Why is Consciousness

So what's really going on?

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Justintruth
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Justintruth »

... this descriptivity provides all the explanation we are ever going to get....
That is true of course but there is a flaw in it still.

It turns out we can have very different experiences of the fact of the lack of explanation. And these experiences of the lack of explanation - the mystery if you will - in turn call for explanation and are significant in and of themselves and also are profound on may very surprising levels.

From the "it just is" to boredom of a nausiatingly painful level to the pleasure a child get's frome seeing a magician to the wonder and exctasy of religios mysticism and artistic sensibility all of these can be "explaned" ...' scuse me ..."described" as a difference in the experience of that particular lack of explanation that you refer to. It is not an ordinary one. It cannot be removed no.matter how advanced the descrptions.

Without those explanations/descriptions of how we experience the lack of explanation inherent in all descrption we are limited to physics and cannot explain the profound effects of metaphysics.

So while you are right in the sense that all explanation is description you are wrong that we cannot also understand/describe/explain the surprising spectra of exerience we can have of the meaning of this fact.
Justintruth
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Justintruth »

The main reason for my impatience with the title was the frequency with which consciousness is discussed in these pages as if consciousness were nothing other than mystical or at least utterly mysterious, and with no reference to the usage of 'consciousness' in its practical scientific or clinical sense.
Unfortunately we know very little of the practical scientific or clinical sense of consciousness. We don't know nothing, but we know very little. We are making fast progress only very lately as the technology to study the brain - nondestructively of course☺- effectiely has been, and still to a large extent, is absent.

The content of the text you quoted unfortuately does not qualify as "practical scientific or clinical sense" except perhaps in some far out speculative sense of the term and would be rejected in most neurology texts. In fact it is pure speculation as far as I can see and there are problems with it even on that level. It is borderline polemic. Check out The Geneology of Morals" to see more of this kind of speculation. How does one check it experimentally?

Perhaps you should check our a good neurology forum if you want mor natural science.

Unfortunately the meaning of the facts we already have, that we are biological and that our brain function causes our conscious experience in the causal sense of natural science for elementary example, are very misunderstood philosophically already - especially with respect to an understanding of mysticism and this is only going to get more confusing as the science progresses - If we cant even understand what we know about ordinary experience and the basic facts of our neuology how will we ever sort out LSD or the effects of halucinogens.

For example your statement that your imatience with the idea that consciousness is nothing other than mystic is understandable but you would need to experience the meaning of the Oneness as perceived mystically to know how impossible it would be for consciousness to be somehow "other" than mystical. Its just impossible on principle.

But that does not mean at all that the mystical facts contribute to science except perhaps one day when some mystic will be in some imaging system reporting on his consciousness like a person does in an eye exam with an optamologist. Mystical experiences are not scentific experiences - in fact they are not natural experiences - they are metaphysical not physical.. That does not mean that they are not caused naturaly, nor that we won't one day know the nature of what causes them in great - perhaps even perfect - detail, but just that that knowledge will never be a mystical insight itself - it will remain scientific.

In fact if a scientist knew enough then he may be able to induce the experience in himself chemically. But that is true of any knowlege. Inducing the understanding of the pythagorean theorum by taking a pill may one day become possible but that would not make the understanding of how that happens neurologicallt the understanding of the theorum itself.

The pill would always have to be taken by the doctor for him to understand.

So i think the non-scientific study is very valuable and has the advantage of not needing an expensive lab. Its not going to advance the science true - but it is necessary to understand what the science means and that is as on topic here as it would be off topic on a neurology forum.
Ginkgo
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Ginkgo »

waechter418 wrote:
Is it because modern western sciences pay little attention to consciousness, and if so, only to try to bind it into matter?
This was true up until about twenty years ago, now science is taking consciousness as a legitimate area of study. In the end science still regards consciousness as an illusion. Regardless of the scientific theory, consciousness presents us with the world, not the individual.
Belinda
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth wrote:
The content of the text you quoted unfortuately does not qualify as "practical scientific or clinical sense" except perhaps in some far out speculative sense of the term and would be rejected in most neurology texts. In fact it is pure speculation as far as I can see and there are problems with it even on that level. It is borderline polemic. Check out The Geneology of Morals" to see more of this kind of speculation. How does one check it experimentally?
I was taught criteria for evaluation of scholarly texts as follows:

1. Is the work itself peer reviewed?
2. Does it include an index?
3. Does it include a bibliography of peer reviewed works?
4. Has the work sufficient literary merit?

