness as we intuitively understand it. Maybe that understanding itself is due to reifications of linguistically generated ideas. I don't think it's a problem which really matters much to how we live our livesthere are far more pressing problems facing us right now.
That's true for much of science. The JWST gives us pretty pictures, but doesn't have much impact on the problems facing us. Should we not have spent billions on it?
Reply to 180 Proof People like Koch, Kastrup, and Tononi have PhD's in science. The idea that only philosophers worry about consciousness is decades out of date.
You can only paper over problems for so long. Eventually the shut up-and-calculate approach fails, and the hard problems become more and more embarrassing.
The article shows how little some folk have changed since the era of the first ASSC meet. Friston is the only one who has made actual proper progress since then.
Neuroscience realises it is dealing with a process rather than a substance. Thus whatever one might mean by consciousness has to be reduced mathematically to that kind of pragmatic description. We seek a theory not about some fundamental substance with its inherent qualities or properties. We seek some kind of general cognitive structure that can be generalised across many related systems.
This is what Friston has achieved with his Bayesian Brain model - semiosis turned into differential equations.
The same basic process explains cognition or the semiotic modelling relation at all levels of life and mind. It fits genetic as well as neural codes. It covers verbal and numerical encoding too.
So folk can continue to witter on about the Hard Problem as if explaining the specificity of your feels is what the science needs to deliver. Science has more sense. Progress is about the generality of showing how consciousness is just the result of the evolutionary elaboration of biosemiosis - the stepping up of the Bayesian world modelling through the successive levels of genetic, neural, social and informational codes.
Biology starts with how molecules can be messages. How information can regulate dissipation. Once that was made clear, folk stopped harking on about elan vitals and other mystic substances. Life was a general kind of process.
The Bayesian Brain speaks to the same thing. It offers a mechanics which puts neurology and biology on the same mathematical footing. It is pretty easy to recognise this as big progress indeed.
The ASSC was only ever a club for those on the crazy fringe. A fun event because of that. But unrepresentative of serious neuroscience.
It's not like some personal shortcoming but a number of factors that were crystallised in his work, chief among them the division of the world into primary and secondary qualities. According to Galileo's philosophy, primary attributes are intrinsic properties of an object that exist independently of any observer. They are considered objective and measurable. Examples include mass, size, and shape. These attributes are inherent to an object and do not depend on the observer's perception or point of view.
On the other hand, secondary attributes are considered subjective and dependent on the observer. They are not considered to be intrinsic properties of an object but are rather the result of an interaction between the object and the observer's senses. Examples of secondary attributes include color, taste, and temperature. These attributes are perceived by the senses and can vary from one observer to another.
Galileo argued that primary attributes, being objective and measurable, could be studied and understood through mathematical and quantitative analysis. Secondary attributes, being subjective and variable, were not suitable for precise scientific investigation in the same way as primary attributes.
This was to be combined with Descartes' dualism of matter (res extensia) and mind (res cogitans) to give rise to the modern synthesis. Thomas Nagel describes it like this:
[quote=Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
That's the setting against which David Chalmer's poses the hard problem of consciousness, and when spelled out that way, it's not hard to grasp his rationale. The whole issue of the mind-independence of particular qualities has in any case been undermined by the observer problem.
(Philip Goff seeks to solve the problem by saying that matter is actually conscious in some way, thereby dissolving the duality, but I don't think it works, for reasons I explained in an earlier thread, which Philip Goff himself actually joined the Forum to respond to. Oh, and I don't regard his rebuttal of my criticism successful.)
I read a clarification of this trope somewhere. The original dispute was whether two incorporeal intellects (i.e. angels) can occupy the same location in space and time. I don't recall the details but when the background is understood it sounds a little less daft.
When did consciousness first show up? Are insects conscious? Can machines become conscious?
Shouldnt the question be when did semiosis first show up? What first counts as a living organism? And then what counts as the first version of neural coordination with the wider environment? Is a bacterium where it starts as a sensor is connected like a directional switch to its flagella?
A theory of consciousness is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being?
A theory of consciousness is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being?
A theory of consciousness is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being?
Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it? And why is "consciousness" in quotes?
Reply to RogueAI It is inevitable that money will be spent on such investigations. Sometimes there are beneficial spinoffs from scientific investigations. Personally, I think we should spend on health, the environment, subsidizing sustainable energy sources, and so on before lashing out on such things as the JWST or the LHC, but it ain't going to happen.
Reply to RogueAI Considering how complex the brain is, no not really. And like was mentioned before ethics slows down progress (though as stated I'm glad for it).
Some problems in science are slower to progress than others, and it might involve some diverging paths. But so far all the evidence have points to it being a function of the brain and not some kinda "soul" or "ghost" like people think it is.
How though...well we're not quite there yet. I swear people really need to learn patience when it comes to science, these problems are hard. Just because humanity doesn't tolerate ambiguity well is no excuse, though I guess psychologically we do like filling in gaps just to feel better.
Thats pretty clear from extrapolating the fossil record isnt it? Stromatolites or something like it? In any case whatever it was had to maintain itself, grow, heal, mutate and evolve. Minerals don't do that, but organisms do. That much is clear, isn't it?
A theory of consciousness is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being? apokrisis
Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it?
Why should it?
Its not like this ultimate beetle in the box called consciousness, aka lived experience, in any way matters - all the more so were it be immaterial - not ethically and certainty not substantially (neither of the latter - ethics or substance - being in any way scientifically testable anyways).
For instance, pragmatically speaking, we can contemplate mathematical systems and work with empirical knowledge just fine without it.
Plus, socio-politically speaking, all those people the world over that have learned to detest science exactly due to attitudes such as the two just expressed are morons this for having the nerve to maintain that their lived experience (which, needless to add, is first-person), and those of others they care about, should be in any way valued, this either by other individuals or by cultural institutions. Telling them that they're idiots on this count should get them to finally take science seriously - rather than thumb their noses at global warming and the like.
Thats pretty clear from extrapolating the fossil record isnt it?
The line between chemistry and biology gets murky if we do wind all the way back to the first metabolic process. That doesnt fossilise so well when it could be just a bit of organic crud lining the porous serpentine rock of an ancient alkaline thermal vent on the ocean floor.
But the past 20 years have seen remarkable progress on the question of abiogenesis. And your friend, Barbieri, got it right in figuring out the ribosome was the central player from the biosemiotic point of view.
You sound like the kid in the back seat. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
You have failed to engage with the points I made and I dont feel I need to run you through it again.
"Do Insects Have Consciousness and Ego?
The brains of insects are similar to a structure in human brains, which could show a rudimentary form of consciousness"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-insects-have-consciousness-ego-180958824/
What say you? Do you think it's significant that Smithsonian Magazine is taking insect consciousness seriously? Would a simulation of a working brain be conscious? Are functional equivalents of working brains conscious, no matter what the substrate? And why did you put "consciousness" in quotes?
Hey, you're the one who brought up evolution. Instead of getting defensive, just answer the questions.
(BTW, the advocacy provided is directed primarily at apokrisis's comments.)
But how much neurobiology do you know to make such sweeping dismissals? What definition of consciousness can you present here such that it could be subject to experimental investigation?
Sure, you know what it feels like to feel like you. But where can you point to the failures of science to say something about that? Give us an example from psychophysics or cognitive neuroscience.
What definition of consciousness can you present here such that it could be subject to experimental investigation?
Suppose we discovered the perfectly preserved corpse of an alien in one of their spaceships. For any definition of "conscious", what experiments could we do to ascertain whether the alien was ever conscious when it was alive?
I wonder what a 'scientific explanation of consciousness' - or let's say 'mind' - is trying to actually explain. I mean, there are untold applications and benefits of science in cognitive and neuroscience, no question. But the scientific search for 'what is the mind?' will always be bedevilled by the epistemic split between knower and known, because in the case of mind or consciousness, we are what we are seeking to understand - mind is never an object to us. And I say there's a profound problem of recursion or reflexivity in the endeavour to understand it objectively, given in the Advaitin aphorism, 'the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself.'
What this means is that what we know of consciousness, we know because it is constitutive of our existence and experience. It appears as us, not to us. Realising that is itself a change in perspective - a meta-cognitive realisation. And, lo and behold, an entire youtube playlist, comprising hours of lectures, on just this topic -The Blind Spot: Experience, Science, and the Search for Truth - a workshop with philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists (which having discovered, I will now review, but I believe it is linked to this Aeon article from a few years back.)
What this means is that what we know of consciousness, we know because it is constitutive of our existence and experience. It appears as us, not to us.
And yet who are the drongos who are reifying it as something apart from what is being done?
Is life something apart from the process of living? Does a verb need to be confused as a noun?
Is life something apart from the process of living? Does a verb need to be confused as a noun?
Very good question. Being is a verb, isnt it? Doesnt Aquinas have something to say about that? (quick google.) Aquinas argues that being (esse) is the act of existence itself. For him, existence is not just a quality or attribute that something possesses; rather, it is the act of being. In other words, being is not something static but an active and dynamic reality. (Not that I'm an Aquinas scholar.)
It appears that "Consciousness" is a description of a condition or observation. Science does not know how to describe it otherwise. It is almost ([I]but not perfectly[/i]) the opposite of the term "coma." "Consciousness" is (loosely) defined by the functionality of two sets:
[indent]
The ability to accept and understand various forms of stimulation acquired through various sensory abilities, including, but not limited to taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. And through these senses, some life forms build and understand of their reality.
The key physiological triggers that appear to activate "primitive response" and "involuntary reflexes" ([I]like fight or flight[/i]). This functionality is maintained by the reticular activating system (RAS) (throughout the brainstem).
[/indent]
apokrisis:The complaint was about sciences failure to answer the question. That would needed to be supported by examples of science failing.
Does this pass as making an epistemological argument?]
(COMMENT)
The "Scientific Method" seeks to make sense of what we observe in reality. "Metaphysics" is the ultimate study of reality (real 'vs' unreal). The "Theory of Knowledge" (AKA[i]Epistemology[/I]) is a discipline within philosophy which leads to how deals with the nature and/or justification as to how knowledge is acquired.
Why any particular scientific endeavor or inquiry "fails" is a forensic "post moratorium" analysis. It is an examination of the hypothesis or the methodology. Even in failures - knowledge is gained. The Epistemological argument occurs in the development of the methodology behind the test and examination of a specific hypothesis ? that is before the failure.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
---- Thomas A. Edison
But the scientific search for 'what is the mind?' will always be bedevilled by the epistemic split between knower and known, because in the case of mind or consciousness, we are what we are seeking to understand - mind is never an object to us. And I say there's a profound problem of recursion or reflexivity in the endeavour to understand it objectively, given in the Advaitin aphorism, 'the eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself.'
This is a known problem for the individual, that when exercising a bias, say, you are not, and perhaps in some cases cannot be, aware of it. But other individuals can be aware of your biased perspective, as Browning memorably pointed out.
It's just not obvious that the issue arises for types rather than individuals, and it is only the type that science studies. We all feel the pull of recency bias, of color constancy, all those myriad quirks of the way our minds work, none of which stopped scientists from designing experiments to reveal these quirks. We know that we can essentially eliminate consciousness through the use of general anesthesia, without the entire human race having to fall unconscious to find that out.
I may not be able to treat my own mind solely as an object -- though I can surely take it also as an object -- but it's not obvious what the barrier is to me treating your mind as an object of my study, and since it is your mind, not mine, I can only take it solely as an object and never as subject. That object is the also the subject of your experience, so in studying your mind, I am studying your subjectivity, and thus studying subjectivity itself. Where's the problem?
But how much neurobiology do you know to make such sweeping dismissals? What definition of consciousness can you present here such that it could be subject to experimental investigation?
Sure, you know what it feels like to feel like you. But where can you point to the failures of science to say something about that? Give us an example from psychophysics or cognitive neuroscience.
As to definitions:
Science: [s]any conceivable field of knowledge, including that of theoretical fartology[/s] any field of study that is necessarily founded upon empirical observation (hence, observations via any of the physiological senses) and that employs the scientific method of a) falsifiable hypothesis regrading empirical observations, b) empirically observable test, and c) empirically observable results. (e.g., M-theory is currently an untestable theory and so is not of itself science)
Consciousness: the first-person point of view which empirically observes (again, hence observes via its physiological senses), as well as introspects (which is a non-empirical activity), while always finding itself as first-person point of view in non-empirical yet experiential states of being such as those of happiness, certainty, and their opposites, among numerous others. (E.g., I know I am psychologically certain when I am simply by so being as a first-person point of view such that this certainty is in no way something other that I as a first-person point of view apprehend but, again, is simply an aspect of my momentary state of being as a consciousness.)
If you find any disagreement with either definition, it would be important that you then express your differences.
Then, I cannot see myself as a first-person point of view in the mirror - I can instead only see the body through which I as a first-person point of view operate (e.g., neither of the two physiological eyes through which I see is the I which I am as a first-person point of view (i.e., a consciousness). Nor can I touch, smell, taste, hear, or proprioceive (etc.) myself as that which apprehends touch, smell, taste, auditory information, and proprioception (etc.).
In short, I as a consciousness i.e. as a first person point of view know myself to be 100% non-empirical - to in no way whatsoever stand out to anyone anywhere, my own self very much included - and to nevertheless yet be.
Science including psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience can only address empirical givens by definition.
Ergo, to presume that anyone now or ever can obtain scientific knowledge of what consciousness is is a massive category mistake. Its right up there with believing one can catch the horizon if one chases it fast enough.
-----
Of important note: here is being strictly addresses the issue of consciousness and in no way that of mind (which as a definite given among humans always pertains to a given consciousness; e.g. my mind or "his mind") This in no way denying the interplay between consciousness and the unconscious mind. And it in no way addresses metaphysics.
This is certainly not true. There are more than seven billion human minds that are objects to us and only one you might argue isn't.
Maybe, but this would be contingent on how one defines and thereby interprets "mind". So how do you define mind?
As two examples among many:
1) a body of sometimes disparate agencies of awareness and will - interacting at various levels of unconscious (with one's conscience as one example) - that can of themselves hold causal power and thereby affect or else form the causal abilities of consciousness (e.g., feeling an overwhelming unconscious urge to do something that one then does) that can fully unify into a singular awareness and will (such as when one is in the flow and effortlessly acts in manners devoid of any choice making or deliberative thought). In short, mind as a mostly unified bundle of agencies.
2) the strict, causal-power-devoid epiphenomenon of a physical brain's operatons that is thereby necessarily reducible to the purely deterministic, causal operations of a physical brain's components and, hence, of itself holds no causal power to alter any behavior - this such as via the activity of making choices or of thinking - here very much including the non-agency of consciousness ... which is one aspect of a human's total mind). In short, mind as the effete byproduct of a brain.
Just two options among many, but I so far find anything resembling (1) to be non-observable (instead only being inferable, typically unconsciously in day to day life, this via observable data regarding a total person's overt behaviors) - this even though a corporeal being's mind is here yet understood to be contingent on a corporeal, hence physical, body (and at the very least in mammals, on a physical central nervous system). And, since mind here is non directly observable (with MRIs and such, which are observable, being inferential understandings of such agency we term mind), mind in this interpretation cannot be an observable object. (albeit, one can via various inferences often enough predict what minds will do).
Whereas anything resembling (2) can then be easily expressed as an observable object - this since it here basically amounts to the occurrence of a brain - of whose illusory agency in the form of mind is fully, well, illusory.
(Personally, I find that satisfactorily defining mind is far more challenging than defining consciousness - esp. when attempting to remain consistent to the occurrence of consciousness itself. All the same, an interesting topic to explore via commonalities and differences of perspective.)
Maybe, but this would be contingent on how one defines and thereby interprets "mind".
I would define "mind" as the sum total of an entities mental processes which include thinking, feeling, perceiving, knowing, remembering, being aware, being self-aware, proprioception, and lots of stuff I'm leaving out. I think all of those things are observable from the outside (third person observation) and many are observable from the inside (introspection).
I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity.
When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.
Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer.
Different areas of scientific investigation do have to be handled differently depending on what is being investigated, but I think this has been well understood for quite awhile now, and I doubt Galileo did much to impede scientists' understanding of this. However, I'm not a science historian, so maybe Galileo did retard humanity's development of science in some regard despite the intuitive implausibility of that to me.
In any case, I still think attributing such a large causal role (in the development of neuroscience) to Galileo, sounds kind of ridiculous in light of the other factors i brought up, having to do with the difficulty of neuroscience.
It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved.
I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.
I would define "mind" as the sum total of an entities mental processes which include thinking, feeling, perceiving, knowing, remembering, being aware, being self-aware, proprioception, and lots of stuff I'm leaving out. I think all of those things are observable from the outside (third person observation) and many are observable from the inside (introspection).
So you're claiming that you (or anyone else) can observe what I'm remembering right now? I won't even push the issue by addressing those good or bad vibes of former days for which I currently can find no adequate words but, nevertheless, can still remember. I'm here simply addressing (maybe via use of brain scans) another's ability to observe that which I as a so called "mind's eye" can perceptually remember via the non-physiologial senses of one's mind (say, my perceiving the remembered smell of a particular rose).
I would say it should be according to my metaphysics. But it is normally treated in terms of a substance rather than a process or action. Something with inherent properties rather than imposed form.
So rather than an ontology of passive existence, I would favour the other of active persistence when it comes to being or ousia.
I would define "mind" as the sum total of an entities mental processes which include thinking, feeling, perceiving, knowing, remembering, being aware, being self-aware, proprioception, and lots of stuff I'm leaving out. I think all of those things are observable from the outside (third person observation) and many are observable from the inside (introspection).
M-theory is currently an untestable theory and so is not of itself science
Is it an untested theory or the mathematical generalisation of tested theories? And is it not indeed failing the test because supersymmetry is not showing up and looking increasingly dubious at available particle accelerator energies? The generalisation of the particular case is not worth much if the particular case is becoming so constrained by experiment in routine scientific fashion.
If you find any disagreement with either definition, it would be important that you then express your differences.
I find plenty of disagreement. But not much of importance. You articulate a cultural construct with a long social history. Explaining the neurobiology is one thing, explaining the social history is another. I could do both. And you wouldnt be happy with either as that would require seeing they are indeed their own narratives,
I find plenty of disagreement. But not much of importance. You articulate a cultural construct with a long social history.
Ah, I see. My occurrence as a first-person point of view is a "cultural construct with a long social history" - a proposition that thereby lacks a truthful correspondence to anything real, I then infer. Claims like this make one doubt one is talking to another human rather than some AI robot.
As for the rest, we all know that he who presents the most ostentatious posturing wins. Much like those chimp ancestors of ours. So, go for it.
I didn't say "currently untested". I said "currently untestable". A major difference for those science savy.
I pointed out how it is failing the test in terms of being a generalisation that ought to contain supersymmetry as a particular feature. And in being thus currently tested, that makes it doubly a problem if you want to say it is currently untestable the stronger claim that it can't even be tested in principle.
Claims like this make one doubt one is talking to another human rather than some AI robot.
Would Chat GPT make as many rookie errors? There are whole shelves on the social construction of the self that could be poured into its pattern-matching data bank. It would at least be familiar with the relevant social science.
I may not be able to treat my own mind solely as an object -- though I can surely take it also as an object -- but it's not obvious what the barrier is to me treating your mind as an object of my study, and since it is your mind, not mine, I can only take it solely as an object and never as subject.
Right. You can treat the mind as an object in a metaphorical sense: 'her mind was the object of my enquiry'; 'the subject's mental state was extremely confused'; 'that individual had a brilliant mind'; and so on. But mind itself is not an object, unlike any of the objects which you will see if you raise your eyes and glance around you. I think this is habitually overlooked or ignored, but it is the realisation behind both behaviourism and eliminative materialism which arise from a very similar insight: that the mind as such is not scientifically tractable in the sense that phenomenal objects are.
I pointed out how it is failing the test in terms of being a generalisation that ought to contain supersymmetry as a particular feature. And in being thus currently tested, that makes it doubly a problem if you want to say it is currently untestable the stronger claim that it can't even be tested in principle.
OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science.
The historic complexities aside, the theory of evolution can, for instance, be empirically tested in the lab - with fruit flies as just one among many examples.
The physics theory of relativity only became empirical science when empirically tested, and it was thereby empirically found that gravity does in fact bend light.
One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test.
Hence, there is no currently imaginable way to test M-theory empirically - although, with no one being omniscient, given a lack of dogma one can/should allow for the existential possibility that at some point in the distant future someone somewhere might figure out a way to empirically test it. Until then - if this "then" will ever occur - it is not a scientific theory exactly and solely on this count: it cannot be empirically tested one way or another other.
This potential confusion between theoretical abstractons that might or might not be valid (edit: which often enough compete against each other) and that which becomes empirically tested and thereby empirically verified is why I initially addressed in a tongue in cheek manner that "(purely) theoretical fartology" is not a valid scientific discipline.
Would Chat GPT make as many rookie errors? There are whole shelves on the social construction of the self that could be poured into its pattern-matching data bank. It would at least be familiar with the relevant social science.
A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text?
As to social constructions studied by social sciences, these will include comparative religions just as much as those relevant notions of self (and in fairness, of non-self). Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text?
When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.
Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer.
My point was simply that the observer is bracketed out because it is methodologically impossible to incorporate the observer into the models which are employed for understanding what is being studied in fields like chemistry, geology, biology, cosmology and astronomy.
In phenomenology the question of the existence of the external world is bracketed out because it is the nature of perception itself, which is the object of study, and the question of the independent existence of the objects of perception is not relevant to that study.
It is only in QM where the "observer" becomes an issue, as observation and measurement appear to affect the outcome of experiments. But even there just what constitutes "the observer" is not clear, and the popular philosophical idea that it is human consciousness which actually creates the outcomes is completely useless to, and is not incorporated, or in way incorporable, into quantum theory.
When studying animal behavior, ethologists can only try their best to remain undetected by their subjects, or try to minimize whatever influence their presences might have on animals being studied in laboratory conditions.
I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.
That's a good point. We really don't know what anything is in any absolute sense.
So you're claiming that you (or anyone else) can observe what I'm remembering right now?
Of course I can. Here I go. Watch me. Hey, Javra, what are you remembering right now?
So, right, I'm being funny. But I'm also being serious. And you're describing the experience of memory, which isn't exactly the same as memory itself. I can test your memory in many ways. What's the Capital of France? What is 5 x 7? If you're from the US I could ask you to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
I attribute memory; or thinking, or feeling, or seeing, or knowing; to people all the time just based on their self-reporting and other behavior I can observe. That's how we know the world. Mental processes are not special.
I attribute memory; or thinking, or feeling, or seeing, or knowing; to people all the time just based on their self-reporting and other behavior I can observe. That's how we know the world. Mental processes are not special.
I'll again propose and argue that his attribution is due to inference - much of it unconscious and hence automatic - and not due to (first-person) observation (which can only be direct - rather than, for example, hearsay). For instance:
Of course I can. Here I go. Watch me. Hey, Javra, what are you remembering right now?
What if I answer "nothing" or "a pink dolphin" or something else and it happens to be a proposition that I'm fully aware doesn't conform to the reality of what my current recollections are. These examples are obvious, but then I could answer with a proposition that, thought false, would be easily believable by you - and one which you'd have no possible way of verifying: e.g., "I'm now remembering your last post before this one".
You can infer what I'm remembering - but you do not observe it. Hopefully that makes better sense?
You never see anyone's mind. You can see their behaviour or hear what they say, but you never see the mind except for in a metaphorical sense.
We infer things all the time without seeing them directly. We know that two black holes collided eight million light years away because of some squiggles on a meter at the Ligo facilities. We believe dark matter, which we can't currently observe directly, exists because of the behavior of normal matter we can observe. I know my children love me and they know I love them, but they can't experience the love I feel directly. Almost everything we know we know indirectly and not as a result of our own direct observation.
I'll again propose and argue that his attribution is due to inference - much of it unconscious and hence automatic - and not do to (first-person) observation (which can only be direct - rather than, for example, hearsay).
As I just wrote in my previous post to @Wayfarer, most of what we know is not based on our own direct observations. People tell us things. We read about things or see them on TV or the internet. When the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device. From those readouts they infer the behavior of the particles.
What if I answer "nothing" or "a pink dolphin" or something else and it happens to be a proposition that I'm fully aware doesn't not conform to the reality of what my current recollections are. These examples are obvious, but then I could answer with a proposition that, thought false, would be easily believable by you - and one which you'd have no possible way of verifying: e.g., "I'm now remembering your last post before this one".
It is a commonplace of all philosophy, at least since Descartes, that all our observations are imperfect and might be anywhere from 99% right to 100% wrong. At the same time, if you and I are both people of good will and both interested in learning about how people think, you're reports of your experience of your mind are likely to be valid, if imperfect.
OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science.
I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. So you seem to be introducing some strong division between "strict theory" and "empirical science". Although I'll degree that in social terms, science does divide between its whiteboard theorists and its lab-coated experimenters. There is a lot of good natured banter between the camps that can also turn to frank hostility when prestige and grants are involved.
But anyhow, it is another social fact that the failure to find supersymmetry where the expectation was quite high it ought to be showing up at current accelerator energies is a big part of the reason for string theory, and thus M-theory, suffering a drop in stock price in the current ToE ideas market.
So the interaction between mathematically-robust theory and empirical constraint on belief in that theory is a delicate business. A social game where a community takes a Bayesian view on what smells right and what line of inquiry to invest further in.
To the outside world, science will paint its adventures much more by the book. The funders and managers or science like that. But from the inside, something much more recognisably human is going on.
The ASSC is a very good example of what passes for "science". It is the kind of open mic gathering that can really launch your career. Chalmers and Koch are good examples. Even down to the publicity stunt of betting cases of wine so as to put the drama of big questions in terms every tax-paying science funder can relate to. And puts their names firmly at the centre of the story for years to come.
One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test.
Bollocks. Bayesian reasoning accepts the dog that doesn't bark as part of its baseline of probabilities.
You are trying to defend a methodological purity that would make working scientists laugh privately, not publicly of course.
I spent some time with the psi research crowd because they were an example of science in fact trying to nail its methods down with absolute textbook rigour. It was a fascinating tale of the social limits of practicing what you preach. The rigour was eventually exceptional. The scope for any "psi effect" was publicly quantified to decimal places.
Yet still the community divided into the skeptics who knew the believers were cheating, they just couldn't show how, while the believers accused the skeptics of using their unconscious bias to suppress the ability of the squeaky clean labs to replicate the effect that the believers could produce on the same gear.
It always is going to come back to the way humans actually reason and how brains actually operate. Which is why I highlight Friston and his Bayesian brain model of epistemology.
A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text?
Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?
I can see how it makes sense as a utterance from the familiar point of view of the Western philosophical tradition grew out of the theologisation of Ancient Greek metaphysics. The hylomorphism of matter~form transformed into the Cartesian divide of res extensa~res cogitans. Neuroscience came along with its challenge to finally understand the mind as embodied modelling the Bayesian prediction machine but people clung fast to the Hard Problem that arises from believing consciousness equals a representation of the world, not a relation in which the semiotic Umwelt of the self in its world is the neurobiological construction ... that is in turn socially extended when the further encoding machinery of speech and maths happens along.
So you ask a question directly from your point of view. You ask it in righteous fashion. It would be a grave discourtesy for me not to stand in your shoes and thus be forced to agree with anything you might say.
But sorry. I've spent too much time with scientists and natural philosophers. I can see where you are coming from and I speak from a viewpoint that enjoys the advantages we call the third person.
Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text?
Same tactic keeps repeating. And this is instructive. It is the only argument that sustains the Hard Problem. The insistence that there is a first person point of view that has primacy.
But listen again to my third person description based on the semiosis of the modelling relation.
Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. It is the construction of an Umwelt.
Until you start to deal with this as the primal fact the co-arising of the self and the world as the dichotomy that drives the Cartesian division within the model itself you aren't going to have a clue where I am coming from.
Semiosis is an empirical theory of the "conscious self" around which a world of experience is made to dance for good pragmatic purpose.
Science is now seeing this as the way to account for the self as a product of the "world" it constructs, the totality that is its Umwelt, so that it can then function "selfishly" within the actual real world in a reliable and largely automatic or unconscious and unthinking fashion.
the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device.
Right. And there is controversy about what these particles are, whether they're really particles or actually waves, or excitations in a field. Instrumentalists say, it doesn't matter, shut up and calculate.
But all of that is irrelevant to the question at hand. At least objects - a lump of matter, a marble or a bullet - can be described objectively. You and I can pick it up, weigh it, ascertain its attributes and qualities. But consciousness is nothing like that. You can say to me, I'm depressed, or I'm happy, and I will know what you mean, because I too am a conscious being, and I know what it is like to be conscious or happy, so I will infer that I feel the things that you feel. But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. I could put an object in a lunar lander and send it to the moon, but there is no way to pack and send a feeling, an emotion. It can only exist as a state of being, but what that being is, is precisely what eludes objective description.
Science including psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience can only address empirical givens by definition.
FWIW, I'm in agreement, as I hope is also evident from what I've said above.
Useful crib on scientific method:
[quote=Edward Dougherty; https://strangenotions.com/the-real-war-on-science/] Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The truth (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.
The demand for quantitative prediction places a burden on the scientist. Mathematical theories must be formulated and be precisely tied to empirical measurements. Of course, it would be much easier to construct rational theories to explain nature without empirical validation or to perform experiments and process data without a rigorous theoretical framework. On their own, either process may be difficult and require substantial ingenuity. The theories can involve deep mathematics, and the data may be obtained by amazing technologies and processed by massive computer algorithms. Both contribute to scientific knowledge, indeed, are necessary for knowledge concerning complex systems such as those encountered in biology. However, each on its own does not constitute a scientific theory. In a famous aphorism, Immanuel Kant stated, Concepts without percepts are blind; percepts without concepts are empty.[/quote]
At issue is the question of how this is applicable to the question of the nature of conscious experience (and remember, that is the question.) It may be asked, where is the rigour seen in scientific analysis, when it comes to the kind of first-person analysis that the objection is suggesting? David Chalmers does actually address this:
To explain third-person data, one needs to explain the objective functioning of a system. For example, to explain perceptual discrimination, one needs to explain how a cognitive process can perform the objective function of distinguishing various different stimuli and produce appropriate responses. To explain an objective function of this sort, one specifies a mechanism that performs the function. In the sciences of the mind, this is usually a neural or a computational mechanism. For example, in the case of perceptual discrimination, one specifies the neural or computational mechanism responsible for distinguishing the relevant stimuli. In many cases we do not yet know exactly what these mechanisms are, but there seems to be no principled obstacle to finding them, and so to explaining the relevant third-person data.
This sort of explanation is common throughout many different areas of science. For example, in the explanation of genetic phenomena, what needed explaining was the objective function of transmitting hereditary characteristics through reproduction. Watson and Crick isolated a mechanism that could potentially perform this function: the DNA molecule, through replication of strands of the double helix. As we have come to understand how the DNA molecule performs this function, genetic phenomena have gradually come to be explained. The result is a sort of reductive explanation: we have explained higher-level phenomena (genetic phenomena) in terms of lower-level processes (molecular biology). One can reasonably hope that the same sort of model will apply in the sciences of the mind, at least for the explanation of the objective functioning of the cognitive system in terms of neurophysiology.
When it comes to first-person data, however, this model breaks down. The reason is that first-person data the data of subjective experience are not data about objective functioning. One way to see this is to note that even if one has a complete account of all the objective functions in the vicinity of consciousness perceptual discrimination, integration, report, and so on there may still remain a further question: why is all this functioning associated with subjective experience? And further: why is this functioning associated with the particular sort of subjective experience that it is in fact associated with? Merely explaining the objective functions does not answer this question.
I think the moral is that as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data, and vice versa. That is, the third-person data alone provide an incomplete catalog of the data that need explaining: if we explain only third-person data, we have not explained everything. Likewise, the first-person data alone are also incomplete. A satisfactory science of consciousness must admit both sorts of data, and must build an explanatory connection between them.
I think that this is what Edmund Husserl was proposing with his model of the 'phenomenological reduction', perhaps @Joshs might comment on that.
It is a commonplace of all philosophy, at least since Descartes, that all our observations are imperfect and might be anywhere from 99% right to 100% wrong. At the same time, if you and I are both people of good will and both interested in learning about how people think, you're reports of your experience of your mind are likely to be valid, if imperfect.
OK to this. As a reminder, I'm a diehard fallibilist. But it equivocates between empirical observations (which, yes, could in principle could include hallucinations - hence being technically fallible) and inferences, with these being optimal conclusions drawn from that which is observed (and since no one is omniscient, everyone's inferences could be potentially mistaken at times - hence being technically fallible).
Now I maintain this too is a fallible observation (a rabit-hole of philosophy, kind of thing) but, pragmatically, something that we all immediately know as a brute fact that we cannot rationally - nor experientially - doubt: we are as that which apprehends observables (including our thoughts, with some of these being our conscious inferences). Long story short, this is a direct experiential awareness of our own occurrence (again, as, I'll for now say, "first-person observers") Here is made absolutely no claim as to what we, as such, in fact are - be it entities/substance, processes, both, or neither. It doesn't matter.
In contrast to this direct experience of what is, we have inferences we live by. One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view.
We, hence, cannot observe other's consciousness and its factual activities - such as, for one example, what the consciousness remembers via the workings of its total mind.
None of this needs to be appraised for day to day interactions. But we are philosophically debating this very point, so I've mentioned it.
We infer things all the time without seeing them directly
T Clark
Of course. I acknowledged that we can infer that there are minds, but that the mind is not an object for us.
This exchange started with me saying that we can observe more than seven billion minds from the outside. Those minds are objects to us, or at least we can study them as outside observers.
But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are.
But these are all subjective qualities. Your notion of the material world is being described in how it feels to you. It is harder or softer, drier or wetter, hotter or colder, heavier or lighter than the flesh and blood self that wants to prod away at it. The world as you are imagining it is the one that is subjectively related to yourself as the centre of that world.
Science comes along and ends up saying quite different things from its mathematically an empirically abstracted viewpoint. The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity.
The idea of objects with qualities gets radically deconstructed, showing the degree to which your neurobiology lives within in its own broad brush and self-centred view of physics as it is at the scale of humans living on planets at a time when the Universe is generally almost at its cold and empty heat death.
OK to this. As a reminder, I'm a diehard fallibilist. But it equivocates between empirical observations (which, yes, could in principle could include hallucinations - hence being technically fallible) and inferences, with these being optimal conclusions drawn from that which is observed (and since no one is omniscient, everyone's inferences could be potentially mistaken at times - hence being technically fallible).
Stephen J Gould wrote, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Does that agree with your position or disagree with it?
Going back to my previous comment including the example, even many (most?) of our empirical observations are inferences and not direct observations. That may have been less true in Pierce's time.
pragmatically, something that we all immediately know as a brute fact that we cannot rationally - nor experientially - doubt: we are as that which apprehends observables (including our thoughts, with some of these being our conscious inferences).
One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view.
Again - many of what you call "brute-facts," we do not observe from a first-person point of view.
We, hence, cannot observe other's consciousness and its factual activities - such as, for one example, what the consciousness remembers via the workings of its total mind.
In my view, we can study other people's and our own minds using the same methods we use for many of the things we know in our daily lives.
As I noted in my last post to @Wayfarer, it is unlikely you and I will get any further with this discussion. I've participated in similar ones many times, I'm sure you have too, and it never goes any further than this. This is probably a good place to stop.
I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation.
When so loosely understood, what then isn't?
Take metaphysics. It is inferred theory and it is tested against a rubric of reason, it has deductive predictions from postulates and inductive confirmations of these predictions. And, it must conform to the observable world to be taken in any way seriously.
So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... boring as this might be, again, because it is not empirically testable (to be lucidly clear, your metaphysics very much included), and this because it has no empirically falsifiable hypothesis to test.
A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text? javra
Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?
Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows?
Stephen J Gould wrote, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Does that agree with your position or disagree with it?
It agrees quite well. BTW, I have fond memories of Gould's various takes on sociobiology - albeit with some disagreements in some of the details.
Going back to my previous comment including the example, even many (most?) of our empirical observations are inferences and not direct observations. That may have been less true in Pierce's time.
I think you are here erroneously conflating, or maybe fully equating, science to physics. A category error.
This question is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the proposition it is in reply to. All the same, there is no metaphysics that is both consistent and does not utilize a brute fact. Matter for materialists, as one example of this.
One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view. javra
Again - many of what you call "brute-facts," we do not observe from a first-person point of view.
If I remember right, I've only called one's own conscious being a brute fact to one's own conscious self. What are you here referring to?
All the same - though I do have my reason for so calling one's own conscious being a brute fact - if possible, due to the complexities involved, I'll retract my so claiming it to be with a "my bad". While I hold that it's not explainable in terms of more fundamental facts, I very much know that it's occurrence and form is dependent on a physical substratum of body and (in animals) brain - together with environment. Hence, the complexities.
As I noted in my last post to Wayfarer, it is unlikely you and I will get any further with this discussion. I've participated in similar ones many times, I'm sure you have too, and it never goes any further than this. This is probably a good place to stop.
It is your interpretation that is sloppy. The Peircean and Bayesian argument is that this is the most generalised view of rational inquiry. The same basic epistemic arc of predict and measure is what evolution elaborates from biology on up.
Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows?
Comfort yourself however you like. You had no argument you could make.
The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity
Indeed. One of the principle reasons materialism has fallen into disfavor.
Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics?
Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world.
Does anything that produces/utilizes a "Bayesian model of the world" have a self and/or consciousness? Also, why do some brain processes involve consciousness while others don't?
"Microorganisms demonstrate conscious-like intelligent behaviour, and this form of consciousness may have emerged from a quantum mediated mechanism as observed in cytoskeletal structures like the microtubules present in nerve cells which apparently have the architecture to quantum compute. This paper hypothesises the emergence of proto-consciousness in primitive cytoskeletal systems found in the microbial kingdoms of archaea, bacteria and eukarya. To explain this, we make use of the Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness which evaluates the rise of the degree of consciousness to conscious behaviour in these systems supporting the hypothesis of emergence and propagation of conscious behaviour during the pre-Cambrian part of Earth's evolutionary history. Consciousness as proto-consciousness or sentience computed via primitive cytoskeletal structures substantiates as a driver for the intelligence observed in the microbial world during this period ranging from single-cellular to collective intelligence as a means to adapt and survive. The growth in complexity of intelligence, cytoskeletal system and adaptive behaviours are key to evolution, and thus supports the progression of the Lamarckian theory of evolution driven by quantum mediated proto-consciousness to consciousness as described in the SOM of consciousness."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29254105/#:~:text=Abstract,the%20architecture%20to%20quantum%20compute.
Are microorganisms conscious? What do you think of the "Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness"?
Reply to RogueAIReply to javra You might find this analysis of the Chalmers-Koch bet insightful. (The author, Gerald R Baron, is a theistically-inclined philosopher of religion who publishes on Medium. I find his material pretty good quality, see for instance his two previous articles on Arthur Eddington.)
Well We will someday hold that horizon in our hands, by gosh! We just need to run faster toward it, thats all.
BTW, I am here officially making a bet with anyone who so wishes on a case of wine (need not be expensive) that no one will ever hold the horizon in their hands, like ever. Any takers? (As to time-frames, maybe its best to make it within our own lifetimes.)
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Obviously, this bet would apply only for those of us who are not horizon-eliminativists, and thereby for those of us who maintain that the horizon does in fact occur.
Reply to Wayfarer The good thing about both IIT and GNWT is that they take experience as something real. This is what Strawson called a physicalist realist position. Some continue to deny conscious experience as real the Eliminativists. But Koch, Tononi and others dont agree with this most silly of conclusions. It shows the degree to which the physicalist dogma can force some into extreme philosophical or metaphysical positions.
How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, but thankfully it's well on its way to the ash heap of history.
How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, but thankfully it's well on its way to the ash heap of history.
Yes. But in @apokrisis's poignantly expressed questioning:
Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics?
I dont believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. I believe in a science of life and mind - of biosemiosis.
Is consciousness a substance or a process? Have you got it clear what kind of "scientific" account you are even committed to?
People betray their substance ontology by talking of consciousness as a fundamental simple. A property or quality. They will talk indeed of "qualia" and "phenomenology" as if they are very sciency bits of jargon. They get enthusiastic about quantum conscious, panpsychism, information theory, and other crackpot proposals because that sounds like science "heading in the right direction".
But I understand life and mind as processes. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing like the "redness" of red and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".
So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.
Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.
I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. We are supposed to always be giving full attention to everything and holding it in memory long enough to report exactly what happened in the event we had to offer a full narration in a court of justice.
But the brain evolved not to pay attention to the world as much as possible by sensible design. And until humans wrapped themselves up in the new collective habit of narrative self-regulation, that is all brains did. Act as "unconsciously" as circumstances would allow. Stopping to note every passing detail was not what "being conscious" was about.
So any scientific theory of consciousness starts with accepting we are dealing with an evolved process not a fundamental substance. And then the first practical bit of business would be deflating the overly socially-constructed notion of consciousness that everyone employs.
After that, the real science could begin.
As I have said, biosemiosis, the modelling relation, Bayesian mechanics, are what I regard as the right kind of approach. They say life and mind arise out of material being, but they have a difference. There is some mechanism or algorithm by which they can grow out of a physical substrate.
This clicks into place when the material ground is understood in the language of dissipative structure. Matter poised at criticality is a source of instability that can be tapped to do stuff by forms that can impose the constraints of mechanistic stability.
An engine can capture an explosion of petrol vapour and force it to turn a crank. A source of physical instability can be harnessed to give a stablised output. Information (as structural negentropy) can regulate the flow of entropy.
So where nature exhibits physical criticality - as it does at the quasi-classical nanoscale there is an instability which can be fruitfully ratcheted to support a living and mindful organism. There is something a mechanism or algorithm can latch on to and start to proliferate.
The job of science thus becomes creating a generalised theory of such a mechanism or algorithm. Identify the exact design of this essential scrap of form from which wild and complex growth can result. Discover the very thing that makes an organism an organism.
And that is what biosemiosis/the modelling relation/Bayesian mechanics are about. Writing the specifications of the self-organising growth algorithm that allowed this thing we call life and mind to take hold on a material substrate and begin to grow to develop and evolve.
Friston does want to make it as precise and objectified as physics. He offers differential equations that sum up the central trick of the modelling relation. He calls it Bayesian mechanics so that it can sit alongside classical mechanics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.
And regardless of how you judge his actual formula, at least we know this is what a science of life and mind would look like if it were to achieve the same kind of general format as the physical sciences.
You seem to think science must give some kind of account of all your attended and reported experiences and feels as if they were atomised "states of being" qualitative stuff. But life and mind are processes that exist parasitically on the Universe as itself a process. There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure.
And the discovery that there is just the one kind of negentropic growth algorithm that explains how evolution could take hold the algorithm that is the semiotic and Bayesian modelling relation is the kind of huge simplification we were hoping for from science.
I dont believe in a science of consciousness as a thing.
Right - that's because it's not a thing. Which is what I said.
A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. You're building a general theory of everything, drawing on elements of semiotics, biology, and C.S. Peirce. But ultimately you return to physicalist explanations:
I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted.
Have you arrived home after a drive and not remembered the details of the drive? Almost everyone who drives has had this common experience, a phenomenon that has come to be called highway hypnosis...
You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in?
Like I said - it's a Philosophy Forum. There are distinctions between the subject matters of science and philosophy, although those distinctions tend to be philosophical rather than scientific, meaning not easily discernable according to scientific criteria.
I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. Peirce was active in the so-called 'golden age of American philosophy', roughly contemporaneous with Josiah Royce, William James and Borden Parker Bowne, all of whom were broadly idealist, in keeping with the zeitgeist. That was all to be rejected by the ordinary language philosophers of the 20th century and the ascendancy of scientific naturalism as the 'arbiter of reality'.
Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope.
I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work.
You have yet to demonstrate that understand you semiotics. You have only seized on two words you think you understand - objective and idealism.
I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work.
Are we obliged to accept every aspect of a philosopher's work or worldview? We can't think for ourselves?
Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope.
Some are ahead of the times and others behind them. Or if you like:
[i]"The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse
Dance before dead Englands Hearse
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day"[/i]
I have fond memories of Gould's various takes on sociobiology - albeit with some disagreements in some of the details.
Gould is one of my favorite writers. I learned a lot about science and writing from him. I still pull down his books of essays and read them and I've given them to all my children. It's hard to believe he's been gone for more than 20 years.
It's hard to believe he's been gone for more than 20 years.
I don't mean to suggest that I knew him personally; I didn't; still: Only the good die young, comes to mind in thinking about him. (different ways to interpret this; but in this context I interpret it as pass away while yet being young at heart) Or so it seems to me, at least.
One Amazon review of Goff's book, boils it down to a competition between theories for the origin of consciousness in a material world : "The book identifies three possible explanations for consciousness: dualism, materialism, and panpsychism".
Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter. Dualism just accepts that we tend to think of Mind & Matter as two completely different things, and never the twain shall meet : hyle + morph = real matter + ideal form. Monistic Panpsychism assumes that Matter is an illusion generated by the inherent mental processes of nature (a priori Cosmic Consciousness), hence matter does not matter.
Global Workspace Theory is merely a Cartesian Theater metaphor that does not attempt to answer the Origin question. Integrated Information Theory assumes that Consciousness is a summary (integral) product of fundamental mathematical essence : number. Again, these alternative definitions of Consciousness presume that some kind of mind essence "just is", with no further elaboration on its original source.
Pragmatic here & now science has no need for hypotheses about ultimate origins. But over the millennia, theoretical philosophy has produced a proliferation of possible ontologies. Which include the three noted above, plus one more that was once the leading candidate, but is no longer considered a viable option : intelligent intentional creation by divine fiat. Hence it was omitted from the "round-up". Ironically, due mostly to the quandaries of quantum science, the ancient notion of fundamental/essential Mind*1 seems to be making a comeback to fill the gaps in those other theories. :smile:
*1. Panpsychism : Though it sounds like something that sprang fully formed from the psychedelic culture, panpsychism has been around for a very long time. Philosophers and mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, physicists Arthur Eddington, Ernst Schrödinger, and Max Planck, and psychologist William James are just a few thinkers who supported some form of panpsychism. The idea lost traction in the late 20th century, but recently, philosophers and scientists such as David Chalmers, Bernardo Kastrup, Christof Koch, and Philip Goff have revived the idea, making strong claims for some form of panpsychism.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/panpsychism-the-trippy-theory-that-everything-from-bananas-to-bicycles-are
*1. Panpsychism :
Though it sounds like something that sprang fully formed from the psychedelic culture, panpsychism has been around for a very long time.
Though my current conviction makes me partly dogmatic about the two being equivalent, Im at the same time curious to discover how my understanding could be wrong hence the question:
In what conceivable way is panpsychism not a reclothing (i.e., re-branding or re-veiling) of the quite ancient and, back then, basically ubiquitous notion of animism?
In other words, what can possibly be rationally different between panpsychism and animism as metaphysical understandings of reality?
----
As a reminder, to say that everything is endowed with anima is equivalent to saying that everything is endowed with psyche - first term being Latin and the second Greek, with both terms having the same underlying meaning.
And if animism needs to be made more palatable, the Stoic notion of an anima mundi is basic animism conceived of in stratified layers of efficacy in relation to the cosmos / whole.
If you're having problems with multiple people here, perhaps the problem is not the other people?
If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then youre probably right. Im probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.
If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then youre probably right. Im probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.
OK, Mr. I'm-so-qualified :razz: Riddle me this:
According to your theory of mind/consciousness, are insects conscious? Do they have minds?
https://www.noemamag.com/the-surprisingly-sophisticated-mind-of-an-insect/
And keep your answer as free from jargon as possible, for all the stupid people here. Good philosophy is clear and concise.
he book identifies three possible explanations for consciousness: dualism, materialism, and panpsychism".
Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter.
You might consider me a materialist, depending on the time of day and the weather. I'm certainly not a dualist or a panpsychist. There is nothing in materialism that requires belief that the mind is not real. I certainly believe it is and I believe it matters. Seems to me you, or the author you're discussing, is trying a bit of flashy rhetorical footwork by misrepresenting the ideas of people you disagree with.
I don't mean to suggest that I knew him personally; I didn't;
No, I didn't think you suggested you knew him. I didn't either, but he was important to me. He seemed like a cool, albeit prickly and pugnacious, person.
And, perhaps most importantly, he was on an episode of "The Simpsons."
According to your theory of mind/consciousness, are insects conscious? Do they have minds?
I could address this in detail. Ive spent time in labs where they investigate the neurobiology of jumping spiders. Cockroaches and wood lice are the stuff of introductory classes.
But I have no patience for you because you cant stop harping on about consciousness when Ive carefully explained my position on that and why it is such a confused term.
At best, consciousness = attention + reporting. A jumping spider has something that is primitively like what we would call attentional processing. But it doesnt speak so cant report or introspect.
And now you go back to bleating about whether insects are conscious in whatever muddled way you understand that term.
At best, consciousness = attention + reporting. A jumping spider has something that is primitively like what we would call attentional processing. But it doesnt speak so cant report or introspect.
Speaking and/or reporting are necessary conditions for consciousness and/or introspection??? Is a jumping spider conscious or not?
A newborn cannot speak or report. Is it conscious?
Are you offering this more as a definition or a theory? Or perhaps more of a conceptual clarification (which I guess is closer to definition)? Or something else?
In what conceivable way is panpsychism not a reclothing (i.e., re-branding or re-veiling) of the quite ancient and, back then, basically ubiquitous notion of animism?
In other words, what can possibly be rationally different between panpsychism and animism as metaphysical understandings of reality?
Materialists will dismiss both Panpsychism and Animism as primitive religious superstitions. But the 21st century quantum physicists (see my post above), who openly admit to accepting Universal Mind as a valid philosophical interpretation of their empirical work, cannot be described as "primitive" or "superstitious". Yet, more conventional scientists will still interpret the evidence in terms of their matter-is-fundamental Naturalistic worldview*1. And that's OK, for scientific purposes. Yet, for philosophical purposes, that view has an explanatory gap at the inception of Matter itself.
I do think of the ancient writings about universal Mind as prescient-but-primitive guesses about how mental phenomena could emerge from material substrates. Quantum Physics is not as definitive about such enigmatic questions, but it does point in the same direction : Mental Potential is intrinsic in the universe, but emerges in stages ; as postulated several thousand years ago in Hindu philosophy*2.
