How our experiences could be local?

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

Moderators: AMod, iMod

User avatar
Arising_uk
Posts: 12314
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 2:31 am

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by Arising_uk »

bahman wrote: The brain process the signals which receive from the finger such that so it seems that there is a pain in the place of injury.
I don't think this quite the way to think about it. There is only the CNS and that runs all the way to your fingers, when there is an injury its reported and the report gives the location and the pain is the signal that it is an injury, other times its things like texture or pressure.
User avatar
bahman
Posts: 8791
Joined: Fri Aug 05, 2016 3:52 pm

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by bahman »

Arising_uk wrote:
bahman wrote: The brain process the signals which receive from the finger such that so it seems that there is a pain in the place of injury.
I don't think this quite the way to think about it. There is only the CNS and that runs all the way to your fingers, when there is an injury its reported and the report gives the location and the pain is the signal that it is an injury, other times its things like texture or pressure.
What is CNS?
User avatar
bahman
Posts: 8791
Joined: Fri Aug 05, 2016 3:52 pm

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by bahman »

thedoc wrote:
bahman wrote:
Terrapin Station wrote: The experience isn't located at your finger, but the injury is.
I know that. The brain fantastically simulate the pain such that it seems that pain is in the place of the injury. That is an amazing phenomena to me. Isn't it to you?
To me it would be fantastic and a bit absurd if the brain located the pain anywhere other than at the injury. Of course that could be useful in public, if the injury was to the groin, and the person grabbed their head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zkIz6qLPwc
Not really, to me the pain could be experience anywhere in your body.
User avatar
Arising_uk
Posts: 12314
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 2:31 am

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by Arising_uk »

bahman wrote: What is CNS?
Central Nervous System
User avatar
Trajk Logik
Posts: 353
Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2016 12:35 pm

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by Trajk Logik »

bahman wrote:This is an amazing phenomena. Suppose that you burn your finger. Your nerves in your finger send signals to your brain. Your brain process the signals and produce feeling of pain in your finger. The interesting question is that your experience of pain is local. How such a thing is possible?
I don't know if the brain actually produces the feeling of pain in the finger. It seems like it simply produces an awareness of the pain in your finger. The pain is in the finger because that is where the damaged nerve endings are. You feel wherever you have nerve endings. You are aware wherever you have a brain. Brains don't have nerve endings which is why you don't ever feel pain in your brain. Headaches are caused by pressure on nerve endings outside your brain that are located in your head.

Try this experiment: Instead of burning your finger, close your eyes and touch your thumb and index finger on one hand together. Now move your hand slowly about, up and down, side to side, around in a circle, etc. Pay close attention to the location of the sensation of the two fingers touching. Notice how the sensation's location is relative to you head. The sensation is above or below your head, or to the right or left of your head. Location is always relative, and the information in our brains contain information about everything else and where it is located relative to the head. This is why you have a perspective - an information architecture of the location of the world relative to the head, or more specifically, the eyes. This is why it seems that we are located in our heads - because of the way the brain creates this information architecture that we call consciousness.
thedoc
Posts: 6473
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2012 4:18 pm

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by thedoc »

bahman wrote:
thedoc wrote:
bahman wrote:
I know that. The brain fantastically simulate the pain such that it seems that pain is in the place of the injury. That is an amazing phenomena to me. Isn't it to you?
To me it would be fantastic and a bit absurd if the brain located the pain anywhere other than at the injury. Of course that could be useful in public, if the injury was to the groin, and the person grabbed their head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zkIz6qLPwc
Not really, to me the pain could be experience anywhere in your body.
I would think that the location of the pain is more useful in avoiding future injury, if the sensation of pain is located where the injury actually is. Anything else would be rather useless and that would be extraordinary, and having the pain located where the injury actually is, would make the most sense. It seems that you think that the way the body actually functions, is somehow extraordinary, to me it's the way it should be and I think evolution has had some influence on the function of the body.
Justintruth
Posts: 187
Joined: Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:10 pm

Re: How our experiences could be local?

Post by Justintruth »

bahman wrote:This is an amazing phenomena. Suppose that you burn your finger. Your nerves in your finger send signals to your brain. Your brain process the signals and produce feeling of pain in your finger. The interesting question is that your experience of pain is local. How such a thing is possible?
The first thing to see is that spatiality is an accident of experiencing. Experiencing is temporal essentially but spatial only as an accident of what is experienced. So spatiality originates with nature - it is an accidental aspect of the nature of what is experienced.

The is a process where nothingness is introduced into the plenum of being - to use Sartre's terms. It means just that there is a moment when we conceive that it is not just my seeing but rather something "in-itself". A thing becomes "that and outside of that nothing" and the link to the experiencing is cut - or rather the experiencing is just how we find out about the thing and is not relevant to the things own being. This also introduces the vacuum between things and "nothing" becomes a privation of being that is between what is but is not anything in-itself.