One checks the genesis of morals historically, anthropologically, and psychologically. All these are empirical academic disciplines so experiments are theoretically useful unless immoral, illegal, or lacking in scientific rigour.

You didn't explain what your objection is. Whinging is not an objection.
Dalek Prime
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Location: Living in a tree with Polly.

Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Dalek Prime »

No reason. Does the universe benefit from it? Doubtful.
Justintruth
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Justintruth »

Belinda wrote: You didn't explain what your objection is. Whinging is not an objection.
My objection is not to whether it is valid acedemically. Look at Aristotle's work, or Heidegger's, or Nietzsche's. Not just valid but great. But none of them are clinical scientific documents and while I persinally believe they all would be useful in understanding what science is you were drawing a distinctionbetween clinical, practical, science and mysticism.

In fact the work you describe is not scientific. There are different criteria for science yhan the ones you mention. You need an hypothesis. Then you need to describe some kind of experiment capable of falsifying your hypothesis. Then you need to have those experiments done and reported according to scientific standards. All alternative explanations need to be empirically eliminated.

What you quoted is no more clinical, practical science then was my post whinning.

I love science and study it nearly every day. I just don't like genuflection to it. It's just antithetical to the spirit of science itself. Evidence dispassionately disclosed is all it needs but it must have that.

What you quoted was scientismist polemic thinly veiled in historical speculation.

BTW, genuine science in these matters cannot be done in a mere discussion like this. It takes a lab or archeological dig, or investigation of historical record not just speculation.
Belinda
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth, is this from me what you are rebutting:
I was taught criteria for evaluation of scholarly texts as follows:

1. Is the work itself peer reviewed?
2. Does it include an index?
3. Does it include a bibliography of peer reviewed works?
4. Has the work sufficient literary merit?
The above aren't criteria for scientific method, but for scholarly texts. True, the criteria I quoted don't cover poetry, fiction, or such archaic texts as you mention, and apply mainly to secondary sources of information and opinion. To report original research the criteria above are probably not sufficient but they are necessary.

I agree with you as to the nature of science which is not to be summed up in the few words that I quoted.

Regarding the scientific status of mystical experiences you need to look to whether or not there are scientific or at least statistical investigations that correlate those experiences with the subjective mystical experience. I'd be surprised if there were no such investigations. For instance when I was doing TM I helped a psychology student by subjecting myself to her little experiment in which I meditated then guessed the nature of a simple drawn shape in each of several closed envelopes.

If a first year psychology student thought this one up, I can safely presume that professional psychologists or neuroscientists can do even more in the way of correlating proper mystical experiences with physical brain events. Perhaps not; perhaps mystical experiences cannot be induced to order under laboratory conditions.

In any case my ontological stance is that brains are minds and minds are brains. Your ontological stance seems to be that minds are separate from brains.
Ginkgo
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Ginkgo »

Belinda wrote: In any case my ontological stance is that brains are minds and minds are brains. Your ontological stance seems to be that minds are separate from brains.
Your stance is basically the materialist/physicalist, viz. the scientific explanation for consciousness. The metaphysical approach to consciousness usually takes the form of substance dualism or property dualism. In the end I guess I am a fan of Chalmers' property dualism.
Justintruth
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Justintruth »

Belinda wrote:Justintruth, is this from me what you are rebutting:
I was taught criteria for evaluation of scholarly texts as follows:

1. Is the work itself peer reviewed?
2. Does it include an index?
3. Does it include a bibliography of peer reviewed works?
4. Has the work sufficient literary merit?
The above aren't criteria for scientific method, but for scholarly texts.
I wasn't rebutting those criteria. I was just pointing out that the text you pointed out had no "practical scientific or clinical sense". The bar on science is much higher - or at least different. I also mentioned that the description you quoted itself was...well let me call it "Fox News-y" and let it go at that.

I can't believe that there is not some interest in studying the brain when it is in a state of having mystical experiences. I also think someone must have tried to do it but I don't have time for a search. But I would also be very surprised if the result of that study was an understanding of the facts regarding under what conditions material ensembles experience mystically, was discovered. The science is as challenging as it is valuable.