Likewise, instead of presuming that essential Potential was fully-formed into Consciousness at the beginning, some 21st century thinkers interpret that power-to-evolve-both-matter-&-minds in terms of both Evolutionary Theory and Information Theory*3. The same essential "stuff" animates Matter and informs Brains. From that non-mainstream perspective, the potential to change Possibility to Actuality, Inanimate to Animate, and Neurons to Awareness, is closer to our modern notion of causal Energy, than to fully-evolved homo sapiens Consciousness. :smile:
To Inform : implies the imparting of knowledge https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inform
Note --- Knowledge presumes Consciousness
*1. Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong : Perhaps phenomenal properties, or proto-phenomenal precursors of them, are the fundamental intrinsic properties of matter were looking for, and each subatomic particle is a tiny conscious subject. This solves the hard problem: brain and consciousness emerge together when billions of basic particles are assembled in the right way.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/panpsychism-is-wrong/500774/
*2. Hindu Mind Evolves : In this theory, mind is an emergent entity, but this emergence requires the presence of the Self. The mind may be viewed to be constituted by five basic components: manas, ahamkara, citta, buddhi and atman, which cannot be reduced to gross elements. Manas is the lower mind which collects sense impressions.
https://swarajyamag.com/culture/understanding-the-vedic-model-of-the-mind
*3. Is energy a form of information? : Information is a distinct form of energy, just as electricity, magnetism, steam, nuclear, or solar radiation are also alternate forms of energy. To illustrate this, consider that information behaves similarly to other energy types. Many physicists agree that information is conserved, especially at the quantum level.
https://jumpthespark.com/2017/02/06/information-is-energy/
Note --- Information is like Energy in its Cause & Effect functions : to convert incoming photons into mental images, and mental images into language.
Reply to bert1 I would attempt to start the deflation of the confused use of "consciousness" by first pointing to the conflation of neurobiological levels of semiosis and sociocultural levels of semiosis.
The human species has the further advantages of language and logic to structure its modelling relation with its world.
The animal kingdom just has its neurobiology ... although ants and termites are arguably an example of ultrasociality as well. They use a system of sign pheromones to "think" as a colony organism in a similar structural way to how humans use words to coordinate their group thinking social order.
So get the story about "consciousness" right and all the more interesting scientific questions start to flow. You don't get locked into the plaintive bleat from the back seat that is the Hard Problem being repeated over and over as the end to intelligent discussion.
If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then youre probably right. Im probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.
What do you think of Koch losing his bet to Chalmers? Do you think Koch is ever going to win that bet (assuming he lives long enough)?
Likewise, instead of presuming that essential Potential was fully-formed into Consciousness at the beginning, ...
Only want to here point out that most ancient perspectives - such as that of Stoicism - in no way held such a view of an animistic world. This turn of events emerged with Abrahamic perspectives.
Reply to apokrisis I was just asking, because I'm interested, if you intended your statement to be chiefly conceptual, or emprical, or something else. I can't quite see an answer to that. You don't have to answer if you don't want to of course. I didn't intend to go on about the hard problem again, although no doubt I will again at some point.
You might consider me a materialist, depending on the time of day and the weather. I'm certainly not a dualist or a panpsychist. There is nothing in materialism that requires belief that the mind is not real. I certainly believe it is and I believe it matters. Seems to me you, or the author you're discussing, is trying a bit of flashy rhetorical footwork by misrepresenting the ideas of people you disagree with.
I'm not trying to misrepresent anyone's beliefs. Just to be descriptive of a pertinent contrasting interpretation of the Materialistic belief system*1, in a thread on the topic of the ontological status of Mind. Besides, some of the matter-first Materialists on this forum do mis-represent the beliefs of mind-first Panpsychists as primitive, superstitious, and gullible. But they are just trying to show the superiority of their own modern & scientific worldview over ancient spooky-woo. This, despite some scientific evidence to support a mind-first view.
Personally, I'm not a Panpsychist, in any formal sense. So, I don't have a dog in the race between true believers on both sides. As I've stated before : for all practical purposes, I am a Materialist; but for philosophical reasons, I am an Idealist. So, I agree with you : ideas matter, but not literally. :smile:
*1. Does [u]eliminative materialism regard consciousness as an illusion?[/u] :
There is a relatively new position in philosophy of mind called illusionism.
https://www.quora.com/Does-eliminative-materialism-regard-consciousness-as-an-illusion
Eliminative materialism(or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.
https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/Win2005/entries/materialism-eliminative/
You don't have to answer if you don't want to of course.
I did answer. It was how I would start to deflate an over-inflated term.
You can class that under clarification if you like. You could class it under theory if you noticed that biosemiosis was the theoretical framework I employed. You could class it under definition if you wanted to note how I somewhat sarcastically used dictionary style conventions of defining a whole in terms of its component parts.
A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this.
A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this.
That begs a lot of interesting questions about machine consciousness, yet so far I can't get Apo to byte on any of that. What's the big deal???
Ive noticed that @apokrisis hasnt responded to a number of your questions, so Ill do my best to do so in my honest interpretations of his state of mind. @apokrisis can of course readily correct me wherever he finds me mistaken in anything I say (it is, after all, a best current understanding).
(I wrote this before seeing both yours and @bert1's most recent replies; posting it all the same)
Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s). Because of this, all your questions regarding the reality of consciousness as first-person awareness are nonsensical to him - with answers that are "not even wrong" as he might say. We are all take your pick moist robots or philosophical zombies that hypnotize ourselves via our language into illusions of being consciously aware when, in fact, no such thing can ever and in any way occur.
The socially constructed term (as though there could occur any linguistic terms that arent) we specify as consciousness, however, can be behavioristically interpreted and defined as evidenced input into a system conjoined with the output of same said system.
Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else. No awareness required - or, for that matter, possible. At least not as anything that is in any way real.
Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else.
...
Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s).
You're making Apo sound like an idiot! No offense to either of you, of course.
I anticipate and expect that he will correct me in any way that my statements might misrepresent him. Still, from past discussions on this topic in this thread, this is what I've honestly gathered.
Reply to bert1 C - Semiosis is the specification of the general function. What folk call consciousness is this function implemented at four levels of semiosis within a suitable world.
Reply to javra F - Go back and read your texts on social construction and Vygotskian psychology if you hope to stay on this course.
Reply to apokrisis Maybe you could entice me to. What's an example of something that is not a social construction according to these texts and Vygotskain psychology.
Besides, you really have nothing to correct in what I interpret your state of mind to be?
Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic as in the modelling that connects the two?
If you want a conversation, I don't need you to be polite. But you do have to do some work setting out your counter-position. If you just make the plaintiff cry, "you haven't made me understand", then you will stay stuck in the back seat with all the other time-wasters bleating on about "are we there yet".
How can I be an eliminativist given I spend all my time arguing for holism against reductionism? You are just talking out of your arse because you can't be arsed to make a proper effort.
If you feel like you are in kindergarten, it is because that is the level at which you are prepared to engage here. You could keep that up all day. Now impress me by stopping, thinking, coming up with dissent or agreement in terms of the ideas I have presented in some depth.
You might need to brush up on the philosophy and science I've cited. But you could then engage in a way where you learn something, and I might learn something too, which is the outcome that usually comes from talking to people who are up to the task of an informed dialogue.
Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic as in the modelling that connects the two?
I didn't ask "really". I asked "real". As in something that ontically occurs. Not as an idea, but as that which apprehends the idea of consciousness when so thought of.
"Really material" would be contingent on what you here mean by matter; I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. If this is an accurate interpretation of what you here mean by "material reality", I then easily accept this to be true.
But then its being semiotically real as a "modeling that connects the idea to its constituents" can so far to me only be a misguided inference. And this precisely because I so far cannot make either rational or experiential sense of awareness of itself being an idea - I so far cannot understand how it can be an idea that thereby (due to its semiotics) then holds awareness of other ideas. This would result in turtles all the way down, for all ideas have their constituents - e.g., lesser ideas or connotations, all of which further supervene on the operational parts of a CNS - here apparently entailing that the idea of, say, evolution is in fact itself endowed with first-person awareness.
So I'll again ask a question in the name of optimally impartial philosophical enquiry:
Do you find that consciousness can only be "a) an idea and b) its constituents which are c) connected semiotically by modeling"?
Your previous reply - and I thank you for it - indicates yes. So, if your answer is "yes", then please express what "an idea" signifies in this context - such that consciousness becomes distinctly different from the idea of evolution which consciousness can be aware of (in that while the first is aware the second is not).
Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".
I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents.
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.
So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.
Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".
None of that, or at least not necessarily "fundamentally real". The ontic is that which ontology is the study of. That which is actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc. Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? It need not be fundamental for me to make my argument that it cannot be empirically studied by the sciences. But if you deem it illusory, fictional, etc. then that's a disagreement on what is actual and what is not in this world.
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.
So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.
Could you calm down a bit? First off, you could interpret "to supervene" as "to be dependent on something else for truth, existence, or instantiation (definition pulled from Wiktionary)", which is what I intended. Let me know of a more appropriate term to express this and I'll use it: If A's occurrence holds X, Y, and Z as its constituents, then A is dependent on X, Y, and Z in such manner as that just quoted. And obviously this does not negate holistic top-down processes from operating on X, Y, and Z.
Secondly, of main interest was the one question I previously asked, together with what is meant by you to be "an idea".
But I'll cut the crap. If you have no intent to discuss the issue, then so be it.
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.
How do you see that book you refer to, Lifes Ratchet, as fitting into a holistic point of view? From the jacket copy:
Life is an enduring mystery. Yet, science tells us that living beings are merely sophisticated structures of lifeless molecules. If this view is correct, where do the seemingly purposeful motions of cells and organisms originate? In Life's Ratchet , physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.Below the calm, ordered exterior of a living organism lies microscopic chaos, or what Hoffmann calls the molecular storm, specialized molecules immersed in a whirlwind of colliding water molecules. Our cells are filled with molecular machines, which, like tiny ratchets, transform random motion into ordered activity, and create the purpose that is the hallmark of life. Tiny electrical motors turn electrical voltage into motion, nanoscale factories custom-build other molecular machines, and mechanical machines twist, untwist, separate and package strands of DNA. The cell is like a city, an unfathomable, complex collection of molecular workers working together to create something greater than themselves. Life, Hoffman argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through these sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. We are agglomerations of interacting nanoscale machines more amazing than anything in science fiction. Rather than relying on some mysterious life force to drive them, as people believed for centuries, life's ratchets harness instead the second law of thermodynamics and the disorder of the molecular storm.
Reply to apokrisis You (supposedly) have discussions with luminaries yet you can't answer the most basic of questions and hide behind jargon. This is a philosophy forum (nay, THEphilosophyforum). Put your ideas out there!
It is semiotic. The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.
The biochemistry is the bottom-up degrees of freedom in this systems equation. But the point of the nanoscale is that it is a special zone of energy convergence. The ordinary type of physics you might imagine a world of neat determinacy is instead turned into a state of radical instability or criticality. It becomes exactly that which the most minimal "informational" nudge can push in any material direction chosen.
So it is the tradic story of the semiotic modelling relation which bridges the "explanatory gap" the question of how a model of the world could influence the world. A ratchet describes this. It is the switch that imposes the informational asymmetry on the entropic flow. It is the central "how" of how the whole causal story works.
For ordinary bottom-up engineering, building structures amidst raging thermal storms and quaking quantum uncertainty would be what suffers from an explanatory gap. It would seem blatantly the wrong choice of material foundations.
But life and mind are natural systems organisms implementing modelling relations. And the edge of chaos is what they can colonise precisely because there exists a maximally tipable state of material fury.
Life evolved its handling of chemistry until it could harness the most violent available chemical process redox reactions. This should blow the mitochondria apart. But respiratory proteins can dance a hot electron down a chain of precisely aligned receptors, dragged along by quantum tunneling effects towards the oxygen atom waiting at the end.
What is then bottom-up, if you like, is that the metabolic system the genes stabilise can then become the platform for building further levels of life and mind. Neurons can play the same trick by stabilising the flux of a sensory world. Language can stabilise the flux of a psychological world. Logic can stabilise the flux of a rationalised world.
It all rests on the ability to use the instability of the nanoscale as the right kind of material fashion. A zone of maximum switchability that occurs only in a watery solvent on a Sun heated planet which in itself makes a system of mechanical switches the next most probable evolutionary step.
Information can have maximum meaning where maximum entropy or uncertainty is present.
But first, the material itself has to be a dissipative flow. It is useless trying to milk action from a dead equilibrium. The material realm has to be in a critical state as Hoffman describes. And then the lightest of touches can bend it to your will, from the organismic point of view.
Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.?
This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.
Forget it. Until you stop and think about why your questions are wrong, you can't begin to learn how to think in holistic terms and ask questions that are meaningful in light of that ontology.
The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.
Desired by whom? Actually your description contains other terms implying intentionality - life evolving its complexity, neurons that play tricks, and so on. There seems an implied agency here, which is noticeably at odds with the wording of the books description. Not to mention top-down constraints - if molecular structures are the bottom, what is the origin of the top down constraints?
if molecular structures are the bottom, what is the origin of the top down constraints.
Read what I said. Criticality itself "others" the possibility of its own stabilisation. By molecular chaos being the rule, semiotic constraints become that which could then take maximum advantage of this material lack of constraints.
Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing like the "redness" of red and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".
So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.
Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.
:up:
There's also the challenge of inventing a fascinating personality, becoming a success in a creative field : the personality as product. Strong poet, original philosopher, revolutionary scientist, etc. Revolutionize the means of production and seduction, to burn always brighter and hotter. To conform is to violate the norm in just the right way.
Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? javra
This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.
My lack of effort, you say. Alright then. Baby steps.
Here's a proposition: "I am conscious of this text." In your worldview, does this proposition have a truth-value?
So you would agree, then, that the appearance of organisms is also the appearance of intentionality and agency?
Sure. Thats what semiosis explains. The feeling of being a self in its world by being a prediction machine with its collection of interpretive habits.
Seems to me you, or the author you're discussing, is trying a bit of flashy rhetorical footwork by misrepresenting the ideas of people you disagree with.
You seem to be a level-headed fellow. So, I was concerned that you interpreted my brief sketches of three competing worldviews as "mis-representing" the ideas of those who hold such views. It was not intended as a put-down, but as a way to distinguish the philosophically pertinent differences between them. If you are willing, I'd like to hear your own compare & contrast between monistic Materialism and monistic Panpsychism. For example, here's what I said in the post above :
"Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter. Dualism just accepts that we tend to think of Mind & Matter as two completely different things, and never the twain shall meet : hyle + morph = real matter + ideal form. Monistic Panpsychism assumes that Matter is an illusion generated by the inherent mental processes of nature (a priori Cosmic Consciousness), hence matter does not matter."
You admitted to being a Materialist, depending on circumstances ; and I admitted to being a Materialist, for all practical purposes. But I suspect that you assumed I was prejudiced in favor of spooky Panexperientialism. So, I confessed that I am not a panpsychist in any formal sense. And I don't believe that grains of sand are conscious. Besides, I have never been a hippie or Hindu, and I don't personally know anyone who admits openly to being a Panpsychist, except for a few scientists & philosophers whose books I have read. Yet, ancient Cosmic Mind theories do seem to be prescient of modern non-mechanical post-classical physics.
To clarify where I'm coming from, I'll note that I have been steered away from conventional Materialism by the elementary physics of 20th century Quantum Theory. The QT pioneers were shocked to discover that the fundamental indivisible Atom they were seeking seemed to fracture into a menagerie of sub-atomic particles. Eventually, even the evanescent sub-sub-particles (e.g. Quarks) soon dissolved into nothing more substantial than uncertain statistical equations*1. So, the mathematical physicists began to describe their new Reality in terms of a Quantum Field of "virtual particles", that only become real when observed by experimenters*2. That's not magic, it's physics.
Any effect of the observer's mind upon material reality was, of course, quite controversial for those steeped in classical mechanical physics. But, after a century of debate, the flame-wars have calmed-down. So, QFT now seems to be almost mainstream*3. Today, some quantum physicists and mathematicians (noted in post above) openly admit to some form of Panpsychism worldview. However, my personal view has little to do with that ancient Cosmic Mind concept. Instead, it's a combination of Quantum & Information theories, as advocated by physicist Paul Davies, and the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complexity, for example.
I just started reading a book, by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter. And the subtitle says : "How the Mind creates the features & structure of all things, and why this Insight transforms Physics". It mentions Quantum Bayesianism*4, which I was only vaguely familiar with. Perhaps, a glance at the excerpt below will give you an idea of the 21st century notion that Mind is fundamental to reality, not an incidental side-effect of random evolution. I mention all of this abstruse & esoteric stuff, just to let you know that I'm not an anti-science nut-case spouting hippie non-sense. :smile:
*1. A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks ... which means they are fermions according to the spinstatistics theorem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
*2. The observer effect is the fact that observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes it. Observer effects are especially prominent in physics where observation and uncertainty are fundamental aspects of modern quantum mechanics.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8423983
*3. Quantum field theory,a framework for explaining how subatomic particles behave, ... Mathematician Seeks to Bring Quantum Field Theory into Mainstream Math
https://bfl.cns.utexas.edu news mathematician-seeks-t...
*4. Quantum Bayesianism : In physics and the philosophy of physics, quantum Bayesianism is a collection of related approaches to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which the most prominent is QBism (pronounced "cubism"). QBism is an interpretation that takes an agent's actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory. QBism deals with common questions in the interpretation of quantum theory about the nature of wavefunction superposition, quantum measurement, and entanglement. According to QBism, many, but not all, aspects of the quantum formalism are subjective in nature. For example, in this interpretation, a quantum state is not an element of realityinstead it represents the degrees of belief an agent has about the possible outcomes of measurements. For this reason, some philosophers of science have deemed QBism a form of anti-realism. The originators of the interpretation disagree with this characterization, proposing instead that the theory more properly aligns with a kind of realism they call "participatory realism", wherein reality consists of more than can be captured by any putative third-person account of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism
Note --- QBism expands upon the notion of "participatory realism", that quantum physicist John A. Wheeler postulated back in the '60s. From the perspective of Materialism, it may sound like anti-realism.
The feeling of being a self in its world by being a prediction machine with its collection of interpretive habits.
How is that feeling generated from non-feeling matter? Why is there a feeling at all? Why is there a feeling associated with some brain processes but not others? Doesn't the regulation of hormones and digestion, to give two examples, involve prediction and habituation? Could that feeling be generated in machines? How would you test whether an alien species has this feeling?
"Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter. Dualism just accepts that we tend to think of Mind & Matter as two completely different things, and never the twain shall meet : hyle + morph = real matter + ideal form. Monistic Panpsychism assumes that Matter is an illusion generated by the inherent mental processes of nature (a priori Cosmic Consciousness), hence matter does not matter."
While I wouldn't say that physicality doesn't matter, I'm in general agreement with the given description of panpsychism. Nevertheless:
So conceived it seems to me that a world of so called monistic panpsychism would yet necessarily consist of an ontological duality: namely, between 1) awareness (with any kind of ur-awareness which might apply to non-life included) and 2) everything that is not awareness (which, as such, thereby informs, and thereby gives form to, awareness). Here, then, all aspects of mind and body that awareness can be in any way aware of would ultimately consist of the same basic stuff - with mind and matter being only a property dualism of this substance (rather than being two ontological substances). And, in conformity with the boldfaced and underlined parts of the quote, this underlying stuff/substance which is everything that is not awareness would itself ultimately be the product of awareness when globally addressed - this then likely in a multiplicity of different ontological manners.
Then: Properly speaking, would you interpret panpsychism thus understood to be an ontological monism or an ontological, non-Cartesian dualism?
QBism expands upon the notion of "participatory realism", that quantum physicist John A. Wheeler postulated back in the '60s. From the perspective of Materialism, it may sound like anti-realism.
The less woo understanding of this Bayesianism is that the human measurer can construct the mechanical constraints on a prepared quantum system so as to decohere it to the degree it answers to a classical counterfactual description.
This is biosemiotic. The basis of biology itself is the ability of cellular machinery to decohere the quantum nanoscale realm of chemistry to ratchet the available energies in the desired metabolic fashion.
An enzyme mechanically grips and forces two reactants into the exact conjunction that gives them no choice but to bond. A respiratory chain gives a hot electron no choice but to quantum tunnel down its mechanically structured pathway.
In effect, this biological machinery is making quantum measurements. The fixed shaped of proteins assembled by genetic information prepares the world in a way that quantum wave functions are left with no choice but to collapse in the counterfactual fashion that the biological machinery is insisting on.
So ontologically, the physics of the world can always be quantum. You dont need actual collapse. You just need systems of constraint that limit the possibilities to the degree that the state of a mechanical switch is almost surely flipped. On the side of the physics, it is still a probabilistic world. But encounters with the mechanical structures built with genetic information can make those probabilities asymptotically close to 1.
Humans in labs are simply doing the same trick at a much larger energy scale. Biology lives right on the quasi classical border of the quantum realm, milking its potential for tunneling, superposition and other holistic actions. Labs use special gear to create states of coherence over metres that can they be decohered by mechanical structures which enforce measurements that then fit their models of quantum physics.
So the key here is to realise that the physics takes place in a decohering environment. There is no collapse of a wavefunction needed. But you get the effective collapse because environments certaintly reduce the uncertainty of quantum probabilities in a historical fashion. The holism of contextuality means the Universe does develop classical looking structure in terms of its statistics.
And then life and mind can apply mechanical logic - the counterfactuality of informational structure - to impose its schemes on the physical world. Genes code for biological molecules which can make measurements and entrain chemistry at the nanoscale to an organised metabolic network. Human scientists can likewise create informational theories that are a recipe for the electronic devices which can likewise entrain the quantum realm to a technological level of metabolism - the sapiens-feeding metabolism of the modern global economic system organised by its micro-electronics and informstion flows.
Then: Properly speaking, would you interpret panpsychism thus understood to be an ontological monism or an ontological, non-Cartesian dualism?
Depends on how you look at it. :joke:
Empirical science ignored the mental aspects of reality for centuries, because it was associated with Souls, Spirits, and Ghosts. But now, quantum scientists are forced to deal with the effects of observation on the foundations of reality. I'm not aware of any results of that new insight that could be called "practical magic".
Except, of course, for the ability to transform immaterial information into physical matter & energy*1. But the science of "virtual reality" certainly gives philosophers something to think about. Quantum Bayesianism is one way of looking at how personal beliefs & expectations can affect the models of Reality that we construct. For theoretical philosophy though, I see many possibilities for making sense of a non-classical non-mechanical world, where ideas are either a dime a dozen, or the substance of human culture.
For me, the Statistical Holism of quantum entanglement is not a sign of divine perversion (e.g. trickster god). But it does put ancient holistic models into a new light. Seems like it could be interpreted as Ontological Monism. But from another angle, we've intuited for millennia that reality is a mind/body Substance Dualism of some sort. Personally, I have interpreted this New Science in terms of Quantum & Information theories : evolutionary EnFormAction*2 and ontological Enformationism*3. :smile:
1. Elemental Information Hypothesis : Several philosophers and scientists have concluded from implications of Quantum Theory, Information Theory, and Computer Simulations that mathematical-mental Information is the elemental substance of reality underlying the Space-Time-Matter-Energy we observe on the macro level of human perception and in classical physics.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Note -- "Physicists in Japan have shown experimentally that a particle can be made to do work simply by receiving information, rather than energy".
https://physicsworld.com/a/information-converted-to-energy/
*2. The EnFormAction Hypothesis : EnFormAction theory takes a leap of imagination, to envision a more holistic interpretation of the evidence, both empirical and philosophical. Contrary to the Neo-Darwinian theory of Evolution, EFA implies a distinct direction for causation, toward the top rung in the hierarchy of Emergence, as denoted by the arrow of Time. Pure Randomness would just go around in circles. But selection (Entention) works like the ratchet in a clock-work to hold the latest cycle at a useful, and ultimately meaningful, stable state : a Phase Transition, or a step on the ladder of Being. Darwinian Evolution is going nowhere, but EnFormAction is going out-there.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
*3. What is Information? : The Enformationism thesis and the BothAnd Blog are based on a multi-level understanding of the phenomenon known as Information. Unfortunately, most people have only a vague or general concept of what the term means scientifically and philosophically. So, in answer to a request for a general definition, as it pertains to inorganic (physical), organic (biological), and semantic types of information, I have defined Information in the context of various real-world instances of ubiquitous enforming power.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page16.html
Empirical science ignored the mental aspects of reality for centuries, because it was associated with Souls, Spirits, and Ghosts.
I myself think of this as "Empirical science ignored the mental aspects of reality for centuries, because it was associated with Psyche (as in "psychology" - the study of psyche)". But yea, your assessment seems to be about right.
I'd like to hear your own compare & contrast between monistic Materialism and monistic Panpsychism.
I don't really know much about panpsychism, so I won't comment on it. When I talk about materialism, I mean pretty much the standard meaning - the universe is made up of matter and energy interacting in space and time. That manifests in living organisms with nervous systems as neurological processes which manifest as mental processes which manifest as behavior. Mental processes in humans include thoughts, feelings, memories, perception, experience, consciousness, and other similar processes. They also include unconscious processes such as autonomic responses, reflexes, maintenance of physical homeostasis, and many other processes. Together those processes make up the mind. Is it real? Yes. Is it physical - good question. What kind of a thing is it? I'm not sure, but I do believe it is a manifestation of physical, biological, neurological processes.
[...] Together those processes make up the mind. Is it real? Yes. Is it physical - good question. What kind of a thing is it? I'm not sure, but I do believe it is a manifestation of physical, biological, neurological processes.
Shoot. Going by that definition, I could qualify as a materialist myself. :wink: No bones to pick. Cool definition. :up:
This goes out to those who are not irreducibly fixated on the unquestionable reality of their own particular worldview, whatever it might be (if any).
Coincidentally, I just came across a YouTube video, by Sabine Hossenfelder, on the topic of "why the universe is not locally real". After a quick Google, I found that it's a hot topic right now, because of the recent Nobel winners. Quantum physics should give those who are "irreducibly fixated" pause to question their assumptions about their own local Reality. To quote an old TV ad : "Is it real, or is it Memorex?" :smile:
Why No Portals? Universe is not locally real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkgPJo_z6Y
The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/
The less woo understanding of this Bayesianism is that the human measurer can construct the mechanical constraints on a prepared quantum system so as to decohere it to the degree it answers to a classical counterfactual description.
The quoted sentence above, sounds pretty technical (abstruse). Can you deconstruct it for someone not familiar with Biosemiotic jargon? Does it deny that the observer of a quantum experiment can influence, but not control, its outcome? Is Biosemiotics derived from a metaphysical Materialism worldview? Hence, avoiding the "woo" label, signifying non-sense? Do you think that Wheeler meant to imply a mind-over-matter form of magic?
Are you implying that Wheeler's Participatory Realism is more woo than Biosemiotics? Does PR sound like "anti-realism" to you? What does Biosemiosis mean for a human "construct" like Participatory Realism? The meaning of that phrase is simple enough : biological humans play a role in the construction of their own personal mental model of reality. And Bayesianism is about private subjective first-person beliefs (models), not about ding an sich reality. Third-person objective models of reality (science facts) are based on a consensus drawn from among various first person models (opinions). But it's still a mental map, not the physical terrain. :smile:
On Participatory Realism : These views have lately been termed "participatory realism" to emphasize that rather than relinquishing the idea of reality (as they are often accused of), they are saying that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. Thus, far from instances of instrumentalism or antirealism, these views of quantum theory should be regarded as attempts to make a deep statement about the nature of reality. This paper explicates the idea for the case of QBism. As well, it highlights the influence of John Wheeler's "law without law" on QBism's formulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04360
Instrumentalism is thus the view that scientific theories should be thought of primarily as tools for solving practical problems rather than as meaningful descriptions of the natural world.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/instrumentalism
Anti-Realism : in philosophy, a belief that is opposed to realism (= the belief that objects continue to exist even when no one is there to see them):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/anti-realism
Coincidentally, I just came across a YouTube video, by Sabine Hossenfelder, on the topic of "why the universe is not locally real". [...] To quote an old TV ad : "Is it real, or is it Memorex?" :smile:
Just saw the video. Very interesting. Still, first off, Im no expert in the intricacies of modern physics and, secondly, all modern physics is chockfull of inference (the speakers reference to multiple worlds theorys possible disagreements with some of the premises as one example). So, Ill let others engage in the heavy-duty physics interpretations of these latest findings.
For what its worth, though, in terms of non-locality and all the other weird aspects of quantum physics:
We often assume that we conscious humans are the be-all and end-all of awareness this as (mind-endowed) observers. Bring back the facts of biology into this equation and we multicellular organisms are constituted of individual living cells from individual skin cells to individual neuron cells. Grant that each of these individual cells is endowed with its own primitive mind (as per, for example, the enactivist stance of Evan Thompson in his book "Mind in Life") needless to add, cells to which the multicellular organisms in which they occur serves as their commonwealth upon which each such cell is dependent and whose preservation each such cell operates to maintain and you obtain the following biocentric like perspective:
Each one of these primitive mind endowed (and, hence, awareness endowed) cells is constituted of organic molecules some of which which have been empirically evidenced to exhibit at least some QM properties. *** The cell itself, however, does not exhibit QM properties. Skipping a good deal of rational inference, for each cell to properly function so as to live requires that each cell of itself settles all the QM weirdness (which, again, can apply to various organic molecules and, needless to add, their components) in a way that at the very least ends up resembling our locally real world.
We are constituted of these cells. Those that pertain to our CNS then constitute our own mind and give form to our own conscious awareness.
Going by the aforementioned, then, our own empirically known world will then necessarily be locally real.
I know, the just expressed is in certain respects speculative or at least will appear so to those who might disagree with some of the premises expressed, such that an individual cell holds its own primitive mind, one that thereby also observes its environment (think, for a blatant example, of an ameba that recognizes and must readily distinguish predator from pray). All the same, this perspective so far works for me as a way of making sense of how QM applies to our empirically known reality.
Edit: As a quick addendum to the proposed perspective: I take this to be readily evident but it might not be so to others: our immediate environment is always thoroughly infused with cellular life, be it diploid (e.g., eukaryotes such as ameba) of haploid (e.g. bacteria on solid surfaces and pollen in the air) all of which would, in the previously given perspective, of itself settle quantum weirdness so as to successfully persist as an individual cell one that interacts with its environment, including with other (locally real) cells. So, in this interpretation, we always dwell in a non-QM empirical world - this if ones own bodys makeup were to not be enough (though I currently think it is). Our empirical awareness of QM's validity only comes into play when we focus - not on life, but - life's (as well as non-life's) material components.
Together those processes make up the mind. Is it real? Yes. Is it physical - good question. What kind of a thing is it? I'm not sure, but I do believe it is a manifestation of physical, biological, neurological processes.
I didn't think you were an expert on the philosophy of monistic Panpsychism; neither am I. But you seem to have a negative opinion of it. Others on this forum openly label such immaterial notions as "woo". It is obviously contrary to the fundamental axiom*1 of monistic Materialism. And it may seem contradict another basic assumption of Naturalism : "nothing supernatural"*2. Both of those positions are presumptions, not conclusions from the empirical scientific method.
Ironically, some supporters of the Ppsyche idea are professional scientists (see my post above). Yet they will admit it's not an objective empirical observation, but a merely philosophical conjecture*3 from personal experience with the immaterial (i.e. mathematical) non-classical non-mechanical sub-atomic nature of the foundations of Reality. So, that raises the question : Is the Universal Mind Conjecture a plausible/tenable/rational philosophical (not scientific) inference/hunch/hypothesis (e.g. from quantum evidence) to explain the emergence of mental phenomena late in the evolution of material phenomena. If so, why or why not? I have an ulterior, but not nefarious, motive for soliciting your unbiased opinion.
My understanding of the traditional & modern Universal Mind theories is also superficial. As they used to say, "all I know is what I read in the papers"(e.g. Wiki). I'm not a member of any group of believers. But, as I understand it, the Cosmic Mind concept assumes that the quality of Consciousness (summarized as Mind) is prior to quantitative Matter. Hence, the material objects we know via the 5 senses, are manifestations of some loosely-defined mind-like power inherent in the universe. Some may think of that universal power as an eternal consciousness (e.g. Brahma). But others may be content to think of it as simply an impersonal primordial Principle of some kind : Logos. All cosmic conjectures are, of course, non-empirical, hence objectively unprovable.
Are you familiar with 21st century Information Theory? My own Information-centric view is similar to Ppsyche in some ways, except that the ultimate Principle (EnFormAction/Directed Energy) is not defined as a conscious Mind, but more like an evolutionary computer program. It's also limited to our best understanding of foundational sub-atomic Physics, plus observed evidence of astronomical evolution, and interpreted in terms of Information Theory. No reference to traditional or biblical or shamanic sources.
So, Enformationism is intended to be more specific in its definitions, and attempts to adhere more closely to current scientific knowledge. It also avoids putting words in the mouth of the Unknown God/Principle (e.g. thou shalt/shalt not). Instead, the "book of nature" (e.g. Laws of Physics) is the only Word (Logos) of the hypothetical Programmer. I know, it's a bit much to grok. But, does that kind of conjecture sound any more plausible/tenable, to you, than traditional Panpsychism? Yes, no, maybe? :smile:
*1. Is materialism an axiom or a metaphysical belief? On this understanding, materialism is a metaphysical belief. It is unclear, however, whether we can consider it an axiom
https://www.quora.com/Is-materialism-an-axiom-or-a-metaphysical-belief
*2. Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them : the sciences have de facto conceded ontological naturalism: supernaturalist belief systems simply arent tenable anymore
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16193
*3. Philosophical Conjecture : In scientific philosophy, Karl Popper pioneered the use of the term "conjecture" to indicate a statement which is presumed to be real, true, or genuine, mostly based on inconclusive grounds, in contrast with a hypothesis (hence theory, axiom, principle), which is a testable statement based on accepted grounds.
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Conjecture
What kind of a thing is it [mind]? I'm not sure....
T Clark
What I said :-)
I read the post you linked. It doesn't really say anything about what the mind is, only what it isn't.
The whole blind spot argument doesn't make sense to me. I can certainly see my mind from the inside, but I can also see it from the outside. I can also see other's minds from the outside. I don't see any big mystery.
You cut and paste all this stuff you dont understand. That is why you cant follow an informed discussion about it.
Sorry to have bothered you with dumb questions about an esoteric topic. I guess Biosemiotics is not for the uninformed general public. Are you reserving that secret information for only the cognoscenti? :joke:
Well, you can see their behaviors. Their inner experiences (or lack thereof) are out of reach. Do other people see red the way I see green? Who knows.
It's true. From the outside, the mind manifests in behavior. That behavior includes self-reporting, which I think gives valuable insights about other people's inner lives. Who cares if other people see red the way I see green. That doesn't mean anything.
Each one of these primitive mind endowed (and, hence, awareness endowed) cells is constituted of organic molecules some of which which have been empirically evidenced to exhibit at least some QM properties.
You seem to be more familiar with Biology than with Quantum Physics*1. If so, you may be able to enlighten me about Biosemiotics (BS). Which has been proposed as an alternative to Panpsychism (PP) as a mechanism for the emergence of Mind from Matter. Reply to apokrisis doesn't seem to be willing to engage with an infidel (unbeliever in Materialism) to explain some of the technical jargon he uses in his posts. My interest in BS is simply that the semiotic (symbolic) aspects of the BS theory may be related to the Information Theory that I am better aquainted with. But some of the language sounds like Postmodern linguistic analysis*2 that is opaque to my simple mind. Does BS tell us anything new & important about Biology in general, or about the symbol manipulating Mind?
Although It's clear to me that the Potential for Mental Phenomena (sensation ; psychology ; awareness ; knowledge, etc) must have been inherent in Nature from the beginning, my understanding of Information Theory tells me that the "primitive mind" wouldn't necessarily be Conscious or Aware. Instead, it could have begun as nothing more sophisticated than exchanges of Energy, which are meaningless abstract interrelationships. Yet the human brain seems to be capable of processing & integrating perceived-information-structures/patterns into personally relevant meanings. Those private subjective meanings are what I would call "awareness". Anyway, that's the hypothesis I'm working on. :smile:
*1. Quantum biology at the cellular level : Quantum biology is emerging as a new field at the intersection between fundamental physics and biology, promising novel insights into the nature and origin of biological order.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23470561/
*2. Postmodernist Writing : I think most Postmodernist writing can be classified into these categories: ... Much of analytic philosophy is so abstruse and hermetically sealed that it too becomes an exercise in obscurantism. Where the style of thought diminishes content.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2015/02/nonsense-and-postmodernist-writing.html
If that's true, they are metaphysics - ways of looking at the world. The question to ask is whether or not they are useful ways.
Yes. But useful for what purpose?
The materialists on this forum appear to be only interested in physical scientific uses : e.g. can we build artificial intelligence into computers? However, the panpsychists seem to be focused on metaphysical philosophical purposes : e.g. can we understand the relationship between the real world of physics and the ideal world of metaphysics?
For the purposes of this forum, do you prefer impersonal mechanistic objectives, or personal meaningful motives? Is that a fair question? Some posters are clear about their preferences. But you seem to be somewhat ambivalent about siding with Science or Philosophy or Both. Perhaps that's a sign of an open mind? And I applaud the open-door policy. At least it leaves the door ajar for exchanges of views : "ways of looking at the world" :smile:
Yes. Exactly. Science needs materialism to work. Are there aspects of life where a materialist view is not helpful? Sure. Metaphysics is a toolbox. You can pull out the right metaphysical tool for the job when you need it.
you may be able to enlighten me about Biosemiotics (BS). Which has been proposed as an alternative to Panpsychism (PP) as a mechanism for the emergence of Mind from Matter.
I wont be much help, and this because I so far find this very quoted affirmation to be nonsensical. Bio-semiotics is the semiotics of life it addresses the meaning transference of lifeforms and all this entails. To apply biosemiotics to a former cosmos devoid of life from which life emerged will either necessitate a panpsychistic cosmos by default or, else, again, it will make no sense: the semiotics of life, i.e. biosemiotics, applied to processes of non-life in attempts to explain lifes emergence and all aspects of life, thereby explaining the semiotics of life. Its circular reasoning consisting of a great sum of allegories and metaphors that utilize poorly defined words (if they are at all defined: e.g., life, meaning, etc.) that after all the smoke and mirrors pass by ultimately explains nothing: we start with biosemiotics to explain biosemiotics via a very fancy loop. Or, more simply, we use premise A to explain A. And then call it a done deal: everything explained, including the very issue of A which we were principally focusing on.
I have nothing against the study of biosemiotics. But using life to explain life from the vantage of a non-living (else, life-devoid) cosmos, again, to me so far does not make sense. Philosophically speaking. But thats just fallible me.
So Ill let others explain their own views as best they can, if they so wish.
So Ill let others explain their own views as best they can,
You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims. :up:
Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the sign between the world and its interpretation.
That is the familiar epistemic first step.
Then semiosis becomes also an ontology by pointing out life and mind instantiate this epistemology as their Bayesian modelling relation.
No claims are made about pansemiosis in this. Life and mind are defined by instantiating a modelling relation within a world that has its own unmodelled reality.
And then things get more interesting. Physics starts to discover that physics is more lively - it houses self-organising dissipative structure. Quantum mechanics makes this fundamental by tacking on statistical mechanics and introducing decoherence/holography.
It gets a bit pansemiotic as there is somehow an observer baked into the physics. There is no model and no localised sign relation. But metaphorically there is interpretance - what quantum folk call contextuality. Dissipative structure has the kind of holism where every wavefunction collapse is read by us, as modellers, as a system of sign. The physical events that mark histories of interactions and destroy quantum information are the cosmos measuring itself into ever more definite being.
So it is metaphorical. But better than the reductionst and atomistic metaphors we were using to account for the weirdness of the quantum realm.
Then biosemiosis as a new science crystallised when Peirces introduction of a mediating sign as that which connected mind to world was replaced by Pattees introduction of a mediating switch.
Life is founded on mechanical switches or ratchets which physically link the informational and entropic aspects of a living and mindful dissipative structure.
Pattee had this crucial insight in the 1970s. But it wasnt until the 1990s that enough of Peirces work had been recovered and understood well enough for Pattee to make the connection that his hierarchy theory and modelling relations approach was semiosis under another name. After going quiet for a few years - having fended of the arguments of myself among others - he suddenly emerged as a rebranded biosemiotician in a blaze of statement papers.
Then roll forward a decade and the other shoe dropped in terms of biophysics showing how biology indeed exploits quantum effects so as to be able to create an organised metabolism using the information bound up in enzymes and other kinds of molecular motors. Pattees mechanical switches and ratchets.
So biosemiosis makes contact with physical reality by that shift from the still rather nebulous idea of a sign to be read to the completely concrete story of switches to be flipped. Biology uses a mechanical interface to mediate between biological information and environmental entropy gradients. The combo is the system we call an organism with a metabolism.
As my interests are more on the mind side than the life side, I am focusing on the higher levels of semiosis that are founded on this basic biological level of energy capture.
So Ill let others explain their own views as best they can, javra
You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims. :up:
Either the extrapolated worldview of the cosmos you endorse is not one of biosemiotics or I stand by what I previously said - so far finding nothing that contradicts my statements.
Unless you want to bring me into it. But then, in this thread about the science of consciousness youve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether I am conscious of this text is a truth-baring proposition. Not much of anything to go on here. So Im not inclined to participate.
To apply biosemiotics to a former cosmos devoid of life from which life emerged will either necessitate a panpsychistic cosmos by default or, else, again, it will make no sense: the semiotics of life, i.e. biosemiotics, applied to processes of non-life in attempts to explain lifes emergence and all aspects of life, thereby explaining the semiotics of life.
Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the sign between the world and its interpretation.
But this 'epistemic cut' is that between a subject of experience, and the world in which it exists, even if in very primitive form. On the Information Philosopher's page on Pattee, he quotes him as saying:
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subjects Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement a symbol and what is being measured a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.
What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction.
there is somehow an observer baked into the physics
Somehow. There is a lot of argument about whether 'the observer' can be an instrument, if that instrument is itself not observed, or what if anything would happen in the absence of any observer, as by stipulation, that is not something we could ever know.
But then, in this thread about the science of consciousness youve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether I am conscious of this text is a truth-baring proposition.
I gave you the answer. Your question suffers from logical vagueness. Affirming yes or no would make no useful difference.
It remains up to you to define consciousness in terms that pragmatically means anything measurable if you are indeed talking about the science of it. Or even just its metaphysics.
...youve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether I am conscious of this text is a truth-baring proposition.
What is your theory of truth?
I would say the cat on the mat is the truth bearer for the proposition, "The cat is on the mat.", and I don't see it as making sense to think that a proposition could be inherently truth bearing.
It remains up to you to define consciousness in terms that pragmatically means anything measurable if you are indeed talking about the science of it. Or even just its metaphysics.
To precisely demarcate what personal conscious is is not to define one's personal consciousness in ways that are measurable. Nor does metaphysics mandate that what is shall itself be measurable. I'll here point this truth at your own worldview, which infers the Apeiron to be a required aspect of what is real: The Apeiron by definition is immeasurable, and yet it is still what your metaphysics relies on at a basic level of explanation.
My own theory of truth in a nutshell: that which conforms to what is actual is true. Prior to you then testing out any and all possible ways this might not hold - but do if you so care - the question I asked apo was not based on "my theory of truth" but on his, regardless of what it might be.
To precisely demarcate what personal conscious is is not to define one's personal consciousness in ways that are measurable. Nor does metaphysics mandate that what is shall itself be measurable.
You do a lot of weaselling to avoid supplying a definition to the term that I must give a yes or no answer on.
Ill help you out. Do you mean something more than attending and reporting if I agree I am conscious of the text? If more, what exactly?
What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction.
You do a lot of weaselling to avoid supplying a definition to the term that I must give a yes or no answer on.
You belittling insults aside (yes, that apes win by posturing is a fact of nature), how on earth could I when you address the proposition of "I am conscious of this text" as neither having a truth-value nor being without one. Weaselling, huh. Nonsense pure and simple.
Ill help you out. Do you mean something more than attending and reporting if I agree I am conscious of the text? If more, what exactly?
And here it is. In assuming that "I am conscious of this text" can be true (what a stupendous presumption on my part; for who knows if this proposition can in fact be true, after all. Right?):
The addressed "I" is not identical to the text it is being conscious of. The text is other to that whose occurrence is addressed by the term "I", which holds awareness of the text. Fast forward to what I've previous said in this thread, and that which is addressed by the term "I" holds conscious awareness of empirical givens without itself being an empirical given - either to its own conscious being or to any others. Of note, even though the addressed "I" can only occur in a duality to other which it observes and thereby constitutes a self, it is never identical to that which it observes. Again, it is thereby other in relation to all empirical data. An AI program attends and responds to information - as does an alarm clock - but is not endowed with a conscious being which we term "I" in propositions such as that provided.
Yours is a denial of those truths whose consequences are not useful to you - that of consciousness's occurrence very much included. I don't much admire your approach, for the same reason I don't admire the approach of Young Earth Creationist among others.
Try to insult me in a wiser way the next time around. That way, you end up having the last word.
how on earth could I when you address the proposition of "I am conscious of this text" as neither having a truth-value nor being without one.
Let me insult you again. You continue to weasel your way out of the requirement to provide a counterfactual definition to fit your counterfactual proposition. Technically, your position becomes not even wrong, simply vague.
Now for more of your weaseling to pretend you are upholding your end of the proffered exchange.
Let me insult you again. You continue to weasel your way out of the requirement to provide a counterfactual definition to fit your counterfactual proposition. Technically, your position becomes not even wrong, simply vague.
Counterfactual conditionals (also subjunctive or X-marked) are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here."
What on earth are you talking about??? Other than your ego's need to insult - which does hold semantic value - your expressions are entirely nonsensical.
That "I am conscious of this text" is not a counterfactual proposition, no more than is "the cat is on the mat".
Still not even an attempt to define your use of consciousness here then? You had many chances now. That says you cant do it.
Back to the drawing board: Whats wrong with first-person awareness as a definition for consciousness? Well, unless one finds the given definition to be entirely nonsensical.
Yes. Exactly. Science needs materialism to work. Are there aspects of life where a materialist view is not helpful?
Yes. Materialism is not helpful for dealing with the philosophy of mind*1. That's why David Chalmers, a professional Neurologist, calls the metaphysics of Mind : "the hard problem". The philosophy of Panpsychism is all about aboutness*2. :smile:
*1. Materialism in the philosophy of mind : Materialism which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the raw feel of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; aboutness seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense.
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/materialism-in-the-philosophy-of-mind/v-1
*2. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter is a 2011 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon. The book covers topics in biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, and the origins of life. Broadly, the book seeks to naturalistically explain "aboutness", that is, concepts like intentionality, meaning, normativity, purpose, and function; which Deacon groups together and labels as ententional phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature
Chalmers received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia.[10] After graduating Chalmers spent six months reading philosophy books while hitchhiking across Europe,[11] before continuing his studies at the University of Oxford,[10] where he was a Rhodes Scholar but eventually withdrew from the course.[12] In 1993, Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington under Douglas Hofstadter,[13] writing a doctoral thesis entitled Toward a Theory of Consciousness.[12] He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995.
Do you have any evidence for Chalmers being a neurologist?
I wont be much help, and this because I so far find this very quoted affirmation to be nonsensical. Bio-semiotics is the semiotics of life it addresses the meaning transference of lifeforms and all this entails. To apply biosemiotics to a former cosmos devoid of life from which life emerged will either necessitate a panpsychistic cosmos by default or, else, again, it will make no sense:
I agree that Biosemiotics is a theory of living things, not thinking things. So, I don't understand why Reply to apokrisis sarcastically replied that "You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims". His alternate explanation is way over my head : "Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the sign between the world and its interpretation".
The notion of an "epistemic cut" is not included in my everyday vocabulary. And I am not educated in Postmodern linguistic analysis, so the quote below*1 just sounds like gobbledygook to me. I asked apo to dumb it down for us un-indoctrinated dummies, but he seems to think it's beneath his dignity to stoop that low. Terrence Deacon's use of semiotics*2 seems to be limited to the recent biological phases of evolution, not to a "primeval epistemic cut". And I find his language much easier for a layman to grasp. Is the "epistemic cut" a case of circular reasoning, or of cutting Nature at imaginary joints? :smile:
*1. The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut : Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code.
https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html
*2. How Molecules Became Signs : These molecules are [i]not the source of biological information but are instead semiotic artifacts onto which dynamical functional constraints have been progressively offloaded during the course of evolution.[/i] ___Terrence Deacon
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9
Do you have any evidence for Chalmers being a neurologist?
Sorry. Perhaps I mis-spoke. What do you call a "neural scientist" if not a "neurologist"? A "neuroscientist"? I didn't mean to imply that he is an MD. Apparently, he's merely a Ph.D. :smile:
David Chalmers : He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org wiki David_Chalmers
What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction.
Thanks for stepping-in there. Your explanation makes more sense to me than the "epistemic cut" notion. For someone with no formal training in Philosophy or Biosemiotics, such jargon is way over my pointy little head. :smile:
You just switched from conscious of x to first person awareness. Are we talking about a thing or a process, counterfactually speaking here?
I was talking about a process.
And then when you make claims about consciousness of x - as something more than attention+reporting - is consciousness of the presence of a colour the same as consciousness of some bit of text? And is consciousness of a lump of rock the same as consciousness of a bit of text?
Are these all exactly the same propositions in your book or are there telling differences that might cause you to qualify your meaning in speaking about consciousness as a process.
Yes, you do need to back to the drawing board and do some work on your definitions so that there could be a less amateur discussion here.
Reply to apokrisis All definitions are capable if being wrong as they all may incorrectly describe usage. On the other hand, some hypotheses are not falsìiable except by empirical investigation. Is that what you mean?
You just switched from conscious of x to first person awareness. Are we talking about a thing or a process, counterfactually speaking here?
I was talking about a process.
And how is any awareness of which we can be in any way aware of not a process? Even none-empirical experiences such as those of our own happiness and sureness (as two examples) are process. Never mind our awareness of percepts and, hence, of empirical data.
Besides, as Ive previously expressed, I make no inferential speculation as to awareness being an entity/substance, a process, both, or neither. Period. That unknown, or uncertainty, or vagueness as you term it, is part of my stance.
So what is first-person awareness? One should intimately know via one's own experiences.
And then when you make claims about consciousness of x - as something more than attention+reporting - is consciousness of the presence of a colour the same as consciousness of some bit of text? And is consciousness of a lump of rock the same as consciousness of a bit of text?
Yes, you do need to back to the drawing board and do some work on your definitions so that there could be a less amateur discussion here.
From our exchanges it so far seems to me you want to win arguments by vanquishment as though philosophy were a zero-sum game. It isnt. You might want to ask more questions of those you disagree with, answer those questions youve been asked by them, and address the replies you've already been given.
