The hard problem of consciousness

[Nick227]

Why should there be a where? People with different learning histories have different behavioral repertoires--to speak of such differences in language that assumes a localization of causation is a bit presumptuous.

And "ouch" because of the mentalistic language of your first phrasing of the question; such language treats "personality" as a causal entity, determining behavior, rather than as a summary label inferred from one's behavior. As such, it is circular language--the personality you infer from behavior is inferred to be the cause of that behavior. You may not have meant it that way, but that would make you the exception rather than the rule.



Well, it just strikes me that people do have individual personalities, stuff they go towards, stuff they avoid. When people regard some of these traits as undesirable they often try to "get rid of them" through various therapies. What you often notice is that all that can really happen is that more choices are created when the same so-called "negative" thoughts recur. Thus it seems to me that most aspects of the personality are mediated somewhere in the human organism, as opposed to simply being learned behaviour acquired from being alive.

So, to my mind, personality is a causal thing, if not really an entity but a channel along which information is modulated, and from which aspects of behaviour are mediated.

Nick

[rocketdodger]

Can you build a thermostat or a computer without a ground, RD?


Sure. You could use a purely mechanical paradigm, or something like a light-based paradigm.

But these all have a concept of ground -- as an energy level that has zero potential difference from the signal level -- as well. So does your brain. And when the neurons in your brain have zero potential, you are dead.

So what is your point?

[John Freestone]

I'm claiming to have an experience of life. I don't know what the difference would be between a physical or non-physical experience.

It's readily apparent that there's no physical explanation as yet for subjective experiences. However, that was the case for many phenomena for which explanations were later found.

I am not in this thread to rule things out - I'm chiefly concerned to avoid narrowing the choices too far.Oh I see, sorry. I thought you'd said you were a materialist. Fair enough, carry on. No further questions m'lud.;)

[rocketdodger]

Do you have an example of such a system? Can you prove that it satisfies the requirements for a formal system, such as internal consistency?

Leon

Well, off the top of my head, mathematics.

Then, if mathematics does indeed constitute a formal system, since we can apparently fully describe everything we can know using mathematics --that is, so far we haven't found something that we can't -- then everything we can know is representable as a formal system as well.

I am not an expert in this stuff so if anyone is, please tell me where my logic is wrong!

[leon_heller]

Well, off the top of my head, mathematics.

Then, if mathematics does indeed constitute a formal system, since we can apparently fully describe everything we can know using mathematics --that is, so far we haven't found something that we can't -- then everything we can know is representable as a formal system as well.

I am not an expert in this stuff so if anyone is, please tell me where my logic is wrong!

There is no finite set of symbols, there are no axioms and there are no production rules for mathematics as a whole. Therefore it can't be a formal system.

Leon

[Nick227]

Sure. You could use a purely mechanical paradigm, or something like a light-based paradigm.

But these all have a concept of ground -- as an energy level that has zero potential difference from the signal level -- as well. So does your brain. And when the neurons in your brain have zero potential, you are dead.

So what is your point?

It's theoretically possible to have a system which is completely self-aware.

Nick

[Piggy]

What I find silly is how you say we have solid evidence for sentience, when you can't even define what sentience is.

Well, I've been through that, too, on this thread.

We can't define sentience in terms of processes, or in the exact way we'd like to yet. Eventually I'm sure we will.

But we're all conscious. We know we move in and out of conscious states. And we can see how some of our brain activity is "on the radar" of our conscious awareness, and some is not.

Sentience is simply that feeling that you are you, and that things are happening to you. If you're asleep but not dreaming, or very heavily sedated, it goes away.

So it's a real phenomenon, there's no doubt about that.

[westprog]

This is quite damning:

"While I have disavowed competence concerning Part II of SM, I can’t help
registering my impression that the effort there is entirely quixotic. What
Penrose aims to do is substitute one “nothing but” theory for another: in
place of “the conscious mind is nothing but the manifestation of sub-atomic
physics”. Can we really ever expect a completely reductive theory of one sort
or another of human cognition? Surely, no one theory will serve to “explain”
the myriad aspects of this phenomenon. As with any other scientific study of
human beings – inside and out – such an enterprise will continue to need to
bring to bear psychology, psycho-physics, physiology (neuro- and otherwise),
biochemistry, molecular biology, physics (macro- and micro-) and lots of stuff
in between (including computational models of all kinds). In my opinion
Penrose’s “missing science of consciousness” is a mirage."

Leon

If it is damning - and I don't think it is, in context - then it's as damning of the strong AI researchers, whose conclusions are far stronger than those of Penrose. He doesn't accept the "nothing but" theories - which accords strongly to the way I think about it.

[Piggy]

I'm sure he was beign quite serious. How do you "observe sentience" ? Because a lot of people "observe" ghosts, space aliens, fairies, and homeopathy at work, we need something more reliable than "observe" for this vaunted sentience thingy.

Since sentience is simply the sensation of feeling like you exist, of feeling like things are happening to you, of being aware, then we all observe it. Anyone capable of having a conversation is sentient.

That's really all there is to it. It's nothing magical or strange or "vaunted".

Ghosts, space aliens, fairies... all of those involve making unfounded assumptions about what's being observed. You have to assume all sorts of properties that aren't there.

Sentience isn't like that.

[westprog]

I must've missed that. Who's Marvin ?



And we know this because we experience it ? Again, how is that different from experiencing ghosts ?

People don't directly experience the ghosts, any more than they directly experience apples, or houses, or other people. They receive sensations, which they interpret.

If the sensations are dubious, then so are the apples, houses and other people.

[Piggy]

I must've missed that. Who's Marvin?

A while back I posted a short video describing observations of the brain of Marvin, who lost his ability to sense his own emotional states (and much of his ability to intuit the emotional states of others) after a stroke damaged an area of the brain which includes neural pathways linking feedback from the body to the areas of the brain responsible for emotional awareness.

I can link it again, if you like. It's a fascinating case study. I can probably also find a short description of his case.

And we know this because we experience it ? Again, how is that different from experiencing ghosts ?

It's different because no one's ever experienced a ghost.

People have experienced noises, lights, things which appear like transparent human figures, that kind of thing.

But ghosts are the spirits of the dead, and no one's ever observed that.

Sentience is simply the sensation that you're you and things are happening to you -- conscious awareness in other words, or felt experience.

We all observe that because -- if we're able to observe anything -- our brains are producing that sensation and we're aware of it.

It's that simple. Nothing mystical or occult.

[Piggy]

That doesn't answer my question. Does everything that has behaviour have a mind ? And if not, how do you draw the line, and where ?

We can't draw the line yet, if there's one to draw. It may turn out to be a blurry boundary, like the one between dialect and language, or between atmosphere and outer space.

There's no reason to believe that a "mind" is necessary for behavior. Just look at the Terri Schiavo case.

I suspect that insects are not sentient.

[westprog]

This means that you simply don't understand what an "emergent property" is since there is nothing about the concept that relies on non-determinism.

That's true. Software systems do have emergent properties, and I should have made that clear. But usually they are called "bugs".

I'm not aware of emergent properties of software systems that turn out to be something that is then looked for. I expect there must be some examples out there, but I can't think of any.

N.B. this is different from a program which uses a heuristic approach to improve its performance of a task, or gathers data to enable a job to be done better. An emergent property implies that a program gets some new capacity which wasn't designed in.

[Piggy]

Ouch. Where does Darat's ran go when he sits down?

The storing of personality traits, like the seeing of images, takes an action and turns it into a thing. To ask where that thing is, is to be fooled by the language into thinking there is a thing there to be found.

I'm going to side with Merc's behaviorist approach here.

"Personality traits" just amount to our conclusion that an individual tends to behave similarly over time.

So the question is "How does the brain/body achieve this consistency?"

Certainly, memory, retrieval, and pattern matching will be involved if we see that individuals do tend to stay within a certain range of behavior compared to others, who stay within somewhat different ranges of behavior.

But yeah, to start talking about "personality traits" as if they were nouny kinds of things... only gonna lead to trouble.

[rocketdodger]

N.B. this is different from a program which uses a heuristic approach to improve its performance of a task, or gathers data to enable a job to be done better. An emergent property implies that a program gets some new capacity which wasn't designed in.

By that definition, are you sure consciousness is emergent? After all, it was "designed in", whether by evolution or creator.

[Piggy]

It's theoretically possible to have a system which is completely self-aware.

Nick

I don't think so.

First of all, you get into infinite regression: If it's aware of everything, then it's aware of its awareness... which means it must be aware of its awareness of its awareness... which means it must be... you get the picture.

Also, there's a resource problem. Awareness requires apparatus. If you build the apparatus to make the system aware of existing subsystems, then once that's done, you need to build apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus that makes it aware of the original systems, then you have to build more apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus... you get the picture.

[westprog]

Well, off the top of my head, mathematics.

Then, if mathematics does indeed constitute a formal system, since we can apparently fully describe everything we can know using mathematics --that is, so far we haven't found something that we can't -- then everything we can know is representable as a formal system as well.

I am not an expert in this stuff so if anyone is, please tell me where my logic is wrong!

The whole question of how mathematical systems are formally defined is very much part of the Penrose books and Godel, Escher, Bach. The Feferman paper http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf covers the same ground.

But I say this as someone who watches the arguments without necessarily following them entirely.

[westprog]

Oh I see, sorry. I thought you'd said you were a materialist. Fair enough, carry on. No further questions m'lud.;)

I don't want to imply that I don't start from a viewpoint - a dirty argumenting trick IMO - but I don't start from a formal philosophical viewpoint. This might be just due to plain ignorance.

[Nick227]

I don't think so.

First of all, you get into infinite regression: If it's aware of everything, then it's aware of its awareness... which means it must be aware of its awareness of its awareness... which means it must be... you get the picture.

If "ground" is awareness then the infinite regression issue doesn't arise. You cannot be "aware of your awareness," not because of IR issues, but because here "your awareness" is merely a concept, merely the result of the mind attempting to apply principles to abstract concepts.