Not that we don't know some things. I think for example that we could probably say that only brains experience mystically. I don't think my foot does for example. And we might say more. Some small facts about activity in the brain perhaps. But since we don't have the brain's software mapped out it is very unlikely we will be able to intelligently hypothesize the difference between mystical and non-mystical brain function in any kind of detailed way. I was amazed that my German shepherd's staring at big views while I was backpacking in the mountain. I think I could probably craft an experiment that demonstrated by the amount of time she spent staring at various views, and correlating that with human ratings of the beauty of those views, that she had some form of appreciation of beauty. But I don't have time and would it really be valuable?

If you rebut the claim that there has been no research on mysticism you would be rebutting a straw man.
In any case my ontological stance is that brains are minds and minds are brains. Your ontological stance seems to be that minds are separate from brains.
I do not believe that minds are separate from brains.

That claim is ridiculous. Tonight is New Years eve and as an easy example, I will demonstrate to myself clearly that adding alcohol to my bloodstream will affect my mind.

I believe that minds are properties of some as yet to be specified sub class of material assemblies. I believe it is possible, but somewhat less likely, but maybe even probable, that minds are a form of computation.

BUT! You must understand I don't mean by "a material assembly" just what the standard model and all that the physical sciences of chemistry etc describes. Nor do I mean by "computation" something that is just a Turing machine! Those are equally ridiculous. In fact I believe that if what brains do is limited to what the physical sciences predict they will do, or if computation is defined as only what a Turing machine does then mind is not physical, nor is it computation. Any claim that it is, is a form of equivocation.

But we can modify the laws of the physical sciences with the facts we discover and we can modify the definitions under information theory to accommodate mind, in a way that we can then say that "this brain is thinking" and maybe even "this computer is thinking" and also say what it is thinking, just based on the physical or computational description. This is basically Chalmers position but I don't agree with him in many respects - but in this respect I do agree. We will augment the physics and probably - maybe - information science.

Saying that minds are just a particular configuration of matter and that matter is "just" as described by the current physical science is to ignore the fact that physical sciences do not predict that there will be a mind for an arbitrary material configuration and with that, and Ockham's razor, you can eliminate the mind as a posit, not describe it. Similar with a Turing machine. No matter the software, a Turing machine does no more that what is described in its current definition, and that is independent of its software, and so if computation is defined to be "just" what a Turing machine does then thinking is not computation.

Still I think it would be better not to stick to the current descriptions but to find laws and definitions that will allow us to describe what thinking a particular configuration of matter is doing, and/or what thinking a particular computation is. Within those structures we will be saying that a brain configured like this or that will be thinking the Pythagorean Theorem.

As for mysticism it is just an ontological possibility. Its possible for brains to experience mystically - that is for sure. That says nothing of the validity of mystic conclusions any more that saying it is possible for brains to experience the Pythagorean theorem says that it is true.
osgart
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by osgart »

Why not consciousness? Maybe consciousness is the norm
Belinda
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Belinda »

Justin truth I appreciate your interesting post. It's a busy morning for me, and I have to get on with it and must defer close reading until later. Minimal alcohol I think!
Londoner
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Londoner »

Justintruth wrote:[
I do not believe that minds are separate from brains.

That claim is ridiculous. Tonight is New Years eve and as an easy example, I will demonstrate to myself clearly that adding alcohol to my bloodstream will affect my mind.
Doesn't saying that imply that your mind has some sort of normal state, a state in which it is unaffected, and to which it will (hopefully) return after the alcohol has been processed? If so, that doesn't seem to reflect the nature of our minds, which are constantly being altered. Just by reading your post, for example, I am not who I was an hour ago.

I would have said that what characterises our minds is a continual awareness of the present. I would suggest that after New Year your mind will be in a different state to what it is now, indeed it can never quite recapture what it was like to be you the day before. We construct memories, but these are always for the purpose of the moment, they feel true only if they work to explain how things are now, so our memories are always new. (We know memory is not a mental filing cabinet in which past experiences are preserved and sometimes retrieved).