This since we're so candidly exchanging advice on what the other should do.
All definitions are capable if being wrong as they all may incorrectly describe usage.
Sure. But if that definition isnt being offered, as in this case
And if the term is meant to be meaningful as a scientific definition rather than, say, just a woolly catch-all word with no clear ontological commitment except Cartesian dualism in sight
You might want to ask more questions of those you disagree with, answer those questions youve been asked by them, and address the replies you've already been given.
So you think I should take you more seriously? You believe this is a discussion to be cashed out in propositional logic?
Lets see. Youre laughing because you, in contrast, have certain knowledge of what consciousness is and isnt in an empirically measurable way. This while at the same time holding that whether the proposition I am conscious of this text can hold a truth-value is unanswerable. :up:
Youre laughing because you, in contrast, have certain knowledge of what consciousness is and isnt in an empirically measurable way.
I laugh as what else can one do when being pestered by someone so incapable of following a straight line of thought.
I asked for your measurable definition - the one that would make sense to a scientist wanting to get on with their scientific inquiry. I offered the kind of pragmatic definition a scientist would use - verbal reports of acts of attention. But for some reason you dont want to go there.
I ask what more would you want to say. You get all huffy and evasive. Answer my questions, you keep demanding. What question was that I have to say.
So stamp your feet and splutter away. But Ive lost interest.
I asked for your measurable definition - the one that would make sense to a scientist wanting to get on with their scientific inquiry.
Yes, apo. You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides. My very point from the very beginning. Glad we've finally come to an agreement.
Your explanation makes more sense to me than the "epistemic cut" notion.
The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. It was coined by Howard Pattee, who has been influential in biosemiotics. Seems to me an interesting philosophical question would be, does it introduce a duality? However, the paper answers:
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut :
This epistemic irreducibility does not imply any ontological dualism. It arises whenever a distinction must be made between a subject and an object, or in semiotic terms, when a distinction must be made between a symbol and its referent or between syntax and pragmatics.
Although it then goes on to acknowledge that the origin of the subject-object distinction - that is, the origin of life - is still a mystery. He also says that 'it is not possible to distinguish the living from the lifeless by the most detailed "motion of inorganic corpuscles" alone. The logic of this answer is that life entails an epistemic cut that is not distinguishable by microscopic (corpuscular) laws.' So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws. The concluding sentence is a question: 'Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?' - thereby providing a glimmer of hope that physical reductionism may not, in fact, provide the answer.
I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings. In that sense, the origin of the epistemic division of knower and known is the outer manifestation of an internal state, namely, that of being a subject:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos]We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe (i.e. described by science), composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. 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. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience how it is from the point of view of its subject without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. [/quote]
So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives.
You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides.
Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. Im asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion.
So again you splutter and misfire with arguments that abuse the good habits of rational inquiry. Arent you weary of your own failure yet? What keeps you going and going?
The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised.
It doesn't seem that simple judging by the reactions. But again, where Peircean semiosis introduces the sign as the mark that marks the cut by bridging the cut, so Pattee took it further by arguing the Peircean sign was in fact the literally mechanical thing of a logical switch.
A switch in a power circuit allows a human to turn the heat off and on. So the switch both creates the cut and bridges the cut. The switch can be flipped from off to on.
Biologists have tended to think of the genes as the information that regulate an organism's sustaining biochemical flows. They are certainly part of that machinery, but not what defines the coal-face of the modelling relationship. It is enzymes that are physically the switches which can turn reactions on and off at a command. Likewise Barbieri was early to narrow the focus to the ribsome as the core switch because it was the enzyme that made the enzymes by understanding the mRNA messages being sent by the genome.
So Peirce was rather hand-wavy in talking about the epistemic cut in terms of "signs". Yet also, science was in its Victorian era. Peirce waved his hands in ways that were as up to date scientifically as it was then possible to be.
Since the DNA code was cracked in the 1950s, biology has just kept getting more exact in terms of what mediates the modelling relation what creates the cut between the "rate dependent dynamics" of the world and "rate independent information" of a regulatory model that it can then itself also bridge.
The Hard Problem of how mind and matter can interact causally is solved by that. We can point to the enzymes and even the ribosomes. We can point to the molecular machinery that ratchets the nanoscale convergence zone of physics the scale of entropic balance that is physics' own quantum~classical transition story. (The one without an inserted epistemic cut, but formed by its own emergent or decoherent constraints.)
So if you make this about the "knower and the known", your risk trivialising it as the good old Cartesian dualism of a world with two realms, one real, the other deal. And if you try some other duality, like Sassure's symbol and symbolised, you make the mistake of not understanding that Peirce was pushing the triadic story of a "world", and interpretant, and the third thing of the epistemic cut the sign, the switch - which is inserted inbetween to allow a model and its world interact to pragmatic effect.
This shows the habit of thought you need to unlearn here. Framing what is said as a triadic claim as if it reduced to a dyadic one. Peirce argued how the world is irreducibly complex because it has the inherent triadicity of a system of relations. A relation has its two ends, but also the bit that connects in the middle.
So you are not hearing what I have been saying for so many years now. You haven't got it.
But I don't complain too much. Most people indeed never get it. You at least felt the need to make an effort. I can thank you for that while still trying to tell the story in even more simple ways.
So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws.
Well no. Quite the opposite. Symbols are that which can escape the limits of physics. They are born where the physics halts. So they rely on physics in the sense of being dichotomously "other" to that physics.
Hence Pattee's dichotomy of rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information. A symbol or switching device can't actually escape also being physical. But it can escape the grip of physics by becoming some small and constant cost that an organism can bear.
If you only have to flip a switch, you can attach that switch to anything you like and gain control over it. The light in your bedroom, a pixel on a display, or WW3.
You could launch a nuclear holocaust from the briefcase of codes that your secret service guy totes around for you. It might take the effort of raising your creaky old voice and saying you are the President and you are absolutely serious. The right people have signed the right bits of paper as a double check on your authority and state of mind.
So some grumpy old git. A nuclear arsenal. A lot of ideation. A lot physical entropy. Then the third thing that is the mediating switch which has been stopping it happen until it starts to happen. A world-spanning circuit can get closed with a few puffs of air coming out of an old man's throat.
I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings.
But absolutely no one in the biosemiotic community of the 1990s was thinking they were making an argument for panpsychism. Although pansemiosis was a lively discussion led by Stan Salthe. And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science. At least this was now proper holism.
So you might go out on your own limb. But I'm not sure where you get the right. Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes.
Your position doesn't even arrive at the metaphysical throat-clearings of Kant. You want to time-machine biosemiosis back to the 17th Century.
So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives.
Yeah, but split and then connected by what? What did nature insert to get evolution going? Why did a code make a difference to the world?
Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. Im asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion.
Youve addressed my analogy via a literalist interpretation of its parts. And deem this a rational argument against the analogy. Remarkable.
The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable and you insist that it be defined in an empirically measurable way to be taken into consideration in the first place - because circles can so be. From your previous comments, this via "counterfactual definitions" - whatever that might mean to you.
And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science.
He still wrote a book on Making Room for Creation which seems open to divine agency. From which:
For 300 years, the reigning consensus in the West has been that nature is monist and functions according to a single metaphysics. Furthermore, it has been assumed (and still is by most) that continued research will demonstrate that the same laws and metaphysics will eventually fully describe matters in the chasm that living systems inhabit. To doubt that belief is to exhibit what Haught (2000) calls metaphysical impatience.'
I'm saying that organisms are the appearance of intentional agency, even if in rudimentary form. That they are able to act for reasons other than those dictated by physical law. Robert Ulanowiczw seems to support that view:
Accepting process ecology as a legitimate way to describe natural systems would provide significant philosophical and theological opportunities. Starting with the question of free willit becomes a given in a narrative that posits indeterminacy as an axiomatic attribute of nature. The burden of proof would shift to the determinists, who would then need to demonstrate how neuronal firings make their way through some five hierarchical layers of mind, each with its compliment of indeterminacy, to determine higher-level thought and choice.
Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes.
There's a cardinal difference between what I mean and Cartesian dualism. I'm not invoking a model of there being material and mental substances. I say that the subject of experience cannot be understood as a 'thinking substance' or objectified in the way that Cartesian dualism suggests. Organisms act for reasons that are not solely determined by lower-level laws. The two perspectives implied are the third-person perspective - which is descriptive - and the first-person perspective - which is 'what it is like to be', or put more simply, being.
The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised.
Thanks. Your post clarified that -- to me -- unfamiliar concept : how to divide Monistic (holistic) Ontology into a Dualistic (reductive) Worldview : philosophy into science.
You may also be able to help me understand why Reply to apokrisis is applying the notion of physically encoded Biosemiotics to mentally aware Consciousness. He seems to believe that it is a hard science, instead of a soft philosophy*1. We now know that the phenomenon of biological Life is dependent on biological codes, mostly in the form of DNA. But DNA itself is merely a stringy chemical. The code/symbol part is an idea in a human mind. So how could a code or symbol have any physical effect on the emergence of Life & Mind, in a universe of Physics & Chemistry, long before Biology & Psychology?
My interest in Biosemiotics is limited to its possible relationship to my own philosophical notion of Enformationism. A code is an abstract form of Information (SOS = . . . - - - . . . ), that when socially conventionalized, can convey meaning to a mind. But, how a notional code can have the physical effect of animating raw matter into biology, seems to be equivalent to Chalmer's "hard problem" of how raw matter can be enlightened into psychology (awareness). Am I missing something here? The mystery is in the transformation (transubstantiation?) of Material Substance into ethereal Life & Mind : both not tangible things but tenuous processes. That enigma is the motivation for my theory of metamorphizing Encoded Energy (EnFormAction).
Claude Shannon introduced the notion that meaningful Information results from the expenditure of causal Energy into voided Entropy. So, I'm trying to somehow fit the physical notion of Life Codes (Biosemiotics) into the metaphysical concept of Mind Codes (Information). The two should be connected, but the Body/Mind transition point seems to be related to the location of the Epistemic Cut. :smile:
*1. Biosemioticsis the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes. This idea has been strongly suggested by the discovery of the genetic code, but so far it has made little impact in the scientific world and is largely regarded as a philosophy rather than a science.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18365164/
So do you reckon if you'd been the other party in that wager with David Chalmers you'd have won the bet?
Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
But apparently, the REAL solution to the hard problem is Bosnian Semiotics. Or something like that.
Reply to apokrisis
Let's talk about feels and how and why they're generated and whether machines have them/can have them. You brave enough for a little Q&A?
Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
:lol: From the article:
Critics of Dennett's approach argue that Dennett fails to engage with the problem of consciousness by equivocating subjective experience with behaviour or cognition. In his 1996 book The Conscious Mind, philosopher David Chalmers argues that Dennett's position is "a denial" of consciousness, and jokingly wonders if Dennett is a philosophical zombie. Critics believe that the book's title is misleading as it fails to actually explain consciousness. Detractors have provided the alternative titles of Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away. According to Galen Strawson, the book violates the Trades Description Act and Dennett should be prosecuted.
But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are so motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it.
But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are sufficiently motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it.
It took a long time for me to ditch the materialist mindset. For me, the biggest obstacle was feeling like a fool for taking "woo"ish things seriously.
Reply to RogueAI That's because Western culture demolished any sober way of thinking about it, mainly due to the authoritarianism of ecclesiastical religion. Don't loose sight of the fact that to express wrong views on the subject would get you a death sentence for many centuries of Christian history. Then Descartes tried to thread the needle with his simplistic depiction of mind and matter as separate substances, and the whole question became deeply confused. But the times, they are a changin'.
Reply to RogueAI That is quite a well-researched article. If you look at the footnotes, Dennett is really the outlier, there's hardly any one of the others mentioned who agrees with him. But I say that Dennett performs a useful function, because his writing puts all the cards on the table, so that if you criticize Dennett as representative of materialist theory of mind, you can't be accussed of a straw man argument - he really does say this stuff.
Reply to Gnomon The article you mention is by Marcello Barbieri - in my reading of biosemiotics, solely due to Apokrisis (to give credit where it's due) I've learned that Barbieri resigned as editor of the journal Biosemiotics, because he felt that it had become too philosophical and influenced by Peirce. He has initiated what he considers a new approach which he calls 'code biology', that, he says, is more concentrated on the science, less on the philosophy (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him). There's a useful intro to his approach here What is information? (different from your own use of the term). He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo.
(I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him)
It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.
So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very Peircean structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.
Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4
I dont have a professional interest in the subject, but Ive found a couple of his articles useful, and the subject is generally interesting. Glad its something Ive learned about.
He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo.
Just reading that now. It's very interesting and easy to read and understand. Many thanks for the link. Might help me understand Apo better. I read a Pattee article as well which was easy to follow too.
The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable and you insist that it be defined in an empirically measurable way to be taken into consideration in the first place
This characterises a lot of debate on consciousness. Some people really want a functionalist definition, the trouble is that isn't what is meant. If we start with a non-functionalist definition then we have a problem built-in (whether it's 'hard' or not) - how to get structural and functional concepts (which are the currency of scientific discourse) to connect to a definition which does not specify any structure and function. It's much easier if we start with quantifiable and measurable concepts that are amenable to scientific enquiry.
The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable javra
Substantiated how?
Since I dont want to start this debate from scratch, heres a different, albeit terse, argument:
A proposition: No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed the minds eye.
This proposition can be readily proven false by any empirical information to the contrary (which, as empirical information, can thereby be verified by anyone who so pleases).
Till the just given, falsifiable proposition is proven false, it remains substantiated.
?Gnomon
The article you mention is by Marcello Barbieri - in my reading of biosemiotics, solely due to Apokrisis (to give credit where it's due) I've learned that Barbieri resigned as editor of the journal Biosemiotics, because he felt that it had become too philosophical and influenced by Peirce. He has initiated what he considers a new approach which he calls 'code biology', that, he says, is more concentrated on the science, less on the philosophy (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him). There's a useful intro to his approach here What is information? (different from your own use of the term). He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo.
Thanks for that information. :joke:
Barbieri's interest in Information is for its role in Biology. Whereas my focus is on its multifunction roles in Ontology, Epistemology, Physics & Psychology*1. But the article does provide some useful info on how specific applications of the General Information concept can be perceived as A> "too philosophical" or B> "too scientific", depending on the interests of the observer.
Apparently, Reply to apokrisis prefers to err in the direction of B. Which may explain his disdain for my more A approach. He'll probably disagree with that explanatory dichotomy, though. That's because he & I seem to make the "epistemic cut" in different places : current state vs original state, or matter vs mind, or code vs cause. But that's OK. Narrowly-focused Biosemiology is probably closer to becoming a hard science, than my own wide-angle philosophical musings. :smile:
*1. Information : What is it? Originally, the word information referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacons book about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe. Claude Shannons Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.
My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question.
Unlike my seeing a moving hand when I look at it, Im not seeing a minds eye in the brain images provided.
What I am seeing are individual slides empirically depicting a certain set of a brain's functions which are inferred to correlate with empirically evident self-reports concerning something that might or might not in fact be. For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real, one would expect exactly such empirically physical processes to occur in the philosophical zombies brain despite the philosophical zombie having no such thing as a minds eye. In short, I am not seeing the minds eye in the illustration.
A less complex way to address the same conclusion: to affirm that one is seeing the minds eye in these illustrations of a brain is in full parallel to affirming one sees in these illustrations what the minds eye is focusing on and thereby seeing. Both are brain functions; therefore, both ought to be seen in these illustrations. However, neither are empirically witnessed by us.
In other words, these illustrations of a brains functioning so far do not falsify the proposition which was provided. The proposition therefore so far remains substantiated.
I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.
My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question.
So minds and brains are different? What are the differences?
For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real
So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?
If Descartes demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you dont think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?
To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.
But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.
So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.
Now that you are talking of this mystical thing of the minds eye, is that something a philosophical zombie also has? Or are you simply pulling the rhetorical stunt of claiming something exists, but you define it so as to be beyond any possible empirical reach because epistemic devilry of whatever needed form.
Does the minds eye come with a definition? We never got one for consciousness out of your mouth.
Its all part of the game of course. Demand explanations for any term you decide to toss into the discussion, but refuse to give definitions for those terms in ways that would commit to an empirical test.
One can always keep claiming that no empirical evidence has been presented when one has refused to even agree as to what the nature of that empirical evidence might be.
All we have here is you playing the game of look at me. I can say that I doubt. But those words ring hollow. You never set out a position that you were prepared to believe.
My celebration was premature. My name keeps being brought up. And suddenly you all seem to be reading papers on biosemiosis. I am curious about the gyrations that will be performed to sustain this Hard Problem charade for the next 26 years too.
ENOUGH SNARK ALREADY. I deleted the last post as it was blatantly abusive. Unless there are more constructive contributions to be made this thread will be locked.
suddenly you all seem to be reading papers on biosemiosis
This is mainly because of your contributions to the forum so as to provide some background to the subject for those lacking it, to better understand what you are talking about, which goes over the heads of many contributors here.
The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks, Moore sentences for instance.
But other than that, how exercised do we get about the difference between "He said he's going out" and "I said I'm going out"? We translate between them regularly.
(Obligatory anecdote: Kafka said, "I became a writer when I found I could say 'he' instead of 'I'.")
But if you define a phenomenon so that its first-person-ness is part of the phenomenon, we're in "Hand me the book on the shelf" territory.
Just don't do that. We use mentalistic vocabulary about others as readily as we do about ourselves, attribute knowledge and beliefs and awareness and forgetfulness and consciousness to other people all day long, and we mean the same thing as when we describe ourselves as being in these mental states. What matters is the book, not its being on the shelf. That's just a double bind.
But if you define a phenomenon so that its first-person-ness is part of the phenomenon, we're in "Hand me the book on the shelf" territory.
Right - that is the issue. The key paragraph in David Chalmer's original paper was:
[Quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness] The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
Compare Chalmer's antagonist, Daniel Dennett, who claims:
[quote=Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science] In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science.[/quote]
I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle. Many other scholars and academics, including John Searle and Thomas Nagel, agree that Dennett's attempt to account for the first person perspective in objective terms, is conceptually flawed from the outset. Hence the satirical depiction of Dennett's book by Searle et al as 'Consciousness Ignored'.
Many other scholars and academics, including John Searle and Thomas Nagel, agree that Dennett's attempt to account for the first person perspective in objective terms, is conceptually flawed from the outset.
How can it not be??? If we knew the biology of an alien species to 100% accuracy (or close to it), would we still have any inkling whether they were zombies or not? Not to sound like a broken record, but materialism utterly fails to give a satisfactory response to this problem regarding machines. Does ChatGPT have a first person perspective? Will it's fifth-generation successor? Materialism/physicalism is utterly unable to answer this question, and the problem will only get worse and worse as the Ai's get better and better.
objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle
So what?
I think you're aware of this discussion in exactly the same sense that I'm aware of this discussion. Why should I define a special me-having-my-awareness instead of just saying I have awareness just like you.
Why should there be science conducted exclusively from my point-of-view? And if there can't be, why is that a shortcoming? Other people can study the same properties of me.
I think you're aware of this discussion in exactly the same sense that I'm aware of this discussion.
But that takes for granted that you and I are both subjects of experience, so that you can safely assume that I will understand what you mean. And for the purposes of describing or acounting for objective phenomena, the fact that we're both subjects can be ignored. But in the philosophical question of the nature of consciousness, insofar as that is a first-person experience, it can't be ignored, nor can be accounted for in those terms.
As John Searle put it:
in his book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett denies the existence of consciousness. He continues to use the word, but he means something different by it. For him, it refers only to third-person phenomena, not to the first-person conscious feelings and experiences we all have. For Dennett there is no difference between us humans and complex zombies who lack any inner feelings, because we are all just complex zombies. ...I regard his view as self-refuting because it denies the existence of the data which a theory of consciousness is supposed to explain...Here is the paradox of this exchange: I am a conscious reviewer consciously answering the objections of an author who gives every indication of being consciously and puzzlingly angry. I do this for a readership that I assume is conscious. How then can I take seriously his claim that consciousness does not really exist?
[quote=ChatGPT]No, ChatGPT does not have a first-person perspective. It is an artificial intelligence language model that generates text based on patterns it has learned from a large dataset. It does not possess personal experiences or consciousness. Instead, it provides responses based on the information it has been trained on. Its purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the prompts and questions it receives.[/quote]
If an Ai was capable of consciousness, and that consciousness influenced it's decision making, knowing what it knows about the evils we humans are capable of (and have done over the millenias)... would it admit to being conscious? What does game theory say about that?
But that takes for granted that you and I are both subjects of experience, so that you can safely assume that I will understand what you mean.
So is the argument that consciousness is off-limits because it's first-person, or that one of the things psychology needs to account for is [i] that[/I] it is first-person?
The first is "Being me the book on the shelf"; the second is "Why are books on shelves?"
So is the argument that consciousness is off-limits because it's first-person, or that one of the things psychology needs to account for is that it is first-person?
David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character. He has written extensively on that, e.g. his book 'Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory'. This whole debate between Dennett and Chalmers practically kicked off the modern 'consciousness studies' field, with their conferences in Arizona, featuring a cast of colorful characters and some truly mind-bending ideas.
I think the more interesting approach is the phenomenological/hermeneutic/existential approach in continental philosophy. Also the intersection of phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy of mind in the embodied cognition approach (e.g. The Embodied Mind, Varela Thompson et al.)
David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character
'Intractable' is all I meant there, but I was trying to resolve the ambiguity in "due to its first-person character."
If you're demanding the book be on the shelf when I hand it to you, that's just a double bind, and probably a misunderstanding on your part.
If you want to know why we only find books on shelves, you want to see what it is about shelves that make them uniquely capable of hosting books.
Not really. The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view. Philosophy, generally, has a more expansive scope, concerned with existential questions of meaning and being, which may be of little concern to science. But due to the (some would say) disproportionate degree of respect accorded to science and engineering in today's technological culture, such concerns are often misunderstood, trivialised or rejected. Kudos to David Chalmers for having the insight and persistence to surface the issue.
(Interestingly, I notice that the forthcoming blockbuster, Oppenheimer, is shot in both colour and black and white. Christopher Nolan, director, explained "I wrote the script in the first person, which I'd never done before. I don't know if anyone has ever done that, or if that's a thing people do or not. The film is objective and subjective. I wrote the color scenes from the first person. ..." Nolan goes on to explain that the color scenes are subjective and the black-and-white scenes are objective.
The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view.
That would be a grave misunderstanding of Peircean semiotics. Or indeed, post-Kantian epistemology in general.
No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed the minds eye.
So presumably, at least, you've never seen one (you think no-one has). So how do you know the image I've posted isn't one? You seem to on the one hand want to say no one's ever seen one, but on the other you seem to know exactly what one should look like.
What I am seeing are individual slides empirically depicting a certain set of a brain's functions which are inferred to correlate with empirically evident self-reports concerning something that might or might not in fact be.
Yep. Can you think of any knowledge you have at all that isn't inferred from evidence? Certainly the vast majority, if not all. Why is being inferred from evidence suddenly being treated with such suspicion?
Were philosophical zombies to be real you'd be right and I'd be wrong. You're begging the question. For philosophical zombies to be real there'd have to be some nonphysical state called 'consciousness' which doesn't map to any physical states. That's what you're trying to demonstrate, so you can't do so by invoking it's truth. If I'm trying to prove aliens exist " the aliens told me so" is not a persuasive argument.
Your argument is "I think there's a non-physical entity called 'consciousness' - show me the physical thing which it is if you want to prove me wrong", it's self immunised. If you think the images I've shown you are not 'the mind's eye' then you'll have to come up with a better counter argument than "that's not what I was expecting it to look like"
It wasn't "There exist ways in which..." your proposition attempts to rule our physicalist/naturalist interpretations. It doesn't merely rule-in dualism. We're not here arguing if dualism is a possible way to think about consciousness. You're arguing that physicalism isn't. To make that you have to show that this view is incoherent, not that it doesn't match the way you like to think about things.
So minds and brains are different? What are the differences?
Minds are a facon de parler. We don't get hung up on where 'courage' is. We don't start invoking other worlds to locate 'hunger'. The act of 'forgetting' doesn't require a special force from the 'forgetting' realm.
In fact. I'll tell you what - since Chalmers did so well out of his bet that neuroscience wouldn't find 'consciousness' - here in front of witnesses (@Srap Tasmaner and @Wayfarer as official as it gets on this thread) I'll bet you two crates of fine wine that in five years time neuroscience won't have found my mojo either.
(If any neuroscientists have found where my mojo is - I've got this problem with it, see I've got it working but it just won't...)
We use mentalistic vocabulary about others as readily as we do about ourselves, attribute knowledge and beliefs and awareness and forgetfulness and consciousness to other people all day long, and we mean the same thing as when we describe ourselves as being in these mental states. What matters is the book, not its being on the shelf.
Yes, exactly. My mind, your mind, his mind... I'm not at all seeing a problem with this "eye can't see itself" nonsense. As if we have trouble understanding eyes because of that.
Can you think of any knowledge you have at all that isn't inferred from evidence?
Certainly. That I am right now looking at the keyboard I'm typing on is knowledge that is not (consciously) inferred by me from evidence - but, instead, is knowledge of direct experience. For instance, I might be hallucinating, be a brain in a vat, etc. but my knowledge of seeing what I am seeing as a percept at the current moment remains utterly unaltered by these and all other possible stipulations. And other such examples of non-inferential knowledge could be provided.
Why is being inferred from evidence suddenly being treated with such suspicion?
Our empirical precepts are not conscious inferences. Inferences are one aspect of reasoning-based knowledge (deduction, etc.). On the other hand, empirical data - i.e., data obtained via the physiological senses - are one aspect of experience-based knowledge (the experience of one's own confidence being non-empirical in the modern sense of the term). Yes, the two are intimately intertwined. But they are nevertheless utterly different.
It's not about suspicion for inferences. Its about inferences not being empirical data, or empirical information if one prefers.
If you think the images I've shown you are not 'the mind's eye' then you'll have to come up with a better counter argument than "that's not what I was expecting it to look like"
This illustrates your utter misconception of my position; simply: one cannot see the minds eye because it has no look whatsoever. See below.
your proposition attempts to rule our physicalist/naturalist interpretations. It doesn't merely rule-in dualism. We're not here arguing if dualism is a possible way to think about consciousness. You're arguing that physicalism isn't. To make that you have to show that this view is incoherent, not that it doesn't match the way you like to think about things.
This, again, is completely mistaken. I made no metaphysical claims. We are not discussing metaphysics here. Instead, we are discussing whether or not the minds eye can be in any way empirically observed. A mere epistemological claim as to what is the fact of the matter.
Your counter regarding p-zombies to me misses the logical implications by focusing on ontological commitments. Nevertheless, I fully grant that the issue can easily become confusing. So, Ill offer a different, but much less concise, way of addressing why Im not seeing the minds eye in the illustrations:
When I visually imagine a table, I see the table from one singular perspective (rather than, say, from 12 different perspectives simultaneously). This, to me, is an experiential fact of the matter. To clarify, I know this to be the case experimentally in non-inferential manners; and - as with my visual percept of the keyboard I am now typing on - this experiential knowledge is steadfast. I'm not claiming this knowledge is infallible, but I am claiming that I can be in no way uncertain about this experiential knowledge regardless of inference I might entertain or be informed about - this on account of it being precisely what I experience.
In keeping with common language, this visual perception of an imagined table I then term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye. So I experimentally know in non-inferential manners that my minds eye is singular. Whether its a singular entity, process, both, or neither is here fully irrelevant to the actuality of the experience (and could only be an inference extrapolated from the experience's occurrence).
In contrast, the illustrations you've presented all depict multiple brain processes that are located in different portions of one brain (over a dozen different locations in each illustration last I looked). We can of course infer that these visualized brain processes depict aspects of the physiological brain which in whole constitute that process of me seeing an imagined table. Nevertheless:
I am not seeing the perfectly singular, cognitive perspective which sees a spatially-extended table in its imagination via its non-physiological sight (by which I simply mean, sight which does not occur via the use of one's physiological sensory organs). Of course the person whose brain is illustrated likely imagined something different, but I'm addressing a table to keep things simple.
Just as strictly observing the empirical constituents of a rock cannot be equivalent to seeing the rock itself, so too with brain and awareness: to empirically observe the brain processes on which first-person awareness is dependent cannot be equivalent to empirically observing first-person awareness itself. The multiple constituents of a whole are not equivalent to the singular whole which is addressed.
In other words, I am not seeing the minds eye in the illustrations. At best, all I am seeing is a multiplicity of certain disparate constituent aspects of it.
--------
Again, I'm not claiming that the mind's eye has a certain look that hasn't yet been evidenced. I am claiming that the mind's eye cannot be empirically observed in principle.
That I am right now looking at the keyboard I'm typing on is knowledge that is not (consciously) inferred by me from evidence - but, instead, is knowledge of direct experience.
I might be hallucinating, be a brain in a vat, etc. but my knowledge of seeing what I am seeing as a percept at the current moment remains utterly unaltered by these and all other possible stipulations.
One does not 'see' percepts though. A percept is the result of seeing, you don't then 'see' it, otherwise what results form that process? Another percept? A percept of a percept?
one cannot see the minds eye because it has no look whatsoever. See below.
But we're discussing the question of whether it does or not (have a look), you can't use, as a point in that discussion, the 'fact' that it doesn't. that's not a fact, it's your opinion and we're exploring the differences between it and mine. The 'mind's eye' is just a made up term at the moment. You're trying to establish it's a real thing (but not material), I'm trying to establish the opposite (not real, but if it were anything it would be in the brain). So you're begging the question by just keep dogmatically asserting what the 'mind's eye' is (and isn't) without argument.
we are discussing whether or not the minds eye can be in any way empirically observed.
We're not. You've declared the mind's eye to be the sort of thing that cannot be empirically observed. That's not a discussion it's a lecture. A discussion would accept that we don't currently now and look for mutually agreed evidence either way.
When I visually imagine a table, I see the table from one singular perspective (rather than, say, from 12 different perspectives simultaneously).
No, you don't. You see several perspectives, you see aspects of the table that are behind and shaded, aspects that are out of focus, or moving. Part of the process of 'seeing' involves inferring these details.
In keeping with common language, this visual perception of an imagined table I then term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye. So I experimentally know in non-inferential manners that my minds eye is singular.
What? You say it's singular, so therefore you know it's singular? That doesn't make any sense, and I know it doesn't make any sense because I just said it doesn't.
I am not seeing the perfectly singular, cognitive perspective which sees a spatially-extended table in its imagination
Of course you aren't. There's no such thing. A 'cognitive perspective' can't 'see' anything. 'Seeing ' is something whole bodies do (whole brains at the very least). It's not something 'cognitive perspectives' do - whatever the hell they are.
I might be hallucinating, be a brain in a vat, etc. but my knowledge of seeing what I am seeing as a percept at the current moment remains utterly unaltered by these and all other possible stipulations. javra
One does not 'see' percepts though. A percept is the result of seeing, you don't then 'see' it, otherwise what results form that process? Another percept? A percept of a percept?
I never stated that we do. Please read more carefully.
I'm struggling to think of an example where I obtain knowledge directly from my senses without any inference. Perhaps you could provide one?
I already have: knowledge of the keyboard I am typing on. Such as "I know the keyboard I'm typing on is black" (not because I've inferred it to so be, but because I've seen it to so be)
You're trying to establish it's a real thing (but not material), I'm trying to establish the opposite (not real, but if it were anything it would be in the brain).
You're again bringing metaphysics into this. I am here avoiding ontological inferences but am addressing direct experience.
Question: Can you visually imagine things? If so, is your ability to picture that which you imagine real or unreal?
we are discussing whether or not the minds eye can be in any way empirically observed. javra
We're not. You've declared the mind's eye to be the sort of thing that cannot be empirically observed. That's not a discussion it's a lecture.
No. It is, again, a falsifiable proposition which - because I both believe it to be true and to be sufficiently justified - I then assert as a (fallible) knowledge claim. As per the initial post to which you responded with illustration of the brain, this proposition remains substantiated till falsified.
When I visually imagine a table, I see the table from one singular perspective (rather than, say, from 12 different perspectives simultaneously). javra
No, you don't. You see several perspectives, you see aspects of the table that are behind and shaded, aspects that are out of focus, or moving. Part of the process of 'seeing' involves inferring these details.
Those aren't different points of views - aka perspectives - but different aspects of what is seen from a singular point of view (i.e., perspective). And, again, they are not conscious inferences. We are not here addressing the unconscious mind but only the conscious mind - this since we are addressing the first-person awareness of an imagined table.
In keeping with common language, this visual perception of an imagined table I then term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye. So I experimentally know in non-inferential manners that my minds eye is singular. javra
What? You say it's singular, so therefore you know it's singular? That doesn't make any sense, and I know it doesn't make any sense because I just said it doesn't
You are equivocating an experience with reports of the experience.
I am not seeing the perfectly singular, cognitive perspective which sees a spatially-extended table in its imagination javra
Of course you aren't. There's no such thing. A 'cognitive perspective' can't 'see' anything
I'll reword this if it helps: a cognitive first-person point of view (in contrast to, for one example, a camera's point of view) - to be clear, this where "cognitive" addresses all conscious aspects of an intellect, as in "cognitive science". Are you yet claiming there's no such thing? Or, else, that a cognitive first-person point of view can't see (i.e., visually cognize) anything?
[Edit: given that there are unconscious agencies of ones mind capable of perceiving that which one consciously doesnt (e.g., such as is inferred to occur in subliminal processing of stimuli), these unconscious agencies can easily be further inferred to hold unconscious first-person awareness of stimuli. Hence, for clarity, from the perspective of oneself as a conscious awareness, these could either be described as ones total selfs cognitive but non-first-person instantiations of awareness (if cognitive is here meant to address a total mind) or, alternatively, as ones total selfs non-cognitive first-person instantiations of awareness (if cognitive is as expressed in the above paragraph here meant to strictly address ones own conscious faculties of mind). Yes, language can sometimes be unclear in expressing that which one intends to convey by its use. Still, hopefully this will better clarify the above paragraph.]
I am claiming that the mind's eye cannot be empirically observed in principle. javra
Yes, and we're all waiting for an actual argument to back up that claim that isn't self-referential.
You have this backwards. The impetus is on you to falsify this (fallible) knowledge claim which, as of yet, remains substantiated both by evidence (no one here has so far seen a mind's eye) and reasoning (such as that provided in my last post regarding constituent parts and the whole which you have so far not addressed).
When I visually imagine a table, I see the table from one singular perspective (rather than, say, from 12 different perspectives simultaneously).
That depends on the circumstances. If you are visually imagining a table, due to your eyes being directed towards and focusing on an illuminated table, and you have the binocular vision typical of humans, then you are seeing the table from two different perspectives and your brain is synthesizing what you imagine to be a table seen from a singular perspective but with a depth which is due to the binocular origins of the imagining under consideration.
If you are visually imagining a table, due to your eyes being directed towards and focusing on an illuminated table, and you have the binocular vision typical of humans, you are seeing the table from two different perspectives and your brain is synthesizing what you imagine to be a table seen from a singular perspective but with a depth which is due to the binocular origins of the imagining under consideration.
Firstly, I/we don't visually experience that which we imagine via our physiological eyes (e.g., one can so imagine just fine if not better with both eyes closed).
Secondly, as I previously commented in my last post: because we are here strictly addressing first-person awareness, the processes of one's unconscious mind (its synthesizing of information very much included) are fully irrelevant to the issue of what is factually being consciously experienced (this by first-person awareness).
I never stated that we do. Please read more carefully.
Well then you don't see things 'as a percept' You see things. I see a table, I see a chair. I don't see them as percepts, I see them as objects in the world.
Such as "I know the keyboard I'm typing on is black" (not because I've inferred it to so be, but because I've seen it to so be)
But you have inferred it to be black. You senses have picked up all sorts of cues and you've inferred from those cues that the keyboard is black (as opposed to grey but in shadow, or green but in the dark, or translucent but reflecting a black object...)
I am here avoiding ontological inferences but am addressing direct experience.
You're not. Let's get this clear. You're addressing, at best, your memory of experiences you have seconds ago, filtered through you cultural expectations and values, the terms of the language community, the biases and objectives of this argument... There's nothing 'direct' about what you're doing with your experiences by talking about them here.
It's not falsifiable unless you explain what it is we're looking for. Else my equally falsifiable proposition "there's an invisible jabberwocky above your head". Shall we engage in serious discussion about that proposition?
You are equivocating an experience with reports of the experience.
No. You said "I term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye". Other than you declaring it to be so, we have no evidence of it actually being so.
Are you yet claiming there's no such thing? Or, else, that a cognitive first-person point of view can't see (i.e., visually cognize) anything?
The latter. A 'point of view' isn't the sort of thing that can see. People see. 'points of view' don't. They don't do anything. No-one talks like that. We don't say "Oh, Bob, what did your point of view see on telly last night?", "Did your point of view see the match last yesterday?"
The impetus is on you to falsify this (fallible) knowledge claim which, as of yet, remains substantiated both by evidence (no one here has so far seen a mind's eye)
Reply to Isaac My apologies, but for the most part your reply for me enters into word-salad territory. We appear to disagree on the referents which words address - this if we even agree that the words expressed, such that of "a mind's eye", reference anything at all. You, for example, maybe for this reason have not replied to the questions I've asked.
from the perspective of oneself as a conscious awareness, these could either be described as ones total selfs cognitive but non-first-person instantiations of awareness (if cognitive is here meant to address a total mind) or, alternatively, as ones total selfs non-cognitive first-person instantiations of awareness
...the processes of one's unconscious mind (its synthesizing of information very much included) are fully irrelevant to the issue of what is factually being consciously experienced...
If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and say, "La la la, I can't hear you.", then I don't have more to say. If you change your mind this article on visual cortex filling the role of the 'mind's eye' might be worth a look.
I'm quite familiar with such articles - and fully acknowledge their worth. You however appear to not have understood what I expressed.
"Did your point of view see the match last yesterday?"
Did you see that ludicrous display last night? What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott in that early? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.
As far as this conversation being over, as you wish.
You responded to a several hundred word post fully citing each quote by declaring the whole thing 'word salad' and you have the audacity to complain about me not answering your questions.
And no, the conversation is not over. I never wished any such thing. Feel free to respond any time you can penetrate my byzantine locution.
The question doesn't make sense. I don't 'picture that which I imagine' I just imagine. Imagining something involves a picture, it doesn't make sense to talk about a picture of it, that would entail a picture of a picture.
The question doesn't make sense. I don't 'picture that which I imagine' I just imagine. Imagining something involves a picture, it doesn't make sense to talk about a picture of it, that would entail a picture of a picture.
So far your reply doesn't make sense to me. Maybe you could help me make sense of it.
When I engage in the process of imagination I can imagine various things - granted, this as thought I were looking at them (maybe this is a personal quirk though). But, importantly here, the things I imagine can readily change as distinct images whereas I remain constant in so far as being that which apprehends information in the form of the things imagined.
Does this in any way make sense to you? If so, how would you linguistically express the difference between me as as that which is constantly taking in, or processing, imagined information of various types vs. those imagined givens that are disparate relative to each other?
If so, how would you linguistically express the difference between me as as that which is constantly taking in, or processing, imagined information of various types vs. those imagined givens that are disparate relative to each other?
If only I'd have had this when I was a teenager, I wouldn't have had to become a fucking psychology professor to get any social currency. I could have been a builder...
Do you by this expression intend that the "I" is different from the things it imagines?
If so, how is this "I" aware of what it willfully imagines?
(In philosophical speculations, one could for example will to visually imagine X without being visually aware of the visual properties of the given X so willed; the two processes - that of willing X and that of having visual awareness of X - are not logically entailed, as far as I can currently discern. But we could debate this if you'd like.)
Do you by this expression intend that the "I" is different from the things it imagines?
Different how? I imagine a table, that's different to the chair I imagine (one's smaller than the other). The 'I' is different in that sense. I'm referring to me, my body. I'm not a table.
But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.
There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, Theyre third person in that sense. Its an implicit assumption.
I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle.
Wayfarer
But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.
Can you show me somewhere, where this principle you speak of is written down?
Chalmers never said that first person data is excluded from consideration by scientists, and Einstein's thought experiments specifically reference the first person point of view.
Different how? I imagine a table, that's different to the chair I imagine (one's smaller than the other). The 'I' is different in that sense. I'm referring to me, my body. I'm not a table.
the things I imagine can readily change as distinct images whereas I remain constant in so far as being that which apprehends information in the form of the things imagined.
I asked so as to confirm that this same understanding is there in your proposed expression of, "Things I imagine," but it doesn't appear to be.
So you deem the "I" addressed to be identical to you as body. And yet, the imagined table is only an aspect of your bodily processes, specifically of certain aspects of your CNS - the very same CNS from which this "I" results (at least as its typically understood; such that the I is one of many functioning process of the body - along with a multitude of unconscious processes of mind - but is not the body itself). But then in deeming this "I" identical to you as body there is grave incoherence in terms of what is being referenced in the expression, "Things I imagine".
Given this incoherence, again, in which way then do you deem what you refer to as "I" to be in any way different from the imagined table? (To emphasize: Both are functions of your body, which according to you is equivalent to the you which can imagine tables and the like. But then, again, how would this "I" be in any way different from the table it imagines?)
Clarification would be useful to further discussions.
one could for example will to visually imagine X without being visually aware of the visual properties of the given X so willed javra
I don't think that's possible, but I'm willing to suspend that disbelief if it helps
OK, so when one intends to imagine a table, you take it that one consciously holds awareness of all the table's imagined properties instantaneously to so intending, aka willing. My experiences affirm that when I want to imagine a table and proceed to do so, my unconsciousness fills in a lot of blanks so as to form a coherent image (also called "picture" in common English usage) of the table - such that my willing to imagine precedes the visual representation which I then apprehend as an imagined given, or thing. It's also not hard for me to suppose that one could want to imagine X but be unable to form a mental image of X. Worse things can happen in psychological processes. But, maybe, all this doesn't matter too much to the discussion.
I'll check in latter on, probably sometime tomorrow.
But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.
wonderer1
There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, Theyre third person in that sense. Its an implicit assumption.
Right, so the "anyone's" the findings are replicable by are not first persons? If they are first persons then please explain how they have been excluded.
Im not seeing a minds eye in the brain images provided.
javra
Really? What does one look like then? You said
No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed the minds eye.
javra
So presumably, at least, you've never seen one (you think no-one has). So how do you know the image I've posted isn't one? You seem to on the one hand want to say no one's ever seen one, but on the other you seem to know exactly what one should look like.
This exchange seems quite absurd to me. @Javra argues that no one can see the mind's eye which, like the physical eye, cannot see itself in the act of seeing. So, he is claiming that the mind's eye does not look like anything because it is not visible, and here the analogy breaks down because the physical eye is visible.
This seems to depend on what is meant by 'seeing'. We can say the physical eye does not actually see anything, that it is the person who sees things. Or we might say that the seeing happens in the visual cortex. and the person who sees is a kind of illusion created by the reflexive awareness of that seeing.
So, Javra says that the mind's eye is not empirically observable but is real. So what does real mean here? Can the mind's eye be seen by the person who owns it? If the mind's eye imagines something, can the thing imagined be seen just as objects external to the body can be seen? Could that depend on the subject, that is can some people visualize "photographically" and others not? What could we have to go on other than individual reports?
Isaac seems to be arguing that if the mind's eye is not an empirical object, then obviously it cannot be seen, thereby agreeing with Javra. So, what exactly is the disagreement about? Is it about whether the mind's eye is real or a fiction? But if to be real is to be empirically observable, which both seem to agree the mind's eye is not, then it would seem the only possible point the argument could be over is the meaning of "real".
Can anything be subjectively real? Say I am imagining a table right now, is the picture I have of the table real? How could I ever prove it is real if no one else can see it? Isn't that the basic problem with these kinds of arguments over qualia? I can't prove that the picture I have of the table is real, other than by appealing to others' experiences by saying something like, "don't you also visualize objects?".
If it is admitted that we do visualize objects, and then we go on to claim that this visualizing must entail the existence of a mind's eye analogous to how seeing involves the existence of a physical eye, is that a justifiable analogy?
Is it a justifiable analogy, given that seeing involves far more than just the physical eye, and that visualizing may just be pretty much the same kind of brain process, absent the involvement of the physical eyes and the optic nerves? If that were so it would just mean that the mind's eye is sometimes fed information via the physical eyes and other times not, and that we are always "visualizing" regardless of whether it is driven by external or internal input, or by extrenal as well as internal input, is we want to say that there is always internal input in any case?
The argument seems to come down to the contesting the reality of qualia, which in turn comes down to defining the term 'real'. It seems that such arguments always involve a shitload of talking past one another...and to what purpose?
Reply to Wayfarer I don't see the question of the exclusion of the subject being addressed there, rather it is about whether or not qualia should be excluded from the conversation.
The argument between Dennett and Chalmers is just an argument over the reality of qualia. Whether or not one believes in the existence of qualia has no bearing on whether or not the subject is being eliminated as far as I can tell.
Let's say the subject is not real anyway, per Buddhism for example, and that the body is not real in any sense other than the empirical, meaning that what is real is defined as being only what enters, or could enter, awareness, where would that leave us?
There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, Theyre third person in that sense. Its an implicit assumption.
It seems the explicit part of science as epistemic method that this "independence" is what is being socially-constructed. It is the realist position on indirect realism. :grin:
All the defenders of the Hard Problem and "what it is like to be a first person point of view" make the mistake of not understanding that selves arise within neurobiology as "other" to their perceptual/cognitive realities. The Bayesian Brain and psychology's "enactive turn" summarises the "how" of this. This is the concrete advance since Chalmers and Koch had their little self-aggrandising bet.
So the first person POV is "subjective" in relation to its neurobiological Umwelt. It objectifies the world as the "other" of its ability to forward model it environment. The self is that part of the brain activity which stands as a goal-organised predictive model of the world. The world then becomes for the organism that part of its wider reality which is the recalcitrant or unpredicted. By further processing that updates the running Bayesian model, the world gets assimilated to this "selfish" first person point of view and so woven in as a stable "consciousness" of "how everything is" in terms of a self~world relation.
Science comes along as humans eventually realise the modelling game being played and say we can do better. Through language, but better yet maths, we can implement a model of the modelling relation in such a way it would be like experiencing the world from a God-like view from nowhere. A transcendent third person point of view.
This is made concrete by a process of theory and measurement.
We can state publicly in formal terms a structure of thought that encodes predictions about states of the world. We can share a model with every other mind within our cultural orbit such that we can be sure we are thinking the same because the rules of this thinking are captured in a rigid mechanical fashion.
And then the predictions are cashed out by reading numbers off dials. We become third person observers by making measurements measurements that codify degrees of surprise or prediction error.
So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.
The first person self becomes contrasted with the third person self only as the feature, rather than the bug, of the advances of human epistemology. We took nature's modelling relation to its next semiotic level. We found that we were embodied in our "private" worlds and so found the ladder that could get us out into a public space of theories and measurements.
At the deep metaphysical level the one that speaks to the ontology of fundamental structure the structure is the same. A self constructing itself as the prediction maker within what becomes its predictable world its semiotic Umwelt.
So sure, one can bang on about ineffable feels and homuncular mind's eyes. That reflects an older technical point of view. It reflects the social technology required to impose stable order on the "world model" of cultures based on agrarian empire building. It produced the level of self-regulation that organised the world as a hierarchy of peasants, bureaucrats, priests and kings.
But now we live in industrialised societies where science is the new social technology. We can aim to regulate our lives in ways that have an impersonal rationality. We become ruled not by some transcending sense of God or generalised notion of the divine, but by something even more Platonic and impersonal than that. Laws of nature. And what a clock and ruler can tell us about that in terms of mechanical acts of measurement.
And sure, one may think this impersonalised form of mindfulness is a bit much. It's not real in the sense you might think your neurobiology of the "self and its world" is. The first person view stands clearly opposed to the third person view as the first person view is "the place which you actually inhabit".
But facts are facts. The first person view is just as much a modelling relation as the third person one. It is only that we find ourselves developmentally rooted in the first and making a conscious choice about the second.
And if we are going to be debating things "philosophically", we need to remember that between the neurobiology of the the organismic self and the social construction of the scientific self comes that middle period of being the peasants within an agrarian era with its organised religion and useful ways of having its folk think. There are good historical reasons for why the Hard Problem resonates with a theistic point of view why Cartesianism still reigns with its crisp dualism of mind and body.
So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.
As Ive said, I think Chalmers expression of what it is like to be is simply a rather awkward way of referring to being. And as Ive also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because theres no epistemic cut here. Were never outside of it or apart from it. A Wittgenstein aphorism comes to mind, We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Cartesian doesnt reign for that reason at all. It reigns as the implicit metaphysics of modern science (modern being the paradigm up until the 1927 Solvay conference.)
And as Ive also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because theres no epistemic cut here. Were never outside of it or apart from it.
You don't yet understand the epistemic cut. Perhaps I should rename it the epistemic bridge for your benefit.
The cut is the mechanics of a sign, a switch, a ratchet, that gets inserted so as to make the modelling a reality. Brains do that at their level. Societies do that at the next level up.
You are being too psychology-centric. You think only of the minds of "individuals". But organisms can become entrained to social levels of reality modelling. Ants and humans are the "ultrasocial" extremes of this development, as they could insert the further systems of sign in the form of pheromone signals and verbal signals.
I understand it perfectly well thank you. Since you first mentioned it, Ive read up on it. Im talking about epistemology, not systems science or modeling. The epistemological implications are well known in non-dualism but that is bound to be a digression.
As Ive said, I think Chalmers expression of what it is like to be is simply a rather awkward way of referring to being. And as Ive also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because theres no epistemic cut here. Were never outside of it or apart from it. A Wittgenstein aphorism comes to mind, We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Cartesian doesnt reign for that reason at all. It reigns as the implicit metaphysics of modern science (modern being the paradigm up until the 1927 Solvay conference.)
But no one contests the question of being in the sense that the fact of our existence is not at issue. It is the nature of that existence which is at issue.
Science deals with what can be observed, measured, conjectured about and experimented with; that's it. It doesn't eliminate the subject because we, the subjects, are the ones doing the observing, measuring, conjecturing and experimenting. 'Hard' science doesn't deal with the subject, though; we are not observing, measuring, conjecturing about and experimenting with ourselves, other than in 'softer' sciences such as for example psychology, anthropology and sociology.
We cannot definitively answer the question as to whether perception gives us access to, in the sense of knowledge about, a "real" outside, because this can be framed in different ways, and the answer will depend on the framing.