Also, there's a resource problem. Awareness requires apparatus.

Are you sure about this? Experience requires apparatus, I don't see how awareness itself necessarily requires any apparatus. It could be innate to existence. The ground does not require a signal. This is, as I understand it, the Buddhist perspective. It's hard to prove, I think, also hard to falsify, which isn't great but there you go.

If you build the apparatus to make the system aware of existing subsystems, then once that's done, you need to build apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus that makes it aware of the original systems, then you have to build more apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus... you get the picture.

But where actually is the locus of awareness, if not ground?

Nick

[INRM]

Neither. You didn't achieve "sentience" (to use piggy's word) until a certain age (probably 3 or 4) and didn't achieve true self-consciousness (the ability to reason about yourself reasoning about yourself) until much later (probably between 8 and 14).

When you are born your brain is merely like a nearly empty RAM bank after a computer boots -- maybe loaded with a rudimentary operating system. That is it.

In either case, I know I was me even at like 2.5 (I remember being on an airplane, and I'm pretty sure I was in my body).

Is the thing that defines me as me is my brain or my brain and the initial data put into it? As in, me and another guy were born at the same time in the same hospital. Was it our brains that made us seperate entities, or was it the sequence of information that initially entered our brains that put us "in our bodies".

Would I have been the other guy if the information that initially entered his brain, entered mine? Or would I still be the same guy sitting in this body right here? (Confusing and bordering on metaphysical, but I'm trying to keep this concrete and on scientific principles, but I simply don't know the words to use)

Is the brain the core of consciousness, and the data going in simply produces the quality of the consciousness, or is the brain and the initial data the core of consciousness.

Not to sound fruitier than well, a nutjob.


Pixy, do you know of any theorem in computing concerning how much a system can know about itself?

I mentioned earlier that such a theorem would be a corollary of godelian incompleteness, but I think it could be proved without resorting to godelian concepts at all.

What's Godelian incompleteness? And what's a godelian concept?

So lets just throw it out there: A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.

Well yeah, I guess...


INRM

[leon_heller]

What's Godelian incompleteness? And what's a godelian concept?


http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=godel&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Leon

[rocketdodger]

There is no finite set of symbols, there are no axioms and there are no production rules for mathematics as a whole. Therefore it can't be a formal system.

Leon

Suppose I merge two sets of axioms from different systems, say set A1 and A2, together.

Can't we use production rules such as "if X is a theorem derived from an axiom from the set A1 then X<whatever> is also a theorem?"

If so, then there is no reason one could not consider all the disjoint areas of mathematics as a single formal system. It would simply be rather heterogenous.

Or does a production rule have to be applicable to all theorems in the system?

[leon_heller]

Suppose I merge two sets of axioms from different systems, say set A1 and A2, together.

Can't we use production rules such as "if X is a theorem derived from an axiom from the set A1 then X<whatever> is also a theorem?"

If so, then there is no reason one could not consider all the disjoint areas of mathematics as a single formal system. It would simply be rather heterogenous.

Or does a production rule have to be applicable to all theorems in the system?

If you merge two sets of axioms from two different formal systems (A1 and A2), you get a new formal system (A3). A given string that is a theorem in A1 and/or A2 might or might not be a theorem in A3.

There is (presumably) an infinite number of theorems in mathematics, and an infinite number of (possible) formal systems. The formal systems can't be combined to create a single formal system that encompasses all of mathematics because it will need an infinite set of symbols and a infinite set of production rules, invalidating the requirement that they be finite.

Leon

[rocketdodger]

I don't think so.

First of all, you get into infinite regression: If it's aware of everything, then it's aware of its awareness... which means it must be aware of its awareness of its awareness... which means it must be... you get the picture.

Also, there's a resource problem. Awareness requires apparatus. If you build the apparatus to make the system aware of existing subsystems, then once that's done, you need to build apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus that makes it aware of the original systems, then you have to build more apparatus to make it aware of the apparatus... you get the picture.

See, piggy, you have all the knowledge you need to understand where Pixy, Cyborg, and I are coming from.

A system can never be fully aware of itself.

The implication of this is that if you sat in the best MRI imaginable, and could map every molecule in every neuron of your mind, you would still not be able to pinpoint exactly where your experiences come from. That knowledge is simply inaccesible to you.

To be sure, you will see some very complex data flow and information processing. Perhaps this is what you mean -- "how does the data flow, how is the information processed?" But it seems to me that you are suggesting there is some final 'key' that will enable us to realize the mechanism of our own sentience.

There isn't. Such a thing does not exist. We will never be able to answer the question "why does a subjective experience feel like a subjective experience?" other than to say "because that is what it feels like." The best we can do -- and this is mathematically provable, as your intuition seems to understand -- is to answer the question "what happens that leads to someone else acting like they have what we consider a subjective experience?"

[rocketdodger]

It doesn't work that way. Look up the definition of a formal system.

Leon

I did before I wrote that! lol

Honestly, I can't find anything stating that a production rule of a grammar must work with all strings in the language. But is that the case?

I am assuming I can have a grammar that looks like

S-->aSb

X-->mXn



Why can't we have rules that apply to only certain start symbols? That doesn't seem to defy any of the criteria I have learned of...

[leon_heller]

I did before I wrote that! lol

Honestly, I can't find anything stating that a production rule of a grammar must work with all strings in the language. But is that the case?

I am assuming I can have a grammar that looks like

S-->aSb

X-->mXn



Why can't we have rules that apply to only certain start symbols? That doesn't seem to defy any of the criteria I have learned of...

See my update. I quite like my proof that mathematics can't be a formal system.

Leon

[leon_heller]

I did before I wrote that! lol

Honestly, I can't find anything stating that a production rule of a grammar must work with all strings in the language. But is that the case?

I am assuming I can have a grammar that looks like

S-->aSb

X-->mXn



Why can't we have rules that apply to only certain start symbols? That doesn't seem to defy any of the criteria I have learned of...

A production rule describes how to form new strings from old ones, which implies that any string can form the basis for a new one.

I don't see why a rule shouldn't apply to certain start symbols.

Leon

[rocketdodger]

A production rule describes how to form new strings from old ones, which implies that any string can form the basis for a new one.

I don't see why a rule shouldn't apply to certain start symbols.

Leon

I am going to check my old computation theory textbook when I go home tonight.

EDIT -- removed gibberish that made no sense

[leon_heller]

I am going to check my old computation theory textbook when I go home tonight.

At any rate -- what does incompleteness imply about multiple formal systems? Are you saying it might be possible to devise two formal systems such that every undecidable theorem in one is a decidable theorem in the other, thus sidestepping incompleteness?

It applies to every formal system. What is undecidable in one system might be decidable in another. I think that is the case, anyway.

Leon

[skiba]

If "ground" is awareness then the infinite regression issue doesn't arise. You cannot be "aware of your awareness," not because of IR issues, but because here "your awareness" is merely a concept, merely the result of the mind attempting to apply principles to abstract concepts.


:clap:

Even though it's a very abstract idea in technical terms, that get rid of one of the biggest problems; infinite regression.

[rocketdodger]

See my update. I quite like my proof that mathematics can't be a formal system.

Leon

So this brings up two questions.

1) How does incompleteness factor into multiple formal systems? That is, if mathematics can be reduced to multiple formal systems, each of which must be incomplete, what does that say about mathematics in general? Must it be incomplete as well, or can we not prove that? Or does "incomplete" even have meaning over the context of multiple systems?

2) If a system is not reducible to a formal system, for whatever reason, is there no analog to godelian incompleteness at all? Formal systems are incomplete because they are powerful enough to describe themselves ...well... formally. If a system lacks that power, on the one hand it will be unable to trap itself using godelian methods but on the other hand it will be less descriptive and hence possibly "incomplete" in a different sense.

[rocketdodger]

:clap:

Even though it's a very abstract idea in technical terms, that get rid of one of the biggest problems; infinite regression.

Yes but it also gets rid everything else.

Seriously, where can you go in a conversation after someone asserts that nothingness is awareness?

[leon_heller]

So this brings up two questions.

1) How does incompleteness factor into multiple formal systems? That is, if mathematics can be reduced to multiple formal systems, each of which must be incomplete, what does that say about mathematics in general? Must it be incomplete as well, or can we not prove that? Or does "incomplete" even have meaning over the context of multiple systems?

Strictly speaking, Godel's work only applies to arithmetic-like formal systems.



2) If a system is not reducible to a formal system, for whatever reason, is there no analog to godelian incompleteness at all? Formal systems are incomplete because they are powerful enough to describe themselves ...well... formally. If a system lacks that power, on the one hand it will be unable to trap itself using godelian methods but on the other hand it will be less descriptive and hence possibly "incomplete" in a different sense.

I think you can have incompleteness in non-formal systems, as well.

Leon

[Nick227]

Yes but it also gets rid everything else.

Seriously, where can you go in a conversation after someone asserts that nothingness is awareness?

I think you have to be careful here to distinguish between a concept being used to relate a model and actuality. Words like "nothingness" have no a priori meaning, they can only be signposts. The "infinite regression" or "turtles" issue here only relates when the mind cannot distinguish between the two. Just as Descartes assumed the "I" aspect of selfhood as a given in his famous axiom, so the IR argument here overlooks the possibility that selfhood itself is merely a series of signals being interpreted by the mind.

In this model, You (as in the locus of experience) are the Ground. All that is experienced are Signals, interpreted by the brain, and framed as self / other stuff.

Nick

[rocketdodger]

I think you have to be careful here to distinguish between a concept being used to relate a model and actuality. Words like "nothingness" have no a priori meaning, they can only be signposts. The "infinite regression" or "turtles" issue here only relates when the mind cannot distinguish between the two. Just as Descartes assumed the "I" aspect of selfhood as a given in his famous axiom, so the IR argument here overlooks the possibility that selfhood itself is merely a series of signals being interpreted by the mind.

In this model, You (as in the locus of experience) are the Ground. All that is experienced are Signals, interpreted by the brain, and framed as self / other stuff.