So I am doubtful about saying that what affects the brain affects the mind, because this suggests that the mind is somehow mapped onto the world. I would agree that the alcohol will affect your senses, so that the part of your brain that processes your senses will have problems, but the part we call our 'mind' is distinct from that mechanical aspect. It is true that others may observe us and think 'He is drunk!' but we will remain ourselves to ourselves, our mind will still be our mind.
Still I think it would be better not to stick to the current descriptions but to find laws and definitions that will allow us to describe what thinking a particular configuration of matter is doing, and/or what thinking a particular computation is. Within those structures we will be saying that a brain configured like this or that will be thinking the Pythagorean Theorem.
Again, I don't know we can map our thoughts onto a thing, like the Pythagorean Theorem, in that way. If I try to think about it, it is elusive. I find I am thinking about my thinking about it. It doesn't seem to be one thing, I seem to see it from several points of view, jumping from one to another. If I look at an object, I do not simply see it, I also think about it as substantiating universals like 'red-ness' or as associated with emotional states, or as a symbol or signal...

So I'm skeptical that we can relate the brain to the mind. I think the fundamental problem is that when we talk about brains we are seeking to give an objective, scientific type account. The sort of account that assumes things can be pinned down and labelled, that they are what they are, that they remain in fixed relationships with each other. But 'mind' describes our subjective condition; the fact that only certain parts our experiences are general and shared. I think that if we attempt to force a combine of the two we will falsify one of the other.
Justintruth
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Justintruth »


Doesn't saying ... imply that your mind has some sort of normal state, a state in which it is unaffected, and to which it will (hopefully) return after the alcohol has been processed?
It's a very difficult issue and has to do with not just what we say but the grammar itself - verb vs noun so to speak. You say my mind has a "normal state". In a sense the "normal" is easy as one can imagine that most of the time I am in some state and so the "average" or "normal" state just means a kind of qualitative sense of what is meant in mathematics. It is a macro state and corresponds to many different possible microstates in the statistical mechanical sense. But that word "state" that is the hard part. I think Heidegger was right putting Time front and center in a meaning of Being itself. But there are these symmetries in nature and we have this idea of objective existence. If I put a ball on a table it stays there and while it may change in fact there is nothing contradictory in saying that it stays the same.

Philosophy has dealt with this by breaking change down into categories. Change that does not change one thing into another is accidental change. Else it is essential change and what stays the same and allows us to pick out the thing is then the material. Now you get into critiques of that that try to parse whether it is material or just the space and time occupied. Can you have two identical things without them being separate in space and time? But consider a continuous material torus rotating. Now there are no essential or accidental differences between a particular area of the ring as an area on one side rotates in and on the other it rotates out. And in fact you can transform the motion away. It is relative. But still relative to some frame we can conceive of it as moving because "that" material moved out and "this" material moved in. So haecity gets involved. I think Bose Einstein statistics demonstrate that the nature of matter is very important in determining the meaning of its materiality. My personal belief is that some form of the logical assumption of the axiom of choice is involved but I can't quite get there. It may be that Bosons are not material in the same way that normal particles are. In fact, there seems to be three notions of matter corresponding to the way distributions result: The Maxwell / Boltzman, Fermi, and Bose Einstein. Each has a slightly different way of distinguishing things and therefore a slightly different way of counting them and that affects the calculation of their probability given assumption that all micro states are equally likely. For it is what "stays the same" - the static - that is at the root of the classical meanings of matter. Modern mathematics has introduced the concepts of symmetry and has gone to the eternally fixed time space continuum in which time is very similar to and can be seen as part of a four dimensional space time continuum which is a set of points that are "static" in that a "time" is just a slice of the events.

I think the only way to understand all that is to get under it at the phenomenology. A phenomenological description of Being and Time is key and is way beyond a simple post in a news group.

I prefer to use a kind of technical language to make the distinction. So if I see an illusion it is better to say I am "illusion seeing" rather than I am "seeing an illusion". This prevents the misinterpretation that I mean that illusion is really there and then I just come upon them and see them. I prefer to use a verb. Therefore I prefer to use something like "mind-ing" over "having a mind" but "thinking" is even better because it is less technical. Material systems can either be thinking or not. We don't have criteria yet established to determine which systems are thinking and which are not in anything except outline. Its pretty clear that it is the brain that is thinking and it can be established by simple amputation which does not seem to prevent the amputee from thinking. Brain dead is another matter. Brain dead people don't think.

I will yield one point however. How do I know that brain dead people don't think? It is logically possible that I am wrong and that the mind is indeed an entity separate from the brain and there is just some profound connection - possibly even a tentative one. But that assumption is subject to Ocham's razor and so without evidence to the contrary, and with our experience of anesthesia as evidence, I believe that the claim that there are minds separate from brains has a burden of proof it has not yet met and until we do.... "No ghosts, no zombies" ...should be our assumption. No functioning brains that do not think and no minds without brains.
If so, that doesn't seem to reflect the nature of our minds, which are constantly being altered. Just by reading your post, for example, I am not who I was an hour ago.