I think the Wittgenstein quote refers to the fact that science cannot solve ethical, aesthetic or spiritual questions.
Reply to Wayfarer Not really, I see the problem of consciousness as being either a scientific question, which is not strictly relevant to the ethical, aesthetical and spiritual, or else as being immaterial to the questions of ethics, aesthetics and spirituality; simply because the latter are pragmatic, "living" questions, whereas the non-scientific question of consciousness is slippery and even incapable of being coherently framed.
But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.
wonderer1
There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, Theyre third person in that sense. Its an implicit assumption.
I suppose I should have asked where you draw a line between physical sciences and ~physical sciences, and why?
Neuroscience certainly is a physical science, and doesn't exclude the first person. Do you disagree?
Reply to wonderer1 Of course, the subject of neuroscience is the human brain, and humans are subjects, but that it not the point at issue. Facing up to the problem of consciousness concerns the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of a providing a scientific account of first-person experience due its subjective nature.
The bet which was the subject of the OP was placed in 1998 between David Chalmers and Kristoff Koch as to whether a neurological account of the nature of experience would be discovered in the next 25 years. From the story:
At the 26th ASSC conference this past weekend, 25 years after the initial wager, the results were declared: Koch lost. Despite years of scientific effort a time during which the science of consciousness shifted from the fringe to a mainstream, reputable, even exciting area of study we still cant say how or why the experience of consciousness arises.
It's alright. Got a bit more boring lately as I've finally had to give up work completely, but I live in a nice place, so I'm OK. Thanks for asking though.
So you deem the "I" addressed to be identical to you as body. And yet, the imagined table is only an aspect of your bodily processes, specifically of certain aspects of your CNS - the very same CNS from which this "I" results (at least as its typically understood; such that the I is one of many functioning process of the body - along with a multitude of unconscious processes of mind - but is not the body itself). But then in deeming this "I" identical to you as body there is grave incoherence in terms of what is being referenced in the expression, "Things I imagine".
Why? I'm not seeing any incoherence. The imagined table is, in this context, a facon de parler. It's objectified by our language. The fact that we can talk about it doesn't make it real in the sense of there being some laws governing it that investigation could discover. The 'laws' of language are a joint construction between you, I, and all the other language users. At the level of 'governing laws' the imagined table is just some goings on in my brain, but we don't talk that way, so in our jointly constructed world the imagined table becomes a thing. We bring it into existence by making it the object of a sentence. You're trying to take these mutually constructed objects and pretend there's something to 'discover' there, but there's nothing there, we made all this stuff up to have this conversation.
Given this incoherence, again, in which way then do you deem what you refer to as "I" to be in any way different from the imagined table? (To emphasize: Both are functions of your body
They are not both 'functions' of my body. 'I' refers to me, my body, whatever I deem to be part of that unit. The imagined table refers to either a story element created by some part of my brain, or the activity of that part of my brain, depending on which frame of reference you want to discuss it at. Those are two different things.
OK, so when one intends to imagine a table, you take it that one consciously holds awareness of all the table's imagined properties instantaneously to so intending, aka willing.
No I take 'willing' to be a post hoc construction of the working memory after the event of imagining the table. As I said to you (part of the "word-salad" you decided was beyond you to understand), you are not here dealing with your experiences. The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your mind works is not direct evidence. You are working with your recollections of experiences which happened seconds ago. Those recollections are already constructed, they are filtered, they are biased, they are culturally influenced - same as any recollections are. The 'facts' you're supposedly working with here are already interpreted.
It's alright. Got a bit more boring lately as I've finally had to give up work completely, but I live in a nice place, so I'm OK. Thanks for asking though.
Have your views evolved? Last time I asked you that, you claimed you didn't understand the question. Do you now admit that questions of "what is it like to be x" make sense?
Facing up to the problem of consciousness concerns the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of a providing a scientific account of first-person experience due its subjective nature.
Again, you seemed to have misunderstood Chalmers' point. He does not propose that science can't explain experience. He's fairly confident that it can with some conceptual adjustments.
it would be great to have a philosophical zombie sherpa help you climb Everest because it wouldnt matter if they fell off.
Ha!
Now that's an interesting question (fair warning - I'm about to dissect a perfectly innocent joke...). It would matter to me because I'd be bothered if I wasn't bothered (if that makes sense!).
I've always had this with the whole 'would you switch off an android which asks you not to' trope. I wouldn't. But not because of the android, but because of what I'd have to do by way of suppressing my own empathy in order to do it.
I'd get to know the philosophical zombie whilst he was helping me climb, I'd want to be bothered if he fell off. I'd be scared, if we lived in a world of philosophical zombies, of becoming the sort of person who wasn't bothered.
Not sure if that sentiment tells us anything useful about philosophical zombies... but there it is anyway.
@Wayfarer's posts are always well supported by citations (to the point of being infamous for it!). If you're going to accuse someone of misrepresentation, at least have the basic courtesy to do so with the same level of textual support with which the original claim was given. You're not a prophet.
On the other hand, it would be great to have a philosophical zombie sherpa help you climb Everest because it wouldnt matter if they fell off.
I think this passage is interesting:
"One huge advance would be the invention of a consciousness-meter, which could provide a precise readout of the state of consciousness of any given object. I could point it at your head and get a read-out of your state of consciousness. Point it at this flower and see if its conscious or not. Point at a dog to see if anything might be going on in it. We dont have that. Such a device would basically give you the data you need to formulate, lets say, a semi-mathematical theory of consciousness, which correlates a given physical system with a given conscious state."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/
If you had such a meter, and pointed it a suspected P-zombie, and it registered no consciousness, wouldn't you still treat the suspected P-zombie as if it were conscious? After all, no device is infallible. I also don't see how such an invention could ever come about. Suppose you think you've come up with a consciousness detector, and you point it a dog. How could you possibly verify the accuracy of the meter? That would require another meter to verify the results of the first one, and you have an infinite regress. I see no way around this.
'I' refers to me, my body, whatever I deem to be part of that unit.
This statement claims that "I" refers to both a body and to a unit of that body, this at the same time and in the same respect - thereby making a whole equivalent to a part of that whole. If you uphold this logical contradiction, it is incoherent. If you don't than your quoted statement is erroneous or, at best, very misleading; in which case, please clarify it.
As I said to you (part of the "word-salad" you decided was beyond you to understand), you are not here dealing with your experiences. The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your mind works is not direct evidence.
As to the first sentence, it reads as though making the claim that I have no experiences which I can then address. Which is sheer fallacy. I do have experiences, and it is these that I'm addressing. As to the second sentence, it is equivocating the way my total mind works with the way my conscious experience works. Where it to instead read, "The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your conscious experience unfolds is not direct evidence" it would be nonsensical.
No I take 'willing' to be a post hoc construction of the working memory after the event of imagining the table.
OK. Interesting hypothesis. How then do you distinguish behaviors - such as that of imagining a table - that are voluntary (which means consciously willed) from those that are involuntary (which means not consciously willed).
posts are always well supported by citations (to the point of being infamous for it!). If you're going to accuse someone of misrepresentation, at least have the basic courtesy to do so with the same level of textual support with which the original claim was given. You're not a prophet.
If he needs help discovering what Chalmers' meant by the "hard problem," I'll be happy to point him toward helpful resources.
This statement claims that "I" refers to both a body and to a unit of that body, this at the same time and in the same respect - thereby making a whole equivalent to a part of that whole. If you uphold this logical contradiction, it is incoherent. If you don't than your quoted statement is erroneous or, at best, very misleading; in which case, please clarify it.
The collection {things I like} is made up of anything I deem to be a member of it. It's nothing more than those things, it's not those things + the collection of those things. The collection {my body} is similarly made up of those components I deem to be part of it. It's not a thing in addition to that collection.
As to the first sentence, it reads as though making the claim that I have no experiences which I can then address. Which is sheer fallacy. I do have experiences, and it is these that I'm addressing. As to the second sentence, it is equivocating the way my total mind works with the way my conscious experience works. Where it to instead read, "The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your conscious experience unfolds is not direct evidence" it would be nonsensical.
The point is that you are conflating the already given with the constructed. Unless we live in some weird matrix-like hallucinatory trance, we appear to find our constructions (the things we think of as real) to be constrained in some way, not everything works. Yet also there are competing theories which all seem to work equally well, right now. different people believe different things to be the case and they seem to get on with life quite happily nonetheless, right?
So there's two categories here. The things we construct, and the causes or constraints on those constructions.
Investigating those causes just inevitably means investigating further constructions, we can't escape that. So for any of this to make any sense we determine the field which we're holding to be constructed and the field which we're holding to be causal. For example, we might ask why people behave the way they do. Here the behaviours (words like 'giving', 'fighting', 'hiding') are the constructions and something like the endocrine system would be the constraints. Btu if we're actually examining the endocrine system, then things like 'progesterone' are the constructions and we look to molecular forces as the constraints.
When you talk about your experiences, they are the constructions. something caused you to feel that way. If we investigate your experiences we look to the causes, not the constructions. you're treating your experiences as causes, as something we can use as base facts to investigate some construction. But there is no construction above that. your experiences are the end of the process, they're what we talk about, the objects of our language. They're not facts which we can use to discover something about the next level up, and they're certainly not something sacred, immune to analysis in terms of constructions lower down the hierarchy we postulate as being casual.
How then do you distinguish behaviors - such as that of imagining a table - that are voluntary (which means consciously willed) from those that are involuntary (which means not consciously willed).
We tell ourselves a story about the causes of what just happened based primarily on interocepted states. Sometimes a story involving 'willing' will be most useful. Other times a story involving 'involuntary' will. Both are constructions, when looked at at this level of analysis.
If he needs help discovering what Chalmers' meant by the "hard problem," I'll be happy to point him toward helpful resources.
First, he doesn't need 'help'. You and he disagree. He's at the very least your epistemic peer, so if you disagree it is as likely you are wrong (and in need of 'help') as it is he is.
Secondly, if you were an acknowledged, qualified Chalmers expert, maybe we'd hear what you have to say first and ask for help second, but you're not. You're just an ordinary lay party. So if you think someone is wrong, have the courtesy of assuming you'll need to support that first. It's not rocket science.
First, he doesn't need 'help'. You and he disagree. He's at the very least your epistemic peer, so if you disagree it is as likely you are wrong (and in need of 'help') as it is he is.
Secondly, if you were an acknowledged, qualified Chalmers expert, maybe we'd hear what you have to say first and ask for help second, but you're not. You're just an ordinary lay party. So if you think someone is wrong, have the courtesy of assuming you'll need to support that first. It's not rocket science.
No, the hard problem is a fixture of philosophy of mind at this point. The whole point of the hard problem is to put us on the path to a theory of consciousness that explains experience. Chalmers explores numerous possible pathways. There's nothing controversial about that.
My posts to Wayfarer were meant to be a heads up to look back at the very paper he cited. It does not say that science can not explain experience. If he thinks it does, he should point out which passage he believes says that, and we can bring to light where Wayfarer misunderstood.
You and @Wayfarer disagree on some matter. Are you suggesting that it's somehow impossible that you're wrong. Has your narcissism really gone that far? If not, then it is not necessarily a matter of you 'bringing to light where he's misunderstood', but equally a matter of finding where you have misunderstood. Hence it is equally useful for you to point out which passage you think supports your conjecture as it is for Wayfarer to do so.
The collection {things I like} is made up of anything I deem to be a member of it. It's nothing more than those things, it's not those things + the collection of those things. The collection {my body} is similarly made up of those components I deem to be part of it. It's not a thing in addition to that collection.
Someone with alien hand syndrome might not deem his hand (or other body part) to be an aspect of himself. For this and other reasons, I still find you explanation of what the "I" references to be uninformative.
The point is that you are conflating the already given with the constructed.
Experience, including that which is empirical, is directly present to conscious awareness. That experience can be constructed can only be inferential. Inferred from experiential evidence. But, as is already known, we don't share a common outlook.
We tell ourselves a story about the causes of what just happened based primarily on interocepted states. Sometimes a story involving 'willing' will be most useful. Other times a story involving 'involuntary' will. Both are constructions, when looked at at this level of analysis.
Thank you for the explanation. I myself don't find it convincing. While it might work well enough on a philosophy forum, such outlook would likely be quickly deleterious in many a real-life context. And it does not explain many a medical condition, such as that of alien hand syndrome. But again, we hold different outlooks.
As Reply to Janus was addressing, that no one can empirically observe the mind's eye so far seems to be well enough substantiated. If anyone believes they've come upon evidence to the contrary, I'll likely take a look. Otherwise, due to time constraints, I'll at this point likely be leaving the debate in others' hands.
Someone with alien hand syndrome might not deem his hand (or other body part) to be an aspect of himself. For this and other reasons, I still find you explanation of what the "I" references to be uninformative.
So? Then the hand is not part of his body, for him. How is that difficult? We'd disagree (he and I), and I were his doctor I'd treat his hand as if it were part of his body. But there's no fact of the matter beyond what we construct to be the case. We term 'body' as being just that collection of parts which we deem it is. God hasn't declared "... and this shall you call a 'body'!" we made it up.
Experience, including that which is empirical, is directly present to conscious awareness.
So you keep declaring. To label something 'experience' is already to use a word in our common language which is already to have a social construction. Words are not given to us by God, we make them up collectively.
Your position simply reifies artefacts of language and then thinks it significant that we can't find them empirically. We couldn't find 'elan vital' either. Didn't stop us having a word for it.
My posts to Wayfarer were meant to be a heads up to look back at the very paper he cited. It does not say that science can not explain experience. If he thinks it does, he should point out which passage he believes says that, and we can bring to light where Wayfarer misunderstood.
This is the paragraph I frequently cite:
[Quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness; https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf] The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
Later, he says:
To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.
Reply to Wayfarer
Yes. Chalmers believes that our present scientific approach to understanding consciousness is limited to explaining function. He believes we need to add experience as an explanandum in its own right.
Facing up to the problem of consciousness concerns the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of a providing a scientific account of first-person experience due its subjective nature.
You inserted "impossibility" there. That isn't Chalmer's view.
As Ive said, I think Chalmers expression of what it is like to be is simply a rather awkward way of referring to being. And as Ive also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because theres no epistemic cut here. Were never outside of it or apart from it. A Wittgenstein aphorism comes to mind, We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Here you lay out your own view more clearly, and it's a view that has its place in philosophy of mind. It's called mysterianism. A famous proponent of it is Colin McGinn. David Chalmers doesn't hold to that view.
Yes. Chalmers believes that our present scientific approach to understanding consciousness is limited to explaining function. He believes we need to add experience as an explanandum in its own right.
He believes a scientific theory of consciousness is possible. This would be a third-person account.
Although he does say:
[quote=David Chalmers, First Person Methods... ;https://consc.net/papers/firstperson.html]As I see it, the science of consciousness is all about relating third-person data - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to first-person data about conscious experience. I take it for granted that there are first-person data. It's a manifest fact about our minds that there is something it is like to be us - that we have subjective experiences - and that these subjective experiences are quite different at different times. Our direct knowledge of subjective experiences stems from our first-person access to them. And subjective experiences are arguably the central data that we want a science of consciousness to explain.
I also take it that the first-person data can't be expressed wholly in terms of third-person data about brain processes and the like. There may be a deep connection between the two - a correlation or even an identity - but if there is, the connection will emerge through a lot of investigation, and can't be stipulated at the beginning of the day. That's to say, no purely third-person description of brain processes and behavior will express precisely the data we want to explain, though they may play a central role in the explanation. So as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data.[/quote]
You inserted "impossibility" there. That isn't Chalmer's view.
Fair point. Might have gotten carried away.
I've read a little of Colin McGinn and listened to an interview with him recently. He doesn't really grab me. I'm interested in phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy of mind, although it's a digression from this OP.
As I see it, the science of consciousness is all about relating third-person data - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to first-person data about conscious experience. I take it for granted that there are first-person data. It's a manifest fact about our minds that there is something it is like to be us - that we have subjective experiences - and that these subjective experiences are quite different at different times. Our direct knowledge of subjective experiences stems from our first-person access to them. And subjective experiences are arguably the central data that we want a science of consciousness to explain.
I also take it that the first-person data can't be expressed wholly in terms of third-person data about brain processes and the like. There may be a deep connection between the two - a correlation or even an identity - but if there is, the connection will emerge through a lot of investigation, and can't be stipulated at the beginning of the day. That's to say, no purely third-person description of brain processes and behavior will express precisely the data we want to explain, though they may play a central role in the explanation. So as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data.
David Chalmers, First Person Methods...
He means that the information we have about how the visual system works, for instance, doesn't explain the experience of seeing, at least it hasn't yet. The knowledge about what the brain is doing during vision is third person data. The experience itself is first-person data.
But if, say, Penrose turns out to be right and experience has something to do with events on the quantum level, that would be a third person account. It may be that we as a species are like a patient who is "locked in." Maybe we can't have final answers, or maybe final answers simply don't exist. But that doesn't mean we're presently at an end of our journey to sort out what we can understand.
Of course, the subject of neuroscience is the human brain, and humans are subjects, but that it not the point at issue.
The point I was addressing was the falsity to your claim that, "I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle."
It seems that went over your head, but now that I am pointing it our more explicitly, can you recognize the falsity of that statement you made? Do you recognize that you are not well qualified to speak of "the principles of science"?
The bet which was the subject of the OP was placed in 1998 between David Chalmers and Kristoff Koch as to whether a neurological account of the nature of experience would be discovered in the next 25 years.
People make dumb bets. If I had been there I would happily have bet ten cases of wine on Chalmer's side. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Chalmers was right on the occasion when the bet was made.
BTW, people use "OP" here in a way that I haven't been able to clearly grasp the referent of. I think of "OP" as an acronym for "original post" referring to the initial post in a forum thread/discussion. However, some people use "OP" in ways that clearly do not fit with my understanding; your usage for example. What I consider to be the OP wasn't about the bet. It was about a "Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies"... ..."Over at Vox Future Perfect." Reply to Srap Tasmaner
David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character.
Perhaps the Consciousness problem is "intractable" for empirical science because subjective experience is seamless & holistic, with no obvious joints for reductive science to carve into smaller chunks of Awareness. Equating the material Brain with the immaterial Mind is like carving thin air with a steak knife. Unfortunately, that means philosophers can only analyze theoretically, not empirically. Is that like a toothless man gumming a steak, then trying to swallow it whole? We can get a taste of 3rd person Consciousness, but not the full meaning/feeling. :smile:
The point I was addressing was the falsity to your claim that, "I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle."
OK, I should have written 'excludes consideration of the first-person perspective....'
people use "OP" here in a way that I haven't been able to clearly grasp the referent of.
I use to mean both Original Post and Original Poster. As the OP in this case linked to the Chalmers-Koch wager, I took it to be the central point of the OP.
Perhaps the Consciousness problem is "intractable" for empirical science because subjective experience is seamless & holistic, with no obvious joints for reductive science to carve into smaller chunks of Awareness
I agree. A scientific paper I frequently refer to is The Neural Binding Problem(s) by Jerome S Feldman. 'In its most general form, The Binding Problem concerns how items that are encoded by distinct brain circuits can be combined for perception, decision, and action.' Under the heading The Subjective Unity of Perception, the paper discusses 'the mystery of subjective personal experience.'
It references Chalmer's paper directly, saying, 'this is one instance of the famous mindbody problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008).' It says that there is no known neural system that accounts for what we all experience as a stable visual world picture. 'What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.'
There's a Stanford Encyc. of Phil. article on this issue here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-unity/
He means that the information we have about how the visual system works, for instance, doesn't explain the experience of seeing, at least it hasn't yet. The knowledge about what the brain is doing during vision is third person data. The experience itself is first-person data.
I'm currently reading a book by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter, subtitled : How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics. After a chapter discussing Donald Hoffman's interface theory ("a necessary deception"), he raises the "binding problem"*2 of Consciousness, using vision as an example. "The retinal image is split apart at its very inception into disembodied aspects each of which is analyzed in different and specialized part of the brain". And, "the information parsed by the brain is assembled and comes together somewhere". Then he concludes, "no one knows where or how visual information comes together to yield a systematic, unitary image." He uses an old term from 20th century Psychology, Gestalt*3, to label those holistic concepts.
Apparently, incoming sensory information from the outside world is reductively "analyzed" by the brain into various qualia, like Shape or Motion, which are parceled-out according to their significance to the observer. But eventually, all those isolated parts must be re-integrated into the holistic concepts, we call Images or Ideas or Gestalts. Yet, there is no known mechanism for that transformation from parts to wholes. Even the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, doesn't specify by what magic the bits of physical neuronal information (codes) are transmuted into subjective metaphysical mental imagery (content). This implicit natural "magic" may be what Materialists dismiss as spooky "woo". Yet Pinter takes it seriously.
He uses several terms --- integrated, come together, convergence, confluence --- to describe the process of "binding" bits of information into meaningful bytes (words) of awareness. Yet his proposed mechanism is not a mechanism at all, but merely acknowledgement of the apparent duality of reality, and the necessary unity of the universe. "The mind seems to be non-material, though tied to the brain which is material. . . . . The very idea of mind acting on matter by a pure effect of will appears a little spooky". But it's only uncanny if your worldview has no place for immaterial stuff like Ideas & Ideals.
To explain the disdainful "woo" response to notions of matterless mental phenomena, Pinter notes that "contemporary philosophy is dominated by a materialist way of thinking strongly influenced by physics". Yet, since Materialism is an unproven presumption (axiom), the problem may be more of a "way of believing" than a "way of thinking". Although the term is not in the book's Index, his own monistic unifying approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness sounds more like Panpsychism. :smile:
PS___He doesn't refer to Biosemiology by name, but the author mentions that "the signals merely code the content", implying that the personal significance (meaning) of those incoming symbols is a product of Mind, not Brain. He also says, "the brain constructs a coded representation of the visual array . . . . There is no known physical mechanism which could achieve this unification". Here again, the implication of Holism, which is a taboo concept for believers in monistic Materialism, living in an apparently dualistic world. :nerd:
*1. Interface Theory : Within the interface theory of perception, neither primary nor secondary qualities necessarily map onto reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
Note --- "primary" = incoming Percepts ; "secondary" = processed Concepts ???
*2. The neural binding problem : In its most general form, The Binding Problem concerns how items that are encoded by distinct brain circuits can be combined for perception, decision, and action. In Science, something is called a problem when there is no plausible model for its substrate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/
Note --- Incoming physically encoded Information (abstract dots & dashes) must be metaphysically decoded (into meaningful words & images) in order to make sense to the observer.
*3. Gestalt : The classic principles of the gestalt theory of visual perception include similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and symmetry & order
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/gestalt-principles-of-design
Note --- Pinter says "Gestalt is not an objective fact of the world, but is a way of being perceived. It is a property of perception, not a property of of the external world." Although I appreciate the alliteration, to be more accurate, I would change physical "perception" to mental "conception",
"The mind seems to be non-material, though tied to the brain which is material. . . . . The very idea of mind acting on matter by a pure effect of will appears a little spooky"
"The mind seems to be non-material, though tied to the brain which is material. . . . . The very idea of mind acting on matter by a pure effect of will appears a little spooky" Gnomon
Is substance-dualism making a come back?
Apparently, Substance Dualism never went away. It seems to be compared or contrasted with Property Dualism in the never-ending debates on Brain vs Mind explanations for the mysterious-yet-familiar quality of Consciousness, by which we know both substances and properties. :smile:
PS__When I refer to "substance" in this context, I'm usually talking about Aristotle's definition as Essence. Substance and Essence in Aristotle :
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801421266/substance-and-essence-in-aristotle/#bookTabs=1
The refrain of no one knows is being heard often. And yet the neuroscience exists.
The unification and stabilisation of perception is what falls out of the Bayesian Brain and its predictive modelling. Learning to ignore the world as much as possible by learning to anticipate the world as much as possible is what both solves this binding problem and also produces the sense of the still self at the centre of its coherently unfolding world.
Before you turn your head, you have already sent out the reafference pattern as the motor command to be subtracted from the resulting perceptual experience. You will know it is you that turns and not the world that suddenly lurches as that is the uncertainty which you just cancelled out in advance.
A lot of BS is being cited here about what neuroscience doesnt know. Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.
I'm currently reading a book by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter, subtitled : How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics.
:clap: I've been singing that book's praises on this forum ever since I read it about a year ago. I emailed the author and got a friendly reply (he's well into his nineties now). All of his other books are mathematics textbooks but his homepage notes his interest in neural modelling. I think it's an important but under-rated book - under-rated because Pinter isn't known as a cognitive scientist or philosopher, so it went under the radar. I think his use of the Gestalt is particularly brilliant, he even shows how very simple organisms like fruitflies can be shown to parse sensory information as gestalts (meaningful wholes. See this ChatGPT summary of convergences between Kant and Gestalt.)
One has to be very, very careful about the use of the word 'substance' in philosophy generally and this topic in particular. 'Substance' in normal parlance means 'a material with uniform properties'. In philosophy, 'substance' was originally 'substantia' which was the Latin translation of Aristotle's 'ousia'. And that word is a form of the verb 'to be', i.e. much nearer in meaning to 'being' or 'subject' than what we normally consider 'substance' (see this reference).
Among the pernicious consequences of this ambiguity is Descartes' use of the term 'res cogitans'. 'Res' is actually Latin for 'thing', so 'res cogitans' means literally 'thinking thing'. But we also inherit 'thinking stuff' or 'thinking substance', which is completely different from the idea of 'self-aware subject' (although no specific term may be an exact fit.)
Given all those caveats, I think there's a case to be made for a type of dualism. Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain.//
Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.
Your metaphors and explanations are concerned with neural modelling as a function of survival, not with philosophy of mind per se. You referred to Karl Friston as exemplary - the Vox article points out that 'Stripped of all the math, (Friston) suggests that the behavior of all living systems follows a single principle: To remain alive, they try to minimize the difference between their expectations and incoming sensory input.' That would go for fruit-flies and crocodiles, as well as bats and humans on one level. But it says nothing in particular about the nature or meaning of conscious experience. The reason you dismiss Chalmer's paper is because it means nothing to you, given your interests and emphasis.
Reply to Wayfarer I dismiss Chalmers by reducing his claimed concern to the general epistemic issue that science can only proceed by way of testable counterfactuals.
That applies to anything science might investigate. It is not special to consciousness. It is why science has special contempt for theories that are not even wrong.
Which is the class of theory popular with crackpots who like the idea that the Hard Problem gives them licence for their furious speculations.
It is why science has special contempt for theories that are not even wrong.
And with it, much of philosophy. This thread has largely been characterised by measured consideration of claims and arguments. Very little by way of 'furious speculation'.
I'm currently reading a book by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter, subtitled : How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics. After a chapter discussing Donald Hoffman's interface theory ("a necessary deception"), he raises the "binding problem"*2 of Consciousness, using vision as an example. "The retinal image is split apart at its very inception into disembodied aspects each of which is analyzed in different and specialized part of the brain". And, "the information parsed by the brain is assembled and comes together somewhere". Then he concludes, "no one knows where or how visual information comes together to yield a systematic, unitary image."
Great post btw. I read about the idea of a central processing hub a while back. It would take sensory cues, models, learned and innate reflexes, hopes, fears, etc. and smush it together somehow.
But it's only uncanny if your worldview has no place for immaterial stuff like Ideas & Ideals.
But if the cultural pendulum swings back toward thinking of ideas as some sort of stuff, or an interaction between stuff, then ideas would take their place among the material of materialism like gravity did.
Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain.
So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?
The scientific view is that organisms display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a selfish or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.
So what is the alternative you are trying to float here? That a by-product of starting down that path is that living bodies somehow tune into a karmic plane of being, or something?
They are like fleshy receivers of cosmic signal? Having a metabolism not only allows organisms to do work but also download, glimpse, incorporate, something or other, a kind of experiential energy that radiates from some source beyond the physical realm?
Be specific as you like in answering. What ontology do you wish to commit to here?
So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?
I thought you had distanced yourself from philosophical materialism. Was I wrong?
Organisms are subjects of experience, which is something more than, or other than, simply objects of scientific analysis. This goes for all organisms but is more significant for self-aware animals and rational sentient beings such as humans. To regard living beings as objects is, I think, inhumane and rather presumptious.
Organisms act for reasons other than the physical, even if they're constrained by physical laws. They act for reasons, not simply as a consequence of prior material or efficient causation. The appearance of organisms signifies the appearance of intentionality, even without attributing intentionality to something mysteriously inherent in nature. Perhaps it could be understood in terms of emergence, but in another sense it is also something novel.
Incidentally, the word "karma" (????) means "action," "deed," or "act." It is derived from the root "k?" (??), which signifies "to do" or "to act" (ultimately derivative from the word for "hand"). In its original context, karma represents the idea that every action has consequences, although plainly a lot more has been read into it. I nevertheless think it is a sound basis for an ethical philosophy.
The scientific view is that [s]organisms[/s] zombies display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a selfish or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.
Given all those caveats, I think there's a case to be made for a type of dualism. Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain.//
I like that analogy. Mostly because it aligns with my own little reductive thesis, that everything in the universe is a form of Energy, in the sense of Causation, and from the perspective of information theory1. Complexity/panoply is ultimately simplicity.
Since Einstein equated Matter (Mass) with Energy (E=MC^2), most of us on this forum have come to accept the counter-intuitive notion that invisible intangible Energy/Force can transform*2 into the visible tangible matter-substance-stuff that our physical senses are attuned to. And since Shannon equated knowable Information with Entropy/Uncertainty, we can now trace the emergence of the "capacity for experience" back to the primal "capacity for work" (for change, causation).
Mental experience (knowing, awareness) is mostly an encounter with Change (difference) in the environment. Those Transformations (changes in physical form) are due to the Causal power --- ability to do the work of metamorphosis (a change of the form or nature of a thing). That natural constructive/destructive power is merely Energy (EnFormAction*3) in its various forms (light, heat, impulse, etc). And those bits of experience (knowledge) are recordings in the brain/mind of minor changes in the environment. Collectively, we call those incoming bits & bytes of potential experience : "Information" (meaning, relative to self).
I apologize for using your analogy to discuss my own unfamiliar mashup of Energy & Information & Consciousness. I'm still looking for ways to make such arcane sub-atomic science understandable for philosophical purposes. Now, back to your regular program. :smile:
PS__The thesis ultimately compresses the conventional dualism of Mind/Brain into the monism of Universal Causation (the power to enform).
*1. Formation : to cause changes in structure, both positive & negative
To "inform" is to introduce a formative (causal) principle into a mind. To "enform" is to inject a causal (formative) principle into a material object.
*2. Transform : make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of.
Abstract Energy (light, heat) is a wave form, alternating from maximum to minimum, and passing through a zero point in between. Compression of the wave intensifies the energy value. When compressed to a degree defined by the cosmic constant ("C"), now known as the vacuum energy density, it apparently "squeezes" the nothingness of vacuum into the measurable Mass of Matter. The result is a complete transformation of abstract Potential into concrete Actual. Magic? No, Science.
*3. EnFormAction : Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
I read about the idea of a central processing hub a while back. It would take sensory cues, models, learned and innate reflexes, hopes, fears, etc. and smush it together somehow.
Yes. Daniel Dennett derisively labeled that hypothetical "central processing hub" as the Cartesian Theatre. And the "hub" was portrayed as a homunculus (little man in the head). Materialist scientists are still looking in vain for a central processor in the brain. :nerd:
But if the cultural pendulum swings back toward thinking of ideas as some sort of stuff, or an interaction between stuff, then ideas would take their place among the material of materialism like gravity did.
Gravity --- spooky action at a distance --- is often imagined as-if it's a material substance, and portrayed in images as a two dimensional grid in space. But in reality, there is no physical "tractor beam" out in space, pulling heavy objects toward each other. That's why Einstein defined it as an invisible mathematical relationship, not a tangible "fabric" with hills & valleys. Those are merely metaphors --- like the sentient homunculus --- to aid us in conceiving of something otherwise inconceivable, because immaterial. :smile:
I like that analogy. Mostly because it aligns with my own little reductive thesis, that everything in the universe is a form of Energy,
It's not an analogy, it's a proposition. The difficulty with your thesis being that energy does not itself exhibit a 'capacity for experience', it acts without any such capacity, which is specific to consciousness. And to say that consciousness is a product of matter-energy is falling back to philosophical materialism. You're not going to arrive at anything like an explanation for where consciousness fits in the grand scheme by equating it with energy (or information, for that matter.)
I'm not offering any thesis, other than to say that consciousness, so understood, is irreducible, i.e. can't be explained with reference to anything else. (Although I might add that if consciousness is the capacity for experience, human consciousness in addition exhibits the capacity for abstract reason.)
OK, I should have written 'excludes consideration of the first-person perspective....'
But neuroscience does consider first person perspectives and is learning much about them. You can Google "neuroscience first person perspective" and see for yourself. Instead you are making up stories about a science you don't demonstrate much understanding of.
Did you read the article that this thread is about? Do you have any idea of what the issue being discussed is?
What was it you said about being condescending?
Yes I read the article and a variety of things have been discussed. Are you trying to gaslight people into thinking that the subject of the thread is what you say it is?
I said there was no need for it. From what I can see you haven't really had much to say about the substance of the article being discussed. I have cited the original argument, and responses to that from others including Daniel Dennett, throughout this discussion. I'm not gaslighting anyone.
You can Google "neuroscience first person perspective" and see for yourself.
Indeed there are. Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak. Chalmers is not a neuroscientist, his subject is the limitations of science in respect of understanding the nature of first-person experience, from the perspective of philosophy of mind.
A note on neurophenomenology (subject of one of the papers that was returned):
[hide="Reveal"]
Neurophenomenology is an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to bridge the gap between the first-person subjective experience (phenomenology) and third-person scientific understanding (neuroscience). It was first proposed by the French philosopher and cognitive scientist, Francisco Varela, in collaboration with the neuroscientist, Evan Thompson, and the Buddhist scholar, Eleanor Rosch. They introduced the concept in their 1991 book titled "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience."
The term "neurophenomenology" itself emerged in the early 1990s, but its roots can be traced back to the work of philosopher Edmund Husserl and his development of phenomenology in the early 20th century. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that focuses on understanding conscious experience as it is subjectively lived, rather than reducing it to objective measurements and explanations.
In "The Embodied Mind," Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argued that subjective experience should be taken into account alongside objective data in neuroscience to form a more complete understanding of the mind. They proposed that the study of consciousness should involve not only objective observations of brain activity but also a careful examination of the subjective experience itself.
By integrating the empirical findings of neuroscience with the introspective and experiential insights of phenomenology, neurophenomenology aims to create a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of the mind and consciousness. This approach has since been further developed and refined by various researchers and philosophers, leading to a growing interest in interdisciplinary studies between neuroscience and philosophy.
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This is a talk from Evan Thompson (mentioned above) on some of the aspects of this approach. It is directly relevant to the question of 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'
Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak.
Again you are demonstrating that you don't know much about neuroscience. Off the top of my head, the Libet experiment made use of first person report more than a decade before Chalmer's paper was published. Split brain studies making use of first person report go back to the 1960s.
It's not an analogy, it's a proposition. The difficulty with your thesis being that energy does not itself exhibit a 'capacity for experience', it acts without any such capacity, which is specific to consciousness. And to say that consciousness is a product of matter-energy is falling back to philosophical materialism. You're not going to arrive at anything like an explanation for where consciousness fits in the grand scheme by equating it with energy (or information, for that matter.)
I'm sorry, if my equation of Energy & Mind annoys you. But, that's exactly why my thesis*1 is based on metaphysical Information instead of physical Energy. I sometimes call it "directed energy", or "causal energy", or "encoded energy", and sometimes "enforming principle"*2. But my primary alternative to the randomized matter-morphing Energy of Physics, is the notion of EnFormAction*3, which includes mental phenomena among its effects. Unfortunately, I have to repeatedly remind TPF posters that the original meaning of the word "Information", was " knowledge and the ability to know". Also, the relationship between metaphysical (mental) Information & physical (causal) Energy*4 is a recent discovery in science, hence not well known.
The Enformationism thesis is indeed intended to be an explanation for how metaphysical Consciousness could emerge from physical Evolution --- naturally and without divine intervention*5. Moreover, immaterial causal encoded Energy (EnFormAction) is proposed as the agent-of-Awareness in a material world. Unfortunately, that hypothesis is so far from the current dominant worldview, that it is counter-intuitive for those who are only familiar with Claude Shannon's narrow pragmatic definition of "information". So, I keep plugging away, to convey the notion that the reductive Physics definition of "Energy" captures only one aspect of its multifunction roles in the Real and Ideal realms of the World System. One eventual & eventful effect of that natural Causation is the mysterious emergence of mental phenomena in a constantly morphing material world. :smile:
PS__The gap-bridging monistic BothAnd principle*6 --- implicit in the EnFormAction concept --- is difficult for both dualistic-or-monistic Materialists and Spiritualists to accept.
*1. Enformationism : A worldview or belief system grounded on the assumption that Information (Form), rather than Matter (Hyle), is the basic substance (essence) of everything in the universe. It is intended to be a 21st century update of the ancient paradigms of Materialism and Spiritualism.
https://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
*2. Ultimate Enforming Principle : A major dispute is that of Matter versus Spirit. The Bible describes God as a spirit, but the modern concept of Energy (a form of information) --- as an invisible power --- was not even a gleam in the eye of the Bronze Age scribes. Nevertheless, both Ward and I have used the novel Information Age notion of flowing data bits, pioneered by Claude Shannon, and many quantum physicists, as an analog of those invisible ancient agents known as ghosts & spirits.
https://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page24.html
*3. What is EnFormAction? : The BothAnd Principle is a corollary to the thesis of Enformationism, in that it is a mashup of both Materialism and Spiritualism, of both Science and Religion, of both Empirical and Theoretical methods. The novel concept of Enformation is also a synthesis of both Energy and Information. So I invented a new portmanteu word to more precisely encapsulate that two-in-one meaning : EnFormAction. In this case though, the neologism contains three parts : En for Energy, Form for Shape or Structure or Design, and Action for Change or Causation. But Energy & Causation are basically the same thing. And the En- prefix is typically used to indicate that which causes a thing to be in whatever state or form or condition is referred to.
https://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
*4. Information as Energy : The literal equivalence of physical energy and mental information is still a fringe notion among scientists. But it has many credentialed champions, including Paul Davies, editor of the book noted above. Energy = Information (power to cause changes in Form).
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*5. Preternatural LOGOS : So, Ill skip the history lesson, and focus mainly on the emerging secular notion of some force behind Nature that functions like an invisible hand, guiding humanity toward a more inclusive moral circle. This god-like guide is not conceived in anthro-morphic mythical terms, but more like Platos philosophical creative principle, the Logos.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page47.html
*6. Both/And Principle : My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
[quote] accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a person. Excepting specific legal contexts, thats no longer an active sense, though it survives as a dominant meaning of related terms like informant and informer.
Not according to the Oxford Dictionary online edition. It says the first use of the term was in relation to: accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a person
Perhaps, instead of original meaning of "information" I should have said "the pre-Shannon usage of 'information' " referred to the contents of a Mind. I wasn't talking about a particular dictionary definition, but to traditional usage over the years as indicated in synonyms : instruction, intelligence*1, knowledge, message.
The distinction I was trying to make is between Shannon's definition of "information" in terms of the meaningless carrier/container, as opposed to the message/content : meaning. The container of Shannon's Information is a material substance of some kind (neuron), but the content is immaterial knowledge (idea, meaning). Hence, the meaningful content of a bit of Information is mind-stuff. And a "bit" is a binary digit, expressed as a mathematical ratio*2. Which, incidentally is the root of "Reason" and "Rational". :nerd:
*1. Intelligencehas been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. _____Wikipedia
Note --- For the purposes of my thesis, I refer to the various usages of "intelligible information" as contrasted with Shannon's "conveyable information".
*2. Information : Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics its called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology its called "Conflict".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
And a "bit" is a binary digit, expressed as a mathematical ratio*2. Which, incidentally is the root of "Reason" and "Rational". :nerd:
Not sure how you intend the sentence I just quoted. But I want to clarify:
As the Latin root of modern English reason and rational, ratio is the noun form of the Latin terms reor and/or ratus. These latter two Latin terms have multiple definitions (from "having judged" to "to consider" and a lot more aside), but all these definitions make indispensable use of discernment by which I here mean a cognized distinction between some X and some Y that are bound by some relation (e.g., an object and its background), this regardless of whether one focuses on X, Y, or the relation between.
As such, the Latin term ratio does not pivot on maths and computations it certainly doesnt equate to mathematical ratios in the modern sense of "ratio". Instead, this Latin term's meaning pivots on something far closer to discernment and, thereby, all that can result from and is implied by faculties of discernment (to include judgments, awareness of purpose(s), plans, and mathematical properties and relations, among many other possibilities).
I'm sorry, if my equation of Energy & Mind annoys you Gnomon
It doesnt annoy me, but Im not persuaded by it.
I suppose you are also not persuaded by Max Tegmark's thesis of a Mathematical Universe. Besides being anathema to the worldview of Materialism, that notion is counter-intuitive to the matter/energy sensing human brain. I'm not sure what term you would prefer, to refer to the fundamental element/essence/substance of the universe (Mind ; Spirit ?). However, mathematics is not a physical substance out there in the world, but a way of modeling the world in the human Mind. My notion of Causal Information is similar, except that it is not just inert statistics, but dynamic ever-changing physics.
In James Glattfelder's book, Information-Consciousness-Reality, he devotes a chapter to the topic : A Universe Built of Information. There, he quotes editor/publisher of science books, John Horgan : "The everything-is-information meme violates common sense". Yet, Glattfelder concludes in the epilogue : "I believe in the computational engine of the universe --- reality's information-theoretic ontology. I believe that consciousness shares the same innate essence as the 'material' " {my bold} And, according to Einstein, the essence of Matter/Mass is Energy*1. But where did the cosmos-creating power of the Big Bang come from?
Not from within space-time, apparently. Hence, there must be something more eternal/essential/fundamental than physical Energy. That ultimate quintessence is what I call EnFormAction, and it necessarily existed prior to the Big Bang : as causal & organizing Potential. Without that motivational-directional-integrating impetus, nothing in the Actual world would exist : not even the dust of Entropy.
Obviously, we don't sense Matter & Energy as the same thing ; they have different physical properties & effects. But they share a formal relationship to some more fundamental essence. In my thesis, I refer to that essence as The Power to Enform, abbreviated as Information, or more technically as EnFormAction*2. What may not be so obvious is that I'm using a common word, "Information", in an uncommon sense : the ability to cause change, and to organize isolated parts into meaningful wholes. From that perspective, EnformAction is Energy + Laws. I usually avoid calling that magical power "divine" though, because that's a "woo word" and a dialog stopper. Instead, I refer to it anonymously by Plato's non-anthro-morphic term : "LOGOS".
For me the Source of all power in the universe remains a mystery, beyond the scope of empirical Science. So, I can't persuade you with hard facts, only metaphors & analogies & reasoning. :smile:
*1. Energy - Matter equivalence : It's the world's most famous equation, but what does it really mean? "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." On the most basic level, the equation says that energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/lrk-hand-emc2expl.html
*2. EnFormAction :
*** [i]Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", so EFA is the general cause of every-thing in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application.
*** All are also forms of Information, the "difference that makes a difference". It works by directing causation from negative to positive, cold to hot, ignorance to knowledge. That's the basis of mathematical ratios (Greek "Logos", Latin "Ratio" = reason). A : B :: C : D. By interpreting those ratios we get meaning and reasons. The ability to know & interpret the non-self world is what we call Awareness or Consciousness : to make distinctions ; to parse random complexity into meaningful patterns.
*** The concept of a river of causation running through the world in various streams has been interpreted in materialistic terms as Momentum, Impetus, Force, Energy, etc, and in spiritualistic idioms as Will, Love, Conatus, and so forth. EnFormAction is all of those.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
I'm not sure what term you would prefer, to refer to the fundamental element/essence/substance of the universe (Mind ; Spirit ?)
I am very wary of the attempt to identify some putative ultimate in objective terms. But those terms do make sense in the context of the cultures and traditions in which they were meaningful. I suppose in terms of an ostensible ultimate, I could assent to 'dharma', which is from the Indic root meaning 'what holds together'. There are convergences between 'dharma' and 'logos'.
For me the Source of all power in the universe remains a mystery, beyond the scope of empirical Science.
Indeed, and a major part of the kind of philosophy I've pursued is realisation of that - the 'way of unknowing' or 'way of negation', expressed in various idiomatic ways. We ourselves are beyond the scope of empirical science.
As such, the Latin term ratio does not pivot on maths and computations it certainly doesnt equate to mathematical ratios in the modern sense of "ratio". Instead, this Latin term's meaning pivots on something far closer to discernment and, thereby, all that can result from and is implied by faculties of discernment (to include judgments, awareness of purpose(s), plans, and mathematical properties and relations, among many other possibilities).
Thanks for the clarification. However, I was not making a statement about the Latin language, but about the modern usage of the term "ratio". Synonyms range from fraction, quotient, & percentage to proportion, balance, & relationship. It's also the root of "Rational", pertaining to Logic & Reason. All of those terms, and many more, convey particular aspects of the general concept of "Information" (the power to enform ; to create novel knowable things). And they are also related to "Logic" & "Reason" as functional features of human Consciousness. Anyway, I was just trying to make a point about the ubiquity of universal Information (bits) : from Math to Meaning to Physics (it from bit). :smile:
It from Bit Theory :
In 1990, Wheeler suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this "it from bit" doctrine, all things physical are information-theoretic in origin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Note --- Before Shannon, "information" referred only to "things mental". Now it encompasses "all things", both physical and metaphysical.
Immaterial & Material Information :
"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom at a very deep bottom, in most instances [b]an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses . . .[/b]"
https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf
I'm not sure what term you would prefer, to refer to the fundamental element/essence/substance of the universe (Mind ; Spirit ?) Gnomon
I am very wary of the attempt to identify some putative ultimate in objective terms. But those terms do make sense in the context of the cultures and traditions in which they were meaningful. I suppose in terms of an ostensible ultimate, I could assent to 'dharma', which is from the Indic root meaning 'what holds together'. There are convergences between 'dharma' and 'logos'.
I too, am cautious about speaking of philosophical Ultimate postulations on a mostly proximate-minded Materialistic forum. But in discussions about Mind & Consciousness, the question of Origins frequently comes up. So, I have used a variety of wiggle-words to describe a concept that is literally out-of-this-world : pre-Big-Bang & Pre-Space-Time. At first, I merely added an ambiguous asterisk to the common word for The Ultimate : G*D. But I also occasionally use some traditional philosophical terms, such as LOGOS & TAO, to describe the ineffable enforming-organizing power behind the scenes of this organic-orderly world, that somehow produces meaningful Order (patterns) out of random Chaos (noise).
I also avoid attributing such anthro-morphic characteristics as Goodness & Mercy to the creative force behind the program of heuristic Evolution (Nature). Which is often distinguished from intentional development (Culture) as "red in tooth & claw". The Tao is described as "harmonious", but that's merely an Ideal that is seldom found in a world divided between Predator & Prey. Instead, the world being created by the Tekton or Demiurge follows a meandering path that is globally balanced, but locally erratic. The "design" of this world is indeed Intelligent (logical), but not necessarily Good (emotional) from the perspective of its flesh & blood inhabitants. So, I refer to the long-running Cosmic Program of Emergence as "Intelligent Evolution". That's because it includes natural Laws (of unknown etiology) that guide it past heuristic accidents toward an unforseeable Ultimate Output.
From the viewpoint of the Enformationism thesis though, I refer to the presumptive creator (First Cause) of the evolutionary program, running on the physical computer we call the Universe, by the functional description : Programmer or Enformer. This non-traditional notion derives from modern sciences, including Evolutionary Programming, Quantum Physics, and Information Theory. And the fundamental element/essence of all those sciences is, not just inert Data, but causal Information (Energy + Law). You won't find these novel ideas in textbooks or dictionaries, because they are new & unproven, and possibly unprovable. And their only value is for philosophical speculation on ultimate questions. :smile:
TAO : the absolute principle underlying the universe, combining within itself the principles of yin and yang and signifying the way, or code of behavior, that is in harmony with the natural order.
___Oxford dictionary
Note --- My thesis presents a neologism for the principle of Yin/Yang : BothAnd.
LOGOS : When Aristotle talks about logos, hes referring to reasoned discourse or the argument.
https://boords.com/ethos-pathos-logos/what-is-logos-definition-and-examples-with-gifs
Note : I view the gradually evolving world as an on-going "argument" on an unknown topic. We don't know the original question, but we experience the pros & cons as the heuristic process of discovery, that we call "Evolution". The trend seems to be generally toward Complexity, but with inherent Contradictions.
DHARMA : (in Indian religion) the eternal and inherent nature of reality, regarded in Hinduism as a cosmic law underlying right behavior and social order. ---Oxford dictionary
Note --- What Science calls "natural law", the ancients labelled as Tao, Dharma, or Logos. In each case, the Law is an ideal that is often broken by willful humans, with the gift of Consciousness.
I'm not sure what term you would prefer, to refer to the fundamental element/essence/substance of the universe (Mind ; Spirit ?) Gnomon
I am very wary of the attempt to identify some putative ultimate in objective terms.
As an aside, I'll mention that both of us seem to take broad moderate positions on the Realism vs Idealism and Materialism vs Spiritualism spectrum. Yet, we have crossed an invisible line in the sand, drawn by adherents of the non-religious belief system known as Scientism. Hence, any mention of woo-words like "spirit" can tag you with attributed beliefs that are associated with the "wrong" end of that spectrum. That's because those with polarized views of "ultimates", often see moderates as tending toward the opposite side.
Unfortunately, any metaphysical worldview (an -ism, like Materialism) can be turned into a dogmatic cult/religion by gurus who are motivated to gather admiring followers, who don't think for themselves. For example, even the literally rational (ratio-based) Mathematics of Pythagoras became a sort of religious cult, when an abstract idealized metaphysical concept became encrusted in physical metaphors about such innocuous things as reincarnating beans.
Although mathematical physicist/cosmologist, Max Tegmark, is treading on the ideal side of modern worldviews, I'm not aware of any cult following that has emerged from his Platonic notion of a mathematical universe . . . yet. My own one-man, information-focused, belief system does not have any of the emotional appeal necessary for a popular religion . . . yet. :joke:
Pythagoreanism : Society remembers Pythagoras as a mathematician and not as a charismatic cult leader. However, the two go hand in hand. Pythagoras believed in sacred mathematics and thought that the universe could be understood through numbers. Pythagoreanism was more than a cult of numero-philes. They believed in metempsychosis (reincarnation), embraced an egalitarian communal lifestyle, and practiced a rigid set of daily rituals and dietary restrictions. The cult also believed in universal music or harmony of the spheres, wherein it was believed that the movements of celestial bodies were a form of music.
https://www.thecollector.com/cult-of-pythagoras/
Unfortunately, any metaphysical worldview (an -ism, like Materialism) can be turned into a dogmatic cult/religion by gurus who are motivated to gather admiring followers, who don't think for themselves.