Nick

Whatever you are talking about makes no sense.

[Beth]

Suppose I merge two sets of axioms from different systems, say set A1 and A2, together.

Can't we use production rules such as "if X is a theorem derived from an axiom from the set A1 then X<whatever> is also a theorem?"

If so, then there is no reason one could not consider all the disjoint areas of mathematics as a single formal system. It would simply be rather heterogenous.

Or does a production rule have to be applicable to all theorems in the system?

Axioms from different formal systems may not be compatible such that they could be included in a single formal system. For example, how could you merge Euclidean Geometry with non-Euclidean Geometry.

[Piggy]

If "ground" is awareness then the infinite regression issue doesn't arise. You cannot be "aware of your awareness," not because of IR issues, but because here "your awareness" is merely a concept, merely the result of the mind attempting to apply principles to abstract concepts.



Are you sure about this? Experience requires apparatus, I don't see how awareness itself necessarily requires any apparatus. It could be innate to existence. The ground does not require a signal. This is, as I understand it, the Buddhist perspective. It's hard to prove, I think, also hard to falsify, which isn't great but there you go.



But where actually is the locus of awareness, if not ground?

Nick

To me, "ground" is what I'm standing on, a wire in an electrical circuit, or what's not the focal point of an image.

What does it mean here? I don't understand you.

[Nick227]

Whatever you are talking about makes no sense.

I'm saying that you don't appear to be distinguishing correctly between words that refer to objects, words that refer to concepts, and words that merely point towards.....

Like Descartes' famous axiom, the infinite regression issue falls apart here due to unexamined assumptions about the nature of selfhood.

Nick

[Piggy]

See, piggy, you have all the knowledge you need to understand where Pixy, Cyborg, and I are coming from.

A system can never be fully aware of itself.

The implication of this is that if you sat in the best MRI imaginable, and could map every molecule in every neuron of your mind, you would still not be able to pinpoint exactly where your experiences come from. That knowledge is simply inaccesible to you.

To be sure, you will see some very complex data flow and information processing. Perhaps this is what you mean -- "how does the data flow, how is the information processed?" But it seems to me that you are suggesting there is some final 'key' that will enable us to realize the mechanism of our own sentience.

There isn't. Such a thing does not exist. We will never be able to answer the question "why does a subjective experience feel like a subjective experience?" other than to say "because that is what it feels like." The best we can do -- and this is mathematically provable, as your intuition seems to understand -- is to answer the question "what happens that leads to someone else acting like they have what we consider a subjective experience?"

What makes you believe that?

Now you're sounding like the mystics.

It's true that we will never understand the mechanism of our own sentience by self-observation.

But there's no reason to believe that we can never figure it out by observing other people -- their behavior, their statements, and their brain activity.

I see no reason to simply abandon the effort to figure out exactly how it is that our brains produce this sensation.

I think one day we will figure it out, in fact.

[Nick227]

To me, "ground" is what I'm standing on, a wire in an electrical circuit, or what's not the focal point of an image.

What does it mean here? I don't understand you.

It means similar. It is that to which a signal refers in expressing its potential. Awareness is the Ground. Information is the Signal. This is essentially a Buddhist conceptual model for reality, devised by those who were regarded as knowing. It's also found in some Vedantic schools and Western esoteric thought.

All experience, interior or exterior, arises as signals and is interpreted by the brain which then constructs its model of reality. One of the primary constructs, created from this mass of signals, is self/not self. Thus, the infinite regression issue, which besets some more abstract models, does not apply here as selfhood can be seen as not a priori real in the deepest level of reality, rather the natural construct of the mind.

This model cannot really be proven objectively, and cannot be disproven neither objectively nor subjectively, as far as I'm aware, which leaves it in a bit of a quandary for the Western mind.

Don't know if this helps any!

Nick

[cyborg]

That's true. Software systems do have emergent properties, and I should have made that clear. But usually they are called "bugs".

You said this before but yet again it doesn't mean anything with respect to "emergent properties".

I'm not aware of emergent properties of software systems that turn out to be something that is then looked for. I expect there must be some examples out there, but I can't think of any.

I can't parse this.

N.B. this is different from a program which uses a heuristic approach to improve its performance of a task, or gathers data to enable a job to be done better. An emergent property implies that a program gets some new capacity which wasn't designed in.

No it doesn't and you seem very fixated on the idea of shrink-wrapped software without even considering the notion of pure research.

Emergent properties simply refer to the emergence of complex behaviours from simple rules - the field of cellular automata is a good place to start to see examples of this.

[Nick227]

It means similar. It is that to which a signal refers in expressing its potential. Awareness is the Ground. Information is the Signal. This is essentially a Buddhist conceptual model for reality, devised by those who were regarded as knowing. It's also found in some Vedantic schools and Western esoteric thought.

All experience, interior or exterior, arises as signals and is interpreted by the brain which then constructs its model of reality. One of the primary constructs, created from this mass of signals, is self/not self. Thus, the infinite regression issue, which besets some more abstract models, does not apply here as selfhood can be seen as not a priori real in the deepest level of reality, rather the natural construct of the mind.

This model cannot really be proven objectively, and cannot be disproven neither objectively nor subjectively, as far as I'm aware, which leaves it in a bit of a quandary for the Western mind.

Don't know if this helps any!

Nick

Put another way...it's saying that, the mind assumes from its processing that You are Self. Yet, in actuality, You are Ground, and Self is an experience being constructed by the mind.

At this point, as I understand it (and I stress I'm no scholar here), the Vedantic (Advaitist tradition) and the Buddhist schools diverge. The Buddhist schools state that "You are Ground" is reality and "You are Self" is illusion. The Advaita Vedanta tradition asserts that "You are Self" is a genuine reality (that which in psychological terms is usually known as the egoic self), but that there is a deeper reality - You as Ground.

Nick

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Then you misunderstood. We (adult humans) perceive the apple. If we look at the brain level, various parts of us (in particular, parts of the brain) perceive different attributes.
Yes, that's what I understood you to mean. I was asking why it looks like a coherent whole instead of a pile of disjoint attributes.


Certainly, there is a lot of perception to explain; but if you look at the Blackmore talk from the MBC conference, you quickly realize that our naive thoughts about our perception are not the standard we need to explain.
Of course not. But as you say, there is a lot to explain nonetheless.


"We practice a lot" is the level of explanation that matters, frankly. As opposed to "it's hardwired", or "it's unexplainable". It really doesn't matter if it is mediated by dopamine as in humans, or by octopamine as it is in honeybees. We learn quickly by experience with associations in the real world.
Yes, but Merc, you know I was not proposing either of those explanations.

There is a high level of integration of perception that is not satisfactorily answered by "we practice a lot."

~~ Paul

[rocketdodger]

I'm saying that you don't appear to be distinguishing correctly between words that refer to objects, words that refer to concepts, and words that merely point towards.....

Like Descartes' famous axiom, the infinite regression issue falls apart here due to unexamined assumptions about the nature of selfhood.

Nick

And I'm saying that you don't appear to be useing words that even you yourself don't know the meaning of.

Look at what you wrote: "words that merely point towards....." Does that "....." mean you have no idea what you are talking about? I think so.

[rocketdodger]

What makes you believe that?

Now you're sounding like the mystics.

...snip...

It's true that we will never understand the mechanism of our own sentience by self-observation.



But self-observation is the only way to access subjective experience.

[skiba]

And I'm saying that you don't appear to be useing words that even you yourself don't know the meaning of.

Look at what you wrote: "words that merely point towards....." Does that "....." mean you have no idea what you are talking about? I think so.

I think nick is trying to say: Don't confuse concepts with actuality.
Concepts only point to it.

Thats why defining consciousness doesn't work, you can only "see it" subjectively, and even then, only if you dont conceptualize it.

[Dancing David]

I think nick is trying to say: Don't confuse concepts with actuality.
Concepts only point to it.

Thats why defining consciousness doesn't work, you can only "see it" subjectively, and even then, only if you dont conceptualize it.

Which is true and false. As all concepts and thoughts are, they are all equaly false and equaly true. there are some that have validity to the common consensus of experience called reality.

That is why you have been asked to define consciousness, because that is the only way to examine the concepts and test them for the validty of reality.

The internal environment is not always valid.

So when you say i have an experinec only when I don't conceptualize it, what leads you to believe that it is not just the body and it's attendant processes. It is possible but so far undemonstrated.

[Piggy]

It means similar. It is that to which a signal refers in expressing its potential. Awareness is the Ground. Information is the Signal. This is essentially a Buddhist conceptual model for reality, devised by those who were regarded as knowing. It's also found in some Vedantic schools and Western esoteric thought.

All experience, interior or exterior, arises as signals and is interpreted by the brain which then constructs its model of reality. One of the primary constructs, created from this mass of signals, is self/not self. Thus, the infinite regression issue, which besets some more abstract models, does not apply here as selfhood can be seen as not a priori real in the deepest level of reality, rather the natural construct of the mind.

This model cannot really be proven objectively, and cannot be disproven neither objectively nor subjectively, as far as I'm aware, which leaves it in a bit of a quandary for the Western mind.

Don't know if this helps any!

Nick

It helps and it doesn't.

It doesn't help me to follow what you're saying, because I find it hopelessly vague, muddled, and confused.

However -- as a former Buddhist -- it does help me understand where you're coming from. Unfortunately, what it leads me to believe is that you're dealing with a bunch of airy concepts that you haven't examined closely enough or done a sufficient reality check on.

So I have nothing to say about all that.

[Piggy]

But self-observation is the only way to access subjective experience.

Depends on what you mean by "access".

Since we know we all have the experience of sentience, and we know our brains are built from the same evolutionary/genetic blueprint, this allows us to study each other.

The most interesting research, to me, comes from studies of brains that have been broken in certain ways -- split brains, aphasias, stroke victims -- as well as from studies of stimuli that get in under the conscious radar, under conditions such as distraction or in what would be popularly called "subliminal" presentations.

What we see from these is that sentience is a function, it is something the brain does, which -- like most everything else the brain does -- is handled by a combination of specialized and general-purpose circuitry.