Well no because the change could be accidental in the Medieval sense. You are not the same but you are still you.
I would have said that what characterises our minds is a continual awareness of the present.
But if you do you run the risk of hypostatizing the present and de temporalizing it.
I would suggest that after New Year your mind will be in a different state to what it is now, indeed it can never quite recapture what it was like to be you the day before. We construct memories, but these are always for the purpose of the moment, they feel true only if they work to explain how things are now, so our memories are always new. (We know memory is not a mental filing cabinet in which past experiences are preserved and sometimes retrieved).
A accurate phenomenology of memory is complicated. There is short and long term for instance. Many times I know I know something and know in a minute or two that I will remember it but I can't now. That is different from just not remembering yet it is not remembering in a sense. Memory is a very important key. If I want to know what it is like to be a bat and I can control my biology completely I can turn myself into one and then back. But I must "remember" what it was like to know it at all. Take a look at cases where people are brain injured and have trouble forming short term memory. Indeed without memory no stasis can ever be determined. So memory plays a very key role in upcoming epistemology I think.
So I am doubtful about saying that what affects the brain affects the mind,
Ok. Let's be very direct. anesthesia, a physical chemical is introduced into your lungs. You are told to count down from 100. You count to 97 or so and you suddenly are in pain and a nurse says. "The operation went very well. Don't worry". All of the reports from the nurses and all of the damage repaired in the operation are totally consistent with an image of you laying there unconscious while they worked on you. So we can talk about it different ways. But this is the *nature* of what we experience. Now if you are doubtful about saying that what affects the brain at least can affect the mind then how do you describe these facts? How do you think of them?

I think the reason this causes a problem is this. You can think of being as being the universe. "Within" this universe are brains and those brains experience. But what is a universe? We get the idea of a universe from the experiences we have. So the brain becomes an aspect of our experience - even if we don't ever see our own brain, we hypothesize that it "is there" in a sense that is derived from the nature of our phenomenal experience.
So which is it becomes the cry. My brain an aspect of my experience or my experience an aspect of my mind. It turns out these are only apparently contradictory. Now it seems contradictory but I think it is merely paradoxical. Now I don't want to get into resolving that here but basically one must keep clear what one means by being. When one does, the material universe is simply the nature of what we experience AND that nature pre-dates sentience, and that predating is also natural. That is not contradictory as long as the senses (and references) of Being and Time are clarified.

One way we have dealt with this is by using capital letters. You might say the brain equates with the mind but does not equate with Mind. But it just makes it even harder for those who have never been Mind lucidly, never were Mind Minding Mind by being the Minding, were never Minding Minding Minding, to be led to having that experience. The way we describe things can induce an experience of being Mind - not very reliably but it does occasionally happen I assure you. And I think having the capital letters in the language helps once one experiences it because one can see that others have and can then see why and in what sense the capitals are used. But I am not sure it contributes much to causing the experience but hey, we have no current way of reliably causing mystical apprehension.
...because this suggests that the mind is somehow mapped onto the world.
It is mapped into the world. And mapped into specific structures. This is just an accident of nature an aspect of what we experience. It is the function of senses to preserve external information and deliver it to the neurology so that its experiences are at least somewhat mapped into the world. Else the signals to the motor neurons will not result in conferring survival advantage. Even when our experiences are hallucination and no sensory pathway exists and there is no mapping of the phenomenology to the external world there is still presumed to be (as I have said we don't know for sure) that there is a correspondence to our brain states. Evidence for this is present in neuroscience and stimulation of various areas of the brain during surgery can actually cause experiencing to change. So even hallucinations are mapped into the specific structures of the brain. There is a further mapping of those structures to structures outside of our brain that set up the intentionality of our sensory experiencing.
I would agree that the alcohol will affect your senses, so that the part of your brain that processes your senses will have problems, but the part we call our 'mind' is distinct from that mechanical aspect. It is true that others may observe us and think 'He is drunk!' but we will remain ourselves to ourselves, our mind will still be our mind.
Yes, but our thinking is still impaired and if you drink enough it is even halted so even if you think it is distinct, you are free to define it that way, you will have to account for the causal connections. That is why Jackson recanted on Mary.
Again, I don't know we can map our thoughts onto a thing, like the Pythagorean Theorem, in that way.
Look, anyone who says that they know that you can for sure is just flat out wrong. We don't have that evidence. But, given what we do know it is likely that we can do that mapping and that we will find that map through neurology. We have some hard won knowledge already. And issues like that the heart is where feeling exists have been debunked.