There's something else, though. To truly penetrate or understand the nature of being (I prefer 'being' to 'reality' in this context) requires a re-orientation or a change to one's way of being - walking the walk. That is what philosophical praxis (distinct from theoria) requires.
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According to Pierre Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. ...
For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the students larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things...
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Modern science doesn't necessarily imbue those qualites (although it might, amongst some of its exponents). But the difference is, scientific method assumes the separation of knower and known, whereas in traditional philosophical discipline, these are not necessarily separate domains.
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Plotinus wishes to speak of a thinking that is not discursive but intuitive, i.e. that it is knowing and what it is knowing are immediately evident to it. There is no gap, then, between thinking and what is thought--they come together in the same moment, which is no longer a moment among other consecutive moments, one following upon the other. Rather, the moment in which such a thinking takes place is immediately present and without difference from any other moment, i.e. its thought is no longer chronological but eternal.
There's something else, though. To truly penetrate or understand the nature of being (I prefer 'being' to 'reality' in this context) requires a re-orientation or a change to one's way of being - walking the walk. That is what philosophical praxis (distinct from theoria) requires.
I suppose my philosophical journey is also focused more on the abstract "nature of being" than on "Reality", in the usual materialistic sense. But it's mostly a bloodless intellectual search for meaning, deficient in passionate pursuit. And that dispassionate quest is lacking any formal Praxis. I was never directly exposed to Hinduism or Buddhism in my youth. And while others of my generation were experiencing the joys of Hippie virtues, I was in southeast Asia "killing the little yellow man". I never personally killed anyone, but I suppose I had the cloaks of killers "laid at my feet". Philosophy was not part of my "being" until I retired from Reality, and had time to spare for Ideal pointless pursuits. :smile:
How did you add the "Reveals" to your post? I didn't know it was an option.
Quote : For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the students larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things...
Exercise! That require motivation. So, I exercise restraint in exercising. :joke:
1. "Repetition" : Sounds like prayer beads, which is not an element of my religious tradition.
2. "Attention" : That may be my weak point, due to a mild case of ADD
3. "Meditation" : Post-military, I went through a meditation phase while attending a super-liberal hippie-ish local Unity Church. I practiced what they called Alpha-Theta meditation, which was monitored by an EEG machine. I was able to peg the needle, but no big deal. I also tried a sensory-deprivation float tank. In the dark dank tank, my ADD mind never shut-down, but attended to peripheral sensations, such as water dripping. Bottom line : I didn't find the meditative state much different from my normal passionless introverted state of mind.
4. "Dogmata" : I left behind the "dogmas " of my fundamentalist raising. And have never found any new religious doctrines to replace them. I suppose you could say that, late in life, I have developed my own personal creedo, based on the Enformationism thesis. But I'm too flexible to make it a dogma.
5. "Self-mastery" : Again, a weak point for me. But that weak-will doesn't bother me, due to my normal "indifference" and "passivity".
6. "Passions" : I am, by nature, lacking in passion and motivation. So, "taming the tiger" is not a significant challenge for me. I am mostly apathetic toward the ups & downs of life. But that's not due to following any Praxis of Stoicism. It's just the way I am.
7. "Indifference" : "What? Me worry?" :cool:
When you're in Edit mode, notice the 'eye' icon in the controls (for 'hide and reveal). Select the text and click on it.
That passage about Pierre Hadot makes the point that philosophy in the classical sense was a matter of practice and (I suppose) self improvement (although I don't like that term much) rather than just arguments about concepts. I'm no exemplar of the classical virtues although I did go through a long period of daily Buddhist meditation. But somehow, you have to change your frequency, like tuning in to the right wavelength.
After all, say what you will about 'materialistic science', its practical benefits in technology, medicine, transport, food production, and countless other areas has been astoundingly productive. So if philosophy has anything to contribute, it is in learning how to live more contentedly, without needless wants.
philosophy in the classical sense was a matter of practice
Most religions are also grounded on Praxis (Works), especially repetitive activities. For example, Islam's primary communal practice is synchronized prayer. Praxis may be the tie that binds individuals into social organisms. Christianity is unusual (in theory), due to its focus on private internal intellectual Faith, instead of public, communal, oxytosin-enhancing, activities. However, some Christians seem to use private prayer as a form of meditation, for self-improvement (e.g. gaining merit), as contrasted with social improvement, or collective bonding (belonging).
As a philosophical loner though, I "belong" to no empathetic & like-minded group. Hence, I am lacking in emotional support to solidify my adherence to an identifying creed. Would some kind of Praxis lead me to emotional or intellectual self-improvement (self-control), apart from the feeling of being one with a group of fellow practitioners (group control)? Can I be saved, philosophically, by cerebral intellectual Faith without physical emotional Works? Just musing! :joke:
PS__More seriously, I suppose my Practice of writing down my philosophical thoughts, and subjecting them to criticism, is a form of Praxis. Could that lead me to "modify my hypothesis to fit reality", or to "understand the world differently"?
What is the difference between praxis and practice? : Practice is what those in the trades (like doctors, engineers, psychologists and musicians) do to modify their hypothesis to fit reality. More seriously: Praxis is usually used in the Hegelian and Marxist sense meaning action that works to change society.
https://www.quora.com/In-an-academic-context-what-is-the-difference-between-praxis-and-practice
What is the difference between Zen meditation and transcendental meditation? : Mantra meditation and Zen meditation both differ from mindfulness. Mantra meditation, which encompasses transcendental meditation, involves repeating a phrase throughout the meditation practice. Zen meditation originates from Zen Buddhism and has the purpose of helping practitioners understand the world differently.
https://positivepsychology.com/differences-between-mindfulness-meditation/
That passage about Pierre Hadot makes the point that philosophy in the classical sense was a matter of practice and (I suppose) self improvement (although I don't like that term much) rather than just arguments about concepts.
Also included is the idea that without praxis, one's theory will be limited and stunted. Hadot thus points to a deep interrelation between the two in the world of ancient philosophy. Here is a nice quote:
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, p. 172:The Stoics made a distinction between philosophy, defined as the lived practice of the virtues of logic, physics, and ethics, and "discourse according to philosophy;" which was theoretical instruction in philosophy. The latter was in turn divided into the theory of physics, the theory of logic, and the theory of ethics. This distinction had a quite specific meaning within the Stoic system, and it could be used in a more general way to describe the phenomenon of "philosophy" in antiquity. Throughout this investigation, we have recognized the existence of a philosophical lifemore precisely, a way of lifewhich can be characterized as philosophical and which is radically opposed to the way of life of nonphilosophers. On the other hand, we have identified the existence of a philosophical discourse, which justifies, motivates, and influences this choice of life. Philosophy and philosophical discourse thus appear to be simultaneously incommensurable and inseparable.
Note - I am reopening a thread that has been off the front page for a while. I just saw the article I've linked below and I thought people might be interested. I haven't come to any opinion about it's contents.
Consciousness theory slammed as pseudoscience sparking uproar
A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness research community. It claims that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious called the integrated information theory (IIT) should be labelled pseudoscience. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has some researchers arguing over the label and others worried it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.
wonderer1September 21, 2023 at 01:47#8390510 likes
Reply to T Clark How apropos. I was just pointing out to wonderer1 in another thread how flimsy scientific theories of consciousness are. Now one of the leading ones get's called pseudoscience. Well, well.
how flimsy scientific theories of consciousness are
As I noted in my post, I don't have an opinion on the particular positions described in the article, but I don't think scientific theories of consciousness are "flimsy" or "pseudoscience." I won't go any further now - I've had enough of "consciousness" for a while.
PatternerSeptember 21, 2023 at 18:23#8392620 likes
:lol:
PeterJonesSeptember 28, 2023 at 15:27#8410860 likes
I feel 'flimsy pseudo-science' is an apt description for modern academic consciousness studies. .
It is flimsy because it has no metaphysical foundation and pseudo-science because it does not study consciousness scientifically. .
I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness Studies for three years and was disgusted by the poor quality of the work. It's not an area of study but a club for people who need to get published. .
Pardon my strong views. I feel;the general public are being duped and scientific standards are being abused, and that academics should behave more responsibly. . .
wonderer1September 28, 2023 at 23:15#8412370 likes
I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness Studies for three years and was disgusted by the poor quality of the work. It's not an area of study but a club for people who need to get published.
There is a matter of perspective here. You should have seen the state of things 36 years ago, when I started looking into the subject. The progress in understanding since then has been substanantial. Considering the complexity of the subject under study, the technological difficulties in gathering detailed information, and the (IMO) warranted ethical restrictions faced by researchers, I'd say we social primates are doing pretty good.
PeterJonesSeptember 29, 2023 at 11:42#8413600 likes
There is a matter of perspective here. You should have seen the state of things 36 years ago, when I started looking into the subject. The progress in understanding since then has been substanantial. Considering the complexity of the subject under study, the technological difficulties in gathering detailed information, and the (IMO) warranted ethical restrictions faced by researchers, I'd say we social primates are doing pretty good.
At least the scientific community now accepts that consciousness exists and this is certainly progress. I don't share your view that it is making progress otherwise, but don't rule out the possibility. I suspect we'll have to wait for one of Kuhn's generational paradigm shifts. .
Comments (383)
Human brains are enormously complex, the technological challenges of gathering sufficient data to learn much are huge, and the ethical restrictions on how science can make progress in the field mean we should expect progress to be relatively slow. (Not saying I disapprove of the ethical restrictions.)
Galileo is hardly to blame for any of this.
I don't see any alternative for science than the Galilean approach. Bracketing out the conscious observer is analogous to, and the reverse of, the Epoché in phenomenology. It is a methodological necessity.
It is hard to see how a seamless causal model from something third person observable (neural activity) to something that is not (conscious experience) could be achieved.
From the first-person perspective it is neural activity which is not observable. Science and phenomenology remain separate "magisteria" (Gould) , the first dealing with what can be observed in things via the senses and the second with how the experience of things seems, and what, on reflection can be said to be the common characteristics of all experience.
That approach doesn't seem to be working. How long do you think we should stick with it?
Sure, but it's come up empty on the hard problem. If there's still no solution in 1,000 years, what should we do?
I think there's more of a focus now than there was thirty years ago, don't you? Science seeks to explain phenomena, correct? So I ask again: what should we do if neuroscience still hasn't explained consciousness 1,000 years from now?
:100:
Perhaps the problem will remain forever unsolved, like the one about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. :razz:
:lol: :up:
That's true for much of science. The JWST gives us pretty pictures, but doesn't have much impact on the problems facing us. Should we not have spent billions on it?
The article shows how little some folk have changed since the era of the first ASSC meet. Friston is the only one who has made actual proper progress since then.
Neuroscience realises it is dealing with a process rather than a substance. Thus whatever one might mean by consciousness has to be reduced mathematically to that kind of pragmatic description. We seek a theory not about some fundamental substance with its inherent qualities or properties. We seek some kind of general cognitive structure that can be generalised across many related systems.
This is what Friston has achieved with his Bayesian Brain model - semiosis turned into differential equations.
The same basic process explains cognition or the semiotic modelling relation at all levels of life and mind. It fits genetic as well as neural codes. It covers verbal and numerical encoding too.
So folk can continue to witter on about the Hard Problem as if explaining the specificity of your feels is what the science needs to deliver. Science has more sense. Progress is about the generality of showing how consciousness is just the result of the evolutionary elaboration of biosemiosis - the stepping up of the Bayesian world modelling through the successive levels of genetic, neural, social and informational codes.
Biology starts with how molecules can be messages. How information can regulate dissipation. Once that was made clear, folk stopped harking on about elan vitals and other mystic substances. Life was a general kind of process.
The Bayesian Brain speaks to the same thing. It offers a mechanics which puts neurology and biology on the same mathematical footing. It is pretty easy to recognise this as big progress indeed.
The ASSC was only ever a club for those on the crazy fringe. A fun event because of that. But unrepresentative of serious neuroscience.
It's not like some personal shortcoming but a number of factors that were crystallised in his work, chief among them the division of the world into primary and secondary qualities. According to Galileo's philosophy, primary attributes are intrinsic properties of an object that exist independently of any observer. They are considered objective and measurable. Examples include mass, size, and shape. These attributes are inherent to an object and do not depend on the observer's perception or point of view.
On the other hand, secondary attributes are considered subjective and dependent on the observer. They are not considered to be intrinsic properties of an object but are rather the result of an interaction between the object and the observer's senses. Examples of secondary attributes include color, taste, and temperature. These attributes are perceived by the senses and can vary from one observer to another.
Galileo argued that primary attributes, being objective and measurable, could be studied and understood through mathematical and quantitative analysis. Secondary attributes, being subjective and variable, were not suitable for precise scientific investigation in the same way as primary attributes.
This was to be combined with Descartes' dualism of matter (res extensia) and mind (res cogitans) to give rise to the modern synthesis. Thomas Nagel describes it like this:
[quote=Mind and Cosmos pp. 35-36]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.[/quote]
That's the setting against which David Chalmer's poses the hard problem of consciousness, and when spelled out that way, it's not hard to grasp his rationale. The whole issue of the mind-independence of particular qualities has in any case been undermined by the observer problem.
(Philip Goff seeks to solve the problem by saying that matter is actually conscious in some way, thereby dissolving the duality, but I don't think it works, for reasons I explained in an earlier thread, which Philip Goff himself actually joined the Forum to respond to. Oh, and I don't regard his rebuttal of my criticism successful.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I read a clarification of this trope somewhere. The original dispute was whether two incorporeal intellects (i.e. angels) can occupy the same location in space and time. I don't recall the details but when the background is understood it sounds a little less daft.
When did consciousness first show up? Are insects conscious? Can machines become conscious?
Panpsychism is a gateway philosophy. It eventually leads to idealism.
Shouldnt the question be when did semiosis first show up? What first counts as a living organism? And then what counts as the first version of neural coordination with the wider environment? Is a bacterium where it starts as a sensor is connected like a directional switch to its flagella?
A theory of consciousness is just the pursuit of a ghostly spirit stuff. Or can you frame the task in a way that is scientific rather than a search for immaterial being?
:smirk:
Science should be able to explain something as fundamental as consciousness, shouldn't it? And why is "consciousness" in quotes?
You sound like the kid in the back seat. Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
You have failed to engage with the points I made and I dont feel I need to run you through it again.
Some problems in science are slower to progress than others, and it might involve some diverging paths. But so far all the evidence have points to it being a function of the brain and not some kinda "soul" or "ghost" like people think it is.
How though...well we're not quite there yet. I swear people really need to learn patience when it comes to science, these problems are hard. Just because humanity doesn't tolerate ambiguity well is no excuse, though I guess psychologically we do like filling in gaps just to feel better.
Thats pretty clear from extrapolating the fossil record isnt it? Stromatolites or something like it? In any case whatever it was had to maintain itself, grow, heal, mutate and evolve. Minerals don't do that, but organisms do. That much is clear, isn't it?
Why should it?
Its not like this ultimate beetle in the box called consciousness, aka lived experience, in any way matters - all the more so were it be immaterial - not ethically and certainty not substantially (neither of the latter - ethics or substance - being in any way scientifically testable anyways).
For instance, pragmatically speaking, we can contemplate mathematical systems and work with empirical knowledge just fine without it.
Plus, socio-politically speaking, all those people the world over that have learned to detest science exactly due to attitudes such as the two just expressed are morons this for having the nerve to maintain that their lived experience (which, needless to add, is first-person), and those of others they care about, should be in any way valued, this either by other individuals or by cultural institutions. Telling them that they're idiots on this count should get them to finally take science seriously - rather than thumb their noses at global warming and the like.
Quoting RogueAI
Because it is one of them illusions? After all, it is neither tangible nor explainable mathematically and, thus, cannot possibly be real.
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Hey, devils advocate at work here. :naughty: Because while I know I am, I cant conclusively prove that individual others are.
(BTW, the advocacy provided is directed primarily at @apokrisis's comments.)
The line between chemistry and biology gets murky if we do wind all the way back to the first metabolic process. That doesnt fossilise so well when it could be just a bit of organic crud lining the porous serpentine rock of an ancient alkaline thermal vent on the ocean floor.
But the past 20 years have seen remarkable progress on the question of abiogenesis. And your friend, Barbieri, got it right in figuring out the ribosome was the central player from the biosemiotic point of view.
"Do Insects Have Consciousness and Ego?
The brains of insects are similar to a structure in human brains, which could show a rudimentary form of consciousness"
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-insects-have-consciousness-ego-180958824/
What say you? Do you think it's significant that Smithsonian Magazine is taking insect consciousness seriously? Would a simulation of a working brain be conscious? Are functional equivalents of working brains conscious, no matter what the substrate? And why did you put "consciousness" in quotes?
Hey, you're the one who brought up evolution. Instead of getting defensive, just answer the questions.
If you can... :grin:
But how much neurobiology do you know to make such sweeping dismissals? What definition of consciousness can you present here such that it could be subject to experimental investigation?
Sure, you know what it feels like to feel like you. But where can you point to the failures of science to say something about that? Give us an example from psychophysics or cognitive neuroscience.
Suppose we discovered the perfectly preserved corpse of an alien in one of their spaceships. For any definition of "conscious", what experiments could we do to ascertain whether the alien was ever conscious when it was alive?
Ahem. Sign on the door says philosophy forum. And arguably the reason for the repeated failures to find a theory is a philosophical one.
Does it need to be changed to say "philosophy silo"?
What this means is that what we know of consciousness, we know because it is constitutive of our existence and experience. It appears as us, not to us. Realising that is itself a change in perspective - a meta-cognitive realisation. And, lo and behold, an entire youtube playlist, comprising hours of lectures, on just this topic -The Blind Spot: Experience, Science, and the Search for Truth - a workshop with philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists (which having discovered, I will now review, but I believe it is linked to this Aeon article from a few years back.)
.
The complaint was about sciences failure to answer the question. That would need to be supported by examples of science failing.
Does this pass as making an epistemological argument? :roll:
And yet who are the drongos who are reifying it as something apart from what is being done?
Is life something apart from the process of living? Does a verb need to be confused as a noun?
Very good question. Being is a verb, isnt it? Doesnt Aquinas have something to say about that? (quick google.) Aquinas argues that being (esse) is the act of existence itself. For him, existence is not just a quality or attribute that something possesses; rather, it is the act of being. In other words, being is not something static but an active and dynamic reality. (Not that I'm an Aquinas scholar.)
?? et al,
(COMMENT)
Before commenting on this contribution, I thought I should refresh my understanding of what "science" means when it says "consciousness." That way, I might know a little bit of the topic. So, I when to Gale Encyclopedia of Science, 4thEd, © 2008 The Gale Group, K. Lee Lerner and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, Editors, pp1012, for some clarity.
It appears that "Consciousness" is a description of a condition or observation. Science does not know how to describe it otherwise. It is almost ([I]but not perfectly[/i]) the opposite of the term "coma." "Consciousness" is (loosely) defined by the functionality of two sets:
[indent]
The ability to accept and understand various forms of stimulation acquired through various sensory abilities, including, but not limited to taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. And through these senses, some life forms build and understand of their reality.
The key physiological triggers that appear to activate "primitive response" and "involuntary reflexes" ([I]like fight or flight[/i]). This functionality is maintained by the reticular activating system (RAS) (throughout the brainstem).
[/indent]
(COMMENT)
The "Scientific Method" seeks to make sense of what we observe in reality. "Metaphysics" is the ultimate study of reality (real 'vs' unreal). The "Theory of Knowledge" (AKA[i]Epistemology[/I]) is a discipline within philosophy which leads to how deals with the nature and/or justification as to how knowledge is acquired.
Why any particular scientific endeavor or inquiry "fails" is a forensic "post moratorium" analysis. It is an examination of the hypothesis or the methodology. Even in failures - knowledge is gained. The Epistemological argument occurs in the development of the methodology behind the test and examination of a specific hypothesis ? that is before the failure.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
---- Thomas A. Edison
Just My Two-Cents Worth...
Most Respectfully,
R
This is a known problem for the individual, that when exercising a bias, say, you are not, and perhaps in some cases cannot be, aware of it. But other individuals can be aware of your biased perspective, as Browning memorably pointed out.
It's just not obvious that the issue arises for types rather than individuals, and it is only the type that science studies. We all feel the pull of recency bias, of color constancy, all those myriad quirks of the way our minds work, none of which stopped scientists from designing experiments to reveal these quirks. We know that we can essentially eliminate consciousness through the use of general anesthesia, without the entire human race having to fall unconscious to find that out.
I may not be able to treat my own mind solely as an object -- though I can surely take it also as an object -- but it's not obvious what the barrier is to me treating your mind as an object of my study, and since it is your mind, not mine, I can only take it solely as an object and never as subject. That object is the also the subject of your experience, so in studying your mind, I am studying your subjectivity, and thus studying subjectivity itself. Where's the problem?
As to definitions:
Science: [s]any conceivable field of knowledge, including that of theoretical fartology[/s] any field of study that is necessarily founded upon empirical observation (hence, observations via any of the physiological senses) and that employs the scientific method of a) falsifiable hypothesis regrading empirical observations, b) empirically observable test, and c) empirically observable results. (e.g., M-theory is currently an untestable theory and so is not of itself science)
Consciousness: the first-person point of view which empirically observes (again, hence observes via its physiological senses), as well as introspects (which is a non-empirical activity), while always finding itself as first-person point of view in non-empirical yet experiential states of being such as those of happiness, certainty, and their opposites, among numerous others. (E.g., I know I am psychologically certain when I am simply by so being as a first-person point of view such that this certainty is in no way something other that I as a first-person point of view apprehend but, again, is simply an aspect of my momentary state of being as a consciousness.)
If you find any disagreement with either definition, it would be important that you then express your differences.
Then, I cannot see myself as a first-person point of view in the mirror - I can instead only see the body through which I as a first-person point of view operate (e.g., neither of the two physiological eyes through which I see is the I which I am as a first-person point of view (i.e., a consciousness). Nor can I touch, smell, taste, hear, or proprioceive (etc.) myself as that which apprehends touch, smell, taste, auditory information, and proprioception (etc.).
In short, I as a consciousness i.e. as a first person point of view know myself to be 100% non-empirical - to in no way whatsoever stand out to anyone anywhere, my own self very much included - and to nevertheless yet be.
Science including psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience can only address empirical givens by definition.
Ergo, to presume that anyone now or ever can obtain scientific knowledge of what consciousness is is a massive category mistake. Its right up there with believing one can catch the horizon if one chases it fast enough.
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Of important note: here is being strictly addresses the issue of consciousness and in no way that of mind (which as a definite given among humans always pertains to a given consciousness; e.g. my mind or "his mind") This in no way denying the interplay between consciousness and the unconscious mind. And it in no way addresses metaphysics.
This is certainly not true. There are more than seven billion human minds that are objects to us and only one you might argue isn't.
Maybe, but this would be contingent on how one defines and thereby interprets "mind". So how do you define mind?
As two examples among many:
1) a body of sometimes disparate agencies of awareness and will - interacting at various levels of unconscious (with one's conscience as one example) - that can of themselves hold causal power and thereby affect or else form the causal abilities of consciousness (e.g., feeling an overwhelming unconscious urge to do something that one then does) that can fully unify into a singular awareness and will (such as when one is in the flow and effortlessly acts in manners devoid of any choice making or deliberative thought). In short, mind as a mostly unified bundle of agencies.
2) the strict, causal-power-devoid epiphenomenon of a physical brain's operatons that is thereby necessarily reducible to the purely deterministic, causal operations of a physical brain's components and, hence, of itself holds no causal power to alter any behavior - this such as via the activity of making choices or of thinking - here very much including the non-agency of consciousness ... which is one aspect of a human's total mind). In short, mind as the effete byproduct of a brain.
Just two options among many, but I so far find anything resembling (1) to be non-observable (instead only being inferable, typically unconsciously in day to day life, this via observable data regarding a total person's overt behaviors) - this even though a corporeal being's mind is here yet understood to be contingent on a corporeal, hence physical, body (and at the very least in mammals, on a physical central nervous system). And, since mind here is non directly observable (with MRIs and such, which are observable, being inferential understandings of such agency we term mind), mind in this interpretation cannot be an observable object. (albeit, one can via various inferences often enough predict what minds will do).
Whereas anything resembling (2) can then be easily expressed as an observable object - this since it here basically amounts to the occurrence of a brain - of whose illusory agency in the form of mind is fully, well, illusory.
(Personally, I find that satisfactorily defining mind is far more challenging than defining consciousness - esp. when attempting to remain consistent to the occurrence of consciousness itself. All the same, an interesting topic to explore via commonalities and differences of perspective.)
I would define "mind" as the sum total of an entities mental processes which include thinking, feeling, perceiving, knowing, remembering, being aware, being self-aware, proprioception, and lots of stuff I'm leaving out. I think all of those things are observable from the outside (third person observation) and many are observable from the inside (introspection).
When considering much of what is scientifically investigated, I don't think there is any need to actively bracket out the observer. One is just considering relatively simple systems where observers aren't playing any significant causal role.
Things get messier at the quantum level, and at the classical level when what is being studied (say an animal) might well have its behavior influenced as a result of sensing the observer.
Different areas of scientific investigation do have to be handled differently depending on what is being investigated, but I think this has been well understood for quite awhile now, and I doubt Galileo did much to impede scientists' understanding of this. However, I'm not a science historian, so maybe Galileo did retard humanity's development of science in some regard despite the intuitive implausibility of that to me.
In any case, I still think attributing such a large causal role (in the development of neuroscience) to Galileo, sounds kind of ridiculous in light of the other factors i brought up, having to do with the difficulty of neuroscience.
Quoting Janus
I agree, but mostly for technical feasibility reasons. Even now, with consciousness itself not being an issue, knowing what is going on in a trained neural network is highly problematic. See The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.
So you're claiming that you (or anyone else) can observe what I'm remembering right now? I won't even push the issue by addressing those good or bad vibes of former days for which I currently can find no adequate words but, nevertheless, can still remember. I'm here simply addressing (maybe via use of brain scans) another's ability to observe that which I as a so called "mind's eye" can perceptually remember via the non-physiologial senses of one's mind (say, my perceiving the remembered smell of a particular rose).
I would say it should be according to my metaphysics. But it is normally treated in terms of a substance rather than a process or action. Something with inherent properties rather than imposed form.
So rather than an ontology of passive existence, I would favour the other of active persistence when it comes to being or ousia.
So mind is a thing, not a process? Or both?
Is it an untested theory or the mathematical generalisation of tested theories? And is it not indeed failing the test because supersymmetry is not showing up and looking increasingly dubious at available particle accelerator energies? The generalisation of the particular case is not worth much if the particular case is becoming so constrained by experiment in routine scientific fashion.
Quoting javra
I find plenty of disagreement. But not much of importance. You articulate a cultural construct with a long social history. Explaining the neurobiology is one thing, explaining the social history is another. I could do both. And you wouldnt be happy with either as that would require seeing they are indeed their own narratives,
I didn't say "currently untested". I said "currently untestable". A major difference for those science savy.
Quoting apokrisis
Ah, I see. My occurrence as a first-person point of view is a "cultural construct with a long social history" - a proposition that thereby lacks a truthful correspondence to anything real, I then infer. Claims like this make one doubt one is talking to another human rather than some AI robot.
As for the rest, we all know that he who presents the most ostentatious posturing wins. Much like those chimp ancestors of ours. So, go for it.
I pointed out how it is failing the test in terms of being a generalisation that ought to contain supersymmetry as a particular feature. And in being thus currently tested, that makes it doubly a problem if you want to say it is currently untestable the stronger claim that it can't even be tested in principle.
Quoting javra
Would Chat GPT make as many rookie errors? There are whole shelves on the social construction of the self that could be poured into its pattern-matching data bank. It would at least be familiar with the relevant social science.
You never see anyone's mind. You can see their behaviour or hear what they say, but you never see the mind except for in a metaphorical sense.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. You can treat the mind as an object in a metaphorical sense: 'her mind was the object of my enquiry'; 'the subject's mental state was extremely confused'; 'that individual had a brilliant mind'; and so on. But mind itself is not an object, unlike any of the objects which you will see if you raise your eyes and glance around you. I think this is habitually overlooked or ignored, but it is the realisation behind both behaviourism and eliminative materialism which arise from a very similar insight: that the mind as such is not scientifically tractable in the sense that phenomenal objects are.
OK, to state what should be obvious to those science savvy, such as yourself, one does not - and cannot - empirically test a theory inferred from data via use of strict theory and still declare such test one of empirical science.
The historic complexities aside, the theory of evolution can, for instance, be empirically tested in the lab - with fruit flies as just one among many examples.
The physics theory of relativity only became empirical science when empirically tested, and it was thereby empirically found that gravity does in fact bend light.
One does not test a theoretical inference against another theoretical inference - regardless of what the latter might be, that of supersymmetry included (which has alternatives to boot) - and then declare this a scientific test. For there's nothing empirical about such a test.
Hence, there is no currently imaginable way to test M-theory empirically - although, with no one being omniscient, given a lack of dogma one can/should allow for the existential possibility that at some point in the distant future someone somewhere might figure out a way to empirically test it. Until then - if this "then" will ever occur - it is not a scientific theory exactly and solely on this count: it cannot be empirically tested one way or another other.
This potential confusion between theoretical abstractons that might or might not be valid (edit: which often enough compete against each other) and that which becomes empirically tested and thereby empirically verified is why I initially addressed in a tongue in cheek manner that "(purely) theoretical fartology" is not a valid scientific discipline.
Quoting apokrisis
A direct question: does the total self of mind and body which can be to whatever extent empirically observed by others which you (I would assume) deem yourself to be hold a first-person point of view which is now reading this text?
As to social constructions studied by social sciences, these will include comparative religions just as much as those relevant notions of self (and in fairness, of non-self). Leave cultural constructs aside for a moment and given an honest proposition regarding what factually is in therms of your consciousness: do you in any way occur as a first-person point of view that is now reading this text?
My point was simply that the observer is bracketed out because it is methodologically impossible to incorporate the observer into the models which are employed for understanding what is being studied in fields like chemistry, geology, biology, cosmology and astronomy.
In phenomenology the question of the existence of the external world is bracketed out because it is the nature of perception itself, which is the object of study, and the question of the independent existence of the objects of perception is not relevant to that study.
It is only in QM where the "observer" becomes an issue, as observation and measurement appear to affect the outcome of experiments. But even there just what constitutes "the observer" is not clear, and the popular philosophical idea that it is human consciousness which actually creates the outcomes is completely useless to, and is not incorporated, or in way incorporable, into quantum theory.
When studying animal behavior, ethologists can only try their best to remain undetected by their subjects, or try to minimize whatever influence their presences might have on animals being studied in laboratory conditions.
Quoting wonderer1
That's a good point. We really don't know what anything is in any absolute sense.
Of course I can. Here I go. Watch me. Hey, Javra, what are you remembering right now?
So, right, I'm being funny. But I'm also being serious. And you're describing the experience of memory, which isn't exactly the same as memory itself. I can test your memory in many ways. What's the Capital of France? What is 5 x 7? If you're from the US I could ask you to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
I attribute memory; or thinking, or feeling, or seeing, or knowing; to people all the time just based on their self-reporting and other behavior I can observe. That's how we know the world. Mental processes are not special.
Not to be a smart ass, but a process, or a group of processes, is a thing. I don't think the mind is a physical thing, if that's what you're asking.
I'll again propose and argue that his attribution is due to inference - much of it unconscious and hence automatic - and not due to (first-person) observation (which can only be direct - rather than, for example, hearsay). For instance:
Quoting T Clark
What if I answer "nothing" or "a pink dolphin" or something else and it happens to be a proposition that I'm fully aware doesn't conform to the reality of what my current recollections are. These examples are obvious, but then I could answer with a proposition that, thought false, would be easily believable by you - and one which you'd have no possible way of verifying: e.g., "I'm now remembering your last post before this one".
You can infer what I'm remembering - but you do not observe it. Hopefully that makes better sense?
We infer things all the time without seeing them directly. We know that two black holes collided eight million light years away because of some squiggles on a meter at the Ligo facilities. We believe dark matter, which we can't currently observe directly, exists because of the behavior of normal matter we can observe. I know my children love me and they know I love them, but they can't experience the love I feel directly. Almost everything we know we know indirectly and not as a result of our own direct observation.
As I just wrote in my previous post to @Wayfarer, most of what we know is not based on our own direct observations. People tell us things. We read about things or see them on TV or the internet. When the Large Hadron Collider sends a bunch of particles into another bunch of particles, no one sees the actual collisions, they see readouts on a recording device. From those readouts they infer the behavior of the particles.
Quoting javra
It is a commonplace of all philosophy, at least since Descartes, that all our observations are imperfect and might be anywhere from 99% right to 100% wrong. At the same time, if you and I are both people of good will and both interested in learning about how people think, you're reports of your experience of your mind are likely to be valid, if imperfect.
I can't follow your argument there. Science is the combination of theory and test, deductive prediction and inductive confirmation. So you seem to be introducing some strong division between "strict theory" and "empirical science". Although I'll degree that in social terms, science does divide between its whiteboard theorists and its lab-coated experimenters. There is a lot of good natured banter between the camps that can also turn to frank hostility when prestige and grants are involved.
But anyhow, it is another social fact that the failure to find supersymmetry where the expectation was quite high it ought to be showing up at current accelerator energies is a big part of the reason for string theory, and thus M-theory, suffering a drop in stock price in the current ToE ideas market.
So the interaction between mathematically-robust theory and empirical constraint on belief in that theory is a delicate business. A social game where a community takes a Bayesian view on what smells right and what line of inquiry to invest further in.
To the outside world, science will paint its adventures much more by the book. The funders and managers or science like that. But from the inside, something much more recognisably human is going on.
The ASSC is a very good example of what passes for "science". It is the kind of open mic gathering that can really launch your career. Chalmers and Koch are good examples. Even down to the publicity stunt of betting cases of wine so as to put the drama of big questions in terms every tax-paying science funder can relate to. And puts their names firmly at the centre of the story for years to come.
Quoting javra
Bollocks. Bayesian reasoning accepts the dog that doesn't bark as part of its baseline of probabilities.
You are trying to defend a methodological purity that would make working scientists laugh privately, not publicly of course.
I spent some time with the psi research crowd because they were an example of science in fact trying to nail its methods down with absolute textbook rigour. It was a fascinating tale of the social limits of practicing what you preach. The rigour was eventually exceptional. The scope for any "psi effect" was publicly quantified to decimal places.
Yet still the community divided into the skeptics who knew the believers were cheating, they just couldn't show how, while the believers accused the skeptics of using their unconscious bias to suppress the ability of the squeaky clean labs to replicate the effect that the believers could produce on the same gear.
It always is going to come back to the way humans actually reason and how brains actually operate. Which is why I highlight Friston and his Bayesian brain model of epistemology.
Quoting javra
Does that sentence even make sense? And from what point of view?
I can see how it makes sense as a utterance from the familiar point of view of the Western philosophical tradition grew out of the theologisation of Ancient Greek metaphysics. The hylomorphism of matter~form transformed into the Cartesian divide of res extensa~res cogitans. Neuroscience came along with its challenge to finally understand the mind as embodied modelling the Bayesian prediction machine but people clung fast to the Hard Problem that arises from believing consciousness equals a representation of the world, not a relation in which the semiotic Umwelt of the self in its world is the neurobiological construction ... that is in turn socially extended when the further encoding machinery of speech and maths happens along.
So you ask a question directly from your point of view. You ask it in righteous fashion. It would be a grave discourtesy for me not to stand in your shoes and thus be forced to agree with anything you might say.
But sorry. I've spent too much time with scientists and natural philosophers. I can see where you are coming from and I speak from a viewpoint that enjoys the advantages we call the third person.
Quoting javra
Same tactic keeps repeating. And this is instructive. It is the only argument that sustains the Hard Problem. The insistence that there is a first person point of view that has primacy.
But listen again to my third person description based on the semiosis of the modelling relation.
Our Bayesian models of the world include the construction of the self within the model as the necessary "other" of this world. It is the construction of an Umwelt.
Until you start to deal with this as the primal fact the co-arising of the self and the world as the dichotomy that drives the Cartesian division within the model itself you aren't going to have a clue where I am coming from.
Semiosis is an empirical theory of the "conscious self" around which a world of experience is made to dance for good pragmatic purpose.
Science is now seeing this as the way to account for the self as a product of the "world" it constructs, the totality that is its Umwelt, so that it can then function "selfishly" within the actual real world in a reliable and largely automatic or unconscious and unthinking fashion.
Of course. I acknowledged that we can infer that there are minds, but that the mind is not an object for us.
Quoting T Clark
Right. And there is controversy about what these particles are, whether they're really particles or actually waves, or excitations in a field. Instrumentalists say, it doesn't matter, shut up and calculate.
But all of that is irrelevant to the question at hand. At least objects - a lump of matter, a marble or a bullet - can be described objectively. You and I can pick it up, weigh it, ascertain its attributes and qualities. But consciousness is nothing like that. You can say to me, I'm depressed, or I'm happy, and I will know what you mean, because I too am a conscious being, and I know what it is like to be conscious or happy, so I will infer that I feel the things that you feel. But none of those qualities are objectively real in the way that bullets or marbles are. I could put an object in a lunar lander and send it to the moon, but there is no way to pack and send a feeling, an emotion. It can only exist as a state of being, but what that being is, is precisely what eludes objective description.
Quoting javra
FWIW, I'm in agreement, as I hope is also evident from what I've said above.
Useful crib on scientific method:
[quote=Edward Dougherty; https://strangenotions.com/the-real-war-on-science/] Modern science emerged in the seventeenth century with two fundamental ideas: planned experiments (Francis Bacon) and the mathematical representation of relations among phenomena (Galileo). This basic experimental-mathematical epistemology evolved until, in the first half of the twentieth century, it took a stringent form involving (1) a mathematical theory constituting scientific knowledge, (2) a formal operational correspondence between the theory and quantitative empirical measurements, and (3) predictions of future measurements based on the theory. The truth (validity) of the theory is judged based on the concordance between the predictions and the observations. While the epistemological details are subtle and require expertise relating to experimental protocol, mathematical modeling, and statistical analysis, the general notion of scientific knowledge is expressed in these three requirements.
Science is neither rationalism nor empiricism. It includes both in a particular way. In demanding quantitative predictions of future experience, science requires formulation of mathematical models whose relations can be tested against future observations. Prediction is a product of reason, but reason grounded in the empirical. Hans Reichenbach summarizes the connection: Observation informs us about the past and the present, reason foretells the future.
The demand for quantitative prediction places a burden on the scientist. Mathematical theories must be formulated and be precisely tied to empirical measurements. Of course, it would be much easier to construct rational theories to explain nature without empirical validation or to perform experiments and process data without a rigorous theoretical framework. On their own, either process may be difficult and require substantial ingenuity. The theories can involve deep mathematics, and the data may be obtained by amazing technologies and processed by massive computer algorithms. Both contribute to scientific knowledge, indeed, are necessary for knowledge concerning complex systems such as those encountered in biology. However, each on its own does not constitute a scientific theory. In a famous aphorism, Immanuel Kant stated, Concepts without percepts are blind; percepts without concepts are empty.[/quote]
At issue is the question of how this is applicable to the question of the nature of conscious experience (and remember, that is the question.) It may be asked, where is the rigour seen in scientific analysis, when it comes to the kind of first-person analysis that the objection is suggesting? David Chalmers does actually address this:
Quoting Can we construct a science of consciousness? David Chalmers
I think that this is what Edmund Husserl was proposing with his model of the 'phenomenological reduction', perhaps @Joshs might comment on that.
Yes. In absolutely full agreement. (Ergo the importance of trust and the significance of betrayal (of trust), including that of willful deceptions.)
Quoting T Clark
OK to this. As a reminder, I'm a diehard fallibilist. But it equivocates between empirical observations (which, yes, could in principle could include hallucinations - hence being technically fallible) and inferences, with these being optimal conclusions drawn from that which is observed (and since no one is omniscient, everyone's inferences could be potentially mistaken at times - hence being technically fallible).
Now I maintain this too is a fallible observation (a rabit-hole of philosophy, kind of thing) but, pragmatically, something that we all immediately know as a brute fact that we cannot rationally - nor experientially - doubt: we are as that which apprehends observables (including our thoughts, with some of these being our conscious inferences). Long story short, this is a direct experiential awareness of our own occurrence (again, as, I'll for now say, "first-person observers") Here is made absolutely no claim as to what we, as such, in fact are - be it entities/substance, processes, both, or neither. It doesn't matter.
In contrast to this direct experience of what is, we have inferences we live by. One of these crucial, pivotal inferences is that others are like us in being endowed with this "first-person point of view". Our observations (not inferences) of what they do sure as hell evidence and validate that they are thus endowed. Nevertheless, we do not observe them as first-person points of view.
We, hence, cannot observe other's consciousness and its factual activities - such as, for one example, what the consciousness remembers via the workings of its total mind.
None of this needs to be appraised for day to day interactions. But we are philosophically debating this very point, so I've mentioned it.
This exchange started with me saying that we can observe more than seven billion minds from the outside. Those minds are objects to us, or at least we can study them as outside observers.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is no controversy - they are both particles and waves.
Quoting Wayfarer
And I say no, and that's as far as this argument ever goes.
But these are all subjective qualities. Your notion of the material world is being described in how it feels to you. It is harder or softer, drier or wetter, hotter or colder, heavier or lighter than the flesh and blood self that wants to prod away at it. The world as you are imagining it is the one that is subjectively related to yourself as the centre of that world.
Science comes along and ends up saying quite different things from its mathematically an empirically abstracted viewpoint. The familiar world of material objects becomes something quite alien once seen from a more properly objectified perspective, with its quantum fields and relativity.
The idea of objects with qualities gets radically deconstructed, showing the degree to which your neurobiology lives within in its own broad brush and self-centred view of physics as it is at the scale of humans living on planets at a time when the Universe is generally almost at its cold and empty heat death.
Stephen J Gould wrote, "In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.'" Does that agree with your position or disagree with it?
Going back to my previous comment including the example, even many (most?) of our empirical observations are inferences and not direct observations. That may have been less true in Pierce's time.
Quoting javra
Again, how much of what we know is a brute fact?
Quoting javra
Again - many of what you call "brute-facts," we do not observe from a first-person point of view.
Quoting javra
In my view, we can study other people's and our own minds using the same methods we use for many of the things we know in our daily lives.
As I noted in my last post to @Wayfarer, it is unlikely you and I will get any further with this discussion. I've participated in similar ones many times, I'm sure you have too, and it never goes any further than this. This is probably a good place to stop.
When so loosely understood, what then isn't?
Take metaphysics. It is inferred theory and it is tested against a rubric of reason, it has deductive predictions from postulates and inductive confirmations of these predictions. And, it must conform to the observable world to be taken in any way seriously.
So now metaphysics is a branch of science? Um, no, it is not. ... boring as this might be, again, because it is not empirically testable (to be lucidly clear, your metaphysics very much included), and this because it has no empirically falsifiable hypothesis to test.
I'll try to leave our disagreement at that.
Quoting apokrisis
Good luck with that, apo. I'll for now just choose to believe yours is merely a stinginess of charity mixed with some degree of deception (be it self-deception or otherwise). But hell, I could be talking to a Chat GPT program after all. So who knows?
:up: Cool. Thanks
It agrees quite well. BTW, I have fond memories of Gould's various takes on sociobiology - albeit with some disagreements in some of the details.
Quoting T Clark
I think you are here erroneously conflating, or maybe fully equating, science to physics. A category error.
Quoting T Clark
This question is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the proposition it is in reply to. All the same, there is no metaphysics that is both consistent and does not utilize a brute fact. Matter for materialists, as one example of this.
Quoting T Clark
If I remember right, I've only called one's own conscious being a brute fact to one's own conscious self. What are you here referring to?
All the same - though I do have my reason for so calling one's own conscious being a brute fact - if possible, due to the complexities involved, I'll retract my so claiming it to be with a "my bad". While I hold that it's not explainable in terms of more fundamental facts, I very much know that it's occurrence and form is dependent on a physical substratum of body and (in animals) brain - together with environment. Hence, the complexities.
Quoting T Clark
Alright. Thanks for the heads up.
It is your interpretation that is sloppy. The Peircean and Bayesian argument is that this is the most generalised view of rational inquiry. The same basic epistemic arc of predict and measure is what evolution elaborates from biology on up.
Quoting javra
Despite your boundary policing, natural philosophers and systems scientists are quite comfortable with this thought.
If it makes you uncomfortable, well um
Quoting javra
Comfort yourself however you like. You had no argument you could make.
The posturing guru speaketh. Bravo!
Quoting javra
You started with the ad homs after quickly running out of arguments. And sadly they are not even witty, let alone cutting.
Indeed. One of the principle reasons materialism has fallen into disfavor.
Do you agree, then, that psychology, insofar as it is the science of consciousness, is in principle capable of the same degree of precision and objectivity as is physics?
Does anything that produces/utilizes a "Bayesian model of the world" have a self and/or consciousness? Also, why do some brain processes involve consciousness while others don't?
"Microorganisms demonstrate conscious-like intelligent behaviour, and this form of consciousness may have emerged from a quantum mediated mechanism as observed in cytoskeletal structures like the microtubules present in nerve cells which apparently have the architecture to quantum compute. This paper hypothesises the emergence of proto-consciousness in primitive cytoskeletal systems found in the microbial kingdoms of archaea, bacteria and eukarya. To explain this, we make use of the Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness which evaluates the rise of the degree of consciousness to conscious behaviour in these systems supporting the hypothesis of emergence and propagation of conscious behaviour during the pre-Cambrian part of Earth's evolutionary history. Consciousness as proto-consciousness or sentience computed via primitive cytoskeletal structures substantiates as a driver for the intelligence observed in the microbial world during this period ranging from single-cellular to collective intelligence as a means to adapt and survive. The growth in complexity of intelligence, cytoskeletal system and adaptive behaviours are key to evolution, and thus supports the progression of the Lamarckian theory of evolution driven by quantum mediated proto-consciousness to consciousness as described in the SOM of consciousness."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29254105/#:~:text=Abstract,the%20architecture%20to%20quantum%20compute.
Are microorganisms conscious? What do you think of the "Subject-Object Model (SOM) of consciousness"?
Well We will someday hold that horizon in our hands, by gosh! We just need to run faster toward it, thats all.
BTW, I am here officially making a bet with anyone who so wishes on a case of wine (need not be expensive) that no one will ever hold the horizon in their hands, like ever. Any takers? (As to time-frames, maybe its best to make it within our own lifetimes.)
-------
Obviously, this bet would apply only for those of us who are not horizon-eliminativists, and thereby for those of us who maintain that the horizon does in fact occur.
The good thing about both IIT and GNWT is that they take experience as something real. This is what Strawson called a physicalist realist position. Some continue to deny conscious experience as real the Eliminativists. But Koch, Tononi and others dont agree with this most silly of conclusions. It shows the degree to which the physicalist dogma can force some into extreme philosophical or metaphysical positions.
How people ever talked themselves into something as nonsensical as eliminativism, I'll never understand, but thankfully it's well on its way to the ash heap of history.
Yes. But in @apokrisis's poignantly expressed questioning:
Quoting apokrisis
:razz:
OK. I'll bugger off now.
Its the only honest form of materialism!
I dont believe in a science of consciousness as a thing. I believe in a science of life and mind - of biosemiosis.
Is consciousness a substance or a process? Have you got it clear what kind of "scientific" account you are even committed to?
People betray their substance ontology by talking of consciousness as a fundamental simple. A property or quality. They will talk indeed of "qualia" and "phenomenology" as if they are very sciency bits of jargon. They get enthusiastic about quantum conscious, panpsychism, information theory, and other crackpot proposals because that sounds like science "heading in the right direction".
But I understand life and mind as processes. Consciousness is not a noun but a verb. And if I say I am conscious, it is of something. What I really mean is that I can attend and report. I can introspect in the socially approved fashion of turning my neurobiology of attention onto even things that I wouldn't naturally waste time noticing like the "redness" of red and speak about it in a narrative fashion as something that "I" have "experienced".
So to be able to look inwards and report is a skill we learn that boils down to being socially trained to use language to direct our attention to all the "phenomenology" that our brain is instead evolved just to "look past". The brain is busy trying to assimilate the world to its running predictive models. Society sets itself up as a higher level self in our heads and demands a full account of all our thoughts and feelings so that we can become "self-regulating" beings aware of ourselves as actors within larger sociocultural contexts.
Consciousness is treated as a big deal in modern culture because it really matters to society that it can sit inside our heads and make sure we run all our decisions through its larger filter. We must notice the details and be ready to report them.
I've said often enough that I can drive in busy traffic without taking in the world as anything more than a vague unremembered flow. Society would be aghast to hear that admitted. We are supposed to always be giving full attention to everything and holding it in memory long enough to report exactly what happened in the event we had to offer a full narration in a court of justice.
But the brain evolved not to pay attention to the world as much as possible by sensible design. And until humans wrapped themselves up in the new collective habit of narrative self-regulation, that is all brains did. Act as "unconsciously" as circumstances would allow. Stopping to note every passing detail was not what "being conscious" was about.
So any scientific theory of consciousness starts with accepting we are dealing with an evolved process not a fundamental substance. And then the first practical bit of business would be deflating the overly socially-constructed notion of consciousness that everyone employs.
After that, the real science could begin.
As I have said, biosemiosis, the modelling relation, Bayesian mechanics, are what I regard as the right kind of approach. They say life and mind arise out of material being, but they have a difference. There is some mechanism or algorithm by which they can grow out of a physical substrate.
This clicks into place when the material ground is understood in the language of dissipative structure. Matter poised at criticality is a source of instability that can be tapped to do stuff by forms that can impose the constraints of mechanistic stability.
An engine can capture an explosion of petrol vapour and force it to turn a crank. A source of physical instability can be harnessed to give a stablised output. Information (as structural negentropy) can regulate the flow of entropy.
So where nature exhibits physical criticality - as it does at the quasi-classical nanoscale there is an instability which can be fruitfully ratcheted to support a living and mindful organism. There is something a mechanism or algorithm can latch on to and start to proliferate.