It appears to be a "downstream" process, relying heavily upon pre-processed information.

There's a whole heckuva lot we can tell by studying what we are and are not aware of under certain conditions and observing what our brains are up to at the time.

There's a reason why self-observation hasn't come up with any answers over the millennia.

And there's a reason why examination of the active brain using modern technology is starting to provide us with some answers.

[skiba]

As all concepts and thoughts are, they are all equaly false and equaly true.
there are some that have validity to the common consensus of experience called reality.

Concepts are very practical, but what we have here is not a practical problem.



That is why you have been asked to define consciousness, because that is the only way to examine the concepts and test them for the validty of reality.


That's why I say: look for yourself. Theres a reason I keep referring to the subjective experience.


The internal environment is not always valid.

Certainly not.


So when you say i have an experinec only when I don't conceptualize it, what leads you to believe that it is not just the body and it's attendant processes.

Nothing really. Then you have a non-conceptual experience of your body. All I'm saying is consciousness isn't that analytical mind chatter that goes on and on all day.

"Mind chatter" is an experience too, but it's an experience of seeing everything through concepts and ideas only. And yes, that works for practical matters well, but It reduces everything to concepts and ideas

[Beth]

Put another way...it's saying that, the mind assumes from its processing that You are Self. Yet, in actuality, You are Ground, and Self is an experience being constructed by the mind.

At this point, as I understand it (and I stress I'm no scholar here), the Vedantic (Advaitist tradition) and the Buddhist schools diverge. The Buddhist schools state that "You are Ground" is reality and "You are Self" is illusion. The Advaita Vedanta tradition asserts that "You are Self" is a genuine reality (that which in psychological terms is usually known as the egoic self), but that there is a deeper reality - You as Ground.

Nick

Thanks. I didn't know that and it's interesting.


There is a high level of integration of perception that is not satisfactorily answered by "we practice a lot."~~ Paul

Thanks. I think you've expressed quite succintly the problem with that answer.

[Dancing David]

Concepts are very practical, but what we have here is not a practical problem.



That's why I say: look for yourself. Theres a reason I keep referring to the subjective experience.



Certainly not.



Nothing really. Then you have a non-conceptual experience of your body. All I'm saying is consciousness isn't that analytical mind chatter that goes on and on all day.

then i would say that there is perception, emotions, habits and a minimum of verbal cognition.

It is still those things, nothing remarkable about that.


"Mind chatter" is an experience too, but it's an experience of seeing everything through concepts and ideas only. And yes, that works for practical matters well, but It reduces everything to concepts and ideas

[Dancing David]

There is also the buddhist teaching of Mind, but that is not something in the Pali canon, the AHB was very careful about that. There are the five skandhas and that is it.

It is questionable and a matter of considerable debate what is meant by 'rebirth', the buddhist karma is very different from the hindu karma, it is more immediate and not requiring of reincarnation. It seems to be more of a mahayana tradition to have reincarnation and transmission of karma beyond death..

Which is why the term 'rebrth' is a source of debate.

The AHB was clear on a number of things: interdependence(contingent history), uniqueness, empty-ness, no-self, transitory nature of all things and the model of the eightfold path.

[Mercutio]

There is a high level of integration of perception that is not satisfactorily answered by "we practice a lot."

~~ Paul

... such as...


I think the forum software cut you off in mid-sentence. Otherwise I really am having a tough time understanding your objection. I mean, I can see a whole lot of functional utility in being able to grab for something in the same location where I see that it is red, round, and has memories for being edible, sweet, and associated with mortal sin. I cannot see a lot of functional utility in such things remaining independent. If I can retrain my visual and kinesthetic senses in a minute or two, why is it so remarkable that my experience with things in my environment leads me to treat my various channels of perceiving as referring to the same thing? Especially since each channel points toward it actually being the same thing (in a functional sense--that is, there is nothing mutually incompatible, and a very good correspondence between this range of sensory data and every other set of sensory data on what comes to be known as this apple.).

If our experience was that apples (and everything else) change color, and shape, and taste, we might be a bit more hesitant about relying on those data to make up our apple constancies. (Come to think of it, take a look at Oliver Sacks's visit to the island of color-blind people, for a bit of how to find if a banana is ripe when you cannot discern "yellow". It applies.)

[Mercutio]

Well, it just strikes me that people do have individual personalities, stuff they go towards, stuff they avoid. When people regard some of these traits as undesirable they often try to "get rid of them" through various therapies. What you often notice is that all that can really happen is that more choices are created when the same so-called "negative" thoughts recur. Thus it seems to me that most aspects of the personality are mediated somewhere in the human organism, as opposed to simply being learned behaviour acquired from being alive.

So, to my mind, personality is a causal thing, if not really an entity but a channel along which information is modulated, and from which aspects of behaviour are mediated.

NickDo you also see gravity as causal? Do things fall because of gravity?


'cos, see, they don't.

The concept of gravity is descriptive; we describe the mutual attraction of objects for one another as gravity. The law of gravity describes this attraction. Gravity does not cause this attraction--it is this attraction. I do not know what causes the attraction. Indeed, I do not know if the cause is known at all; I will defer to physicists here.

Personality is descriptive. People behave in manner X, Y, and/or Z; from this, we infer a personality type. We cannot then (unless we really are jonesing for circularity) attribute the observed behavior to a causal personality.

You say "people have individual personalities". Let me ask: does "people have individual behavioral repertoires" mean the same as what you mean? People reliably behave differently than one another? Now... can you see that "have individual personalities" must be an inference of a causal nature, a step beyond mere description, and fallacious due to circularity?

I thought so.

[skiba]

then i would say that there is perception, emotions, habits and a minimum of verbal cognition.



Again, all these are concepts. These concepts point towards the actual experience/awareness of perception, emotions, habits and verbal cognition as it happens "in the moment"

[Mercutio]

Again, all these are concepts. These concepts point towards the actual experience/awareness of perception, emotions, habits and verbal cognition as it happens "in the moment"
Umm... sorry, but are you Iacchus (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=25965)?

[Beth]

You say "people have individual personalities". Let me ask: does "people have individual behavioral repertoires" mean the same as what you mean?
I can't speak for Nick of course, but while I wouldn't phrase it that way, I think the two descriptions are isomorphic.

People reliably behave differently than one another? Now... can you see that "have individual personalities" must be an inference of a causal nature, a step beyond mere description, and fallacious due to circularity? No. We say things fall because of gravity even if techically, gravity is merely the noun we have assigned to the phenomon. Why can't we also say that people have personalities in the same way? Further, the 'behavioral repertoires' of individuals will be formed by some complex interaction of their genetic heritage and their environment, particularly during their formative years. Which is widely how personality is considered to be formed, isn't it?



I

[Mercutio]

I can't speak for Nick of course, but while I wouldn't phrase it that way, I think the two descriptions are isomorphic.
No. We say things fall because of gravity even if techically, gravity is merely the noun we have assigned to the phenomon. Why can't we also say that people have personalities in the same way? Further, the 'behavioral repertoires' of individuals will be formed by some complex interaction of their genetic heritage and their environment, particularly during their formative years. Which is widely how personality is considered to be formed, isn't it?


Thank you for illustrating my point.

Colloquially, it is fine to say that things fall because of gravity. It is, of course, absolutely untrue, and a physicist speaking accurately would not say it.

We speak colloquially about human behavior all the time, but we must not think that our casual terms are sufficient for a serious examination of consciousness!

[PixyMisa]

I think nick is trying to say: Don't confuse concepts with actuality.
Concepts only point to it.

Thats why defining consciousness doesn't work, you can only "see it" subjectively, and even then, only if you dont conceptualize it.
Ah. So you don't know anything about it, but you know it when you "see" it?

I "see" a slight problem there.

[westprog]

Ah. So you don't know anything about it, but you know it when you "see" it?

I "see" a slight problem there.

Seeing things and not understanding them has been usual for mankind throughout history.

Saying "maybe lightning isn't hurled from heaven by Zeus" is a sensible progression. Saying "maybe lightning is just an illusion" isn't.

[PixyMisa]

Seeing things and not understanding them has been usual for mankind throughout history.

Saying "maybe lightning isn't hurled from heaven by Zeus" is a sensible progression. Saying "maybe lightning is just an illusion" isn't.
It would be a sensible progression if lightning were an illusion. Lightning happens not to be an illusion, that's all.

Anyway, what Skiba is saying here is considerably dafter than that; he's claiming that consciousness can't be defined.

And, once again, that's a problem only he seems to suffer; I can define it perfectly well. Skiba may not like my definition, but since he has no definition of his own, he can't produce any coherent objection either.

[Darat]

Yes, that's what I understood you to mean. I was asking why it looks like a coherent whole instead of a pile of disjoint attributes.

...snip....

Isn't the answer a simple "because that was selected for by environmental pressures"?

[westprog]

It would be a sensible progression if lightning were an illusion. Lightning happens not to be an illusion, that's all.

Anyway, what Skiba is saying here is considerably dafter than that; he's claiming that consciousness can't be defined.

And, once again, that's a problem only he seems to suffer; I can define it perfectly well. Skiba may not like my definition, but since he has no definition of his own, he can't produce any coherent objection either.

It's quite easy to provide a definition for consciousness. It's a lot harder to provide one that is comprehensively correct.

I don't agree that such a defition is necessarily impossible. But I do think that it has not yet been achieved.

There was a stage when lightning wasn't clearly defined. It wasn't known how it was created, or what its nature was. Any fixed definition at that stage would have been wrong. It would have been made on the basis of insufficient knowledge.

[Mashuna]

Isn't the answer a simple "because that was selected for by environmental pressures"?

or even, "So we can eat it."

[cyberdyno]

It's quite easy to provide a definition for consciousness. It's a lot harder to provide one that is comprehensively correct.

I don't agree that such a defition is necessarily impossible. But I do think that it has not yet been achieved.