This also affects our imagination and visual experiencing. Look at a line drawing of a cube and imagine first one face forward and then another. You will see it change - not just know that it can change but actually see it change. It is not just knowing in the usual sense. It looks different. We can know that there are just planar lines on the page but our minds still imagine as having a forward face - one or the other usually. It is possible to see it as just lines if you are try carefully. That process is informed by what Sartre calls the nihilating withdrawal of the for-itself from the in-itself that and we basically find ourselves in a situation with things all around us. Further information about how these things behave constitutes materialism in the naïve sense and there are conservation laws. We are able to make one thing into another only because we take the stuff - the matter - and re-form it. We then are in a space with these material things around us. The vacuum itself is just nothing. It is just what is the non-being between what is. And we can see those things by seeing in terms of things.

To experience beyond this view is possible and it involves mysticism. The descriptions you can read of the "Oneness" around on this forum are descriptions of a type of experiencing that has ceased introducing nothingness into the plenum of being. It is a rare individual that achieves this but the insights obtained are profound and not to be taken lightly or simply dismissed. Once one experiences this way one will never take the notions of spatiality and the separation that allows us to localize in the same way, or with the same weight, That is once the alternative ontology is achieved it informs our future views of what being is. Still people who have experienced that way then make the opposite mistake and frequently will deny scientific reality which expresses the real nature of the world - for naturally our world is spatial - its just that it is not so ontologically.

Now the resulting naïve material view itself is not scientific. The relativity of time and quantum indeterminacy and non-locality provide a more abstract and more accurate view of what is. The current view is that there are vectors in a Hilbert space that forms a four dimensional space-time continuum. The vectors evolve over time according to the time dependent Schrödinger equation. These allow us to predict statistically the results of experiments. The standard model allows us to predict the interactions and the resulting construction is a scientific view of matter that differs from the naïve view in several ways. One of them the ways is that things do not have exact positions, they are not really local, or to be more precise, if you measure the position of something you will then have no idea where it is due to the way the uncertainty principle works which itself is derived from the way the frequency of a wave requires infinite extension to have a defined value and requires infinite spatial indeterminacy if there is a single frequency.

But the theory also predicts that naïve materialism is approximately correct with significant experiences of it being wrong having a probability such that it would take many times the age of the universe for you to find yourself, let's say on Mars, in the next few minutes. The theory says that for certain spatial and temporal scales naïve materialism is a very, very, very good approximation - read many, many, many, zeros. This is a good thing for the theory, since we all navigate our way through our lives using naïve materialism. Even our scientific experiments are done that way which is described in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

On top of this basic quantum / relativistic theory you have a theory of atomic and molecular chemistry and then biochemistry and the cell biology, the organs of mammals, and finally the study of primates of which we are examples.

Now we see other forms of indeterminacy in locality here for we do not guess that there is one specific place in the brain that is conscious. Rather it is a feature of the assembly of the brain as a whole. Therefore, again in a sense, we are localized to only within something slightly less than a foot. And there is another indeterminacy. Take the resolution of our optical sensors for example. It is not infinitely small. Also, if you take two pencils and have a friend place the points on your inner arm as you close your eyes you will be able to sense two points. Now if those pencils are made closer and closer there will be a point where you will only feel one of them. But they will still be somewhat separated and there will be two if you look. So what we perceive as a specific place is in fact a region and the size of the regions resolvable varies with the density of sensory neurons. So place the pencils on your finger tips and you get a different answer with much better resolution because of the density of sensory neurons in your finger.

There are also a number of experiments that can be done with incarnation - the fact that we experience some matter as "us". We associate ourselves with more than our brain and see our hands, for example, as some part of us with which we feel and not something that is felt. This is again a naïve view and while the thought of amputation can seem like you are destroying a part of ourselves most of us will incinerate or bury the hand but try to keep the rest alive because that is "just" our hand - not us. So there is a whole literature on the psychology of locality and how it operates. Look at some of the description of robotic extensions of the brains reach and see that one can make ambiguous the notion and perception of "where you are".

So in fact we are only approximately localized on several levels and there is an extensive explanation of the meaning of this already in the philosophic and scientific literature.

To understand it you need first to know the relation of Being to Time and space as expressed by Heidegger's work, primarily Being and Time. You need to see how time is essential to being but not space. That allows you to see what space is. Then you need to see how nothingness is introduced which is described in Being and Nothingness in Sartre. That allows you to see what a thing is. Then you need to understand the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity both of which will allow you to understand what it means for something to be localized scientifically - it shows you the limits of that view - and shows you the relation between what the scientific view is and our own everyday material view. Then you need the basics of neurology and cognitive psychology to see specifically how these feature play out in forming the naïve materialist views at the foundation of our normal everyday perceptions.

Then it will still be amazing but you can in fact see how it happens.

There is also some interesting work in "indexicals". Sort of like you can't tell which body you are from physics but require indexical knowledge which you get as described above to locate which of the many people that physically exist you are. You get it obviously from what you see. All of it is natural experience.
Post Reply