The job of science thus becomes creating a generalised theory of such a mechanism or algorithm. Identify the exact design of this essential scrap of form from which wild and complex growth can result. Discover the very thing that makes an organism an organism.
And that is what biosemiosis/the modelling relation/Bayesian mechanics are about. Writing the specifications of the self-organising growth algorithm that allowed this thing we call life and mind to take hold on a material substrate and begin to grow to develop and evolve.
Friston does want to make it as precise and objectified as physics. He offers differential equations that sum up the central trick of the modelling relation. He calls it Bayesian mechanics so that it can sit alongside classical mechanics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.
And regardless of how you judge his actual formula, at least we know this is what a science of life and mind would look like if it were to achieve the same kind of general format as the physical sciences.
You seem to think science must give some kind of account of all your attended and reported experiences and feels as if they were atomised "states of being" qualitative stuff. But life and mind are processes that exist parasitically on the Universe as itself a process. There is dissipative structure and then organisms that ratchet dissipative structure.
And the discovery that there is just the one kind of negentropic growth algorithm that explains how evolution could take hold the algorithm that is the semiotic and Bayesian modelling relation is the kind of huge simplification we were hoping for from science.
Right - that's because it's not a thing. Which is what I said.
A lot of what you say is not science, per se, but metaphysics. You're building a general theory of everything, drawing on elements of semiotics, biology, and C.S. Peirce. But ultimately you return to physicalist explanations:
Quoting apokrisis
We're on a road to nowhere.
You make that sound like a complaint. What would you prefer your science to be grounded in?
You think highway hypnosis is something unique about you?
Like I said - it's a Philosophy Forum. There are distinctions between the subject matters of science and philosophy, although those distinctions tend to be philosophical rather than scientific, meaning not easily discernable according to scientific criteria.
I have noticed with respect to Peirce, that whenever I bring up his categorisation as an objective idealist, you find ways to deprecate that or explain it away as not being what is important about his work. Peirce was active in the so-called 'golden age of American philosophy', roughly contemporaneous with Josiah Royce, William James and Borden Parker Bowne, all of whom were broadly idealist, in keeping with the zeitgeist. That was all to be rejected by the ordinary language philosophers of the 20th century and the ascendancy of scientific naturalism as the 'arbiter of reality'.
Plainly I've been born in the wrong century, although we all have to learn to cope.
You have yet to demonstrate that understand you semiotics. You have only seized on two words you think you understand - objective and idealism.
Condescension. I'm not here to pass tests set by you.
You seem to want to tell me what Peirce really argued. And I happily call bullshit on that pretension.
Are we obliged to accept every aspect of a philosopher's work or worldview? We can't think for ourselves?
Quoting Wayfarer
Some are ahead of the times and others behind them. Or if you like:
[i]"The Harlots cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet
The Winners Shout the Losers Curse
Dance before dead Englands Hearse
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to sweet delight
Some are Born to Endless Night
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day"[/i]
From 'Auguries of Innocence' by William Blake
Gould is one of my favorite writers. I learned a lot about science and writing from him. I still pull down his books of essays and read them and I've given them to all my children. It's hard to believe he's been gone for more than 20 years.
It's easy to understand why.
Quoting T Clark
I don't mean to suggest that I knew him personally; I didn't; still: Only the good die young, comes to mind in thinking about him. (different ways to interpret this; but in this context I interpret it as pass away while yet being young at heart) Or so it seems to me, at least.
One Amazon review of Goff's book, boils it down to a competition between theories for the origin of consciousness in a material world : "The book identifies three possible explanations for consciousness: dualism, materialism, and panpsychism".
Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter. Dualism just accepts that we tend to think of Mind & Matter as two completely different things, and never the twain shall meet : hyle + morph = real matter + ideal form. Monistic Panpsychism assumes that Matter is an illusion generated by the inherent mental processes of nature (a priori Cosmic Consciousness), hence matter does not matter.
Global Workspace Theory is merely a Cartesian Theater metaphor that does not attempt to answer the Origin question. Integrated Information Theory assumes that Consciousness is a summary (integral) product of fundamental mathematical essence : number. Again, these alternative definitions of Consciousness presume that some kind of mind essence "just is", with no further elaboration on its original source.
Pragmatic here & now science has no need for hypotheses about ultimate origins. But over the millennia, theoretical philosophy has produced a proliferation of possible ontologies. Which include the three noted above, plus one more that was once the leading candidate, but is no longer considered a viable option : intelligent intentional creation by divine fiat. Hence it was omitted from the "round-up". Ironically, due mostly to the quandaries of quantum science, the ancient notion of fundamental/essential Mind*1 seems to be making a comeback to fill the gaps in those other theories. :smile:
*1. Panpsychism :
Though it sounds like something that sprang fully formed from the psychedelic culture, panpsychism has been around for a very long time. Philosophers and mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, physicists Arthur Eddington, Ernst Schrödinger, and Max Planck, and psychologist William James are just a few thinkers who supported some form of panpsychism. The idea lost traction in the late 20th century, but recently, philosophers and scientists such as David Chalmers, Bernardo Kastrup, Christof Koch, and Philip Goff have revived the idea, making strong claims for some form of panpsychism.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/panpsychism-the-trippy-theory-that-everything-from-bananas-to-bicycles-are
Quoting Gnomon
Though my current conviction makes me partly dogmatic about the two being equivalent, Im at the same time curious to discover how my understanding could be wrong hence the question:
In what conceivable way is panpsychism not a reclothing (i.e., re-branding or re-veiling) of the quite ancient and, back then, basically ubiquitous notion of animism?
In other words, what can possibly be rationally different between panpsychism and animism as metaphysical understandings of reality?
----
As a reminder, to say that everything is endowed with anima is equivalent to saying that everything is endowed with psyche - first term being Latin and the second Greek, with both terms having the same underlying meaning.
And if animism needs to be made more palatable, the Stoic notion of an anima mundi is basic animism conceived of in stratified layers of efficacy in relation to the cosmos / whole.
If you call being qualified to speak to the OP a problem, then youre probably right. Im probably the only one to have discussed all this with Chalmers, Koch, Friston, etc.
OK, Mr. I'm-so-qualified :razz: Riddle me this:
According to your theory of mind/consciousness, are insects conscious? Do they have minds?
https://www.noemamag.com/the-surprisingly-sophisticated-mind-of-an-insect/
And keep your answer as free from jargon as possible, for all the stupid people here. Good philosophy is clear and concise.
You might consider me a materialist, depending on the time of day and the weather. I'm certainly not a dualist or a panpsychist. There is nothing in materialism that requires belief that the mind is not real. I certainly believe it is and I believe it matters. Seems to me you, or the author you're discussing, is trying a bit of flashy rhetorical footwork by misrepresenting the ideas of people you disagree with.
No, I didn't think you suggested you knew him. I didn't either, but he was important to me. He seemed like a cool, albeit prickly and pugnacious, person.
And, perhaps most importantly, he was on an episode of "The Simpsons."
:lol:
I could address this in detail. Ive spent time in labs where they investigate the neurobiology of jumping spiders. Cockroaches and wood lice are the stuff of introductory classes.
But I have no patience for you because you cant stop harping on about consciousness when Ive carefully explained my position on that and why it is such a confused term.
At best, consciousness = attention + reporting. A jumping spider has something that is primitively like what we would call attentional processing. But it doesnt speak so cant report or introspect.
And now you go back to bleating about whether insects are conscious in whatever muddled way you understand that term.
Can machines be conscious?
Quoting apokrisis
Speaking and/or reporting are necessary conditions for consciousness and/or introspection??? Is a jumping spider conscious or not?
A newborn cannot speak or report. Is it conscious?
Are you offering this more as a definition or a theory? Or perhaps more of a conceptual clarification (which I guess is closer to definition)? Or something else?
Materialists will dismiss both Panpsychism and Animism as primitive religious superstitions. But the 21st century quantum physicists (see my post above), who openly admit to accepting Universal Mind as a valid philosophical interpretation of their empirical work, cannot be described as "primitive" or "superstitious". Yet, more conventional scientists will still interpret the evidence in terms of their matter-is-fundamental Naturalistic worldview*1. And that's OK, for scientific purposes. Yet, for philosophical purposes, that view has an explanatory gap at the inception of Matter itself.
I do think of the ancient writings about universal Mind as prescient-but-primitive guesses about how mental phenomena could emerge from material substrates. Quantum Physics is not as definitive about such enigmatic questions, but it does point in the same direction : Mental Potential is intrinsic in the universe, but emerges in stages ; as postulated several thousand years ago in Hindu philosophy*2.
Likewise, instead of presuming that essential Potential was fully-formed into Consciousness at the beginning, some 21st century thinkers interpret that power-to-evolve-both-matter-&-minds in terms of both Evolutionary Theory and Information Theory*3. The same essential "stuff" animates Matter and informs Brains. From that non-mainstream perspective, the potential to change Possibility to Actuality, Inanimate to Animate, and Neurons to Awareness, is closer to our modern notion of causal Energy, than to fully-evolved homo sapiens Consciousness. :smile:
To Inform : implies the imparting of knowledge https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inform
Note --- Knowledge presumes Consciousness
*1. Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong :
Perhaps phenomenal properties, or proto-phenomenal precursors of them, are the fundamental intrinsic properties of matter were looking for, and each subatomic particle is a tiny conscious subject. This solves the hard problem: brain and consciousness emerge together when billions of basic particles are assembled in the right way.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/panpsychism-is-wrong/500774/
*2. Hindu Mind Evolves :
In this theory, mind is an emergent entity, but this emergence requires the presence of the Self. The mind may be viewed to be constituted by five basic components: manas, ahamkara, citta, buddhi and atman, which cannot be reduced to gross elements. Manas is the lower mind which collects sense impressions.
https://swarajyamag.com/culture/understanding-the-vedic-model-of-the-mind
*3. Is energy a form of information? :
Information is a distinct form of energy, just as electricity, magnetism, steam, nuclear, or solar radiation are also alternate forms of energy. To illustrate this, consider that information behaves similarly to other energy types. Many physicists agree that information is conserved, especially at the quantum level.
https://jumpthespark.com/2017/02/06/information-is-energy/
Note --- Information is like Energy in its Cause & Effect functions : to convert incoming photons into mental images, and mental images into language.
The human species has the further advantages of language and logic to structure its modelling relation with its world.
The animal kingdom just has its neurobiology ... although ants and termites are arguably an example of ultrasociality as well. They use a system of sign pheromones to "think" as a colony organism in a similar structural way to how humans use words to coordinate their group thinking social order.
So get the story about "consciousness" right and all the more interesting scientific questions start to flow. You don't get locked into the plaintive bleat from the back seat that is the Hard Problem being repeated over and over as the end to intelligent discussion.
What do you think of Koch losing his bet to Chalmers? Do you think Koch is ever going to win that bet (assuming he lives long enough)?
Quoting Gnomon
Only want to here point out that most ancient perspectives - such as that of Stoicism - in no way held such a view of an animistic world. This turn of events emerged with Abrahamic perspectives.
When do you think that will happen?
I'm not trying to misrepresent anyone's beliefs. Just to be descriptive of a pertinent contrasting interpretation of the Materialistic belief system*1, in a thread on the topic of the ontological status of Mind. Besides, some of the matter-first Materialists on this forum do mis-represent the beliefs of mind-first Panpsychists as primitive, superstitious, and gullible. But they are just trying to show the superiority of their own modern & scientific worldview over ancient spooky-woo. This, despite some scientific evidence to support a mind-first view.
Personally, I'm not a Panpsychist, in any formal sense. So, I don't have a dog in the race between true believers on both sides. As I've stated before : for all practical purposes, I am a Materialist; but for philosophical reasons, I am an Idealist. So, I agree with you : ideas matter, but not literally. :smile:
*1. Does [u]eliminative materialism regard consciousness as an illusion?[/u] :
There is a relatively new position in philosophy of mind called illusionism.
https://www.quora.com/Does-eliminative-materialism-regard-consciousness-as-an-illusion
Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.
https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/Win2005/entries/materialism-eliminative/
I did answer. It was how I would start to deflate an over-inflated term.
You can class that under clarification if you like. You could class it under theory if you noticed that biosemiosis was the theoretical framework I employed. You could class it under definition if you wanted to note how I somewhat sarcastically used dictionary style conventions of defining a whole in terms of its component parts.
What's so hard to understand here?
For you, never. But thanks for asking. :up:
Quoting RogueAI
Your views. Thanks for explaining further.
I see I'm not the only one.
Can you explain, in words of as few syllables as possible, what you think consciousness is?
A system, typically a brain, is conscious iff it creates a model of it's environment it uses to make predictions. Consciousness is the action or function of doing this.
That begs a lot of interesting questions about machine consciousness, yet so far I can't get Apo to byte on any of that. What's the big deal???
Ive noticed that @apokrisis hasnt responded to a number of your questions, so Ill do my best to do so in my honest interpretations of his state of mind. @apokrisis can of course readily correct me wherever he finds me mistaken in anything I say (it is, after all, a best current understanding).
(I wrote this before seeing both yours and @bert1's most recent replies; posting it all the same)
Apo is an eliminativist who deems all speak of first-person awareness and, hence, of consciousness to be a linguistic social construct devoid of real referent(s). Because of this, all your questions regarding the reality of consciousness as first-person awareness are nonsensical to him - with answers that are "not even wrong" as he might say. We are all take your pick moist robots or philosophical zombies that hypnotize ourselves via our language into illusions of being consciously aware when, in fact, no such thing can ever and in any way occur.
The socially constructed term (as though there could occur any linguistic terms that arent) we specify as consciousness, however, can be behavioristically interpreted and defined as evidenced input into a system conjoined with the output of same said system.
Hence, if a robot or computer program can report on inputs with Chat GTP as one example of this - it is then as conscious as anything else. No awareness required - or, for that matter, possible. At least not as anything that is in any way real.
You're making Apo sound like an idiot! No offense to either of you, of course.
Are you an eliminativist?
It was in no way my intention to.
I anticipate and expect that he will correct me in any way that my statements might misrepresent him. Still, from past discussions on this topic in this thread, this is what I've honestly gathered.
ps. I should have written Chat GPT (not GTP)
F - Go back and read your texts on social construction and Vygotskian psychology if you hope to stay on this course.
Besides, you really have nothing to correct in what I interpret your state of mind to be?
Use more syllables, apo. Meaning transference is important to discussions.
----------
Why do I feel like I'm in kindergarten ... on a philosophy forum? One of those things one might never know.
Ask RogueAI.
My bad for not clarifying: my last question regarding kindergarten was rhetorical.
As to RogueAI asking me, can you not, you know, express your views in manners that others can understand?
Their implications are so far too vague to be clear, apo. Do you uphold that first-person awareness, aka consciousness, is real?
Really what? Really an idea? Really material? Really semiotic as in the modelling that connects the two?
If you want a conversation, I don't need you to be polite. But you do have to do some work setting out your counter-position. If you just make the plaintiff cry, "you haven't made me understand", then you will stay stuck in the back seat with all the other time-wasters bleating on about "are we there yet".
How can I be an eliminativist given I spend all my time arguing for holism against reductionism? You are just talking out of your arse because you can't be arsed to make a proper effort.
If you feel like you are in kindergarten, it is because that is the level at which you are prepared to engage here. You could keep that up all day. Now impress me by stopping, thinking, coming up with dissent or agreement in terms of the ideas I have presented in some depth.
You might need to brush up on the philosophy and science I've cited. But you could then engage in a way where you learn something, and I might learn something too, which is the outcome that usually comes from talking to people who are up to the task of an informed dialogue.
I didn't ask "really". I asked "real". As in something that ontically occurs. Not as an idea, but as that which apprehends the idea of consciousness when so thought of.
"Really material" would be contingent on what you here mean by matter; I'll tentatively interpret you meaning that matter is the constitutional makeup of any given (what Aristotle intended by "matter") - and that consciousness thereby supervenes on its own constituents. If this is an accurate interpretation of what you here mean by "material reality", I then easily accept this to be true.
But then its being semiotically real as a "modeling that connects the idea to its constituents" can so far to me only be a misguided inference. And this precisely because I so far cannot make either rational or experiential sense of awareness of itself being an idea - I so far cannot understand how it can be an idea that thereby (due to its semiotics) then holds awareness of other ideas. This would result in turtles all the way down, for all ideas have their constituents - e.g., lesser ideas or connotations, all of which further supervene on the operational parts of a CNS - here apparently entailing that the idea of, say, evolution is in fact itself endowed with first-person awareness.
So I'll again ask a question in the name of optimally impartial philosophical enquiry:
Do you find that consciousness can only be "a) an idea and b) its constituents which are c) connected semiotically by modeling"?
Your previous reply - and I thank you for it - indicates yes. So, if your answer is "yes", then please express what "an idea" signifies in this context - such that consciousness becomes distinctly different from the idea of evolution which consciousness can be aware of (in that while the first is aware the second is not).
Yes. But what are the ontic commitments of this term "real" that you employ. Or what has become now the term "ontic" that I guess is supposed to mean "really real" or "fundamentally real" or "monistically real".
Quoting javra
I've told you I am a holist and not a reductionist and therefore don't buy the causal cop-out that is supervenience.
So your line of argument goes wrong from there. I am not a reductionist. And you don't seem to have a clue about what else that leaves.
None of that, or at least not necessarily "fundamentally real". The ontic is that which ontology is the study of. That which is actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc. Hence, is consciousness actual rather than illusory, fictional, etc.? It need not be fundamental for me to make my argument that it cannot be empirically studied by the sciences. But if you deem it illusory, fictional, etc. then that's a disagreement on what is actual and what is not in this world.
Quoting apokrisis
Could you calm down a bit? First off, you could interpret "to supervene" as "to be dependent on something else for truth, existence, or instantiation (definition pulled from Wiktionary)", which is what I intended. Let me know of a more appropriate term to express this and I'll use it: If A's occurrence holds X, Y, and Z as its constituents, then A is dependent on X, Y, and Z in such manner as that just quoted. And obviously this does not negate holistic top-down processes from operating on X, Y, and Z.
Secondly, of main interest was the one question I previously asked, together with what is meant by you to be "an idea".
But I'll cut the crap. If you have no intent to discuss the issue, then so be it.
How do you see that book you refer to, Lifes Ratchet, as fitting into a holistic point of view? From the jacket copy:
Isnt that a reductionist (i.e. bottom-up) model?
It is semiotic. The model imposes its mechanical constraints in top-down fashion so as to ratchet the biochemistry in the desired direction.
The biochemistry is the bottom-up degrees of freedom in this systems equation. But the point of the nanoscale is that it is a special zone of energy convergence. The ordinary type of physics you might imagine a world of neat determinacy is instead turned into a state of radical instability or criticality. It becomes exactly that which the most minimal "informational" nudge can push in any material direction chosen.
So it is the tradic story of the semiotic modelling relation which bridges the "explanatory gap" the question of how a model of the world could influence the world. A ratchet describes this. It is the switch that imposes the informational asymmetry on the entropic flow. It is the central "how" of how the whole causal story works.
For ordinary bottom-up engineering, building structures amidst raging thermal storms and quaking quantum uncertainty would be what suffers from an explanatory gap. It would seem blatantly the wrong choice of material foundations.
But life and mind are natural systems organisms implementing modelling relations. And the edge of chaos is what they can colonise precisely because there exists a maximally tipable state of material fury.
Life evolved its handling of chemistry until it could harness the most violent available chemical process redox reactions. This should blow the mitochondria apart. But respiratory proteins can dance a hot electron down a chain of precisely aligned receptors, dragged along by quantum tunneling effects towards the oxygen atom waiting at the end.
What is then bottom-up, if you like, is that the metabolic system the genes stabilise can then become the platform for building further levels of life and mind. Neurons can play the same trick by stabilising the flux of a sensory world. Language can stabilise the flux of a psychological world. Logic can stabilise the flux of a rationalised world.
It all rests on the ability to use the instability of the nanoscale as the right kind of material fashion. A zone of maximum switchability that occurs only in a watery solvent on a Sun heated planet which in itself makes a system of mechanical switches the next most probable evolutionary step.
Information can have maximum meaning where maximum entropy or uncertainty is present.
But first, the material itself has to be a dissipative flow. It is useless trying to milk action from a dead equilibrium. The material realm has to be in a critical state as Hoffman describes. And then the lightest of touches can bend it to your will, from the organismic point of view.
This is monism. This is reductionism. So how I think of things how Peirce thought of things, how systems science thinks of things just doesn't share your ontological commitments. You are trying to jam square pegs into round holes.
Forget it. Until you stop and think about why your questions are wrong, you can't begin to learn how to think in holistic terms and ask questions that are meaningful in light of that ontology.
Quoting javra
Then stop excusing your lack of effort by claiming I haven't ever said anything in reply.
Desired by whom? Actually your description contains other terms implying intentionality - life evolving its complexity, neurons that play tricks, and so on. There seems an implied agency here, which is noticeably at odds with the wording of the books description. Not to mention top-down constraints - if molecular structures are the bottom, what is the origin of the top down constraints?
The bleeding organism. The system with the metabolism. Don't pretend this is some tricky mystery.
Quoting Wayfarer
Implied? It's a fucking theory of teleology.
Quoting Wayfarer
Read what I said. Criticality itself "others" the possibility of its own stabilisation. By molecular chaos being the rule, semiotic constraints become that which could then take maximum advantage of this material lack of constraints.
So you would agree, then, that the appearance of organisms is also the appearance of intentionality and agency?
:up:
There's also the challenge of inventing a fascinating personality, becoming a success in a creative field : the personality as product. Strong poet, original philosopher, revolutionary scientist, etc. Revolutionize the means of production and seduction, to burn always brighter and hotter. To conform is to violate the norm in just the right way.
My lack of effort, you say. Alright then. Baby steps.
Here's a proposition: "I am conscious of this text." In your worldview, does this proposition have a truth-value?
Sure. Thats what semiosis explains. The feeling of being a self in its world by being a prediction machine with its collection of interpretive habits.
You seem to be a level-headed fellow. So, I was concerned that you interpreted my brief sketches of three competing worldviews as "mis-representing" the ideas of those who hold such views. It was not intended as a put-down, but as a way to distinguish the philosophically pertinent differences between them. If you are willing, I'd like to hear your own compare & contrast between monistic Materialism and monistic Panpsychism. For example, here's what I said in the post above :
"Apparently, monistic Materialism solves the origin problem by denying that it is a problem : consciousness is not real, but ideal : a figment of imagination, so it literally does not matter. Dualism just accepts that we tend to think of Mind & Matter as two completely different things, and never the twain shall meet : hyle + morph = real matter + ideal form. Monistic Panpsychism assumes that Matter is an illusion generated by the inherent mental processes of nature (a priori Cosmic Consciousness), hence matter does not matter."
You admitted to being a Materialist, depending on circumstances ; and I admitted to being a Materialist, for all practical purposes. But I suspect that you assumed I was prejudiced in favor of spooky Panexperientialism. So, I confessed that I am not a panpsychist in any formal sense. And I don't believe that grains of sand are conscious. Besides, I have never been a hippie or Hindu, and I don't personally know anyone who admits openly to being a Panpsychist, except for a few scientists & philosophers whose books I have read. Yet, ancient Cosmic Mind theories do seem to be prescient of modern non-mechanical post-classical physics.
To clarify where I'm coming from, I'll note that I have been steered away from conventional Materialism by the elementary physics of 20th century Quantum Theory. The QT pioneers were shocked to discover that the fundamental indivisible Atom they were seeking seemed to fracture into a menagerie of sub-atomic particles. Eventually, even the evanescent sub-sub-particles (e.g. Quarks) soon dissolved into nothing more substantial than uncertain statistical equations*1. So, the mathematical physicists began to describe their new Reality in terms of a Quantum Field of "virtual particles", that only become real when observed by experimenters*2. That's not magic, it's physics.
Any effect of the observer's mind upon material reality was, of course, quite controversial for those steeped in classical mechanical physics. But, after a century of debate, the flame-wars have calmed-down. So, QFT now seems to be almost mainstream*3. Today, some quantum physicists and mathematicians (noted in post above) openly admit to some form of Panpsychism worldview. However, my personal view has little to do with that ancient Cosmic Mind concept. Instead, it's a combination of Quantum & Information theories, as advocated by physicist Paul Davies, and the Santa Fe Institute for the study of complexity, for example.
I just started reading a book, by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter. And the subtitle says : "How the Mind creates the features & structure of all things, and why this Insight transforms Physics". It mentions Quantum Bayesianism*4, which I was only vaguely familiar with. Perhaps, a glance at the excerpt below will give you an idea of the 21st century notion that Mind is fundamental to reality, not an incidental side-effect of random evolution. I mention all of this abstruse & esoteric stuff, just to let you know that I'm not an anti-science nut-case spouting hippie non-sense. :smile:
*1. A quark is a type of elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks ... which means they are fermions according to the spinstatistics theorem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark
*2. The observer effect is the fact that observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes it. Observer effects are especially prominent in physics where observation and uncertainty are fundamental aspects of modern quantum mechanics.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8423983
*3. Quantum field theory,a framework for explaining how subatomic particles behave, ... Mathematician Seeks to Bring Quantum Field Theory into Mainstream Math
https://bfl.cns.utexas.edu news mathematician-seeks-t...
*4. Quantum Bayesianism :
In physics and the philosophy of physics, quantum Bayesianism is a collection of related approaches to the interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which the most prominent is QBism (pronounced "cubism"). QBism is an interpretation that takes an agent's actions and experiences as the central concerns of the theory. QBism deals with common questions in the interpretation of quantum theory about the nature of wavefunction superposition, quantum measurement, and entanglement. According to QBism, many, but not all, aspects of the quantum formalism are subjective in nature. For example, in this interpretation, a quantum state is not an element of realityinstead it represents the degrees of belief an agent has about the possible outcomes of measurements. For this reason, some philosophers of science have deemed QBism a form of anti-realism. The originators of the interpretation disagree with this characterization, proposing instead that the theory more properly aligns with a kind of realism they call "participatory realism", wherein reality consists of more than can be captured by any putative third-person account of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism
Note --- QBism expands upon the notion of "participatory realism", that quantum physicist John A. Wheeler postulated back in the '60s. From the perspective of Materialism, it may sound like anti-realism.
How is that feeling generated from non-feeling matter? Why is there a feeling at all? Why is there a feeling associated with some brain processes but not others? Doesn't the regulation of hormones and digestion, to give two examples, involve prediction and habituation? Could that feeling be generated in machines? How would you test whether an alien species has this feeling?
Quantum Bayesian is really out there. Consciousness is all the rage these days.
Quoting Gnomon
While I wouldn't say that physicality doesn't matter, I'm in general agreement with the given description of panpsychism. Nevertheless:
So conceived it seems to me that a world of so called monistic panpsychism would yet necessarily consist of an ontological duality: namely, between 1) awareness (with any kind of ur-awareness which might apply to non-life included) and 2) everything that is not awareness (which, as such, thereby informs, and thereby gives form to, awareness). Here, then, all aspects of mind and body that awareness can be in any way aware of would ultimately consist of the same basic stuff - with mind and matter being only a property dualism of this substance (rather than being two ontological substances). And, in conformity with the boldfaced and underlined parts of the quote, this underlying stuff/substance which is everything that is not awareness would itself ultimately be the product of awareness when globally addressed - this then likely in a multiplicity of different ontological manners.
Then: Properly speaking, would you interpret panpsychism thus understood to be an ontological monism or an ontological, non-Cartesian dualism?
The less woo understanding of this Bayesianism is that the human measurer can construct the mechanical constraints on a prepared quantum system so as to decohere it to the degree it answers to a classical counterfactual description.
This is biosemiotic. The basis of biology itself is the ability of cellular machinery to decohere the quantum nanoscale realm of chemistry to ratchet the available energies in the desired metabolic fashion.
An enzyme mechanically grips and forces two reactants into the exact conjunction that gives them no choice but to bond. A respiratory chain gives a hot electron no choice but to quantum tunnel down its mechanically structured pathway.
In effect, this biological machinery is making quantum measurements. The fixed shaped of proteins assembled by genetic information prepares the world in a way that quantum wave functions are left with no choice but to collapse in the counterfactual fashion that the biological machinery is insisting on.
So ontologically, the physics of the world can always be quantum. You dont need actual collapse. You just need systems of constraint that limit the possibilities to the degree that the state of a mechanical switch is almost surely flipped. On the side of the physics, it is still a probabilistic world. But encounters with the mechanical structures built with genetic information can make those probabilities asymptotically close to 1.
Humans in labs are simply doing the same trick at a much larger energy scale. Biology lives right on the quasi classical border of the quantum realm, milking its potential for tunneling, superposition and other holistic actions. Labs use special gear to create states of coherence over metres that can they be decohered by mechanical structures which enforce measurements that then fit their models of quantum physics.
So the key here is to realise that the physics takes place in a decohering environment. There is no collapse of a wavefunction needed. But you get the effective collapse because environments certaintly reduce the uncertainty of quantum probabilities in a historical fashion. The holism of contextuality means the Universe does develop classical looking structure in terms of its statistics.
And then life and mind can apply mechanical logic - the counterfactuality of informational structure - to impose its schemes on the physical world. Genes code for biological molecules which can make measurements and entrain chemistry at the nanoscale to an organised metabolic network. Human scientists can likewise create informational theories that are a recipe for the electronic devices which can likewise entrain the quantum realm to a technological level of metabolism - the sapiens-feeding metabolism of the modern global economic system organised by its micro-electronics and informstion flows.
Depends on how you look at it. :joke:
Empirical science ignored the mental aspects of reality for centuries, because it was associated with Souls, Spirits, and Ghosts. But now, quantum scientists are forced to deal with the effects of observation on the foundations of reality. I'm not aware of any results of that new insight that could be called "practical magic".
Except, of course, for the ability to transform immaterial information into physical matter & energy*1. But the science of "virtual reality" certainly gives philosophers something to think about. Quantum Bayesianism is one way of looking at how personal beliefs & expectations can affect the models of Reality that we construct. For theoretical philosophy though, I see many possibilities for making sense of a non-classical non-mechanical world, where ideas are either a dime a dozen, or the substance of human culture.
For me, the Statistical Holism of quantum entanglement is not a sign of divine perversion (e.g. trickster god). But it does put ancient holistic models into a new light. Seems like it could be interpreted as Ontological Monism. But from another angle, we've intuited for millennia that reality is a mind/body Substance Dualism of some sort. Personally, I have interpreted this New Science in terms of Quantum & Information theories : evolutionary EnFormAction*2 and ontological Enformationism*3. :smile:
1. Elemental Information Hypothesis :
Several philosophers and scientists have concluded from implications of Quantum Theory, Information Theory, and Computer Simulations that mathematical-mental Information is the elemental substance of reality underlying the Space-Time-Matter-Energy we observe on the macro level of human perception and in classical physics.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Note -- "Physicists in Japan have shown experimentally that a particle can be made to do work simply by receiving information, rather than energy".
https://physicsworld.com/a/information-converted-to-energy/
*2. The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
EnFormAction theory takes a leap of imagination, to envision a more holistic interpretation of the evidence, both empirical and philosophical. Contrary to the Neo-Darwinian theory of Evolution, EFA implies a distinct direction for causation, toward the top rung in the hierarchy of Emergence, as denoted by the arrow of Time. Pure Randomness would just go around in circles. But selection (Entention) works like the ratchet in a clock-work to hold the latest cycle at a useful, and ultimately meaningful, stable state : a Phase Transition, or a step on the ladder of Being. Darwinian Evolution is going nowhere, but EnFormAction is going out-there.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
*3. What is Information? :
The Enformationism thesis and the BothAnd Blog are based on a multi-level understanding of the phenomenon known as Information. Unfortunately, most people have only a vague or general concept of what the term means scientifically and philosophically. So, in answer to a request for a general definition, as it pertains to inorganic (physical), organic (biological), and semantic types of information, I have defined Information in the context of various real-world instances of ubiquitous enforming power.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page16.html
That's as good an answer as I'll probably get in regard to my question. :grin: Thanks for it.
Quoting Gnomon
I myself think of this as "Empirical science ignored the mental aspects of reality for centuries, because it was associated with Psyche (as in "psychology" - the study of psyche)". But yea, your assessment seems to be about right.
I don't really know much about panpsychism, so I won't comment on it. When I talk about materialism, I mean pretty much the standard meaning - the universe is made up of matter and energy interacting in space and time. That manifests in living organisms with nervous systems as neurological processes which manifest as mental processes which manifest as behavior. Mental processes in humans include thoughts, feelings, memories, perception, experience, consciousness, and other similar processes. They also include unconscious processes such as autonomic responses, reflexes, maintenance of physical homeostasis, and many other processes. Together those processes make up the mind. Is it real? Yes. Is it physical - good question. What kind of a thing is it? I'm not sure, but I do believe it is a manifestation of physical, biological, neurological processes.
Shoot. Going by that definition, I could qualify as a materialist myself. :wink: No bones to pick. Cool definition. :up:
Coincidentally, I just came across a YouTube video, by Sabine Hossenfelder, on the topic of "why the universe is not locally real". After a quick Google, I found that it's a hot topic right now, because of the recent Nobel winners. Quantum physics should give those who are "irreducibly fixated" pause to question their assumptions about their own local Reality. To quote an old TV ad : "Is it real, or is it Memorex?" :smile:
Why No Portals?
Universe is not locally real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkgPJo_z6Y
The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/
The quoted sentence above, sounds pretty technical (abstruse). Can you deconstruct it for someone not familiar with Biosemiotic jargon? Does it deny that the observer of a quantum experiment can influence, but not control, its outcome? Is Biosemiotics derived from a metaphysical Materialism worldview? Hence, avoiding the "woo" label, signifying non-sense? Do you think that Wheeler meant to imply a mind-over-matter form of magic?
Are you implying that Wheeler's Participatory Realism is more woo than Biosemiotics? Does PR sound like "anti-realism" to you? What does Biosemiosis mean for a human "construct" like Participatory Realism? The meaning of that phrase is simple enough : biological humans play a role in the construction of their own personal mental model of reality. And Bayesianism is about private subjective first-person beliefs (models), not about ding an sich reality. Third-person objective models of reality (science facts) are based on a consensus drawn from among various first person models (opinions). But it's still a mental map, not the physical terrain. :smile:
On Participatory Realism :
These views have lately been termed "participatory realism" to emphasize that rather than relinquishing the idea of reality (as they are often accused of), they are saying that reality is more than any third-person perspective can capture. Thus, far from instances of instrumentalism or antirealism, these views of quantum theory should be regarded as attempts to make a deep statement about the nature of reality. This paper explicates the idea for the case of QBism. As well, it highlights the influence of John Wheeler's "law without law" on QBism's formulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.04360
Instrumentalism is thus the view that scientific theories should be thought of primarily as tools for solving practical problems rather than as meaningful descriptions of the natural world.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/instrumentalism
Anti-Realism : in philosophy, a belief that is opposed to realism (= the belief that objects continue to exist even when no one is there to see them):
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/anti-realism
Just saw the video. Very interesting. Still, first off, Im no expert in the intricacies of modern physics and, secondly, all modern physics is chockfull of inference (the speakers reference to multiple worlds theorys possible disagreements with some of the premises as one example). So, Ill let others engage in the heavy-duty physics interpretations of these latest findings.
For what its worth, though, in terms of non-locality and all the other weird aspects of quantum physics:
We often assume that we conscious humans are the be-all and end-all of awareness this as (mind-endowed) observers. Bring back the facts of biology into this equation and we multicellular organisms are constituted of individual living cells from individual skin cells to individual neuron cells. Grant that each of these individual cells is endowed with its own primitive mind (as per, for example, the enactivist stance of Evan Thompson in his book "Mind in Life") needless to add, cells to which the multicellular organisms in which they occur serves as their commonwealth upon which each such cell is dependent and whose preservation each such cell operates to maintain and you obtain the following biocentric like perspective:
Each one of these primitive mind endowed (and, hence, awareness endowed) cells is constituted of organic molecules some of which which have been empirically evidenced to exhibit at least some QM properties. *** The cell itself, however, does not exhibit QM properties. Skipping a good deal of rational inference, for each cell to properly function so as to live requires that each cell of itself settles all the QM weirdness (which, again, can apply to various organic molecules and, needless to add, their components) in a way that at the very least ends up resembling our locally real world.
We are constituted of these cells. Those that pertain to our CNS then constitute our own mind and give form to our own conscious awareness.
Going by the aforementioned, then, our own empirically known world will then necessarily be locally real.
I know, the just expressed is in certain respects speculative or at least will appear so to those who might disagree with some of the premises expressed, such that an individual cell holds its own primitive mind, one that thereby also observes its environment (think, for a blatant example, of an ameba that recognizes and must readily distinguish predator from pray). All the same, this perspective so far works for me as a way of making sense of how QM applies to our empirically known reality.
At any rate, nice video / info!
----
*** for example:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/11/09/238365/a-natural-biomolecule-has-been-measured-acting-in-a-quantum-wave-for-the-first-time/
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-diffract-molecules.html
------
Edit: As a quick addendum to the proposed perspective: I take this to be readily evident but it might not be so to others: our immediate environment is always thoroughly infused with cellular life, be it diploid (e.g., eukaryotes such as ameba) of haploid (e.g. bacteria on solid surfaces and pollen in the air) all of which would, in the previously given perspective, of itself settle quantum weirdness so as to successfully persist as an individual cell one that interacts with its environment, including with other (locally real) cells. So, in this interpretation, we always dwell in a non-QM empirical world - this if ones own bodys makeup were to not be enough (though I currently think it is). Our empirical awareness of QM's validity only comes into play when we focus - not on life, but - life's (as well as non-life's) material components.
I didn't think you were an expert on the philosophy of monistic Panpsychism; neither am I. But you seem to have a negative opinion of it. Others on this forum openly label such immaterial notions as "woo". It is obviously contrary to the fundamental axiom*1 of monistic Materialism. And it may seem contradict another basic assumption of Naturalism : "nothing supernatural"*2. Both of those positions are presumptions, not conclusions from the empirical scientific method.
Ironically, some supporters of the Ppsyche idea are professional scientists (see my post above). Yet they will admit it's not an objective empirical observation, but a merely philosophical conjecture*3 from personal experience with the immaterial (i.e. mathematical) non-classical non-mechanical sub-atomic nature of the foundations of Reality. So, that raises the question : Is the Universal Mind Conjecture a plausible/tenable/rational philosophical (not scientific) inference/hunch/hypothesis (e.g. from quantum evidence) to explain the emergence of mental phenomena late in the evolution of material phenomena. If so, why or why not? I have an ulterior, but not nefarious, motive for soliciting your unbiased opinion.
My understanding of the traditional & modern Universal Mind theories is also superficial. As they used to say, "all I know is what I read in the papers"(e.g. Wiki). I'm not a member of any group of believers. But, as I understand it, the Cosmic Mind concept assumes that the quality of Consciousness (summarized as Mind) is prior to quantitative Matter. Hence, the material objects we know via the 5 senses, are manifestations of some loosely-defined mind-like power inherent in the universe. Some may think of that universal power as an eternal consciousness (e.g. Brahma). But others may be content to think of it as simply an impersonal primordial Principle of some kind : Logos. All cosmic conjectures are, of course, non-empirical, hence objectively unprovable.
Are you familiar with 21st century Information Theory? My own Information-centric view is similar to Ppsyche in some ways, except that the ultimate Principle (EnFormAction/Directed Energy) is not defined as a conscious Mind, but more like an evolutionary computer program. It's also limited to our best understanding of foundational sub-atomic Physics, plus observed evidence of astronomical evolution, and interpreted in terms of Information Theory. No reference to traditional or biblical or shamanic sources.
So, Enformationism is intended to be more specific in its definitions, and attempts to adhere more closely to current scientific knowledge. It also avoids putting words in the mouth of the Unknown God/Principle (e.g. thou shalt/shalt not). Instead, the "book of nature" (e.g. Laws of Physics) is the only Word (Logos) of the hypothetical Programmer. I know, it's a bit much to grok. But, does that kind of conjecture sound any more plausible/tenable, to you, than traditional Panpsychism? Yes, no, maybe? :smile:
*1. Is materialism an axiom or a metaphysical belief?
On this understanding, materialism is a metaphysical belief. It is unclear, however, whether we can consider it an axiom
https://www.quora.com/Is-materialism-an-axiom-or-a-metaphysical-belief
*2. Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them :
the sciences have de facto conceded ontological naturalism: supernaturalist belief systems simply arent tenable anymore
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/16193
*3. Philosophical Conjecture :
In scientific philosophy, Karl Popper pioneered the use of the term "conjecture" to indicate a statement which is presumed to be real, true, or genuine, mostly based on inconclusive grounds, in contrast with a hypothesis (hence theory, axiom, principle), which is a testable statement based on accepted grounds.
https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Conjecture
Apo, I could say the same about the quote from your post. But I didn't want to be crass. :joke:
I was simply asking for clarification of unfamiliar jargon and technical idioms. Is that so hard? :smile:
You cut and paste all this stuff you dont understand. That is why you cant follow an informed discussion about it.
What I said :-)
I read the post you linked. It doesn't really say anything about what the mind is, only what it isn't.
The whole blind spot argument doesn't make sense to me. I can certainly see my mind from the inside, but I can also see it from the outside. I can also see other's minds from the outside. I don't see any big mystery.
Agreed. They are what R.G. Collingwood called "absolute presuppositions."
Quoting Gnomon
If that's true, they are metaphysics - ways of looking at the world. The question to ask is whether or not they are useful ways.
Well, philosophers do say that 'wisdom begins in wonder'.
Well, you can see their behaviors. Their inner experiences (or lack thereof) are out of reach. Do other people see red the way I see green? Who knows.
Sorry to have bothered you with dumb questions about an esoteric topic. I guess Biosemiotics is not for the uninformed general public. Are you reserving that secret information for only the cognoscenti? :joke:
It's true. From the outside, the mind manifests in behavior. That behavior includes self-reporting, which I think gives valuable insights about other people's inner lives. Who cares if other people see red the way I see green. That doesn't mean anything.
You seem to be more familiar with Biology than with Quantum Physics*1. If so, you may be able to enlighten me about Biosemiotics (BS). Which has been proposed as an alternative to Panpsychism (PP) as a mechanism for the emergence of Mind from Matter. doesn't seem to be willing to engage with an infidel (unbeliever in Materialism) to explain some of the technical jargon he uses in his posts. My interest in BS is simply that the semiotic (symbolic) aspects of the BS theory may be related to the Information Theory that I am better aquainted with. But some of the language sounds like Postmodern linguistic analysis*2 that is opaque to my simple mind. Does BS tell us anything new & important about Biology in general, or about the symbol manipulating Mind?
Although It's clear to me that the Potential for Mental Phenomena (sensation ; psychology ; awareness ; knowledge, etc) must have been inherent in Nature from the beginning, my understanding of Information Theory tells me that the "primitive mind" wouldn't necessarily be Conscious or Aware. Instead, it could have begun as nothing more sophisticated than exchanges of Energy, which are meaningless abstract interrelationships. Yet the human brain seems to be capable of processing & integrating perceived-information-structures/patterns into personally relevant meanings. Those private subjective meanings are what I would call "awareness". Anyway, that's the hypothesis I'm working on. :smile:
*1. Quantum biology at the cellular level :
Quantum biology is emerging as a new field at the intersection between fundamental physics and biology, promising novel insights into the nature and origin of biological order.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23470561/
*2. Postmodernist Writing :
I think most Postmodernist writing can be classified into these categories: ... Much of analytic philosophy is so abstruse and hermetically sealed that it too becomes an exercise in obscurantism. Where the style of thought diminishes content.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2015/02/nonsense-and-postmodernist-writing.html
Yes. But useful for what purpose?
The materialists on this forum appear to be only interested in physical scientific uses : e.g. can we build artificial intelligence into computers? However, the panpsychists seem to be focused on metaphysical philosophical purposes : e.g. can we understand the relationship between the real world of physics and the ideal world of metaphysics?
For the purposes of this forum, do you prefer impersonal mechanistic objectives, or personal meaningful motives? Is that a fair question? Some posters are clear about their preferences. But you seem to be somewhat ambivalent about siding with Science or Philosophy or Both. Perhaps that's a sign of an open mind? And I applaud the open-door policy. At least it leaves the door ajar for exchanges of views : "ways of looking at the world" :smile:
Yes. Exactly. Science needs materialism to work. Are there aspects of life where a materialist view is not helpful? Sure. Metaphysics is a toolbox. You can pull out the right metaphysical tool for the job when you need it.
I wont be much help, and this because I so far find this very quoted affirmation to be nonsensical. Bio-semiotics is the semiotics of life it addresses the meaning transference of lifeforms and all this entails. To apply biosemiotics to a former cosmos devoid of life from which life emerged will either necessitate a panpsychistic cosmos by default or, else, again, it will make no sense: the semiotics of life, i.e. biosemiotics, applied to processes of non-life in attempts to explain lifes emergence and all aspects of life, thereby explaining the semiotics of life. Its circular reasoning consisting of a great sum of allegories and metaphors that utilize poorly defined words (if they are at all defined: e.g., life, meaning, etc.) that after all the smoke and mirrors pass by ultimately explains nothing: we start with biosemiotics to explain biosemiotics via a very fancy loop. Or, more simply, we use premise A to explain A. And then call it a done deal: everything explained, including the very issue of A which we were principally focusing on.
I have nothing against the study of biosemiotics. But using life to explain life from the vantage of a non-living (else, life-devoid) cosmos, again, to me so far does not make sense. Philosophically speaking. But thats just fallible me.
So Ill let others explain their own views as best they can, if they so wish.
You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims. :up:
Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the sign between the world and its interpretation.
That is the familiar epistemic first step.
Then semiosis becomes also an ontology by pointing out life and mind instantiate this epistemology as their Bayesian modelling relation.
No claims are made about pansemiosis in this. Life and mind are defined by instantiating a modelling relation within a world that has its own unmodelled reality.
And then things get more interesting. Physics starts to discover that physics is more lively - it houses self-organising dissipative structure. Quantum mechanics makes this fundamental by tacking on statistical mechanics and introducing decoherence/holography.
It gets a bit pansemiotic as there is somehow an observer baked into the physics. There is no model and no localised sign relation. But metaphorically there is interpretance - what quantum folk call contextuality. Dissipative structure has the kind of holism where every wavefunction collapse is read by us, as modellers, as a system of sign. The physical events that mark histories of interactions and destroy quantum information are the cosmos measuring itself into ever more definite being.
So it is metaphorical. But better than the reductionst and atomistic metaphors we were using to account for the weirdness of the quantum realm.
Then biosemiosis as a new science crystallised when Peirces introduction of a mediating sign as that which connected mind to world was replaced by Pattees introduction of a mediating switch.
Life is founded on mechanical switches or ratchets which physically link the informational and entropic aspects of a living and mindful dissipative structure.
Pattee had this crucial insight in the 1970s. But it wasnt until the 1990s that enough of Peirces work had been recovered and understood well enough for Pattee to make the connection that his hierarchy theory and modelling relations approach was semiosis under another name. After going quiet for a few years - having fended of the arguments of myself among others - he suddenly emerged as a rebranded biosemiotician in a blaze of statement papers.
Then roll forward a decade and the other shoe dropped in terms of biophysics showing how biology indeed exploits quantum effects so as to be able to create an organised metabolism using the information bound up in enzymes and other kinds of molecular motors. Pattees mechanical switches and ratchets.
So biosemiosis makes contact with physical reality by that shift from the still rather nebulous idea of a sign to be read to the completely concrete story of switches to be flipped. Biology uses a mechanical interface to mediate between biological information and environmental entropy gradients. The combo is the system we call an organism with a metabolism.
As my interests are more on the mind side than the life side, I am focusing on the higher levels of semiosis that are founded on this basic biological level of energy capture.
Either the extrapolated worldview of the cosmos you endorse is not one of biosemiotics or I stand by what I previously said - so far finding nothing that contradicts my statements.
Besides, this is between you and @Gnomon.
Unless you want to bring me into it. But then, in this thread about the science of consciousness youve so far been unable to address the rather basic question of whether I am conscious of this text is a truth-baring proposition. Not much of anything to go on here. So Im not inclined to participate.
My question also.
Quoting apokrisis
But this 'epistemic cut' is that between a subject of experience, and the world in which it exists, even if in very primitive form. On the Information Philosopher's page on Pattee, he quotes him as saying:
What he's calling 'an epistemic problem' is actually the metaphysical problem of appearance ('world image') and reality ('what we call the real world'). So I don't see that as 'resolving' the idealist-realist distinction.
Quoting apokrisis
Somehow. There is a lot of argument about whether 'the observer' can be an instrument, if that instrument is itself not observed, or what if anything would happen in the absence of any observer, as by stipulation, that is not something we could ever know.
I gave you the answer. Your question suffers from logical vagueness. Affirming yes or no would make no useful difference.
It remains up to you to define consciousness in terms that pragmatically means anything measurable if you are indeed talking about the science of it. Or even just its metaphysics.
What is your theory of truth?
I would say the cat on the mat is the truth bearer for the proposition, "The cat is on the mat.", and I don't see it as making sense to think that a proposition could be inherently truth bearing.
Honesty is important. For trust and the like. No, you only just gave me your answer right now. Its value here overlooked.
Quoting apokrisis
To precisely demarcate what personal conscious is is not to define one's personal consciousness in ways that are measurable. Nor does metaphysics mandate that what is shall itself be measurable. I'll here point this truth at your own worldview, which infers the Apeiron to be a required aspect of what is real: The Apeiron by definition is immeasurable, and yet it is still what your metaphysics relies on at a basic level of explanation.
My own theory of truth in a nutshell: that which conforms to what is actual is true. Prior to you then testing out any and all possible ways this might not hold - but do if you so care - the question I asked apo was not based on "my theory of truth" but on his, regardless of what it might be.
:up:
You do a lot of weaselling to avoid supplying a definition to the term that I must give a yes or no answer on.
Ill help you out. Do you mean something more than attending and reporting if I agree I am conscious of the text? If more, what exactly?
Why not?
You belittling insults aside (yes, that apes win by posturing is a fact of nature), how on earth could I when you address the proposition of "I am conscious of this text" as neither having a truth-value nor being without one. Weaselling, huh. Nonsense pure and simple.
Quoting apokrisis
And here it is. In assuming that "I am conscious of this text" can be true (what a stupendous presumption on my part; for who knows if this proposition can in fact be true, after all. Right?):
The addressed "I" is not identical to the text it is being conscious of. The text is other to that whose occurrence is addressed by the term "I", which holds awareness of the text. Fast forward to what I've previous said in this thread, and that which is addressed by the term "I" holds conscious awareness of empirical givens without itself being an empirical given - either to its own conscious being or to any others. Of note, even though the addressed "I" can only occur in a duality to other which it observes and thereby constitutes a self, it is never identical to that which it observes. Again, it is thereby other in relation to all empirical data. An AI program attends and responds to information - as does an alarm clock - but is not endowed with a conscious being which we term "I" in propositions such as that provided.