There was a stage when lightning wasn't clearly defined. It wasn't known how it was created, or what its nature was. Any fixed definition at that stage would have been wrong. It would have been made on the basis of insufficient knowledge.

At the beginning of time there was a change in state, symmetry was broken, we went from equilibrium and order to instability and chaos, from a singularity to a Universe... from certainty to uncertainty. Reality went from a simple state to an ever increasing complexity, from an empty and perfectly flat vacuum state to curved spacetime full of objects. From not just being but also to existing.

Ponderable matter has its own refresh rate, like a TV screen, just that it happens at a much faster rate and in 3D. Each object being accompanied by a continuously collapsing wave, each full collapsation representing a moment in time, as described by contemporary Quantum Mechanics. This is what makes evolution possible, or how else could state be preserved if or when information were not? It is a learning mechanism. Objects, including the Universe as a whole, go from state to state as each new state supersedes the previous one (Is this where e-motions come from?). All this information replication and preservation being caused by this continuous succession of states. Matter goes from state to state in a direction determined by how balanced or coherent the now state is... or feels (Is this qualia?).

Sentience, in my view, is analogous to Active Information, and just like cell automata can produce infinite complexity from only a few laws, Active Information re-creates itself according to passive information contained within each particular system's pilot wave and the environment, as it follows Nature's four fundamental forces... which are directed at the Aether level. Sentience, the way I see it, comes from a self-reference mechanism intrinsic to Active Information. So, in that sense, meaning continues to be intrinsic to sentience, as we already knew.

As cybernetic systems go from state to state, these will keep or reject data depending on its usefulness, in other words, depending on its meaning or significance. Self-replication, learning, memory, self-organisation, etc., all depend on change, and for these mechanisms to work, these systems must go from one state to the next, as the state-wave collapses, each collapse, each wave-front, representing a new state, each state representing actuality, or the now moment, the particle being in a rock-like state only during this moment, however brief that moment may be, each particle having its own wave-length, wave-phase, frequency (or energy), etc. Meaning being discerned through a mechanism of wave superposition, or parallel information processing which acts from top to bottom and bottom to top, all at once.

Why does matter try to better itself, where does this syntropy come from? Is the best possible choice always selected? I tend to think it is a phenomenon ruled by the laws of Thermodynamics, the path of less resistance, or the most energy efficient and meaningful, useful process, but, at the same time, I think that Aether is Spirit, or Will, and that this is where energy comes from. Will that comes from an urge, a need to fight entropy, to order, balance, stabilize and preserve information, i.e., atoms and DNA. This is where Humanity's hunger for knowledge comes from.

As I said, all you need to be physical is to be able to act. To will is to act. There is matter because there is Will. This is where Active Information and quanta come from. Quanta is defined as a quantum of action, in other words, an amount of energy, a quantized amount of fluctuating spacetime.

Information (geometry) starts with the quantum. Existence starts with the quantum. Before the quantum there is the Aether. There can be an aether without quanta but there can be no quanta without an aether. Matter is dependent on the Higgs field (aka aether), it depends on the background as an energy supply, hence particle complementarity. Particles emerge as needed or, as expected... as dictated by spacetime conditions. The Aether has a non-zero vacuum expectation value.

Aether/God/Spirit -> Energy/Will -> Matter/Information

Electrons always move the same way, just like magnetic fields always follow the rules. Those things are controlled by another thing, they can't choose which way to move. According to the facts, the Universe is ruled by four forces and logic, the rest happens by chance. The Aether acts like a traffic light which directs energy flow as required by all types of field interactions; there are no decisions being taken, electric and magnetic fields will always interact in the same exact manner. Neither the Universe, nor Consciousness, or whatever you prefer to call it, cares about us. Once Humanity is extinguished the Universe will continue to exist as if nothing had happened. Sorry, no Promised Land nor an afterlife, those are physical impossibilities.

If there were such an all knowing Mind, why would it be taking so long (13.7 billion years and counting) to finish its creation? There isn't, but there appears to be a Noosphere, as Teilhard de Chardin called it. Just like every object, the Earth has its own state wave, each species has its own state wave, and because self-reflection, gathering and preserving information are built-in features in matter, we also want to acquire and preserve it as we process it (or as we think)... just as all matter does. As far as we know, we are the repository and gate keepers of all the acquired understanding, the rest of the Universe could care less... until the day little green men come to visit us. Nietzsche was right.

Material systems will use only that information which contains meaning to them, in other words, meaningful information. Whatever happens here on Earth has meaning only to us humans, and we, as Nature's top product, are responsible... in this neighborhood. Scientific research is our duty. By the same token, whatever advances in science extraterrestrial beings may be responsible for would never be transferred to us... unless we went to one of their schools. If information were really contained by some Universal Mind, then, what need would Nature have for the DNA molecule?

We can't use subjectivity to understand or explain objective reality. Love, purpose... these things have meaning to us, but neither Science nor the Universe, cares about what they mean. To understand and explain reality we must look at it in an objective way, and the facts say that the Aether... God... Mind... Consciousness... or whatever, is just a thing with no purpose. It can neither see, nor think... until process turns it into brains with eyes. We see and think for it, and we like it and want to continue, that is where purpose comes from. We have purpose, the Aether does not. In other words, the quantum state of the Universe is barely affected by the quantum state of Humanity or planet Earth. Its state depends on many other factors. Who knows how many other civilizations may be also contributing to its overall state.

In his book "Answer to Job" Carl Jung said:



"The importance of consciousness is so great that one cannot help suspecting the element of meaning to be concealed somewhere within all the monstrous, apparently senseless biological turmoil, and that the road to its manifestation was ultimately found on the level of warm-blooded vertebrates possessed of a differentiated brain - found as if by chance, unintended and unforeseen, and yet somehow sensed, felt and groped for out of some dark urge."

That which is needs to be something eternal, immutable and absolute, with no beginning and no ending. For that to be possible there needs to be no motion, therefore, no time. Matter is then ruled out. Matter is what it is only at present. Neither the past, nor the future exist as matter. The Real, absolute matter, as Hegel called it, is the Aether. Whether you can call it God or not would depend on what you think God is. To me, God is a thing incapable of thinking, until matter and brains come to existence. Many call it Cosmic Consciousness, others call it Mind, but they are all referring to same thing, a universal being. The Aether, like God, is omnipresent and eternal, with no beginning and no ending; it is One.

The Aether is the seat to all fields, and without fields there can be no Universe, therefore, it is the source of everything there is. Will is inherent to matter because matter sits on the Aether. Energy (Aether), or Will (Spirit) without purpose is, but does not exist... until it turns into spacetime, purpose comes afterward.

If we are to understand what David Chalmers, director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University, calls the hard problem, or to answer - What is that which is? - we need the notion of an aether. After all, what is real, this ever changing material reality or the eternal? The Aether is that which is. It is immutable, it is now what it always was, and there is nothing in this Universe that you can say that about simply because matter is in constant change, what was five seconds ago is no longer.

Considering that matter is made of fields, that if there were no fields there would be no Universe, then, we could safely say that all objects that exist as matter are little more than apparitions whose being is given to them only temporarily. If you stop an atom from spinning, it disintegrates. I say given to them because they all exist within that which is. They are thanks to the Aether they come from. If you are because of the Aether then, your being comes from the Aether. But you, the biological unit, because of the rules that govern matter, are only for a short period of time. There is no death, only renewal.

God is but cannot exist unless it exists as matter, as a universe. I see the Universe as God in its material form, and matter as an instrument to get the information it needs to constantly re-create itself. The Universe, spacetime, is where knowledge comes from, and that is what existing is all about... seeing and learning.

As long as the basic laws remain the same, the Universe will always anthropomorphize itself in the sense that whatever comes out as a top product it will likely have many of the qualities characteristic to human beings. We were not created in God's image, the Universe created itself in man's image because humanoids were the most likely outcome, in this planet, after dinosaurs disappeared. Make any changes to any of the fundamental forces, and we may not even get a universe. But as long as the laws remain the same, we will always end up with something similar to what we now have. It could happen anywhere in the Universe but, sooner or later, as long as there is matter, it will happen. It is the way of Nature.

We are just biological units Active Information employs to see the world, to exist. In this sense, we truly are God's servants. Look at birds, all they want in life is to get somewhere where they can mate, have offsprings, provide for them, and then die. Same with salmon, in their world, getting to the top of that mountain is all that counts. To them, that is what life is all about, that is the information world they live in. We get God (the Universe) the best input possible, as far as we know. Because of the way we see the world and our ability to process the information we gather through our senses, we are God's most efficient source of usable, valuable, and especially meaningful information in this neighborhood. A pigeon's life story may be a beautiful thing, but that isn't enough, not enough information compared to what we humans can gather and provide. Now - in respect to sentient, self-observing matter - humans, after 14 billion years of evolution, are state of the art in this part of the Universe.

You may say, but how am I connected to God, how can God be every man, or every man be God? Well, that is why I am so obsessed with the concept of an aether, or empty space, if you prefer to call it that. Remember, in this view and thanks to wholeness, state, not knowledge, spreads throughout the whole Universe instantaneously. Empty space is everywhere, it is the space between the points. And the points, the particles, are just clusters, nodes of information floating in that empty space as a hologram ruled by the laws of Wave Harmonics, Thermodynamics and Relativity. Empty space is not what separates us, it is what unites us! Because this empty space permeates everything, it is omnipresent. So, it does not matter where you are, you could be a man in Moscow, in Montreal or in Beijing... you would still be connected to God through the empty space in which the Universe exists. Spirit is one.

When your thoughts wander away, what brings them back, what makes you pay attention? Will does. That's where intention comes from, but this thing can neither think nor see by itself, it needs our brains. There is Will, energy and matter, then comes human consciousness and purpose. When we learn how this wandering of the mind happens, then we can learn how to control it. Eventually, this understanding of the process of mind, is what gives us tranquility while allowing the mind to continue wandering as required by Nature.

"I think, therefore I am" - Descartes used to say. I say - I think, therefore I exist. I agree with Carl Jung's materialistic interpretation, the collective unconscious as a morphic field where fields are considered to be matter. Teilhard de Chardin was right.