What we can't do is equivocate and say that the motion of a thing, the evolution of its state vector in time, as conceived of classically or in modern physics, does not constitute a map that allows us to say which arrangements of things are thinking the Pythagorean theorem. Again it is logically possible that such a map does not exist but my position is we have sufficient evidence to put the burden for proof on the side that imagines such a correlation cannot be made. Or you can remain agnostic. Surely no amount of just thinking with solve this. We need advance in neuroscience.
If I try to think about it, it is elusive. I find I am thinking about my thinking about it. It doesn't seem to be one thing, I seem to see it from several points of view, jumping from one to another. If I look at an object, I do not simply see it, I also think about it as substantiating universals like 'red-ness' or as associated with emotional states, or as a symbol or signal...


Ok, great. An honest attempt at a phenomenological description of your thinking. But don't you think that if you are doing that and I introduce a drug to your brain that that will cease? And why is it that we all can look in a mirror and see anything anyway? Part of our objective experience of nature is that we are incarnate.
So I'm skeptical that we can relate the brain to the mind. I think the fundamental problem is that when we talk about brains we are seeking to give an objective, scientific type account. The sort of account that assumes things can be pinned down and labelled, that they are what they are, that they remain in fixed relationships with each other. But 'mind' describes our subjective condition; the fact that only certain parts our experiences are general and shared. I think that if we attempt to force a combine of the two we will falsify one of the other.
Why? I think that an assumption that such things can be pinned down and labeled does in fact describe our subjective condition. Specific aspects of the nature of our experiencing have symmetries that allow me to truthfully report that I have a brain and that it is involved in my thinking.

With respect to the will, or with respect to how one thought may be derived from another and if the causality of the brain physics is determining it then how do you know it is true, or is it, can all be very carefully considered. But I don't think that that obviates the possibility of us considering thinking as something a brain does, or a computation is doing, *provided* we are allowed to augment the current physical and computational models
Londoner
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Londoner »

Justintruth wrote:
I prefer to use a kind of technical language to make the distinction....
Plainly we have to use some sort of language, but it will always be language derived from the mind looking out at the world and trying to make some sense of it. I do not think we can use it in the other direction, (not without begging the question by first turning the mind into an external object like the brain).
Its pretty clear that it is the brain that is thinking and it can be established by simple amputation which does not seem to prevent the amputee from thinking. Brain dead is another matter. Brain dead people don't think....

Ok. Let's be very direct. anesthesia, a physical chemical is introduced into your lungs. You are told to count down from 100. You count to 97 or so and you suddenly are in pain and a nurse says. "The operation went very well. Don't worry". All of the reports from the nurses and all of the damage repaired in the operation are totally consistent with an image of you laying there unconscious while they worked on you. So we can talk about it different ways. But this is the *nature* of what we experience. Now if you are doubtful about saying that what affects the brain at least can affect the mind then how do you describe these facts? How do you think of them?
I do not imagine that I am ever clearly and directly conscious of the world, under anesthetic, when drunk, asleep or otherwise. My sensations are always filtered through my sensory organs, then translated into ideas via a mental architecture that is partly innate and partly learnt.

So my mind must be something distinct from any particular sensation, let alone the claim that a particular sensation is 'real' in the sense of representing the world, or being shared by others. The reason I think I have a mind is rather in that difference; I can accept that what the nurse describes as what happened during the operation is 'true', yet also that it was not what happened to 'me', me meaning 'my mind'..
...because this suggests that the mind is somehow mapped onto the world.

It is mapped into the world. And mapped into specific structures. This is just an accident of nature an aspect of what we experience. It is the function of senses to preserve external information and deliver it to the neurology so that its experiences are at least somewhat mapped into the world. Else the signals to the motor neurons will not result in conferring survival advantage...
To describe the senses as preserving 'external information' rather begs the question. Cells in my eye respond to light in a mechanical way; my brain may turn this into what we are calling information, but that is different from the electrical signal in the optic nerve, let alone the photons themselves or the origin of those photons. After all, a tree also responds to light, (which confers survival advantage) but we do not imagine that the tree sees the world.