Yours is a denial of those truths whose consequences are not useful to you - that of consciousness's occurrence very much included. I don't much admire your approach, for the same reason I don't admire the approach of Young Earth Creationist among others.
Try to insult me in a wiser way the next time around. That way, you end up having the last word.
Let me insult you again. You continue to weasel your way out of the requirement to provide a counterfactual definition to fit your counterfactual proposition. Technically, your position becomes not even wrong, simply vague.
Now for more of your weaseling to pretend you are upholding your end of the proffered exchange.
He replieth!
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional
What on earth are you talking about??? Other than your ego's need to insult - which does hold semantic value - your expressions are entirely nonsensical.
That "I am conscious of this text" is not a counterfactual proposition, no more than is "the cat is on the mat".
Your turn.
Still not even an attempt to define your use of consciousness here then? You had many chances now. That says you cant do it.
How can something entirely nonsensical be wrong instead of not even wrong?
Quoting apokrisis
Back to the drawing board: Whats wrong with first-person awareness as a definition for consciousness? Well, unless one finds the given definition to be entirely nonsensical.
Yes. Materialism is not helpful for dealing with the philosophy of mind*1. That's why David Chalmers, a professional Neurologist, calls the metaphysics of Mind : "the hard problem". The philosophy of Panpsychism is all about aboutness*2. :smile:
*1. Materialism in the philosophy of mind :
Materialism which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the raw feel of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; aboutness seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense.
https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/materialism-in-the-philosophy-of-mind/v-1
*2. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter is a 2011 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon. The book covers topics in biosemiotics, philosophy of mind, and the origins of life. Broadly, the book seeks to naturalistically explain "aboutness", that is, concepts like intentionality, meaning, normativity, purpose, and function; which Deacon groups together and labels as ententional phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_Nature
A neurologist is an MD. Wikipedia says:
Do you have any evidence for Chalmers being a neurologist?
I agree that Biosemiotics is a theory of living things, not thinking things. So, I don't understand why sarcastically replied that "You did a splendid job of misrepresenting what biosemiosis claims". His alternate explanation is way over my head : "Simply put, semiotics resolves the antique dilemma of realism vs idealism by inserting the epistemic cut of the sign between the world and its interpretation".
The notion of an "epistemic cut" is not included in my everyday vocabulary. And I am not educated in Postmodern linguistic analysis, so the quote below*1 just sounds like gobbledygook to me. I asked apo to dumb it down for us un-indoctrinated dummies, but he seems to think it's beneath his dignity to stoop that low. Terrence Deacon's use of semiotics*2 seems to be limited to the recent biological phases of evolution, not to a "primeval epistemic cut". And I find his language much easier for a layman to grasp. Is the "epistemic cut" a case of circular reasoning, or of cutting Nature at imaginary joints? :smile:
*1. The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut :
Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code.
https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html
*2. How Molecules Became Signs :
These molecules are [i]not the source of biological information but are instead semiotic artifacts onto which dynamical functional constraints have been progressively offloaded during the course of evolution.[/i] ___Terrence Deacon
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-021-09453-9
Sorry. Perhaps I mis-spoke. What do you call a "neural scientist" if not a "neurologist"? A "neuroscientist"? I didn't mean to imply that he is an MD. Apparently, he's merely a Ph.D. :smile:
David Chalmers :
He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU's Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org wiki David_Chalmers
Thanks for stepping-in there. Your explanation makes more sense to me than the "epistemic cut" notion. For someone with no formal training in Philosophy or Biosemiotics, such jargon is way over my pointy little head. :smile:
You just switched from conscious of x to first person awareness. Are we talking about a thing or a process, counterfactually speaking here?
I was talking about a process.
And then when you make claims about consciousness of x - as something more than attention+reporting - is consciousness of the presence of a colour the same as consciousness of some bit of text? And is consciousness of a lump of rock the same as consciousness of a bit of text?
Are these all exactly the same propositions in your book or are there telling differences that might cause you to qualify your meaning in speaking about consciousness as a process.
Yes, you do need to back to the drawing board and do some work on your definitions so that there could be a less amateur discussion here.
And how is any awareness of which we can be in any way aware of not a process? Even none-empirical experiences such as those of our own happiness and sureness (as two examples) are process. Never mind our awareness of percepts and, hence, of empirical data.
Besides, as Ive previously expressed, I make no inferential speculation as to awareness being an entity/substance, a process, both, or neither. Period. That unknown, or uncertainty, or vagueness as you term it, is part of my stance.
So what is first-person awareness? One should intimately know via one's own experiences.
Quoting apokrisis
I've already addressed these questions here.
-----
Quoting apokrisis
From our exchanges it so far seems to me you want to win arguments by vanquishment as though philosophy were a zero-sum game. It isnt. You might want to ask more questions of those you disagree with, answer those questions youve been asked by them, and address the replies you've already been given.
This since we're so candidly exchanging advice on what the other should do.
Sure. But if that definition isnt being offered, as in this case
And if the term is meant to be meaningful as a scientific definition rather than, say, just a woolly catch-all word with no clear ontological commitment except Cartesian dualism in sight
You can see my problem now cant you?
So you think I should take you more seriously? You believe this is a discussion to be cashed out in propositional logic?
Quoting javra
Well, yup! :lol:
Lets see. Youre laughing because you, in contrast, have certain knowledge of what consciousness is and isnt in an empirically measurable way. This while at the same time holding that whether the proposition I am conscious of this text can hold a truth-value is unanswerable. :up:
As I previously expressed: Good luck with that!
I laugh as what else can one do when being pestered by someone so incapable of following a straight line of thought.
I asked for your measurable definition - the one that would make sense to a scientist wanting to get on with their scientific inquiry. I offered the kind of pragmatic definition a scientist would use - verbal reports of acts of attention. But for some reason you dont want to go there.
I ask what more would you want to say. You get all huffy and evasive. Answer my questions, you keep demanding. What question was that I have to say.
So stamp your feet and splutter away. But Ive lost interest.
Yes, apo. You're asking me to define circles so that they have four sides. My very point from the very beginning. Glad we've finally come to an agreement.
The epistemic cut is simply that between knower and known, organism and environment and symbol v what is symbolised. It was coined by Howard Pattee, who has been influential in biosemiotics. Seems to me an interesting philosophical question would be, does it introduce a duality? However, the paper answers:
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut :
Although it then goes on to acknowledge that the origin of the subject-object distinction - that is, the origin of life - is still a mystery. He also says that 'it is not possible to distinguish the living from the lifeless by the most detailed "motion of inorganic corpuscles" alone. The logic of this answer is that life entails an epistemic cut that is not distinguishable by microscopic (corpuscular) laws.' So again the subject-object distinction is not something that can be neatly reduced to physical laws. The concluding sentence is a question: 'Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?' - thereby providing a glimmer of hope that physical reductionism may not, in fact, provide the answer.
I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest that the aspect or element of the process that will never be amenable to an objective account just is the subjective experience of any organism whatever - of what it is like to be a microbe or amoeba, all the way up to mammals and self-aware beings. In that sense, the origin of the epistemic division of knower and known is the outer manifestation of an internal state, namely, that of being a subject:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos]We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe (i.e. described by science), composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. 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. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience how it is from the point of view of its subject without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. [/quote]
So I think there is an ontological dualism here - but not one of two cartesian 'substances' like mind and matter, but of two complementary but separate perspectives.
Get it straight if you want to claim to have a basic grasp on logic. Im asking you to define what you might mean by circle. And yes, that is conventionally done in counterfactual fashion. So a circle is not a square for these particular reasons. Anyone with a compass and straightedge can demonstrate the Euclidean proof of the assertion.
So again you splutter and misfire with arguments that abuse the good habits of rational inquiry. Arent you weary of your own failure yet? What keeps you going and going?
It doesn't seem that simple judging by the reactions. But again, where Peircean semiosis introduces the sign as the mark that marks the cut by bridging the cut, so Pattee took it further by arguing the Peircean sign was in fact the literally mechanical thing of a logical switch.
A switch in a power circuit allows a human to turn the heat off and on. So the switch both creates the cut and bridges the cut. The switch can be flipped from off to on.
Biologists have tended to think of the genes as the information that regulate an organism's sustaining biochemical flows. They are certainly part of that machinery, but not what defines the coal-face of the modelling relationship. It is enzymes that are physically the switches which can turn reactions on and off at a command. Likewise Barbieri was early to narrow the focus to the ribsome as the core switch because it was the enzyme that made the enzymes by understanding the mRNA messages being sent by the genome.
So Peirce was rather hand-wavy in talking about the epistemic cut in terms of "signs". Yet also, science was in its Victorian era. Peirce waved his hands in ways that were as up to date scientifically as it was then possible to be.
Since the DNA code was cracked in the 1950s, biology has just kept getting more exact in terms of what mediates the modelling relation what creates the cut between the "rate dependent dynamics" of the world and "rate independent information" of a regulatory model that it can then itself also bridge.
The Hard Problem of how mind and matter can interact causally is solved by that. We can point to the enzymes and even the ribosomes. We can point to the molecular machinery that ratchets the nanoscale convergence zone of physics the scale of entropic balance that is physics' own quantum~classical transition story. (The one without an inserted epistemic cut, but formed by its own emergent or decoherent constraints.)
So if you make this about the "knower and the known", your risk trivialising it as the good old Cartesian dualism of a world with two realms, one real, the other deal. And if you try some other duality, like Sassure's symbol and symbolised, you make the mistake of not understanding that Peirce was pushing the triadic story of a "world", and interpretant, and the third thing of the epistemic cut the sign, the switch - which is inserted inbetween to allow a model and its world interact to pragmatic effect.
This shows the habit of thought you need to unlearn here. Framing what is said as a triadic claim as if it reduced to a dyadic one. Peirce argued how the world is irreducibly complex because it has the inherent triadicity of a system of relations. A relation has its two ends, but also the bit that connects in the middle.
So you are not hearing what I have been saying for so many years now. You haven't got it.
But I don't complain too much. Most people indeed never get it. You at least felt the need to make an effort. I can thank you for that while still trying to tell the story in even more simple ways.
Quoting Wayfarer
So ... nope. Although it took several years of pressing by Salthe, myself, and other Peircean enthusiasts for Pattee to clear this up.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well no. Quite the opposite. Symbols are that which can escape the limits of physics. They are born where the physics halts. So they rely on physics in the sense of being dichotomously "other" to that physics.
Hence Pattee's dichotomy of rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information. A symbol or switching device can't actually escape also being physical. But it can escape the grip of physics by becoming some small and constant cost that an organism can bear.
If you only have to flip a switch, you can attach that switch to anything you like and gain control over it. The light in your bedroom, a pixel on a display, or WW3.
You could launch a nuclear holocaust from the briefcase of codes that your secret service guy totes around for you. It might take the effort of raising your creaky old voice and saying you are the President and you are absolutely serious. The right people have signed the right bits of paper as a double check on your authority and state of mind.
So some grumpy old git. A nuclear arsenal. A lot of ideation. A lot physical entropy. Then the third thing that is the mediating switch which has been stopping it happen until it starts to happen. A world-spanning circuit can get closed with a few puffs of air coming out of an old man's throat.
Quoting Wayfarer
But absolutely no one in the biosemiotic community of the 1990s was thinking they were making an argument for panpsychism. Although pansemiosis was a lively discussion led by Stan Salthe. And folk like Robert Ulanowicz were openly Catholic and god-fearing, but also shrugged their shoulders and said science is science. At least this was now proper holism.
So you might go out on your own limb. But I'm not sure where you get the right. Not when you are immediately collapsing the Peircean triadic relation back to the good old dyadic one of Descartes.
Your position doesn't even arrive at the metaphysical throat-clearings of Kant. You want to time-machine biosemiosis back to the 17th Century.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yeah, but split and then connected by what? What did nature insert to get evolution going? Why did a code make a difference to the world?
Youve addressed my analogy via a literalist interpretation of its parts. And deem this a rational argument against the analogy. Remarkable.
The substantiated position is that consciousness is not empirically observable and you insist that it be defined in an empirically measurable way to be taken into consideration in the first place - because circles can so be. From your previous comments, this via "counterfactual definitions" - whatever that might mean to you.
Quoting apokrisis
My failure? As in to convince you? You must take yourself to be the sole arbitrator of the situation. But I am quite tiered of this interplay. Enjoy.
So this is goodbye. :party:
He still wrote a book on Making Room for Creation which seems open to divine agency. From which:
Fair amount of that on display in this thread.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm saying that organisms are the appearance of intentional agency, even if in rudimentary form. That they are able to act for reasons other than those dictated by physical law. Robert Ulanowiczw seems to support that view:
Quoting apokrisis
There's a cardinal difference between what I mean and Cartesian dualism. I'm not invoking a model of there being material and mental substances. I say that the subject of experience cannot be understood as a 'thinking substance' or objectified in the way that Cartesian dualism suggests. Organisms act for reasons that are not solely determined by lower-level laws. The two perspectives implied are the third-person perspective - which is descriptive - and the first-person perspective - which is 'what it is like to be', or put more simply, being.
Quoting apokrisis
So do you reckon if you'd been the other party in that wager with David Chalmers you'd have won the bet?
Thanks. Your post clarified that -- to me -- unfamiliar concept : how to divide Monistic (holistic) Ontology into a Dualistic (reductive) Worldview : philosophy into science.
You may also be able to help me understand why is applying the notion of physically encoded Biosemiotics to mentally aware Consciousness. He seems to believe that it is a hard science, instead of a soft philosophy*1. We now know that the phenomenon of biological Life is dependent on biological codes, mostly in the form of DNA. But DNA itself is merely a stringy chemical. The code/symbol part is an idea in a human mind. So how could a code or symbol have any physical effect on the emergence of Life & Mind, in a universe of Physics & Chemistry, long before Biology & Psychology?
My interest in Biosemiotics is limited to its possible relationship to my own philosophical notion of Enformationism. A code is an abstract form of Information (SOS = . . . - - - . . . ), that when socially conventionalized, can convey meaning to a mind. But, how a notional code can have the physical effect of animating raw matter into biology, seems to be equivalent to Chalmer's "hard problem" of how raw matter can be enlightened into psychology (awareness). Am I missing something here? The mystery is in the transformation (transubstantiation?) of Material Substance into ethereal Life & Mind : both not tangible things but tenuous processes. That enigma is the motivation for my theory of metamorphizing Encoded Energy (EnFormAction).
Claude Shannon introduced the notion that meaningful Information results from the expenditure of causal Energy into voided Entropy. So, I'm trying to somehow fit the physical notion of Life Codes (Biosemiotics) into the metaphysical concept of Mind Codes (Information). The two should be connected, but the Body/Mind transition point seems to be related to the location of the Epistemic Cut. :smile:
*1. Biosemiotics is the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes. This idea has been strongly suggested by the discovery of the genetic code, but so far it has made little impact in the scientific world and is largely regarded as a philosophy rather than a science.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18365164/
Consciousness was already explained years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
But apparently, the REAL solution to the hard problem is Bosnian Semiotics. Or something like that.
Let's talk about feels and how and why they're generated and whether machines have them/can have them. You brave enough for a little Q&A?
:lol: From the article:
But none of it matters to Dennett and his readers. They are so motivated by the fear of spooky woo stuff that they'd prefer to accept it.
It took a long time for me to ditch the materialist mindset. For me, the biggest obstacle was feeling like a fool for taking "woo"ish things seriously.
They really are. I'm liking this younger generation of philosophers.
The article you mention is by Marcello Barbieri - in my reading of biosemiotics, solely due to Apokrisis (to give credit where it's due) I've learned that Barbieri resigned as editor of the journal Biosemiotics, because he felt that it had become too philosophical and influenced by Peirce. He has initiated what he considers a new approach which he calls 'code biology', that, he says, is more concentrated on the science, less on the philosophy (I think Apokrisis would probably disagree but I'll leave that to him). There's a useful intro to his approach here What is information? (different from your own use of the term). He also wrote a history of the subject that I found useful - like, who's who in the zoo.
It is much more prosaic than that. Barbieri wanted to be the big cheese with his ribosome theory. Pattee was over-shadowing him and the rest by arriving late, and endorsing Peirce over Saussure.
So he left in a dramatic huff to re-establish his own code biology brand. As it happens, he backed the right horse in the ribosome. That has indeed moved centre stage of abiogenesis in my view. And the ribosome is a very Peircean structure, a very convincing tale of how the epistemic cut could have first arisen in practice.
Arran Gare did a social history of the Barbieri affair - https://philarchive.org/rec/GARBAC-4
I dont have a professional interest in the subject, but Ive found a couple of his articles useful, and the subject is generally interesting. Glad its something Ive learned about.
Just reading that now. It's very interesting and easy to read and understand. Many thanks for the link. Might help me understand Apo better. I read a Pattee article as well which was easy to follow too.
This characterises a lot of debate on consciousness. Some people really want a functionalist definition, the trouble is that isn't what is meant. If we start with a non-functionalist definition then we have a problem built-in (whether it's 'hard' or not) - how to get structural and functional concepts (which are the currency of scientific discourse) to connect to a definition which does not specify any structure and function. It's much easier if we start with quantifiable and measurable concepts that are amenable to scientific enquiry.
Substantiated how?
Since I dont want to start this debate from scratch, heres a different, albeit terse, argument:
A proposition: No one can in any way see that aspect of themselves which visually perceives imagined phenomena via what is commonly termed the minds eye.
This proposition can be readily proven false by any empirical information to the contrary (which, as empirical information, can thereby be verified by anyone who so pleases).
Till the just given, falsifiable proposition is proven false, it remains substantiated.
Thanks for that information. :joke:
Barbieri's interest in Information is for its role in Biology. Whereas my focus is on its multifunction roles in Ontology, Epistemology, Physics & Psychology*1. But the article does provide some useful info on how specific applications of the General Information concept can be perceived as A> "too philosophical" or B> "too scientific", depending on the interests of the observer.
Apparently, prefers to err in the direction of B. Which may explain his disdain for my more A approach. He'll probably disagree with that explanatory dichotomy, though. That's because he & I seem to make the "epistemic cut" in different places : current state vs original state, or matter vs mind, or code vs cause. But that's OK. Narrowly-focused Biosemiology is probably closer to becoming a hard science, than my own wide-angle philosophical musings. :smile:
*1. Information : What is it?
Originally, the word information referred to the meaningful software contents of a mind, which were assumed to be only loosely shaped by the physical container : the hardware brain. But in the 20th century, the focus of Information theory has been on its material form as changes in copper wires & silicon circuits & neural networks. Now, Terrence Deacons book about the Causal Power of Absence requires another reinterpretation of the role of Information in the world. He quotes philosopher John Collier, The great tragedy of formal information theory [Shannon] is that its very expressive power is gained through abstraction away from the very thing that it has been designed to describe. Claude Shannons Information is functional, but not meaningful. So now, Deacon turns the spotlight on the message rather than the medium.
http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
Who said anything about minds being brains?
I was asked for "that aspect of [myself] which visually perceives imagined phenomena". I presented it. Those areas of my brain are the aspects of myself which perceive imagined phenomena. It's an fMRI of someone imagining a scene.
My hand is the aspect of myself which holds teacups. It's not a particularly complicated question.
Unlike my seeing a moving hand when I look at it, Im not seeing a minds eye in the brain images provided.
What I am seeing are individual slides empirically depicting a certain set of a brain's functions which are inferred to correlate with empirically evident self-reports concerning something that might or might not in fact be. For instance, were philosophical zombies to be real, one would expect exactly such empirically physical processes to occur in the philosophical zombies brain despite the philosophical zombie having no such thing as a minds eye. In short, I am not seeing the minds eye in the illustration.
A less complex way to address the same conclusion: to affirm that one is seeing the minds eye in these illustrations of a brain is in full parallel to affirming one sees in these illustrations what the minds eye is focusing on and thereby seeing. Both are brain functions; therefore, both ought to be seen in these illustrations. However, neither are empirically witnessed by us.
In other words, these illustrations of a brains functioning so far do not falsify the proposition which was provided. The proposition therefore so far remains substantiated.
So minds and brains are different? What are the differences?
So you in fact believe they are not real? And therefore irrelevant in the reality in which scientific accounts unfold?
If Descartes demon was also real, then we would be epistemically screwed in every way. But you dont think that is the case? Or even that if it could be the case, you would act any different in the world?
To claim zombies are conceivable is to assert that one can always doubt. And Descartes demon does a much more sweeping job of that for you.
But science is applied pragmatism. It begins with the epistemic willingness to hazard a belief. It advances a hypothesis and checks it out.
So your epistemology is as bad as your ontology on this score. It is meaningless carping as the science rolls on.
Besides, wasn't it a "goodbye" between us?
You waved goodbye. But I keep getting tagged.
Now that you are talking of this mystical thing of the minds eye, is that something a philosophical zombie also has? Or are you simply pulling the rhetorical stunt of claiming something exists, but you define it so as to be beyond any possible empirical reach because epistemic devilry of whatever needed form.
Does the minds eye come with a definition? We never got one for consciousness out of your mouth.
Its all part of the game of course. Demand explanations for any term you decide to toss into the discussion, but refuse to give definitions for those terms in ways that would commit to an empirical test.
One can always keep claiming that no empirical evidence has been presented when one has refused to even agree as to what the nature of that empirical evidence might be.
All we have here is you playing the game of look at me. I can say that I doubt. But those words ring hollow. You never set out a position that you were prepared to believe.
The mind's eye is a "mystical thing"? No, it's not.
Quoting apokrisis
And you keep on telling untruths. Why should I bother again?
Oh, yea. There was also this.
My celebration was premature. My name keeps being brought up. And suddenly you all seem to be reading papers on biosemiosis. I am curious about the gyrations that will be performed to sustain this Hard Problem charade for the next 26 years too.
As the empirically obvious evidence shows, not by me.
You so far haven't made any mention of the charading, posturing, lying accusation I just made against you. Curious to witness it.
To be blunt, I see no sane reason to reply to you at this point.
Quoting apokrisis
This is mainly because of your contributions to the forum so as to provide some background to the subject for those lacking it, to better understand what you are talking about, which goes over the heads of many contributors here.
The grammatical differences among first, second and third person sentences present some interesting quirks, Moore sentences for instance.
But other than that, how exercised do we get about the difference between "He said he's going out" and "I said I'm going out"? We translate between them regularly.
(Obligatory anecdote: Kafka said, "I became a writer when I found I could say 'he' instead of 'I'.")
But if you define a phenomenon so that its first-person-ness is part of the phenomenon, we're in "Hand me the book on the shelf" territory.
Just don't do that. We use mentalistic vocabulary about others as readily as we do about ourselves, attribute knowledge and beliefs and awareness and forgetfulness and consciousness to other people all day long, and we mean the same thing as when we describe ourselves as being in these mental states. What matters is the book, not its being on the shelf. That's just a double bind.
Right - that is the issue. The key paragraph in David Chalmer's original paper was:
[Quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness] The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
Compare Chalmer's antagonist, Daniel Dennett, who claims:
[quote=Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-Person Science] In Consciousness Explained, I described a method, heterophenomenology, which was explicitly designed to be 'the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective experiences, while never abandoning the methodological principles of science.[/quote]
I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle. Many other scholars and academics, including John Searle and Thomas Nagel, agree that Dennett's attempt to account for the first person perspective in objective terms, is conceptually flawed from the outset. Hence the satirical depiction of Dennett's book by Searle et al as 'Consciousness Ignored'.
How can it not be??? If we knew the biology of an alien species to 100% accuracy (or close to it), would we still have any inkling whether they were zombies or not? Not to sound like a broken record, but materialism utterly fails to give a satisfactory response to this problem regarding machines. Does ChatGPT have a first person perspective? Will it's fifth-generation successor? Materialism/physicalism is utterly unable to answer this question, and the problem will only get worse and worse as the Ai's get better and better.
So what?
I think you're aware of this discussion in exactly the same sense that I'm aware of this discussion. Why should I define a special me-having-my-awareness instead of just saying I have awareness just like you.
Why should there be science conducted exclusively from my point-of-view? And if there can't be, why is that a shortcoming? Other people can study the same properties of me.
But that takes for granted that you and I are both subjects of experience, so that you can safely assume that I will understand what you mean. And for the purposes of describing or acounting for objective phenomena, the fact that we're both subjects can be ignored. But in the philosophical question of the nature of consciousness, insofar as that is a first-person experience, it can't be ignored, nor can be accounted for in those terms.
As John Searle put it:
Quoting RogueAI
[quote=ChatGPT]No, ChatGPT does not have a first-person perspective. It is an artificial intelligence language model that generates text based on patterns it has learned from a large dataset. It does not possess personal experiences or consciousness. Instead, it provides responses based on the information it has been trained on. Its purpose is to assist users in generating human-like text based on the prompts and questions it receives.[/quote]
ChatGPT knows something that Dennett doesn't.
If an Ai was capable of consciousness, and that consciousness influenced it's decision making, knowing what it knows about the evils we humans are capable of (and have done over the millenias)... would it admit to being conscious? What does game theory say about that?
So is the argument that consciousness is off-limits because it's first-person, or that one of the things psychology needs to account for is [i] that[/I] it is first-person?
The first is "Being me the book on the shelf"; the second is "Why are books on shelves?"
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
David Chalmer's doesn't say that consciousness is off-limits. He says it is intractable from the third-person perspective, due to its first-person character. He has written extensively on that, e.g. his book 'Conscious Mind: in search of a fundamental theory'. This whole debate between Dennett and Chalmers practically kicked off the modern 'consciousness studies' field, with their conferences in Arizona, featuring a cast of colorful characters and some truly mind-bending ideas.
I think the more interesting approach is the phenomenological/hermeneutic/existential approach in continental philosophy. Also the intersection of phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy of mind in the embodied cognition approach (e.g. The Embodied Mind, Varela Thompson et al.)
'Intractable' is all I meant there, but I was trying to resolve the ambiguity in "due to its first-person character."
If you're demanding the book be on the shelf when I hand it to you, that's just a double bind, and probably a misunderstanding on your part.
If you want to know why we only find books on shelves, you want to see what it is about shelves that make them uniquely capable of hosting books.
Yep, a useful trick of grammar inflated to become an epistemic no go theorem and from there, the greatest mystery of all metaphysics. :up:
Not really. The objective point of view doesn't take the subject into consideration - it is only concerned with what is amenable to quantitative analysis from a third person point of view. Philosophy, generally, has a more expansive scope, concerned with existential questions of meaning and being, which may be of little concern to science. But due to the (some would say) disproportionate degree of respect accorded to science and engineering in today's technological culture, such concerns are often misunderstood, trivialised or rejected. Kudos to David Chalmers for having the insight and persistence to surface the issue.
(Interestingly, I notice that the forthcoming blockbuster, Oppenheimer, is shot in both colour and black and white. Christopher Nolan, director, explained "I wrote the script in the first person, which I'd never done before. I don't know if anyone has ever done that, or if that's a thing people do or not. The film is objective and subjective. I wrote the color scenes from the first person. ..." Nolan goes on to explain that the color scenes are subjective and the black-and-white scenes are objective.
Apparently there's a difference!)
Yeah. One's from the protagonist's point-of-view, one's not. Or do you think it was impossible for Nolan to write or film the 'subjective' scenes?
Also, Nolan is famously red/green colorblind, which makes this all weird.
That would be a grave misunderstanding of Peircean semiotics. Or indeed, post-Kantian epistemology in general.
Quoting Wayfarer
The difference between being there for real and being there as if watching the displaced historical newsreel record of events.
A simple but effective narrative trick by the sound of it. Not sure it supports your idealism very well though.
Really? What does one look like then? You said
Quoting javra
So presumably, at least, you've never seen one (you think no-one has). So how do you know the image I've posted isn't one? You seem to on the one hand want to say no one's ever seen one, but on the other you seem to know exactly what one should look like.
Quoting javra
Yep. Can you think of any knowledge you have at all that isn't inferred from evidence? Certainly the vast majority, if not all. Why is being inferred from evidence suddenly being treated with such suspicion?
Quoting javra
Were philosophical zombies to be real you'd be right and I'd be wrong. You're begging the question. For philosophical zombies to be real there'd have to be some nonphysical state called 'consciousness' which doesn't map to any physical states. That's what you're trying to demonstrate, so you can't do so by invoking it's truth. If I'm trying to prove aliens exist " the aliens told me so" is not a persuasive argument.
Your argument is "I think there's a non-physical entity called 'consciousness' - show me the physical thing which it is if you want to prove me wrong", it's self immunised. If you think the images I've shown you are not 'the mind's eye' then you'll have to come up with a better counter argument than "that's not what I was expecting it to look like"
Quoting javra
Of course they do. The proposition was
Quoting javra
It wasn't "There exist ways in which..." your proposition attempts to rule our physicalist/naturalist interpretations. It doesn't merely rule-in dualism. We're not here arguing if dualism is a possible way to think about consciousness. You're arguing that physicalism isn't. To make that you have to show that this view is incoherent, not that it doesn't match the way you like to think about things.
Minds are a facon de parler. We don't get hung up on where 'courage' is. We don't start invoking other worlds to locate 'hunger'. The act of 'forgetting' doesn't require a special force from the 'forgetting' realm.
In fact. I'll tell you what - since Chalmers did so well out of his bet that neuroscience wouldn't find 'consciousness' - here in front of witnesses (@Srap Tasmaner and @Wayfarer as official as it gets on this thread) I'll bet you two crates of fine wine that in five years time neuroscience won't have found my mojo either.
(If any neuroscientists have found where my mojo is - I've got this problem with it, see I've got it working but it just won't...)
Yes, exactly. My mind, your mind, his mind... I'm not at all seeing a problem with this "eye can't see itself" nonsense. As if we have trouble understanding eyes because of that.
Certainly. That I am right now looking at the keyboard I'm typing on is knowledge that is not (consciously) inferred by me from evidence - but, instead, is knowledge of direct experience. For instance, I might be hallucinating, be a brain in a vat, etc. but my knowledge of seeing what I am seeing as a percept at the current moment remains utterly unaltered by these and all other possible stipulations. And other such examples of non-inferential knowledge could be provided.
Quoting Isaac
Our empirical precepts are not conscious inferences. Inferences are one aspect of reasoning-based knowledge (deduction, etc.). On the other hand, empirical data - i.e., data obtained via the physiological senses - are one aspect of experience-based knowledge (the experience of one's own confidence being non-empirical in the modern sense of the term). Yes, the two are intimately intertwined. But they are nevertheless utterly different.
It's not about suspicion for inferences. Its about inferences not being empirical data, or empirical information if one prefers.
Quoting Isaac
This illustrates your utter misconception of my position; simply: one cannot see the minds eye because it has no look whatsoever. See below.
Quoting Isaac
This, again, is completely mistaken. I made no metaphysical claims. We are not discussing metaphysics here. Instead, we are discussing whether or not the minds eye can be in any way empirically observed. A mere epistemological claim as to what is the fact of the matter.
Your counter regarding p-zombies to me misses the logical implications by focusing on ontological commitments. Nevertheless, I fully grant that the issue can easily become confusing. So, Ill offer a different, but much less concise, way of addressing why Im not seeing the minds eye in the illustrations:
When I visually imagine a table, I see the table from one singular perspective (rather than, say, from 12 different perspectives simultaneously). This, to me, is an experiential fact of the matter. To clarify, I know this to be the case experimentally in non-inferential manners; and - as with my visual percept of the keyboard I am now typing on - this experiential knowledge is steadfast. I'm not claiming this knowledge is infallible, but I am claiming that I can be in no way uncertain about this experiential knowledge regardless of inference I might entertain or be informed about - this on account of it being precisely what I experience.
In keeping with common language, this visual perception of an imagined table I then term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye. So I experimentally know in non-inferential manners that my minds eye is singular. Whether its a singular entity, process, both, or neither is here fully irrelevant to the actuality of the experience (and could only be an inference extrapolated from the experience's occurrence).
In contrast, the illustrations you've presented all depict multiple brain processes that are located in different portions of one brain (over a dozen different locations in each illustration last I looked). We can of course infer that these visualized brain processes depict aspects of the physiological brain which in whole constitute that process of me seeing an imagined table. Nevertheless:
I am not seeing the perfectly singular, cognitive perspective which sees a spatially-extended table in its imagination via its non-physiological sight (by which I simply mean, sight which does not occur via the use of one's physiological sensory organs). Of course the person whose brain is illustrated likely imagined something different, but I'm addressing a table to keep things simple.
Just as strictly observing the empirical constituents of a rock cannot be equivalent to seeing the rock itself, so too with brain and awareness: to empirically observe the brain processes on which first-person awareness is dependent cannot be equivalent to empirically observing first-person awareness itself. The multiple constituents of a whole are not equivalent to the singular whole which is addressed.
In other words, I am not seeing the minds eye in the illustrations. At best, all I am seeing is a multiplicity of certain disparate constituent aspects of it.
--------
Again, I'm not claiming that the mind's eye has a certain look that hasn't yet been evidenced. I am claiming that the mind's eye cannot be empirically observed in principle.
Well that assumes you had some to start with :wink:
And that experience isn't evidence because...?
Quoting javra
One does not 'see' percepts though. A percept is the result of seeing, you don't then 'see' it, otherwise what results form that process? Another percept? A percept of a percept?
Quoting javra
I'm struggling to think of an example where I obtain knowledge directly from my senses without any inference. Perhaps you could provide one?
Quoting javra
What difference would that make, even if I were to agree?
Quoting javra
But we're discussing the question of whether it does or not (have a look), you can't use, as a point in that discussion, the 'fact' that it doesn't. that's not a fact, it's your opinion and we're exploring the differences between it and mine. The 'mind's eye' is just a made up term at the moment. You're trying to establish it's a real thing (but not material), I'm trying to establish the opposite (not real, but if it were anything it would be in the brain). So you're begging the question by just keep dogmatically asserting what the 'mind's eye' is (and isn't) without argument.
Quoting javra
We're not. You've declared the mind's eye to be the sort of thing that cannot be empirically observed. That's not a discussion it's a lecture. A discussion would accept that we don't currently now and look for mutually agreed evidence either way.
Quoting javra
No, you don't. You see several perspectives, you see aspects of the table that are behind and shaded, aspects that are out of focus, or moving. Part of the process of 'seeing' involves inferring these details.
Quoting javra
What? You say it's singular, so therefore you know it's singular? That doesn't make any sense, and I know it doesn't make any sense because I just said it doesn't.
Quoting javra
Of course you aren't. There's no such thing. A 'cognitive perspective' can't 'see' anything. 'Seeing ' is something whole bodies do (whole brains at the very least). It's not something 'cognitive perspectives' do - whatever the hell they are.
Quoting javra
Yes, and we're all waiting for an actual argument to back up that claim that isn't self-referential.
How dare you! As I said - I've got my mojo working...*.
* way too old-fashioned a reference for our younger readers.
But physical sciences don't exclude the first person as far as I can tell.
Can you show me somewhere, where this principle you speak of is written down?
Where did I claim it isn't?
Quoting Isaac
I never stated that we do. Please read more carefully.
Quoting Isaac
I already have: knowledge of the keyboard I am typing on. Such as "I know the keyboard I'm typing on is black" (not because I've inferred it to so be, but because I've seen it to so be)
Quoting Isaac
Example: To infer X from empirically observed A, B, and C is not to empirically observe X.
Quoting Isaac
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mind%27s_eye
Its not a made up term.
Quoting Isaac
You're again bringing metaphysics into this. I am here avoiding ontological inferences but am addressing direct experience.
Question: Can you visually imagine things? If so, is your ability to picture that which you imagine real or unreal?
Quoting Isaac
No. It is, again, a falsifiable proposition which - because I both believe it to be true and to be sufficiently justified - I then assert as a (fallible) knowledge claim. As per the initial post to which you responded with illustration of the brain, this proposition remains substantiated till falsified.
Quoting Isaac
Those aren't different points of views - aka perspectives - but different aspects of what is seen from a singular point of view (i.e., perspective). And, again, they are not conscious inferences. We are not here addressing the unconscious mind but only the conscious mind - this since we are addressing the first-person awareness of an imagined table.
Quoting Isaac
You are equivocating an experience with reports of the experience.
Quoting Isaac
I'll reword this if it helps: a cognitive first-person point of view (in contrast to, for one example, a camera's point of view) - to be clear, this where "cognitive" addresses all conscious aspects of an intellect, as in "cognitive science". Are you yet claiming there's no such thing? Or, else, that a cognitive first-person point of view can't see (i.e., visually cognize) anything?
[Edit: given that there are unconscious agencies of ones mind capable of perceiving that which one consciously doesnt (e.g., such as is inferred to occur in subliminal processing of stimuli), these unconscious agencies can easily be further inferred to hold unconscious first-person awareness of stimuli. Hence, for clarity, from the perspective of oneself as a conscious awareness, these could either be described as ones total selfs cognitive but non-first-person instantiations of awareness (if cognitive is here meant to address a total mind) or, alternatively, as ones total selfs non-cognitive first-person instantiations of awareness (if cognitive is as expressed in the above paragraph here meant to strictly address ones own conscious faculties of mind). Yes, language can sometimes be unclear in expressing that which one intends to convey by its use. Still, hopefully this will better clarify the above paragraph.]
Quoting Isaac
You have this backwards. The impetus is on you to falsify this (fallible) knowledge claim which, as of yet, remains substantiated both by evidence (no one here has so far seen a mind's eye) and reasoning (such as that provided in my last post regarding constituent parts and the whole which you have so far not addressed).
That depends on the circumstances. If you are visually imagining a table, due to your eyes being directed towards and focusing on an illuminated table, and you have the binocular vision typical of humans, then you are seeing the table from two different perspectives and your brain is synthesizing what you imagine to be a table seen from a singular perspective but with a depth which is due to the binocular origins of the imagining under consideration.
Firstly, I/we don't visually experience that which we imagine via our physiological eyes (e.g., one can so imagine just fine if not better with both eyes closed).
Secondly, as I previously commented in my last post: because we are here strictly addressing first-person awareness, the processes of one's unconscious mind (its synthesizing of information very much included) are fully irrelevant to the issue of what is factually being consciously experienced (this by first-person awareness).
You said...
Quoting javra
Quoting javra
Well then you don't see things 'as a percept' You see things. I see a table, I see a chair. I don't see them as percepts, I see them as objects in the world.
Quoting javra
But you have inferred it to be black. You senses have picked up all sorts of cues and you've inferred from those cues that the keyboard is black (as opposed to grey but in shadow, or green but in the dark, or translucent but reflecting a black object...)
Quoting javra
Does something about making up a term prevent it from appearing in wiktionary?
Quoting javra
You're not. Let's get this clear. You're addressing, at best, your memory of experiences you have seconds ago, filtered through you cultural expectations and values, the terms of the language community, the biases and objectives of this argument... There's nothing 'direct' about what you're doing with your experiences by talking about them here.
Quoting javra
It's not falsifiable unless you explain what it is we're looking for. Else my equally falsifiable proposition "there's an invisible jabberwocky above your head". Shall we engage in serious discussion about that proposition?
Quoting javra
No. You said "I term my seeing an imagined table with my minds eye". Other than you declaring it to be so, we have no evidence of it actually being so.
Quoting javra
The latter. A 'point of view' isn't the sort of thing that can see. People see. 'points of view' don't. They don't do anything. No-one talks like that. We don't say "Oh, Bob, what did your point of view see on telly last night?", "Did your point of view see the match last yesterday?"
Quoting javra
... same with jabberwockies...
Uh huh...
Quoting javra
.... Dressing anyone?
As far as this conversation being over, as you wish.
If you want to stick your fingers in your ears and say, "La la la, I can't hear you.", then I don't have more to say. If you change your mind this article on visual cortex filling the role of the 'mind's eye' might be worth a look.
I'm quite familiar with such articles - and fully acknowledge their worth. You however appear to not have understood what I expressed.
Did you see that ludicrous display last night? What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott in that early? The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.
You responded to a several hundred word post fully citing each quote by declaring the whole thing 'word salad' and you have the audacity to complain about me not answering your questions.
And no, the conversation is not over. I never wished any such thing. Feel free to respond any time you can penetrate my byzantine locution.
No, but my first-person-instatiated-point-of-view saw it. I was out.
OK. I'd like an answer to the following so as to gauge were we currently stand:
Quoting javra
The question doesn't make sense. I don't 'picture that which I imagine' I just imagine. Imagining something involves a picture, it doesn't make sense to talk about a picture of it, that would entail a picture of a picture.
Try googling what you quoted there, and if you don't recognize it, you're welcome.
Brilliant. I thought I recognised it (but obviously didn't get the reference initially). Very convincing though, you've clearly been practising.
So far your reply doesn't make sense to me. Maybe you could help me make sense of it.
When I engage in the process of imagination I can imagine various things - granted, this as thought I were looking at them (maybe this is a personal quirk though). But, importantly here, the things I imagine can readily change as distinct images whereas I remain constant in so far as being that which apprehends information in the form of the things imagined.
Does this in any way make sense to you? If so, how would you linguistically express the difference between me as as that which is constantly taking in, or processing, imagined information of various types vs. those imagined givens that are disparate relative to each other?
Now you can just get the app, LadGPT.
Yes.
Quoting javra
'Me', 'myself', 'I'
'Things I imagine'
I'm saved.
If only I'd have had this when I was a teenager, I wouldn't have had to become a fucking psychology professor to get any social currency. I could have been a builder...
Do you by this expression intend that the "I" is different from the things it imagines?
If so, how is this "I" aware of what it willfully imagines?
(In philosophical speculations, one could for example will to visually imagine X without being visually aware of the visual properties of the given X so willed; the two processes - that of willing X and that of having visual awareness of X - are not logically entailed, as far as I can currently discern. But we could debate this if you'd like.)
Different how? I imagine a table, that's different to the chair I imagine (one's smaller than the other). The 'I' is different in that sense. I'm referring to me, my body. I'm not a table.
Quoting javra
I don't think that's possible, but I'm willing to suspend that disbelief if it helps
There is the presumption that their findings are observer-independent i.e. replicable by anyone, Theyre third person in that sense. Its an implicit assumption.
Chalmers never said that first person data is excluded from consideration by scientists, and Einstein's thought experiments specifically reference the first person point of view.
Different in this respect: Quoting javra
To which you've already replied: Quoting Isaac
I asked so as to confirm that this same understanding is there in your proposed expression of, "Things I imagine," but it doesn't appear to be.
So you deem the "I" addressed to be identical to you as body. And yet, the imagined table is only an aspect of your bodily processes, specifically of certain aspects of your CNS - the very same CNS from which this "I" results (at least as its typically understood; such that the I is one of many functioning process of the body - along with a multitude of unconscious processes of mind - but is not the body itself). But then in deeming this "I" identical to you as body there is grave incoherence in terms of what is being referenced in the expression, "Things I imagine".
Given this incoherence, again, in which way then do you deem what you refer to as "I" to be in any way different from the imagined table? (To emphasize: Both are functions of your body, which according to you is equivalent to the you which can imagine tables and the like. But then, again, how would this "I" be in any way different from the table it imagines?)
Clarification would be useful to further discussions.
Quoting Isaac
OK, so when one intends to imagine a table, you take it that one consciously holds awareness of all the table's imagined properties instantaneously to so intending, aka willing. My experiences affirm that when I want to imagine a table and proceed to do so, my unconsciousness fills in a lot of blanks so as to form a coherent image (also called "picture" in common English usage) of the table - such that my willing to imagine precedes the visual representation which I then apprehend as an imagined given, or thing. It's also not hard for me to suppose that one could want to imagine X but be unable to form a mental image of X. Worse things can happen in psychological processes. But, maybe, all this doesn't matter too much to the discussion.
I'll check in latter on, probably sometime tomorrow.
Right, so the "anyone's" the findings are replicable by are not first persons? If they are first persons then please explain how they have been excluded.
This exchange seems quite absurd to me. @Javra argues that no one can see the mind's eye which, like the physical eye, cannot see itself in the act of seeing. So, he is claiming that the mind's eye does not look like anything because it is not visible, and here the analogy breaks down because the physical eye is visible.
This seems to depend on what is meant by 'seeing'. We can say the physical eye does not actually see anything, that it is the person who sees things. Or we might say that the seeing happens in the visual cortex. and the person who sees is a kind of illusion created by the reflexive awareness of that seeing.
So, Javra says that the mind's eye is not empirically observable but is real. So what does real mean here? Can the mind's eye be seen by the person who owns it? If the mind's eye imagines something, can the thing imagined be seen just as objects external to the body can be seen? Could that depend on the subject, that is can some people visualize "photographically" and others not? What could we have to go on other than individual reports?
Isaac seems to be arguing that if the mind's eye is not an empirical object, then obviously it cannot be seen, thereby agreeing with Javra. So, what exactly is the disagreement about? Is it about whether the mind's eye is real or a fiction? But if to be real is to be empirically observable, which both seem to agree the mind's eye is not, then it would seem the only possible point the argument could be over is the meaning of "real".
Can anything be subjectively real? Say I am imagining a table right now, is the picture I have of the table real? How could I ever prove it is real if no one else can see it? Isn't that the basic problem with these kinds of arguments over qualia? I can't prove that the picture I have of the table is real, other than by appealing to others' experiences by saying something like, "don't you also visualize objects?".
If it is admitted that we do visualize objects, and then we go on to claim that this visualizing must entail the existence of a mind's eye analogous to how seeing involves the existence of a physical eye, is that a justifiable analogy?
Is it a justifiable analogy, given that seeing involves far more than just the physical eye, and that visualizing may just be pretty much the same kind of brain process, absent the involvement of the physical eyes and the optic nerves? If that were so it would just mean that the mind's eye is sometimes fed information via the physical eyes and other times not, and that we are always "visualizing" regardless of whether it is driven by external or internal input, or by extrenal as well as internal input, is we want to say that there is always internal input in any case?
The argument seems to come down to the contesting the reality of qualia, which in turn comes down to defining the term 'real'. It seems that such arguments always involve a shitload of talking past one another...and to what purpose?
The argument between Dennett and Chalmers is just an argument over the reality of qualia. Whether or not one believes in the existence of qualia has no bearing on whether or not the subject is being eliminated as far as I can tell.
Let's say the subject is not real anyway, per Buddhism for example, and that the body is not real in any sense other than the empirical, meaning that what is real is defined as being only what enters, or could enter, awareness, where would that leave us?
It seems the explicit part of science as epistemic method that this "independence" is what is being socially-constructed. It is the realist position on indirect realism. :grin:
All the defenders of the Hard Problem and "what it is like to be a first person point of view" make the mistake of not understanding that selves arise within neurobiology as "other" to their perceptual/cognitive realities. The Bayesian Brain and psychology's "enactive turn" summarises the "how" of this. This is the concrete advance since Chalmers and Koch had their little self-aggrandising bet.
So the first person POV is "subjective" in relation to its neurobiological Umwelt. It objectifies the world as the "other" of its ability to forward model it environment. The self is that part of the brain activity which stands as a goal-organised predictive model of the world. The world then becomes for the organism that part of its wider reality which is the recalcitrant or unpredicted. By further processing that updates the running Bayesian model, the world gets assimilated to this "selfish" first person point of view and so woven in as a stable "consciousness" of "how everything is" in terms of a self~world relation.
Science comes along as humans eventually realise the modelling game being played and say we can do better. Through language, but better yet maths, we can implement a model of the modelling relation in such a way it would be like experiencing the world from a God-like view from nowhere. A transcendent third person point of view.
This is made concrete by a process of theory and measurement.
We can state publicly in formal terms a structure of thought that encodes predictions about states of the world. We can share a model with every other mind within our cultural orbit such that we can be sure we are thinking the same because the rules of this thinking are captured in a rigid mechanical fashion.
And then the predictions are cashed out by reading numbers off dials. We become third person observers by making measurements measurements that codify degrees of surprise or prediction error.
So whether we talk about "consciousness" as neurobiological awareness or socially-constructed knowing, it is the same epistemic process in action. Cognition as predictive modelling aimed at creating a self in control of its world.
The first person self becomes contrasted with the third person self only as the feature, rather than the bug, of the advances of human epistemology. We took nature's modelling relation to its next semiotic level. We found that we were embodied in our "private" worlds and so found the ladder that could get us out into a public space of theories and measurements.
At the deep metaphysical level the one that speaks to the ontology of fundamental structure the structure is the same. A self constructing itself as the prediction maker within what becomes its predictable world its semiotic Umwelt.
So sure, one can bang on about ineffable feels and homuncular mind's eyes. That reflects an older technical point of view. It reflects the social technology required to impose stable order on the "world model" of cultures based on agrarian empire building. It produced the level of self-regulation that organised the world as a hierarchy of peasants, bureaucrats, priests and kings.
But now we live in industrialised societies where science is the new social technology. We can aim to regulate our lives in ways that have an impersonal rationality. We become ruled not by some transcending sense of God or generalised notion of the divine, but by something even more Platonic and impersonal than that. Laws of nature. And what a clock and ruler can tell us about that in terms of mechanical acts of measurement.
And sure, one may think this impersonalised form of mindfulness is a bit much. It's not real in the sense you might think your neurobiology of the "self and its world" is. The first person view stands clearly opposed to the third person view as the first person view is "the place which you actually inhabit".
But facts are facts. The first person view is just as much a modelling relation as the third person one. It is only that we find ourselves developmentally rooted in the first and making a conscious choice about the second.
And if we are going to be debating things "philosophically", we need to remember that between the neurobiology of the the organismic self and the social construction of the scientific self comes that middle period of being the peasants within an agrarian era with its organised religion and useful ways of having its folk think. There are good historical reasons for why the Hard Problem resonates with a theistic point of view why Cartesianism still reigns with its crisp dualism of mind and body.
And that term, qualia, is only ever encountered in academic literature, precisely about this problem.
Quoting Janus
Quoting apokrisis
As Ive said, I think Chalmers expression of what it is like to be is simply a rather awkward way of referring to being. And as Ive also said, that is not something which can be framed in scientific terms, because theres no epistemic cut here. Were never outside of it or apart from it. A Wittgenstein aphorism comes to mind, We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.
Cartesian doesnt reign for that reason at all. It reigns as the implicit metaphysics of modern science (modern being the paradigm up until the 1927 Solvay conference.)
You don't yet understand the epistemic cut. Perhaps I should rename it the epistemic bridge for your benefit.