Your brain, Nature's jewel in the crown on this part of the Universe, will be doing what it created itself to do; which is to gather the best available information in order to better understand and enjoy existence. Always thriving to maintain a state of well being, stability and tranquility. Uncertainty is what drives the Universe, it is what drives us.

State, not knowledge, spreads throughout the whole Universe instantaneously. God feels what biological matter feels, and the day it feels at peace and fulfilled, or the day there is no more uncertainty, will be the day the Universe freezes and goes back to being just flat, empty space.

God (Aether) is Spirit, Will without purpose... pure energy, which is neither hot nor bright. Aithor means I burn, maybe that is why the meaning of the word aether is maker, as in burner, or, the fire that builds. Thousands of years ago, Aether and Thor were also known, respectively, as the gods of light and thunder.

Aether is the physicalists' God.

I have restored the text in this post, as it appears that Cyberdyno is indeed the author. My apologies.

[Nick227]

I think nick is trying to say: Don't confuse concepts with actuality.
Concepts only point to it.

Thats why defining consciousness doesn't work, you can only "see it" subjectively, and even then, only if you dont conceptualize it.

Personally, I would rather dispute that one experiences consciousness, even subjectively. I think the word is simply a conceptual one, used to try and communicate something at best on the borders of tangibility. To me it's a term that arises in introspection, most likely through a need to try and communicate a sought-after uniqueness.

Nick

[PixyMisa]

It's quite easy to provide a definition for consciousness. It's a lot harder to provide one that is comprehensively correct.
Well, you do have to decide what you mean by the word before you can get anywhere. :)

I don't agree that such a defition is necessarily impossible. But I do think that it has not yet been achieved.
That's not unreasonable.

There was a stage when lightning wasn't clearly defined.
No, it was defined, it just wasn't understood. There's a huge difference.

It wasn't known how it was created, or what its nature was. Any fixed definition at that stage would have been wrong. It would have been made on the basis of insufficient knowledge.
A definition doesn't need to specify a cause, only observable behaviours. A definition of lightning could have been made at any moment after humans developed language. They still wouldn't know what caused it, but they would know what was meant when someone used the term.

[PixyMisa]

At the beginning of time there was a change in state, symmetry was broken, we went from equilibrium and order to instability and chaos, from a singularity to a Universe... from certainty to uncertainty. Reality went from a simple state to an ever increasing complexity, from an empty and perfectly flat vacuum state to curved spacetime full of objects. From not just being but also to existing.

Ponderable matter has its own refresh rate, like a TV screen, just that it happens at a much faster rate and in 3D. Each object being accompanied by a continuously collapsing wave, each full collapsation representing a moment in time, as described by contemporary Quantum Mechanics. This is what makes evolution possible, or how else could state be preserved if or when information were not? It is a learning mechanism. Objects, including the Universe as a whole, go from state to state as each new state supersedes the previous one (Is this where e-motions come from?). All this information replication and preservation being caused by this continuous succession of states. Matter goes from state to state in a direction determined by how balanced or coherent the now state is... or feels (Is this qualia?).

Sentience, in my view, is analogous to Active Information, and just like cell automata can produce infinite complexity from only a few laws, Active Information re-creates itself according to passive information contained within each particular system's pilot wave and the environment, as it follows Nature's four fundamental forces... which are directed at the Aether level. Sentience, the way I see it, comes from a self-reference mechanism intrinsic to Active Information. So, in that sense, meaning continues to be intrinsic to sentience, as we already knew.

[Edited for Rule 4]
No.

[Nick227]

The concept of gravity is descriptive; we describe the mutual attraction of objects for one another as gravity. The law of gravity describes this attraction. Gravity does not cause this attraction--it is this attraction. I do not know what causes the attraction. Indeed, I do not know if the cause is known at all; I will defer to physicists here.

Personality is descriptive. People behave in manner X, Y, and/or Z; from this, we infer a personality type. We cannot then (unless we really are jonesing for circularity) attribute the observed behavior to a causal personality.


You say "people have individual personalities". Let me ask: does "people have individual behavioral repertoires" mean the same as what you mean? People reliably behave differently than one another? Now... can you see that "have individual personalities" must be an inference of a causal nature, a step beyond mere description, and fallacious due to circularity?

I thought so.

What I've noticed, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that people report that the same kinds of thoughts come up in the same situations. Of all the different thoughts arising in certain types of situations, only specific thoughts are acted upon. In therapy, people eventually learn to choose to follow other thoughts, rather than ones that lead them into behaviour which they don't like.

This to me infers that there is a causal factor operating around the thinking response to situations, or a causal factor that determines which of a series of thoughts should be acted upon.

I don't really see why one needs to bring behaviour into it so much, as there are causal factors behind behaviour, ie thinking and feeling, which can be examined. The consistencies in these thinking and feeling responses to perceived reality are what I consider "personality."

You are discussing behaviour. I am talking about the factors which create behaviour. We're on different tacks here.

Nick

[Belz...]

We can't define sentience in terms of processes, or in the exact way we'd like to yet. Eventually I'm sure we will.

I wan't talking about process, but nature. What's sentience :

Sentience is simply that feeling that you are you, and that things are happening to you.

How is that different from simply reacting to stimuli ? Your definition sounds more like a philosophy about sentience.

So it's a real phenomenon, there's no doubt about that.

Well I doubt it. So it can't be that obvious.

Anyone capable of having a conversation is sentient.

Then chatbots are sentient.

[Belz...]

People don't directly experience the ghosts, any more than they directly experience apples, or houses, or other people. They receive sensations, which they interpret.

And how is that different from the subject at hand ? I can just as easily say that we don't directly experience sentience. How are they different ?

If the sensations are dubious, then so are the apples, houses and other people.

And anything else you experience, including yourself.

People have experienced noises, lights, things which appear like transparent human figures, that kind of thing.

Exactly. You're just making my point.

[Dancing David]

Again, all these are concepts. These concepts point towards the actual experience/awareness of perception, emotions, habits and verbal cognition as it happens "in the moment"


Again semantics are semantics, you can no more directly approach reality at a internet BB than you can write an equation for the way a rock tends to fall in a gravitational field.

That does not mean that one can not approach valid discussion of the events commonly labeled and described as conscious. Private behaviors are open to discussion, to just say 'well that is beyong language' is the same as Jerome saying 'black holes do not exist'. I already accept that this is a place where we are using self referencing idiomatic symbols to discuss approximate reality.

There is no mystery in saying "What have I got in my pocket."

[Dancing David]

No.


Yup, that is no.

[John Freestone]

Very pragmatic statement! But I think if you're trying to create a concept out of something which, by definition, cannot be experientially escaped from, then at some point either the conceptual mind wins and you become abstracted from reality, or you have to admit that it does not exist. Duality, huh!Yes, that's the problem. There's no use proposing a concept of the subject, or 'mind' or 'observer' (where these mean the non-objective witness of object things), and then asking what it is, since that implies objectifying it or plugging directly in to someone's 'mind' and silently grokking together as one.

If something utterly subjective exists, it cannot be found because it cannot be seen (unless the world is much more strange than we generally imagine and something can see itself, both object and subject at once). Even if that is the case, it seems from general experience that it cannot be shown to someone else, so such a centre of experience can never be known to exist publicly, only privately. *

It still may be philosophically feasible to construct this as one's cosmology. Indeed, people who claim to have 'seen themselves' (in that fundamental sense of being a unified subject-object, in meditation, for instance) could have seen the Truth.

By similar argument, however, so could people who swear they have been abducted by aliens, or that they know Jesus is in their heart. We cannot argue that the proposition of mind is supported by being asserted by many people, since people believe in all sorts of things, many of them mutually exclusive. Another philosophy with perfect internal logic would be that only your consciousness exists and you're imagining everything else.

Westprog seems to suggest that we are dismissing a concept which may exist, but even if we are, it can't be shown to exist outside of unitary awareness - self as subject-object. We have to choose, I think, whether we're going to put our internal concepts, imaginings or 'realities' first, or the 'objective facts', including each other, out there in the universe, discovered through reason and science.

* Well, not quite...it is sometimes asserted that this Self is all of us, which would make distinctions between public and private redundant. As the religious say, you can't show it to someone else, but you can point the way towards it. Once it arrives, each deluded small self recognises its Absolute reality as Self. Here, however, a reverse problem could be put to that which westprog keeps putting concerning illusion. If the small divided ego is an illusion, it must be being had by the Unitary Self. Somehow God pulls the veil over His own Eyes. Spiritual philosophies often come down to this God returning to Himself kind of cosmology, and I suppose if you're the All and the only alternative is sitting in the Void, what else is there to do with Eternity? If you're omnipotent, presumably you can forget yourself at will for the fun of a game of hide and seek.:covereyes

[cyberdyno]

Thank you for illustrating my point.

Colloquially, it is fine to say that things fall because of gravity. It is, of course, absolutely untrue, and a physicist speaking accurately would not say it.

We speak colloquially about human behavior all the time, but we must not think that our casual terms are sufficient for a serious examination of consciousness!

Leon Rosenfeld (1933, 1963) considered:

G_uv = 8pi(T^uv)psi

Where PSI is the quantum state of the matter fields and:

· Gravitation is the beginning of a semi-deterministic process. The gravitational force is a product of the electromagnetic properties of the medium, and is a classical, non-quantized phenomena.

· Gravity and wave packet collapse are interrelated. There is state-wave collapse because there is gravity, gravity being the product of electromotive forces generated within matter.

· Gravitation is caused by a space pressure differential created by the inward, radial space flow that occurs as a result of the object's state-wave continuous collapsation.

· Quantization and organization of space is orchestrated by matter fields (pilot-waves) which originate from and follow exclusive dimensions (information) already existing as matter (particles).