I would suggest that the 'information' is something we create, internally. The map is in our heads. We interpret the signals from our optic nerve by reference to that map. Thus, if we get discordant signals we do not immediately make a new map. When things do not fit in, we first think; 'I must be dreaming/drunk/under anesthetic etc.' Only reluctantly, if there is no other way, will we readjust our map (as minimally as possible) to adapt to disruption. (I see God. I will go with 'I'm drunk' or 'somebody is playing a trick' or even 'an alien!' before abandoning all of science.)

I think we can only do this because we (our minds) stand at a remove from any given sensation, or piece of information. The tree responds to light, we respond to light, but unlike the tree we are aware we are responding to light, thus we have the ability to think about light as a general phenomenon, and thus we know that our eyes can deceive us.
Even when our experiences are hallucination and no sensory pathway exists and there is no mapping of the phenomenology to the external world there is still presumed to be (as I have said we don't know for sure) that there is a correspondence to our brain states. Evidence for this is present in neuroscience and stimulation of various areas of the brain during surgery can actually cause experiencing to change. So even hallucinations are mapped into the specific structures of the brain. There is a further mapping of those structures to structures outside of our brain that set up the intentionality of our sensory experiencing.
Absolutely. I do not think there is any need to refer to neuroscience. We all know that the sensory experience 'seeing' can be mapped onto the structure 'the eyes'. A baby learns that if it closes its eyes mummy disappears, that if it touches something hot it experiences pain. But the baby also learns from such interactions that it is not mummy, not the hot thing. Its mind is created through realising difference, separateness.
If so, that doesn't seem to reflect the nature of our minds, which are constantly being altered. Just by reading your post, for example, I am not who I was an hour ago.

Well no because the change could be accidental in the Medieval sense. You are not the same but you are still you.

I would have said that what characterises our minds is a continual awareness of the present.

But if you do you run the risk of hypostatizing the present and de temporalizing it.
I would disagree that I am the same 'me' as I was an hour ago. If I was, then I could not know it; I would not be aware that an hour had passed, since no change would have occurred.

As I live in the moment, everything is fluid. But in the past, everything is fixed. That in itself is a fundamental difference between 'me an hour ago' and 'me now'. I can only connect the two if I think of myself now as if I was an object, if I view myself from outside, imagine myself as a cinema film where a series of slightly changing images connects 'then' to 'now'. Yet at the same time, I am aware this is a falsification; a construction. The me that was is gone absolutely.
A accurate phenomenology of memory is complicated. There is short and long term for instance. Many times I know I know something and know in a minute or two that I will remember it but I can't now. That is different from just not remembering yet it is not remembering in a sense. Memory is a very important key. If I want to know what it is like to be a bat and I can control my biology completely I can turn myself into one and then back. But I must "remember" what it was like to know it at all. Take a look at cases where people are brain injured and have trouble forming short term memory. Indeed without memory no stasis can ever be determined. So memory plays a very key role in upcoming epistemology I think.
I think that making memory into a noun does what I wrote about earlier, turn it into an object, one that can be lost or found. But I would say that there is something we do called 'remember', in which we try to make sense of the present, place it in our metal map. We need to create patterns, discern cause and effect relationships. When doing this, I think it works both ways. We are quite capable of creating, or adjusting, our memory to fit in with how things are now. I understand that this is something readily observed in life; the witness to an accident will 'remember' details that create a narrative that makes sense, and so on. It is not difficult to implant memories or 'lose' them.
With respect to the will, or with respect to how one thought may be derived from another and if the causality of the brain physics is determining it then how do you know it is true, or is it, can all be very carefully considered. But I don't think that that obviates the possibility of us considering thinking as something a brain does, or a computation is doing, *provided* we are allowed to augment the current physical and computational models
Once again, to be clear, I do not dispute that our ability to have thoughts depends on our brains and body.

I would say that the question of causality is different. Causality is something we create in order to make the world predictable. If I say 'A caused B' I am selecting two features of the world and pointing out a connection between them, because I find it useful to do so. But the causality only arises because I did that selecting; in reality B is caused by the state of the entire universe, (as was A).