The cut is the mechanics of a sign, a switch, a ratchet, that gets inserted so as to make the modelling a reality. Brains do that at their level. Societies do that at the next level up.
You are being too psychology-centric. You think only of the minds of "individuals". But organisms can become entrained to social levels of reality modelling. Ants and humans are the "ultrasocial" extremes of this development, as they could insert the further systems of sign in the form of pheromone signals and verbal signals.
I understand it perfectly well thank you. Since you first mentioned it, Ive read up on it. Im talking about epistemology, not systems science or modeling. The epistemological implications are well known in non-dualism but that is bound to be a digression.
But no one contests the question of being in the sense that the fact of our existence is not at issue. It is the nature of that existence which is at issue.
Science deals with what can be observed, measured, conjectured about and experimented with; that's it. It doesn't eliminate the subject because we, the subjects, are the ones doing the observing, measuring, conjecturing and experimenting. 'Hard' science doesn't deal with the subject, though; we are not observing, measuring, conjecturing about and experimenting with ourselves, other than in 'softer' sciences such as for example psychology, anthropology and sociology.
We cannot definitively answer the question as to whether perception gives us access to, in the sense of knowledge about, a "real" outside, because this can be framed in different ways, and the answer will depend on the framing.
I think the Wittgenstein quote refers to the fact that science cannot solve ethical, aesthetic or spiritual questions.
Quite so. Cant you see how that also relates to the problem of consciousness that is being discussed?
I suppose I should have asked where you draw a line between physical sciences and ~physical sciences, and why?
Neuroscience certainly is a physical science, and doesn't exclude the first person. Do you disagree?
The bet which was the subject of the OP was placed in 1998 between David Chalmers and Kristoff Koch as to whether a neurological account of the nature of experience would be discovered in the next 25 years. From the story:
(The article is here.)
Do you see the distinction that is being made? Have you read the original Chalmers paper?
It's alright. Got a bit more boring lately as I've finally had to give up work completely, but I live in a nice place, so I'm OK. Thanks for asking though.
Why? I'm not seeing any incoherence. The imagined table is, in this context, a facon de parler. It's objectified by our language. The fact that we can talk about it doesn't make it real in the sense of there being some laws governing it that investigation could discover. The 'laws' of language are a joint construction between you, I, and all the other language users. At the level of 'governing laws' the imagined table is just some goings on in my brain, but we don't talk that way, so in our jointly constructed world the imagined table becomes a thing. We bring it into existence by making it the object of a sentence. You're trying to take these mutually constructed objects and pretend there's something to 'discover' there, but there's nothing there, we made all this stuff up to have this conversation.
Quoting javra
They are not both 'functions' of my body. 'I' refers to me, my body, whatever I deem to be part of that unit. The imagined table refers to either a story element created by some part of my brain, or the activity of that part of my brain, depending on which frame of reference you want to discuss it at. Those are two different things.
Quoting javra
No I take 'willing' to be a post hoc construction of the working memory after the event of imagining the table. As I said to you (part of the "word-salad" you decided was beyond you to understand), you are not here dealing with your experiences. The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your mind works is not direct evidence. You are working with your recollections of experiences which happened seconds ago. Those recollections are already constructed, they are filtered, they are biased, they are culturally influenced - same as any recollections are. The 'facts' you're supposedly working with here are already interpreted.
Have your views evolved? Last time I asked you that, you claimed you didn't understand the question. Do you now admit that questions of "what is it like to be x" make sense?
Depends on the answer you want. Are you happy with the one I've given? Does that progress consciousness studies somehow?
"What is it like to climb Everest?" is a perfectly normal question if you accept the answer as "It was really good fun, but a bit cold".
If you want something involving philosophical zombies, your question makes no sense.
A crate of wine, I think, was the goal, if I recall correctly.
Again, you seemed to have misunderstood Chalmers' point. He does not propose that science can't explain experience. He's fairly confident that it can with some conceptual adjustments.
Subject of Dennetts critical article The Fantasy of First Person Science, which Ive already mentioned.
In no way have I misrepresented Chalmers position in this thread.
On the other hand, it would be great to have a philosophical zombie sherpa help you climb Everest because it wouldnt matter if they fell off.
Actually you have, repeatedly. Chalmers is optimistic about a theory of consciousness that explains experience.
Ha!
Now that's an interesting question (fair warning - I'm about to dissect a perfectly innocent joke...). It would matter to me because I'd be bothered if I wasn't bothered (if that makes sense!).
I've always had this with the whole 'would you switch off an android which asks you not to' trope. I wouldn't. But not because of the android, but because of what I'd have to do by way of suppressing my own empathy in order to do it.
I'd get to know the philosophical zombie whilst he was helping me climb, I'd want to be bothered if he fell off. I'd be scared, if we lived in a world of philosophical zombies, of becoming the sort of person who wasn't bothered.
Not sure if that sentiment tells us anything useful about philosophical zombies... but there it is anyway.
@Wayfarer's posts are always well supported by citations (to the point of being infamous for it!). If you're going to accuse someone of misrepresentation, at least have the basic courtesy to do so with the same level of textual support with which the original claim was given. You're not a prophet.
I think this passage is interesting:
"One huge advance would be the invention of a consciousness-meter, which could provide a precise readout of the state of consciousness of any given object. I could point it at your head and get a read-out of your state of consciousness. Point it at this flower and see if its conscious or not. Point at a dog to see if anything might be going on in it. We dont have that. Such a device would basically give you the data you need to formulate, lets say, a semi-mathematical theory of consciousness, which correlates a given physical system with a given conscious state."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/david-chalmers-thinks-the-hard-problem-is-really-hard/
If you had such a meter, and pointed it a suspected P-zombie, and it registered no consciousness, wouldn't you still treat the suspected P-zombie as if it were conscious? After all, no device is infallible. I also don't see how such an invention could ever come about. Suppose you think you've come up with a consciousness detector, and you point it a dog. How could you possibly verify the accuracy of the meter? That would require another meter to verify the results of the first one, and you have an infinite regress. I see no way around this.
There's a few aspects, but I'll start with this:
Quoting Isaac
This statement claims that "I" refers to both a body and to a unit of that body, this at the same time and in the same respect - thereby making a whole equivalent to a part of that whole. If you uphold this logical contradiction, it is incoherent. If you don't than your quoted statement is erroneous or, at best, very misleading; in which case, please clarify it.
Quoting Isaac
As to the first sentence, it reads as though making the claim that I have no experiences which I can then address. Which is sheer fallacy. I do have experiences, and it is these that I'm addressing. As to the second sentence, it is equivocating the way my total mind works with the way my conscious experience works. Where it to instead read, "The evidence you think you're presenting of the way your conscious experience unfolds is not direct evidence" it would be nonsensical.
Quoting Isaac
OK. Interesting hypothesis. How then do you distinguish behaviors - such as that of imagining a table - that are voluntary (which means consciously willed) from those that are involuntary (which means not consciously willed).
If he needs help discovering what Chalmers' meant by the "hard problem," I'll be happy to point him toward helpful resources.
The collection {things I like} is made up of anything I deem to be a member of it. It's nothing more than those things, it's not those things + the collection of those things. The collection {my body} is similarly made up of those components I deem to be part of it. It's not a thing in addition to that collection.
Quoting javra
The point is that you are conflating the already given with the constructed. Unless we live in some weird matrix-like hallucinatory trance, we appear to find our constructions (the things we think of as real) to be constrained in some way, not everything works. Yet also there are competing theories which all seem to work equally well, right now. different people believe different things to be the case and they seem to get on with life quite happily nonetheless, right?
So there's two categories here. The things we construct, and the causes or constraints on those constructions.
Investigating those causes just inevitably means investigating further constructions, we can't escape that. So for any of this to make any sense we determine the field which we're holding to be constructed and the field which we're holding to be causal. For example, we might ask why people behave the way they do. Here the behaviours (words like 'giving', 'fighting', 'hiding') are the constructions and something like the endocrine system would be the constraints. Btu if we're actually examining the endocrine system, then things like 'progesterone' are the constructions and we look to molecular forces as the constraints.
When you talk about your experiences, they are the constructions. something caused you to feel that way. If we investigate your experiences we look to the causes, not the constructions. you're treating your experiences as causes, as something we can use as base facts to investigate some construction. But there is no construction above that. your experiences are the end of the process, they're what we talk about, the objects of our language. They're not facts which we can use to discover something about the next level up, and they're certainly not something sacred, immune to analysis in terms of constructions lower down the hierarchy we postulate as being casual.
Quoting javra
We tell ourselves a story about the causes of what just happened based primarily on interocepted states. Sometimes a story involving 'willing' will be most useful. Other times a story involving 'involuntary' will. Both are constructions, when looked at at this level of analysis.
First, he doesn't need 'help'. You and he disagree. He's at the very least your epistemic peer, so if you disagree it is as likely you are wrong (and in need of 'help') as it is he is.
Secondly, if you were an acknowledged, qualified Chalmers expert, maybe we'd hear what you have to say first and ask for help second, but you're not. You're just an ordinary lay party. So if you think someone is wrong, have the courtesy of assuming you'll need to support that first. It's not rocket science.
No, the hard problem is a fixture of philosophy of mind at this point. The whole point of the hard problem is to put us on the path to a theory of consciousness that explains experience. Chalmers explores numerous possible pathways. There's nothing controversial about that.
My posts to Wayfarer were meant to be a heads up to look back at the very paper he cited. It does not say that science can not explain experience. If he thinks it does, he should point out which passage he believes says that, and we can bring to light where Wayfarer misunderstood.
You and @Wayfarer disagree on some matter. Are you suggesting that it's somehow impossible that you're wrong. Has your narcissism really gone that far? If not, then it is not necessarily a matter of you 'bringing to light where he's misunderstood', but equally a matter of finding where you have misunderstood. Hence it is equally useful for you to point out which passage you think supports your conjecture as it is for Wayfarer to do so.
Someone with alien hand syndrome might not deem his hand (or other body part) to be an aspect of himself. For this and other reasons, I still find you explanation of what the "I" references to be uninformative.
Quoting Isaac
Experience, including that which is empirical, is directly present to conscious awareness. That experience can be constructed can only be inferential. Inferred from experiential evidence. But, as is already known, we don't share a common outlook.
Quoting Isaac
Thank you for the explanation. I myself don't find it convincing. While it might work well enough on a philosophy forum, such outlook would likely be quickly deleterious in many a real-life context. And it does not explain many a medical condition, such as that of alien hand syndrome. But again, we hold different outlooks.
As was addressing, that no one can empirically observe the mind's eye so far seems to be well enough substantiated. If anyone believes they've come upon evidence to the contrary, I'll likely take a look. Otherwise, due to time constraints, I'll at this point likely be leaving the debate in others' hands.
So? Then the hand is not part of his body, for him. How is that difficult? We'd disagree (he and I), and I were his doctor I'd treat his hand as if it were part of his body. But there's no fact of the matter beyond what we construct to be the case. We term 'body' as being just that collection of parts which we deem it is. God hasn't declared "... and this shall you call a 'body'!" we made it up.
Quoting javra
So you keep declaring. To label something 'experience' is already to use a word in our common language which is already to have a social construction. Words are not given to us by God, we make them up collectively.
Your position simply reifies artefacts of language and then thinks it significant that we can't find them empirically. We couldn't find 'elan vital' either. Didn't stop us having a word for it.
This is the paragraph I frequently cite:
[Quote=David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness; https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf] The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.[/quote]
Later, he says:
That's fairly clear cut, is it not?
Yes. Chalmers believes that our present scientific approach to understanding consciousness is limited to explaining function. He believes we need to add experience as an explanandum in its own right.
On the other hand, you said:
Quoting Wayfarer
This isn't true. He believes a scientific theory of consciousness is possible. This would be a third-person account.
Quoting Wayfarer
You inserted "impossibility" there. That isn't Chalmer's view.
Quoting Wayfarer
Here you lay out your own view more clearly, and it's a view that has its place in philosophy of mind. It's called mysterianism. A famous proponent of it is Colin McGinn. David Chalmers doesn't hold to that view.
Thank you.
Quoting frank
Although he does say:
[quote=David Chalmers, First Person Methods... ;https://consc.net/papers/firstperson.html]As I see it, the science of consciousness is all about relating third-person data - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to first-person data about conscious experience. I take it for granted that there are first-person data. It's a manifest fact about our minds that there is something it is like to be us - that we have subjective experiences - and that these subjective experiences are quite different at different times. Our direct knowledge of subjective experiences stems from our first-person access to them. And subjective experiences are arguably the central data that we want a science of consciousness to explain.
I also take it that the first-person data can't be expressed wholly in terms of third-person data about brain processes and the like. There may be a deep connection between the two - a correlation or even an identity - but if there is, the connection will emerge through a lot of investigation, and can't be stipulated at the beginning of the day. That's to say, no purely third-person description of brain processes and behavior will express precisely the data we want to explain, though they may play a central role in the explanation. So as data, the first-person data are irreducible to third-person data.[/quote]
Quoting frank
Fair point. Might have gotten carried away.
I've read a little of Colin McGinn and listened to an interview with him recently. He doesn't really grab me. I'm interested in phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy of mind, although it's a digression from this OP.
He means that the information we have about how the visual system works, for instance, doesn't explain the experience of seeing, at least it hasn't yet. The knowledge about what the brain is doing during vision is third person data. The experience itself is first-person data.
But if, say, Penrose turns out to be right and experience has something to do with events on the quantum level, that would be a third person account. It may be that we as a species are like a patient who is "locked in." Maybe we can't have final answers, or maybe final answers simply don't exist. But that doesn't mean we're presently at an end of our journey to sort out what we can understand.
The point I was addressing was the falsity to your claim that, "I agree with Chalmers, on the grounds that objective physical sciences exclude the first person as a matter of principle."
It seems that went over your head, but now that I am pointing it our more explicitly, can you recognize the falsity of that statement you made? Do you recognize that you are not well qualified to speak of "the principles of science"?
Quoting Wayfarer
People make dumb bets. If I had been there I would happily have bet ten cases of wine on Chalmer's side. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and Chalmers was right on the occasion when the bet was made.
BTW, people use "OP" here in a way that I haven't been able to clearly grasp the referent of. I think of "OP" as an acronym for "original post" referring to the initial post in a forum thread/discussion. However, some people use "OP" in ways that clearly do not fit with my understanding; your usage for example. What I consider to be the OP wasn't about the bet. It was about a "Nice little roundup of the state of consciousness studies"... ..."Over at Vox Future Perfect."
Quoting Wayfarer
I haven't read this thread closely enough to know what paper you are referring to. Can you provide a non-paywalled link?
Perhaps the Consciousness problem is "intractable" for empirical science because subjective experience is seamless & holistic, with no obvious joints for reductive science to carve into smaller chunks of Awareness. Equating the material Brain with the immaterial Mind is like carving thin air with a steak knife. Unfortunately, that means philosophers can only analyze theoretically, not empirically. Is that like a toothless man gumming a steak, then trying to swallow it whole? We can get a taste of 3rd person Consciousness, but not the full meaning/feeling. :smile:
OK, I should have written 'excludes consideration of the first-person perspective....'
Quoting wonderer1
No need to be condescending.
Quoting wonderer1
I use to mean both Original Post and Original Poster. As the OP in this case linked to the Chalmers-Koch wager, I took it to be the central point of the OP.
Quoting wonderer1
And was still right 25 years later, as it happens.
Quoting wonderer1
Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers.
Quoting Gnomon
I agree. A scientific paper I frequently refer to is The Neural Binding Problem(s) by Jerome S Feldman. 'In its most general form, The Binding Problem concerns how items that are encoded by distinct brain circuits can be combined for perception, decision, and action.' Under the heading The Subjective Unity of Perception, the paper discusses 'the mystery of subjective personal experience.'
It references Chalmer's paper directly, saying, 'this is one instance of the famous mindbody problem (Chalmers 1996) concerning the relation of our subjective experience (aka qualia) to neural function. Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole. This is closely related to the problem known as the illusion of a stable visual world (Martinez-Conde et al. 2008).' It says that there is no known neural system that accounts for what we all experience as a stable visual world picture. 'What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.'
There's a Stanford Encyc. of Phil. article on this issue here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-unity/
I'm currently reading a book by mathematical physicist Charles Pinter, subtitled : How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics. After a chapter discussing Donald Hoffman's interface theory ("a necessary deception"), he raises the "binding problem"*2 of Consciousness, using vision as an example. "The retinal image is split apart at its very inception into disembodied aspects each of which is analyzed in different and specialized part of the brain". And, "the information parsed by the brain is assembled and comes together somewhere". Then he concludes, "no one knows where or how visual information comes together to yield a systematic, unitary image." He uses an old term from 20th century Psychology, Gestalt*3, to label those holistic concepts.
Apparently, incoming sensory information from the outside world is reductively "analyzed" by the brain into various qualia, like Shape or Motion, which are parceled-out according to their significance to the observer. But eventually, all those isolated parts must be re-integrated into the holistic concepts, we call Images or Ideas or Gestalts. Yet, there is no known mechanism for that transformation from parts to wholes. Even the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, doesn't specify by what magic the bits of physical neuronal information (codes) are transmuted into subjective metaphysical mental imagery (content). This implicit natural "magic" may be what Materialists dismiss as spooky "woo". Yet Pinter takes it seriously.
He uses several terms --- integrated, come together, convergence, confluence --- to describe the process of "binding" bits of information into meaningful bytes (words) of awareness. Yet his proposed mechanism is not a mechanism at all, but merely acknowledgement of the apparent duality of reality, and the necessary unity of the universe. "The mind seems to be non-material, though tied to the brain which is material. . . . . The very idea of mind acting on matter by a pure effect of will appears a little spooky". But it's only uncanny if your worldview has no place for immaterial stuff like Ideas & Ideals.
To explain the disdainful "woo" response to notions of matterless mental phenomena, Pinter notes that "contemporary philosophy is dominated by a materialist way of thinking strongly influenced by physics". Yet, since Materialism is an unproven presumption (axiom), the problem may be more of a "way of believing" than a "way of thinking". Although the term is not in the book's Index, his own monistic unifying approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness sounds more like Panpsychism. :smile:
PS___He doesn't refer to Biosemiology by name, but the author mentions that "the signals merely code the content", implying that the personal significance (meaning) of those incoming symbols is a product of Mind, not Brain. He also says, "the brain constructs a coded representation of the visual array . . . . There is no known physical mechanism which could achieve this unification". Here again, the implication of Holism, which is a taboo concept for believers in monistic Materialism, living in an apparently dualistic world. :nerd:
*1. Interface Theory :
Within the interface theory of perception, neither primary nor secondary qualities necessarily map onto reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
Note --- "primary" = incoming Percepts ; "secondary" = processed Concepts ???
*2. The neural binding problem :
In its most general form, The Binding Problem concerns how items that are encoded by distinct brain circuits can be combined for perception, decision, and action. In Science, something is called a problem when there is no plausible model for its substrate.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/
Note --- Incoming physically encoded Information (abstract dots & dashes) must be metaphysically decoded (into meaningful words & images) in order to make sense to the observer.
*3. Gestalt :
The classic principles of the gestalt theory of visual perception include similarity, continuation, closure, proximity, figure/ground, and symmetry & order
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ui/gestalt-principles-of-design
Note --- Pinter says "Gestalt is not an objective fact of the world, but is a way of being perceived. It is a property of perception, not a property of of the external world." Although I appreciate the alliteration, to be more accurate, I would change physical "perception" to mental "conception",
Perception = analysis (reductive science)
Conception = integration (holistic philosophy)
Is substance-dualism making a come back?
Apparently, Substance Dualism never went away. It seems to be compared or contrasted with Property Dualism in the never-ending debates on Brain vs Mind explanations for the mysterious-yet-familiar quality of Consciousness, by which we know both substances and properties. :smile:
PS__When I refer to "substance" in this context, I'm usually talking about Aristotle's definition as Essence.
Substance and Essence in Aristotle :
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801421266/substance-and-essence-in-aristotle/#bookTabs=1
The refrain of no one knows is being heard often. And yet the neuroscience exists.
The unification and stabilisation of perception is what falls out of the Bayesian Brain and its predictive modelling. Learning to ignore the world as much as possible by learning to anticipate the world as much as possible is what both solves this binding problem and also produces the sense of the still self at the centre of its coherently unfolding world.
Before you turn your head, you have already sent out the reafference pattern as the motor command to be subtracted from the resulting perceptual experience. You will know it is you that turns and not the world that suddenly lurches as that is the uncertainty which you just cancelled out in advance.
A lot of BS is being cited here about what neuroscience doesnt know. Chalmers and Koch are perpetuating a giant public con. You are falling for it.
Really? Are they actively scheming to fool people or just unwitting dupes of a Bayesian mastermind?
:clap: I've been singing that book's praises on this forum ever since I read it about a year ago. I emailed the author and got a friendly reply (he's well into his nineties now). All of his other books are mathematics textbooks but his homepage notes his interest in neural modelling. I think it's an important but under-rated book - under-rated because Pinter isn't known as a cognitive scientist or philosopher, so it went under the radar. I think his use of the Gestalt is particularly brilliant, he even shows how very simple organisms like fruitflies can be shown to parse sensory information as gestalts (meaningful wholes. See this ChatGPT summary of convergences between Kant and Gestalt.)
Quoting RogueAI
One has to be very, very careful about the use of the word 'substance' in philosophy generally and this topic in particular. 'Substance' in normal parlance means 'a material with uniform properties'. In philosophy, 'substance' was originally 'substantia' which was the Latin translation of Aristotle's 'ousia'. And that word is a form of the verb 'to be', i.e. much nearer in meaning to 'being' or 'subject' than what we normally consider 'substance' (see this reference).
Among the pernicious consequences of this ambiguity is Descartes' use of the term 'res cogitans'. 'Res' is actually Latin for 'thing', so 'res cogitans' means literally 'thinking thing'. But we also inherit 'thinking stuff' or 'thinking substance', which is completely different from the idea of 'self-aware subject' (although no specific term may be an exact fit.)
Given all those caveats, I think there's a case to be made for a type of dualism. Perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is 'the capacity for experience' in an allegorical manner to energy as 'the capacity for work'// and that physical matter, in the absence of consciousness, lacks the capacity for experience. So that the emergence of organisms is also the emergence of the capacity for experience, which is absent in the non-organic domain.//
Quoting apokrisis
Your metaphors and explanations are concerned with neural modelling as a function of survival, not with philosophy of mind per se. You referred to Karl Friston as exemplary - the Vox article points out that 'Stripped of all the math, (Friston) suggests that the behavior of all living systems follows a single principle: To remain alive, they try to minimize the difference between their expectations and incoming sensory input.' That would go for fruit-flies and crocodiles, as well as bats and humans on one level. But it says nothing in particular about the nature or meaning of conscious experience. The reason you dismiss Chalmer's paper is because it means nothing to you, given your interests and emphasis.
That applies to anything science might investigate. It is not special to consciousness. It is why science has special contempt for theories that are not even wrong.
Which is the class of theory popular with crackpots who like the idea that the Hard Problem gives them licence for their furious speculations.
And with it, much of philosophy. This thread has largely been characterised by measured consideration of claims and arguments. Very little by way of 'furious speculation'.
Great post btw. I read about the idea of a central processing hub a while back. It would take sensory cues, models, learned and innate reflexes, hopes, fears, etc. and smush it together somehow.
Quoting Gnomon
But if the cultural pendulum swings back toward thinking of ideas as some sort of stuff, or an interaction between stuff, then ideas would take their place among the material of materialism like gravity did.
So what is it about organisms that is so special? What characterises them beyond what the bare physics of matter can tell us?
The scientific view is that organisms display intelligence and behavioural autonomy because they use semiotic codes to construct a selfish or enactive modelling relation with their worlds. That is what can be seen plainly written into the structure of their nervous systems. It is not a mystery.
So what is the alternative you are trying to float here? That a by-product of starting down that path is that living bodies somehow tune into a karmic plane of being, or something?
They are like fleshy receivers of cosmic signal? Having a metabolism not only allows organisms to do work but also download, glimpse, incorporate, something or other, a kind of experiential energy that radiates from some source beyond the physical realm?
Be specific as you like in answering. What ontology do you wish to commit to here?
I thought you had distanced yourself from philosophical materialism. Was I wrong?
Organisms are subjects of experience, which is something more than, or other than, simply objects of scientific analysis. This goes for all organisms but is more significant for self-aware animals and rational sentient beings such as humans. To regard living beings as objects is, I think, inhumane and rather presumptious.
Organisms act for reasons other than the physical, even if they're constrained by physical laws. They act for reasons, not simply as a consequence of prior material or efficient causation. The appearance of organisms signifies the appearance of intentionality, even without attributing intentionality to something mysteriously inherent in nature. Perhaps it could be understood in terms of emergence, but in another sense it is also something novel.
Incidentally, the word "karma" (????) means "action," "deed," or "act." It is derived from the root "k?" (??), which signifies "to do" or "to act" (ultimately derivative from the word for "hand"). In its original context, karma represents the idea that every action has consequences, although plainly a lot more has been read into it. I nevertheless think it is a sound basis for an ethical philosophy.
I like that analogy. Mostly because it aligns with my own little reductive thesis, that everything in the universe is a form of Energy, in the sense of Causation, and from the perspective of information theory1. Complexity/panoply is ultimately simplicity.
Since Einstein equated Matter (Mass) with Energy (E=MC^2), most of us on this forum have come to accept the counter-intuitive notion that invisible intangible Energy/Force can transform*2 into the visible tangible matter-substance-stuff that our physical senses are attuned to. And since Shannon equated knowable Information with Entropy/Uncertainty, we can now trace the emergence of the "capacity for experience" back to the primal "capacity for work" (for change, causation).
Mental experience (knowing, awareness) is mostly an encounter with Change (difference) in the environment. Those Transformations (changes in physical form) are due to the Causal power --- ability to do the work of metamorphosis (a change of the form or nature of a thing). That natural constructive/destructive power is merely Energy (EnFormAction*3) in its various forms (light, heat, impulse, etc). And those bits of experience (knowledge) are recordings in the brain/mind of minor changes in the environment. Collectively, we call those incoming bits & bytes of potential experience : "Information" (meaning, relative to self).
I apologize for using your analogy to discuss my own unfamiliar mashup of Energy & Information & Consciousness. I'm still looking for ways to make such arcane sub-atomic science understandable for philosophical purposes. Now, back to your regular program. :smile:
PS__The thesis ultimately compresses the conventional dualism of Mind/Brain into the monism of Universal Causation (the power to enform).
*1. Formation : to cause changes in structure, both positive & negative
To "inform" is to introduce a formative (causal) principle into a mind. To "enform" is to inject a causal (formative) principle into a material object.
*2. Transform : make a thorough or dramatic change in the form, appearance, or character of.
Abstract Energy (light, heat) is a wave form, alternating from maximum to minimum, and passing through a zero point in between. Compression of the wave intensifies the energy value. When compressed to a degree defined by the cosmic constant ("C"), now known as the vacuum energy density, it apparently "squeezes" the nothingness of vacuum into the measurable Mass of Matter. The result is a complete transformation of abstract Potential into concrete Actual. Magic? No, Science.
*3. EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Yes. Daniel Dennett derisively labeled that hypothetical "central processing hub" as the Cartesian Theatre. And the "hub" was portrayed as a homunculus (little man in the head). Materialist scientists are still looking in vain for a central processor in the brain. :nerd:
INFINITE REGRESS OF CONCEPTION
Quoting frank
Gravity --- spooky action at a distance --- is often imagined as-if it's a material substance, and portrayed in images as a two dimensional grid in space. But in reality, there is no physical "tractor beam" out in space, pulling heavy objects toward each other. That's why Einstein defined it as an invisible mathematical relationship, not a tangible "fabric" with hills & valleys. Those are merely metaphors --- like the sentient homunculus --- to aid us in conceiving of something otherwise inconceivable, because immaterial. :smile:
WARPED FABRIC OF EMPTY SPACE
It's not an analogy, it's a proposition. The difficulty with your thesis being that energy does not itself exhibit a 'capacity for experience', it acts without any such capacity, which is specific to consciousness. And to say that consciousness is a product of matter-energy is falling back to philosophical materialism. You're not going to arrive at anything like an explanation for where consciousness fits in the grand scheme by equating it with energy (or information, for that matter.)
I'm not offering any thesis, other than to say that consciousness, so understood, is irreducible, i.e. can't be explained with reference to anything else. (Although I might add that if consciousness is the capacity for experience, human consciousness in addition exhibits the capacity for abstract reason.)
Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved, Bernardo Kastrup.
But neuroscience does consider first person perspectives and is learning much about them. You can Google "neuroscience first person perspective" and see for yourself. Instead you are making up stories about a science you don't demonstrate much understanding of.
What was it you said about being condescending?
Yes I read the article and a variety of things have been discussed. Are you trying to gaslight people into thinking that the subject of the thread is what you say it is?
I said there was no need for it. From what I can see you haven't really had much to say about the substance of the article being discussed. I have cited the original argument, and responses to that from others including Daniel Dennett, throughout this discussion. I'm not gaslighting anyone.
Quoting wonderer1
Indeed there are. Most of them were published subsequent to 2005, from what I can see. David Chalmer's article was published in 1996. I think much of the literature reflects that, as it was an influential article and put the idea on the agenda, so to speak. Chalmers is not a neuroscientist, his subject is the limitations of science in respect of understanding the nature of first-person experience, from the perspective of philosophy of mind.
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This is a talk from Evan Thompson (mentioned above) on some of the aspects of this approach. It is directly relevant to the question of 'facing up to the problem of consciousness'
Again you are demonstrating that you don't know much about neuroscience. Off the top of my head, the Libet experiment made use of first person report more than a decade before Chalmer's paper was published. Split brain studies making use of first person report go back to the 1960s.
Did Chalmers write any papers as an infant?
I'm sorry, if my equation of Energy & Mind annoys you. But, that's exactly why my thesis*1 is based on metaphysical Information instead of physical Energy. I sometimes call it "directed energy", or "causal energy", or "encoded energy", and sometimes "enforming principle"*2. But my primary alternative to the randomized matter-morphing Energy of Physics, is the notion of EnFormAction*3, which includes mental phenomena among its effects. Unfortunately, I have to repeatedly remind TPF posters that the original meaning of the word "Information", was " knowledge and the ability to know". Also, the relationship between metaphysical (mental) Information & physical (causal) Energy*4 is a recent discovery in science, hence not well known.
The Enformationism thesis is indeed intended to be an explanation for how metaphysical Consciousness could emerge from physical Evolution --- naturally and without divine intervention*5. Moreover, immaterial causal encoded Energy (EnFormAction) is proposed as the agent-of-Awareness in a material world. Unfortunately, that hypothesis is so far from the current dominant worldview, that it is counter-intuitive for those who are only familiar with Claude Shannon's narrow pragmatic definition of "information". So, I keep plugging away, to convey the notion that the reductive Physics definition of "Energy" captures only one aspect of its multifunction roles in the Real and Ideal realms of the World System. One eventual & eventful effect of that natural Causation is the mysterious emergence of mental phenomena in a constantly morphing material world. :smile:
PS__The gap-bridging monistic BothAnd principle*6 --- implicit in the EnFormAction concept --- is difficult for both dualistic-or-monistic Materialists and Spiritualists to accept.
*1. Enformationism :
A worldview or belief system grounded on the assumption that Information (Form), rather than Matter (Hyle), is the basic substance (essence) of everything in the universe. It is intended to be a 21st century update of the ancient paradigms of Materialism and Spiritualism.
https://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/page2%20Welcome.html
*2. Ultimate Enforming Principle :
A major dispute is that of Matter versus Spirit. The Bible describes God as a spirit, but the modern concept of Energy (a form of information) --- as an invisible power --- was not even a gleam in the eye of the Bronze Age scribes. Nevertheless, both Ward and I have used the novel Information Age notion of flowing data bits, pioneered by Claude Shannon, and many quantum physicists, as an analog of those invisible ancient agents known as ghosts & spirits.
https://bothandblog5.enformationism.info/page24.html
*3. What is EnFormAction? :
The BothAnd Principle is a corollary to the thesis of Enformationism, in that it is a mashup of both Materialism and Spiritualism, of both Science and Religion, of both Empirical and Theoretical methods. The novel concept of Enformation is also a synthesis of both Energy and Information. So I invented a new portmanteu word to more precisely encapsulate that two-in-one meaning : EnFormAction. In this case though, the neologism contains three parts : En for Energy, Form for Shape or Structure or Design, and Action for Change or Causation. But Energy & Causation are basically the same thing. And the En- prefix is typically used to indicate that which causes a thing to be in whatever state or form or condition is referred to.
https://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
*4. Information as Energy :
The literal equivalence of physical energy and mental information is still a fringe notion among scientists. But it has many credentialed champions, including Paul Davies, editor of the book noted above. Energy = Information (power to cause changes in Form).
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
*5. Preternatural LOGOS :
So, Ill skip the history lesson, and focus mainly on the emerging secular notion of some force behind Nature that functions like an invisible hand, guiding humanity toward a more inclusive moral circle. This god-like guide is not conceived in anthro-morphic mythical terms, but more like Platos philosophical creative principle, the Logos.
https://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page47.html
*6. Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
It doesnt annoy me, but Im not persuaded by it.
Quoting Gnomon
Not according to the Oxford Dictionary online edition. It says the first use of the term was in relation to:
[quote] accusatory or incriminatory intelligence against a person. Excepting specific legal contexts, thats no longer an active sense, though it survives as a dominant meaning of related terms like informant and informer.
Perhaps, instead of original meaning of "information" I should have said "the pre-Shannon usage of 'information' " referred to the contents of a Mind. I wasn't talking about a particular dictionary definition, but to traditional usage over the years as indicated in synonyms : instruction, intelligence*1, knowledge, message.
The distinction I was trying to make is between Shannon's definition of "information" in terms of the meaningless carrier/container, as opposed to the message/content : meaning. The container of Shannon's Information is a material substance of some kind (neuron), but the content is immaterial knowledge (idea, meaning). Hence, the meaningful content of a bit of Information is mind-stuff. And a "bit" is a binary digit, expressed as a mathematical ratio*2. Which, incidentally is the root of "Reason" and "Rational". :nerd:
*1. Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. _____Wikipedia
Note --- For the purposes of my thesis, I refer to the various usages of "intelligible information" as contrasted with Shannon's "conveyable information".
*2. Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics its called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology its called "Conflict".
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Not sure how you intend the sentence I just quoted. But I want to clarify:
As the Latin root of modern English reason and rational, ratio is the noun form of the Latin terms reor and/or ratus. These latter two Latin terms have multiple definitions (from "having judged" to "to consider" and a lot more aside), but all these definitions make indispensable use of discernment by which I here mean a cognized distinction between some X and some Y that are bound by some relation (e.g., an object and its background), this regardless of whether one focuses on X, Y, or the relation between.
As such, the Latin term ratio does not pivot on maths and computations it certainly doesnt equate to mathematical ratios in the modern sense of "ratio". Instead, this Latin term's meaning pivots on something far closer to discernment and, thereby, all that can result from and is implied by faculties of discernment (to include judgments, awareness of purpose(s), plans, and mathematical properties and relations, among many other possibilities).
I suppose you are also not persuaded by Max Tegmark's thesis of a Mathematical Universe. Besides being anathema to the worldview of Materialism, that notion is counter-intuitive to the matter/energy sensing human brain. I'm not sure what term you would prefer, to refer to the fundamental element/essence/substance of the universe (Mind ; Spirit ?). However, mathematics is not a physical substance out there in the world, but a way of modeling the world in the human Mind. My notion of Causal Information is similar, except that it is not just inert statistics, but dynamic ever-changing physics.
In James Glattfelder's book, Information-Consciousness-Reality, he devotes a chapter to the topic : A Universe Built of Information. There, he quotes editor/publisher of science books, John Horgan : "The everything-is-information meme violates common sense". Yet, Glattfelder concludes in the epilogue : "I believe in the computational engine of the universe --- reality's information-theoretic ontology. I believe that consciousness shares the same innate essence as the 'material' " {my bold} And, according to Einstein, the essence of Matter/Mass is Energy*1. But where did the cosmos-creating power of the Big Bang come from?
Not from within space-time, apparently. Hence, there must be something more eternal/essential/fundamental than physical Energy. That ultimate quintessence is what I call EnFormAction, and it necessarily existed prior to the Big Bang : as causal & organizing Potential. Without that motivational-directional-integrating impetus, nothing in the Actual world would exist : not even the dust of Entropy.
Obviously, we don't sense Matter & Energy as the same thing ; they have different physical properties & effects. But they share a formal relationship to some more fundamental essence. In my thesis, I refer to that essence as The Power to Enform, abbreviated as Information, or more technically as EnFormAction*2. What may not be so obvious is that I'm using a common word, "Information", in an uncommon sense : the ability to cause change, and to organize isolated parts into meaningful wholes. From that perspective, EnformAction is Energy + Laws. I usually avoid calling that magical power "divine" though, because that's a "woo word" and a dialog stopper. Instead, I refer to it anonymously by Plato's non-anthro-morphic term : "LOGOS".
For me the Source of all power in the universe remains a mystery, beyond the scope of empirical Science. So, I can't persuade you with hard facts, only metaphors & analogies & reasoning. :smile:
*1. Energy - Matter equivalence :
It's the world's most famous equation, but what does it really mean? "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." On the most basic level, the equation says that energy and mass (matter) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/lrk-hand-emc2expl.html
*2. EnFormAction :
*** [i]Metaphorically, it's the Will-power of G*D, which is the First Cause of everything in creation. Aquinas called the Omnipotence of God the "Primary Cause", so EFA is the general cause of every-thing in the world. Energy, Matter, Gravity, Life, Mind are secondary creative causes, each with limited application.
*** All are also forms of Information, the "difference that makes a difference". It works by directing causation from negative to positive, cold to hot, ignorance to knowledge. That's the basis of mathematical ratios (Greek "Logos", Latin "Ratio" = reason). A : B :: C : D. By interpreting those ratios we get meaning and reasons. The ability to know & interpret the non-self world is what we call Awareness or Consciousness : to make distinctions ; to parse random complexity into meaningful patterns.
*** The concept of a river of causation running through the world in various streams has been interpreted in materialistic terms as Momentum, Impetus, Force, Energy, etc, and in spiritualistic idioms as Will, Love, Conatus, and so forth. EnFormAction is all of those.[/i]
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
I am very wary of the attempt to identify some putative ultimate in objective terms. But those terms do make sense in the context of the cultures and traditions in which they were meaningful. I suppose in terms of an ostensible ultimate, I could assent to 'dharma', which is from the Indic root meaning 'what holds together'. There are convergences between 'dharma' and 'logos'.
Quoting Gnomon
Indeed, and a major part of the kind of philosophy I've pursued is realisation of that - the 'way of unknowing' or 'way of negation', expressed in various idiomatic ways. We ourselves are beyond the scope of empirical science.
Thanks for the clarification. However, I was not making a statement about the Latin language, but about the modern usage of the term "ratio". Synonyms range from fraction, quotient, & percentage to proportion, balance, & relationship. It's also the root of "Rational", pertaining to Logic & Reason. All of those terms, and many more, convey particular aspects of the general concept of "Information" (the power to enform ; to create novel knowable things). And they are also related to "Logic" & "Reason" as functional features of human Consciousness. Anyway, I was just trying to make a point about the ubiquity of universal Information (bits) : from Math to Meaning to Physics (it from bit). :smile:
It from Bit Theory :
In 1990, Wheeler suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this "it from bit" doctrine, all things physical are information-theoretic in origin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
Note --- Before Shannon, "information" referred only to "things mental". Now it encompasses "all things", both physical and metaphysical.
Immaterial & Material Information :
"It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom at a very deep bottom, in most instances [b]an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses . . .[/b]"
https://philpapers.org/archive/WHEIPQ.pdf
I too, am cautious about speaking of philosophical Ultimate postulations on a mostly proximate-minded Materialistic forum. But in discussions about Mind & Consciousness, the question of Origins frequently comes up. So, I have used a variety of wiggle-words to describe a concept that is literally out-of-this-world : pre-Big-Bang & Pre-Space-Time. At first, I merely added an ambiguous asterisk to the common word for The Ultimate : G*D. But I also occasionally use some traditional philosophical terms, such as LOGOS & TAO, to describe the ineffable enforming-organizing power behind the scenes of this organic-orderly world, that somehow produces meaningful Order (patterns) out of random Chaos (noise).
I also avoid attributing such anthro-morphic characteristics as Goodness & Mercy to the creative force behind the program of heuristic Evolution (Nature). Which is often distinguished from intentional development (Culture) as "red in tooth & claw". The Tao is described as "harmonious", but that's merely an Ideal that is seldom found in a world divided between Predator & Prey. Instead, the world being created by the Tekton or Demiurge follows a meandering path that is globally balanced, but locally erratic. The "design" of this world is indeed Intelligent (logical), but not necessarily Good (emotional) from the perspective of its flesh & blood inhabitants. So, I refer to the long-running Cosmic Program of Emergence as "Intelligent Evolution". That's because it includes natural Laws (of unknown etiology) that guide it past heuristic accidents toward an unforseeable Ultimate Output.
From the viewpoint of the Enformationism thesis though, I refer to the presumptive creator (First Cause) of the evolutionary program, running on the physical computer we call the Universe, by the functional description : Programmer or Enformer. This non-traditional notion derives from modern sciences, including Evolutionary Programming, Quantum Physics, and Information Theory. And the fundamental element/essence of all those sciences is, not just inert Data, but causal Information (Energy + Law). You won't find these novel ideas in textbooks or dictionaries, because they are new & unproven, and possibly unprovable. And their only value is for philosophical speculation on ultimate questions. :smile:
TAO :
the absolute principle underlying the universe, combining within itself the principles of yin and yang and signifying the way, or code of behavior, that is in harmony with the natural order.
___Oxford dictionary
Note --- My thesis presents a neologism for the principle of Yin/Yang : BothAnd.
LOGOS :
When Aristotle talks about logos, hes referring to reasoned discourse or the argument.
https://boords.com/ethos-pathos-logos/what-is-logos-definition-and-examples-with-gifs
Note : I view the gradually evolving world as an on-going "argument" on an unknown topic. We don't know the original question, but we experience the pros & cons as the heuristic process of discovery, that we call "Evolution". The trend seems to be generally toward Complexity, but with inherent Contradictions.
DHARMA :
(in Indian religion) the eternal and inherent nature of reality, regarded in Hinduism as a cosmic law underlying right behavior and social order. ---Oxford dictionary
Note --- What Science calls "natural law", the ancients labelled as Tao, Dharma, or Logos. In each case, the Law is an ideal that is often broken by willful humans, with the gift of Consciousness.
As an aside, I'll mention that both of us seem to take broad moderate positions on the Realism vs Idealism and Materialism vs Spiritualism spectrum. Yet, we have crossed an invisible line in the sand, drawn by adherents of the non-religious belief system known as Scientism. Hence, any mention of woo-words like "spirit" can tag you with attributed beliefs that are associated with the "wrong" end of that spectrum. That's because those with polarized views of "ultimates", often see moderates as tending toward the opposite side.
Unfortunately, any metaphysical worldview (an -ism, like Materialism) can be turned into a dogmatic cult/religion by gurus who are motivated to gather admiring followers, who don't think for themselves. For example, even the literally rational (ratio-based) Mathematics of Pythagoras became a sort of religious cult, when an abstract idealized metaphysical concept became encrusted in physical metaphors about such innocuous things as reincarnating beans.
Although mathematical physicist/cosmologist, Max Tegmark, is treading on the ideal side of modern worldviews, I'm not aware of any cult following that has emerged from his Platonic notion of a mathematical universe . . . yet. My own one-man, information-focused, belief system does not have any of the emotional appeal necessary for a popular religion . . . yet. :joke:
Pythagoreanism :
Society remembers Pythagoras as a mathematician and not as a charismatic cult leader. However, the two go hand in hand. Pythagoras believed in sacred mathematics and thought that the universe could be understood through numbers. Pythagoreanism was more than a cult of numero-philes. They believed in metempsychosis (reincarnation), embraced an egalitarian communal lifestyle, and practiced a rigid set of daily rituals and dietary restrictions. The cult also believed in universal music or harmony of the spheres, wherein it was believed that the movements of celestial bodies were a form of music.
https://www.thecollector.com/cult-of-pythagoras/
There's something else, though. To truly penetrate or understand the nature of being (I prefer 'being' to 'reality' in this context) requires a re-orientation or a change to one's way of being - walking the walk. That is what philosophical praxis (distinct from theoria) requires.
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Modern science doesn't necessarily imbue those qualites (although it might, amongst some of its exponents). But the difference is, scientific method assumes the separation of knower and known, whereas in traditional philosophical discipline, these are not necessarily separate domains.
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I suppose my philosophical journey is also focused more on the abstract "nature of being" than on "Reality", in the usual materialistic sense. But it's mostly a bloodless intellectual search for meaning, deficient in passionate pursuit. And that dispassionate quest is lacking any formal Praxis. I was never directly exposed to Hinduism or Buddhism in my youth. And while others of my generation were experiencing the joys of Hippie virtues, I was in southeast Asia "killing the little yellow man". I never personally killed anyone, but I suppose I had the cloaks of killers "laid at my feet". Philosophy was not part of my "being" until I retired from Reality, and had time to spare for Ideal pointless pursuits. :smile:
How did you add the "Reveals" to your post? I didn't know it was an option.
Quote :
For Hadot...the means for the philosophical student to achieve the complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the students larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things...
Exercise! That require motivation. So, I exercise restraint in exercising. :joke:
1. "Repetition" : Sounds like prayer beads, which is not an element of my religious tradition.
2. "Attention" : That may be my weak point, due to a mild case of ADD
3. "Meditation" : Post-military, I went through a meditation phase while attending a super-liberal hippie-ish local Unity Church. I practiced what they called Alpha-Theta meditation, which was monitored by an EEG machine. I was able to peg the needle, but no big deal. I also tried a sensory-deprivation float tank. In the dark dank tank, my ADD mind never shut-down, but attended to peripheral sensations, such as water dripping. Bottom line : I didn't find the meditative state much different from my normal passionless introverted state of mind.
4. "Dogmata" : I left behind the "dogmas " of my fundamentalist raising. And have never found any new religious doctrines to replace them. I suppose you could say that, late in life, I have developed my own personal creedo, based on the Enformationism thesis. But I'm too flexible to make it a dogma.
5. "Self-mastery" : Again, a weak point for me. But that weak-will doesn't bother me, due to my normal "indifference" and "passivity".
6. "Passions" : I am, by nature, lacking in passion and motivation. So, "taming the tiger" is not a significant challenge for me. I am mostly apathetic toward the ups & downs of life. But that's not due to following any Praxis of Stoicism. It's just the way I am.
7. "Indifference" : "What? Me worry?" :cool:
When you're in Edit mode, notice the 'eye' icon in the controls (for 'hide and reveal). Select the text and click on it.
That passage about Pierre Hadot makes the point that philosophy in the classical sense was a matter of practice and (I suppose) self improvement (although I don't like that term much) rather than just arguments about concepts. I'm no exemplar of the classical virtues although I did go through a long period of daily Buddhist meditation. But somehow, you have to change your frequency, like tuning in to the right wavelength.
After all, say what you will about 'materialistic science', its practical benefits in technology, medicine, transport, food production, and countless other areas has been astoundingly productive. So if philosophy has anything to contribute, it is in learning how to live more contentedly, without needless wants.
Most religions are also grounded on Praxis (Works), especially repetitive activities. For example, Islam's primary communal practice is synchronized prayer. Praxis may be the tie that binds individuals into social organisms. Christianity is unusual (in theory), due to its focus on private internal intellectual Faith, instead of public, communal, oxytosin-enhancing, activities. However, some Christians seem to use private prayer as a form of meditation, for self-improvement (e.g. gaining merit), as contrasted with social improvement, or collective bonding (belonging).
As a philosophical loner though, I "belong" to no empathetic & like-minded group. Hence, I am lacking in emotional support to solidify my adherence to an identifying creed. Would some kind of Praxis lead me to emotional or intellectual self-improvement (self-control), apart from the feeling of being one with a group of fellow practitioners (group control)? Can I be saved, philosophically, by cerebral intellectual Faith without physical emotional Works? Just musing! :joke:
PS__More seriously, I suppose my Practice of writing down my philosophical thoughts, and subjecting them to criticism, is a form of Praxis. Could that lead me to "modify my hypothesis to fit reality", or to "understand the world differently"?
What is the difference between praxis and practice? :
Practice is what those in the trades (like doctors, engineers, psychologists and musicians) do to modify their hypothesis to fit reality. More seriously: Praxis is usually used in the Hegelian and Marxist sense meaning action that works to change society.
https://www.quora.com/In-an-academic-context-what-is-the-difference-between-praxis-and-practice
What is the difference between Zen meditation and transcendental meditation? :
Mantra meditation and Zen meditation both differ from mindfulness. Mantra meditation, which encompasses transcendental meditation, involves repeating a phrase throughout the meditation practice. Zen meditation originates from Zen Buddhism and has the purpose of helping practitioners understand the world differently.
https://positivepsychology.com/differences-between-mindfulness-meditation/
I think it is. I'm sure you all your efforts are driven by what used to be understood as a calling. It's how to answer that is the challenge!
Incidentally about praxis - rather a good Wikipedia article on that also
Also included is the idea that without praxis, one's theory will be limited and stunted. Hadot thus points to a deep interrelation between the two in the world of ancient philosophy. Here is a nice quote:
Quoting Nature
Thanks!
As I noted in my post, I don't have an opinion on the particular positions described in the article, but I don't think scientific theories of consciousness are "flimsy" or "pseudoscience." I won't go any further now - I've had enough of "consciousness" for a while.
So you're unconscious at the moment?
I edited my previous post for clarity.
It is flimsy because it has no metaphysical foundation and pseudo-science because it does not study consciousness scientifically. .
I subscribed to the Journal of Consciousness Studies for three years and was disgusted by the poor quality of the work. It's not an area of study but a club for people who need to get published. .
Pardon my strong views. I feel;the general public are being duped and scientific standards are being abused, and that academics should behave more responsibly. . .
There is a matter of perspective here. You should have seen the state of things 36 years ago, when I started looking into the subject. The progress in understanding since then has been substanantial. Considering the complexity of the subject under study, the technological difficulties in gathering detailed information, and the (IMO) warranted ethical restrictions faced by researchers, I'd say we social primates are doing pretty good.
At least the scientific community now accepts that consciousness exists and this is certainly progress. I don't share your view that it is making progress otherwise, but don't rule out the possibility. I suspect we'll have to wait for one of Kuhn's generational paradigm shifts. .