If there were no wave collapse there would be no matter, simple as that. Stopping or reversing gravity would require the stopping or reversing of the state-wave flow, and that would cause matter to disintegrate. All matter is wave and particle at the same time (de Broglie, et al.), that is why there is gravity. So let's stop wasting time on anti-gravity devices and let's concentrate on creating a spacetime bubble in a different matrix and completely independent from our space. A bubble which could be extracted from and reintroduced into the time-cone at will.

Cosmic background radiation is what fills the observable Universe. It is composed by many different particles, like photons or EMR, which are considered particles, and ZPR, also considered particles but of a very different nature. What I call aether is before this material space, it is what Einstein called the gravitational ether.

What I call space is not the same as what 19th century and early 20th century physicists called space. Back then there were no CBR, nor Wheeler's quantum foam. Today, space is considered to be material, a collection of small particles, some of which are called dark energy, other are zero point radiation. This is why modern physics now say space is grainy.

Gravity causes space to flow as an electromotive force is created by a body's rotation. The gravitational field, as described by Einstein, is continuous, not quantized like the CBR is. As morphic fields surrounding rotating bodies cut through the CBR, there is friction which creates matter-waves, just as EMR is created when you shake an electron. These matter-waves, or matter selective quanta (Gravitons?), are pulled in by an electromagnetic force orthogonal to the direction of rotation of bodies, inwardly pulling ZPR particles to the center of the system. This process depends on the characteristics of the matter-waves, which in turn depend on the characteristics of the rotating body. This model explains why some planets have greater concentrations of some elements than others.

Gravitation comes from a pressure differential in material space caused by the constant, radial flow of matter waves into bodies with mass, as quantum matter condenses and crystallizes into its objective state. Space particles are carried by matter-selective, inwardly flowing quanta, in an electrical current. Just like electrons are moved by electromotive forces.

Picture two bodies like the Earth and the Moon, now imagine space flowing into the Earth and into the Moon at the same time, that causes gravitation. Because there is flow going in opposite directions and a decrease in material space density, there is a drop in pressure, causing objects to drift towards the lower pressure region as pressure tries to equalize itself. That is how we get tide movement; the Moon casts a shadow, so to speak, that blocks space flow, causing gravitic pressure to drop between the two bodies, consequently causing the sea level to rise where the shadow is being cast.

[John Freestone]

I'd just like to answer the question of whether westprog is the only one who doesn't get pixy's distinction between thermostats and rocks. He's (he - yes?) not. I think he's putting a line between aware and not aware somewhere up in the animal realm, which leads to a dualism IMHO, where most of the materialists extend awareness right down into mechanical things, apply it to thermostats and, when pushed as to where the series ends, are shown to devise their own kind of dualism. I perceive this, as westprog notes, in some (perhaps unconscious) attributing of value to a thermostat and none to a rock, which it seems to me requires putting the human subject back into the picture. Someone even tried the thought experiment of little people inside rocks, for heaven's sake. It seems quite clear to me that if you are going to develop a philosophy in which human beings and all life are utterly mechanistic, deterministic processes, to argue which bunch of atoms (thermostat or rock) has or has not 'consciousness' has utterly missed the useful point that could be drawn from thinking about the question, namely, that the difference is semantic, that all differences we like to pretend are real are semantic, other than perhaps the question of ontology itself - what, if anything, actually exists? Indeed, the point would have been obvious to us from the start, when people demanded definition of terms. It is quite possible that all things are aware or that all things are not aware, depending on how the term is defined, which does not answer the question of whether awareness exists!

I'm quite willing to consider a model where there are no people involved at all. But if we do that, and simply consider the passage of information, the rock and the thermostat are equivalent. Quite so. People pretend they're defining a real difference, when what is going on is the insertion of a human operator using a thermostat, hence it's function is easy to think of as meaningful, hence the processing of information rather than blind, dead reaction. But Pixy suggested the condition of using a piece of rock as a thermostat, which seems to give the game away - if a piece of rock is sometimes aware and sometimes not, and that depends on whether it is used as a thermostat, what does that mean, we wake them up when we put them in our circuitry, kill them when we take them out?

But the thermostat passes just as much as its bandwidth happens to permit. It's bandwidth is narrow. The rock passes more information.I think something you said elsewhere was more appropriate to materialism without dualist assumption of an observer - that actually they're just the same. The difference can only be a human conceptual label, surely, attached by the particular lump of matter called a human? Sure, in terms of its output, it is digital only, but you see the distinction between this, I think, which is a human judgement 'output: 0 or 1' and its molecular substance, which is functionally as vast an array of switches, or not, (digital or infinitely variable makes no difference) as the molecules of a rock.

We could replace the thermostat with a thermocouple, which would transmit information that would give us a temperature measurement, rather than just a switch. Would a thermocouple be more aware than the thermostat? Then imagine dozens of thermocouples in a dome shape. Keep adding them until we have a system that emulates the rock. At what point do we lose awareness instead of gaining it?Exactly. Pity that you see emergent awareness (or level of) in this increased complexity (presumably you do), but not when the switches are synapses and the consciousness gradient is higher.

Value is another concept that only matters to human beings. Thermostats and rocks don't have concepts of value. We do - which is why we use thermostats to operate our immersion heaters instead of rocks.Yes.

The information transmitted by the thermostat and the information transmitted by the rock have exactly the same value according to TLOP: =0, as above.It would seem so to me. So, however, does the information transmitted by a human being. There are no values in TLOP.

When dealing with a non-sentient being such as a thermostat, it seems to be entirely arbitrary which states form part of its function.Function - isn't that a human value too? Processing? Information? Conscious? Aren't they all?

Is it entirely coincidental that the supposed engine of awareness in the thermostat happens to be the exact behaviour that makes it useful to human beings? It seems rather odd that the value system of a thermostat is exactly the same as the human beings who created it.With you there. No coincidence at all.


So does the passing of information to the centre of the rock. The temperature gradient is smoothed out. All information is processed as it passes between objects.

That a thermostat behaves in a repeatable and predictable way makes it more useful to us as a device. I don't see how that constitutes awareness.
Hmm. It's a bit like the question of the noise a tree might or might not make when it falls in a forest and no-one's there. Is a sharp piece of flint lying on a beach just a piece of pointless rock, if in several million years a human being is going to pick it up and kill a deer with it? Would the concept of thermostat have any meaning whatsoever, let alone be aware, if humans had never existed to use one?

[skiba]

Umm... sorry, but are you Iacchus (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=25965)?

Nope. But by reading he's posts I can see why you would think that :D


Anyway, what Skiba is saying here is considerably dafter than that; he's claiming that consciousness can't be defined.


I've never tasted Sushi. Have you?
Can you define the taste of sushi for me?
Please be specific, I dont wanna miss out on anything.



Again semantics are semantics, you can no more directly approach reality at a internet BB than you can write an equation for the way a rock tends to fall in a gravitational field.
That does not mean that one can not approach valid discussion of the events commonly labeled and described as conscious.

Private behaviors are open to discussion, to just say 'well that is beyong language' is the same as Jerome saying 'black holes do not exist'. I already accept that this is a place where we are using self referencing idiomatic symbols to discuss approximate reality.


Problem is, we dont have equations / models on how to describe a subjective experience. When both know what the words are reffering to, it gets much more straightforward.

Saying "I am happy" means nothing to you unless you've experienced happiness. You can study the behaviour, but that tells you very little.

Maybe, you want to make "happiness" in to an concept, so you can examine it and understand it.

[John Freestone]

What are you talking about?

I am simply stating that if you want to be picky about it yes, every physical interaction in the universe can be viewed as a decision. But it is pointless to view every interaction that way because you will be giving meaning to interactions that have no meaning. That is why such a view is inconsistent with the rest of science.

You can claim that a rock falling is a decision -- if there were no gravity, the rock would not fall, so the input (gravity) is mapped to the output (falling), which could be called a decision. But what meaning? What is that decision for?

A thermostat's decision, on the other hand, has meaning -- to control temperature. It's meaning was designed. A neuron's decision has meaning -- to control some biological process. It's meaning was evolved. Meaning, meaning, meaning.Maybe we're at crossed purposes. It seemed that in the argument about why a thermostat should be considered aware but not a rock (as Pixy said) you supported the difference. I think I have explained why I don't think that is a real difference, but a semantic one. The point I made was that in a monist view, I can't see how a thermostat can be considered aware and a rock not, then you seemed to say that it could, and the difference was that this labeling made it consistent with the rest of science, and that raised the question for me of how just consistency of labels can be a valid basis for examining the world. I realise that it might have to be, since we can't say anything about it otherwise and therefore can't discover anything that can be said in sentences or expressed even mathematically perhaps, but it seemed like a valid point to make.

Now you seem to be saying that the difference between happenings and decisions is really just semantic, which I have no problem with and thought I was suggesting to you as a reason why rocks and solar systems were as conscious as thermostats. Then, oddly, you seem to be suggesting (to my reading) differences between such happenings that we could, if we're being picky, call meaningful (OTOH) and meaningful happenings (OTO) in the case of synapses and objects designed to control temperature. Is that last bit just unfortunate wording? Is 'meaning' just a semantic difference or not? I think it is. I don't understand what I've said that you're taking issue with.

[PixyMisa]

Picture two bodies like the Earth and the Moon, now imagine space flowing into the Earth and into the Moon at the same time, that causes gravitation. Because there is flow going in opposite directions and a decrease in material space density, there is a drop in pressure, causing objects to drift towards the lower pressure region as pressure tries to equalize itself. That is how we get tide movement; the Moon casts a shadow, so to speak, that blocks space flow, causing gravitic pressure to drop between the two bodies, consequently causing the sea level to rise where the shadow is being cast.
Not even no.

[Nick227]

It helps and it doesn't.

It doesn't help me to follow what you're saying, because I find it hopelessly vague, muddled, and confused.

However -- as a former Buddhist -- it does help me understand where you're coming from. Unfortunately, what it leads me to believe is that you're dealing with a bunch of airy concepts that you haven't examined closely enough or done a sufficient reality check on.

Can you be more specific? I'm very happy to learn. Are you saying that Brahman does not represent the "Ground of Being" to Buddhists? Or that the phenomenal self is considered real?