So by trying to explain the mind in terms of causality, we are using a technique that is created in the mind. It is like trying to show that hallucinations are not real through the medium of hallucinations.
Belinda
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Re: Why is Consciousness

Post by Belinda »

Justintruth wrote:
The main reason for my impatience with the title was the frequency with which consciousness is discussed in these pages as if consciousness were nothing other than mystical or at least utterly mysterious, and with no reference to the usage of 'consciousness' in its practical scientific or clinical sense.
(Justin truth)Unfortunately we know very little of the practical scientific or clinical sense of consciousness. We don't know nothing, but we know very little. We are making fast progress only very lately as the technology to study the brain - nondestructively of course☺- effectiely has been, and still to a large extent, is absent.


The content of the text you quoted unfortuately does not qualify as "practical scientific or clinical sense" except perhaps in some far out speculative sense of the term and would be rejected in most neurology texts. In fact it is pure speculation as far as I can see and there are problems with it even on that level. It is borderline polemic. Check out The Geneology of Morals" to see more of this kind of speculation. How does one check it experimentally?

(Belinda)I looked for "the text---quoted" and I cannot find it in this thread, so I don't know what you are referring to.

(J)Perhaps you should check our a good neurology forum if you want mor natural science.

(B)But I believe the ontological axiom that mind and brain are identical, and if and until I discover some other appealing axiom, I must follow that one, which is based upon such scientific facts that I'm aware of. My attachment to philosophy is that some philosopher may present me with an alternative axiom which I have to evaluate and perhaps substitute for the one I have now.

True, a neurologist might present alternative facts to me, but I cannot do that as well as philosophy, and must make do with a humble attitude towards my present learning such as it is. "Foxy-newsy" is disheartening and I really am sincerely humble as to my learning and ability and hope that will protect me against stupidity.

(J)Unfortunately the meaning of the facts we already have, that we are biological and that our brain function causes our conscious experience in the causal sense of natural science for elementary example, are very misunderstood philosophically already - especially with respect to an understanding of mysticism and this is only going to get more confusing as the science progresses - If we cant even understand what we know about ordinary experience and the basic facts of our neuology how will we ever sort out LSD or the effects of halucinogens.

(B)But I don't believe that "our brain function causes our conscious experience" . I believe that (some of) our brain function is identical with our conscious experience, and in addition, what we call our minds are subjective perspectives on what to others, especially neuroscientists, are objective facts. In other words we feel what an observer sees : the brain-mind is felt or seen according to the perspective under discussion.

(J)For example your statement that your imatience with the idea that consciousness is nothing other than mystic is understandable but you would need to experience the meaning of the Oneness as perceived mystically to know how impossible it would be for consciousness to be somehow "other" than mystical. Its just impossible on principle.

(B)I so respect reports of mystical experiences that I am happy to believe that they are really felt, and moreover that the mystical experiences theoretically have specific counterparts in publicly observable anatomical and physiological events. Nature as a whole is so wonderful that I have no need to stipulate that mystical experiences are other than natural.

(J)But that does not mean at all that the mystical facts contribute to science except perhaps one day when some mystic will be in some imaging system reporting on his consciousness like a person does in an eye exam with an optamologist. Mystical experiences are not scentific experiences - in fact they are not natural experiences - they are metaphysical not physical.. That does not mean that they are not caused naturaly, nor that we won't one day know the nature of what causes them in great - perhaps even perfect - detail, but just that that knowledge will never be a mystical insight itself - it will remain scientific.

(B)Each individual has 'privileged access' to their feelings and thoughts. This is natural and is a well established fact.

(J)In fact if a scientist knew enough then he may be able to induce the experience in himself chemically. But that is true of any knowlege. Inducing the understanding of the pythagorean theorum by taking a pill may one day become possible but that would not make the understanding of how that happens neurologicallt the understanding of the theorum itself.

(B)It has been said that a mystical experience is knowledge, and also that some mood is knowledge. This usage of 'knowledge' is imprecise. 'Knowledge', as far as philosophers and teachers are concerned, is best limited to publicly verifiable and preferably also falsifiable knowledge.

(J)The pill would always have to be taken by the doctor for him to understand.

(B)To share a mystical experience would be nice . However, my intellectual understanding that, when there is no money or power involved, mystics don't tell lies will suffice.

(J)So i think the non-scientific study is very valuable and has the advantage of not needing an expensive lab. Its not going to advance the science true - but it is necessary to understand what the science means and that is as on topic here as it would be off topic on a neurology forum.
(B)I agree that subjective reporting is valid . But it's insufficient.
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