Nick

[PixyMisa]

I'd just like to answer the question of whether westprog is the only one who doesn't get pixy's distinction between thermostats and rocks. He's (he - yes?) not. I think he's putting a line between aware and not aware somewhere up in the animal realm, which leads to a dualism IMHO, where most of the materialists extend awareness right down into mechanical things, apply it to thermostats and, when pushed as to where the series ends, are shown to devise their own kind of dualism. I perceive this, as westprog notes, in some (perhaps unconscious) attributing of value to a thermostat and none to a rock, which it seems to me requires putting the human subject back into the picture. Someone even tried the thought experiment of little people inside rocks, for heaven's sake.
Yeah, that was Westprog, missing the point.

Quite so. People pretend they're defining a real difference, when what is going on is the insertion of a human operator using a thermostat, hence it's function is easy to think of as meaningful, hence the processing of information rather than blind, dead reaction.
A blind, dead, aware reaction, thank you very much.

But Pixy suggested the condition of using a piece of rock as a thermostat
No I didn't.

which seems to give the game away - if a piece of rock is sometimes aware and sometimes not, and that depends on whether it is used as a thermostat, what does that mean, we wake them up when we put them in our circuitry, kill them when we take them out?
No.

What I said was you can use a rock as a component of a thermostat. The thermostat is aware. Individual bits of the thermostat are not. If you render your own brain down to its component atoms, they're not aware either.

Look, it's very simple: Does it switch?

Thermostat, yes.
Rock, no.

If it switches, then the only difference between it and the human brain is quantitative. Wire up enough switches and you can simulate anything at any level of detail. All the most powerful supercomputer or the human brain are is a bunch of switches.

If it doesn't switch, it doesn't switch. Ten trillion rocks are no more aware than one, no matter how attractively arranged.

[RandFan]

Thermostat, yes.
Rock, no.Actually there are rocks that switch. Quartz is a temperature sensitive crystal. Of course the point might depend on your definition of switch.

BTW, Dennett who famously made the point about Thermostats also pointed out that thermostats are not aware that they are aware in the sense that humans are so there is an appreciable difference.

[John Freestone]

Yeah, but now he's added language into the mix, as though the failings of language are the failings of reality. Which I've seen argued before, admittedly.

So then why can't we say that a rock experiences nothing, a thermostat experiences very little, ants experience a bit, and people experience very much? What is wrong with that?Nothing. But nor is there anything wrong with saying that everything from quanta to the Universe is conscious. We're just getting lost in words and drawing arbitrary lines where we want them from our personal biases. Hence my concern that the test of whether something makes decisions or not is because that label is consistent with the rest of science.

There's been a lot of noise made about defining terms scientifically, even absolutely clearly and specifically. I'm not sure there is such a process in reality, since everything we map linguistically to a concept as part of its definition is also a concept that needs defining. Language, including scientific language is utterly and entirely circular, like mathematics cannot step outside its axioms. Oh yes, we've been here before, asking if the problem of reality is a problem bound up with language. It seems so to me. Why we don't actually know things in an absolute sense is because 'things' can only be labelled approximately. The idea of defining things specifically is one of the big lies of science. Clearly, every phenomenon is bound up with others and changes through time, and has no clear boundaries at all, from (apparently) the smallest observable entity to the universe. We don't know anything (absolutely) is such a difficult admission. We know approximately certain relationships between things we've approximately defined. We don't even know if 'things' exist or not. The dismissal of the language problem is just scientific ego.

So I'm with you, westprog, in saying that it is a problem. I'm not sure whether defining terms more clearly will shed light on consciousness, but clearly our terms are as flexible as methane just now, so it might be a way forward. However, I do rather think that the whole thing rests on ontology and its relationship to labels - what exists (obviously part of the question) and what we're going to call it - how can we seriously believe we're going to separate them? Define anything specifically and without leading to circularity first if you can, then see if you can do it with sloppy old concepts like consciousness!

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Isn't the answer a simple "because that was selected for by environmental pressures"?
Of course, but how does it work?

"We built it to do that" is not a complete answer to "How does the car move?"


I think the forum software cut you off in mid-sentence. Otherwise I really am having a tough time understanding your objection. I mean, I can see a whole lot of functional utility in being able to grab for something in the same location where I see that it is red, round, and has memories for being edible, sweet, and associated with mortal sin. I cannot see a lot of functional utility in such things remaining independent.
Again, I agree. But I want an answer to "how," not "why."


If I can retrain my visual and kinesthetic senses in a minute or two, why is it so remarkable that my experience with things in my environment leads me to treat my various channels of perceiving as referring to the same thing? Especially since each channel points toward it actually being the same thing (in a functional sense--that is, there is nothing mutually incompatible, and a very good correspondence between this range of sensory data and every other set of sensory data on what comes to be known as this apple.).
But each channel is filled with information about 50 objects. How do I keep them separate? How do I focus attention on one or two instead of all of them?

There is some sort of attentional grouping mechanism that seems as if it operates above all the details.

~~ Paul

[Darat]

Oh how is easy,

Atoms obey TLOP
You are made of Atoms
You obey TLOP (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=162)

[rocketdodger]

Is 'meaning' just a semantic difference or not? I think it is. I don't understand what I've said that you're taking issue with.

It is just a semantic difference. But that doesn't make it any less stupid to adopt stupid semantics.

I am taking issue with people like westprog differing in semantics only for the purpose of argument.

It is quite clear that he doesn't consider a rock warming in the sun to have any meaning, other than in the context of this argument. The only reason he would say otherwise is because he wants a thermostat to be the same as a rock -- so he assigns the same level of meaning to both.

Everyone knows this is nonsense. A rock sitting in the sun has no meaning, unless you want to assign arbitrary meaning to everything, at which point the meaning of "meaning" is diluted to uselessness and we have to come up with a new term. What is the point of that?

[cyberdyno]

Not even no.


Flowing Space
Henry H. Lindner

Abstract
A simple theory of Cosmic space and motion explains the experimental results, unifies our understanding of the effects of motion and of gravity, produces no paradoxes, and makes more predictions than Relativity.

http : //www .geocities. com/hlindner1/Writings/Space/Physics.htm

-------------------------

" Two complementary and equally important approaches to relativistic
physics are explained. One is the standard approach, and the other
is based on a study of the flows of an underlying physical
substratum. Previous results concerning the substratum flow approach
are reviewed, expanded, and more closely related to the formalism of
General Relativity. An absolute relativistic dynamics is derived in
which energy and momentum take on absolute significance with respect
to the substratum. Possible new effects on satellites are described.
" --- Tom Martin

http ://xxx .lanl. gov/abs/gr-qc/0006029

-----------------------

Process Physics: From Quantum Foam to General Relativity
Authors: Reginald T. Cahill
(Submitted on 5 Mar 2002)
Abstract: Progress in the new information-theoretic process physics is reported in which the link to the phenomenology of general relativity is made. In process physics the fundamental assumption is that reality is to be modelled as self-organising semantic (or internal or relational) information using a self-referentially limited neural network model. Previous progress in process physics included the demonstration that space and quantum physics are emergent and unified, with time a distinct non-geometric process, that quantum phenomena are caused by fractal topological defects embedded in and forming a growing three-dimensional fractal process-space, which is essentially a quantum foam. Other features of the emergent physics were: quantum field theory with emergent flavour and confined colour, limited causality and the Born quantum measurement metarule, inertia, time-dilation effects, gravity and the equivalence principle, a growing universe with a cosmological constant, black holes and event horizons, and the emergence of classicality. Here general relativity and the technical language of general covariance is seen not to be fundamental but a phenomenological construct, arising as an amalgam of two distinct phenomena: the `gravitational' characteristics of the emergent quantum foam for which `matter' acts as a sink, and the classical `spacetime' measurement protocol, but with the later violated by quantum measurement processes. Quantum gravity, as manifested in the emergent Quantum Homotopic Field Theory of the process-space or quantum foam, is logically prior to the emergence of the general relativity phenomenology, and cannot be derived from it.

Comments: 26 pages Latex, 1 separate eps file
Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
Cite as: arXiv:gr-qc/0203015v1

http :// arxiv. org/abs/gr-qc/0203015

------------------------

3-Space In-Flow Theory of Gravity: Boreholes, Blackholes andthe Fine Structure Constant

Reginald T. Cahill
School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, AustraliaE-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au

A theory of 3-space explains the phenomenon of gravity as arising from the time-dependence and inhomogeneity of the differential flow of this 3-space. The emergenttheory of gravity has two gravitational constants: GN— Newton’s constant, and adimensionless constant α. Various experiments and astronomical observations haveshown that α is the fine structure constant ≈ 1/137. Here we analyse the Greenland IceShelf and Nevada Test Site borehole g anomalies, and confirm with increased precisionthis value of α. This and other successful tests of this theory of gravity, including thesupermassive black holes in globular clusters and galaxies, and the “dark-matter” effectin spiral galaxies, shows the validity of this theory of gravity. This success implies thatthe non-relativistic Newtonian gravity was fundamentally flawed from the beginning,and that this flaw was inherited by the relativistic General Relativity theory of gravity.

http ://www .ptep-online. com/index_files/2006/PP-05-03.PDF

[cyberdyno]

??

[cyberdyno]

Nothing. But nor is there anything wrong with saying that everything from quanta to the Universe is conscious. We're just getting lost in words and drawing arbitrary lines where we want them from our personal biases. Hence my concern that the test of whether something makes decisions or not is because that label is consistent with the rest of science.

There's been a lot of noise made about defining terms scientifically, even absolutely clearly and specifically. I'm not sure there is such a process in reality, since everything we map linguistically to a concept as part of its definition is also a concept that needs defining. Language, including scientific language is utterly and entirely circular, like mathematics cannot step outside its axioms. Oh yes, we've been here before, asking if the problem of reality is a problem bound up with language. It seems so to me. Why we don't actually know things in an absolute sense is because 'things' can only be labelled approximately. The idea of defining things specifically is one of the big lies of science. Clearly, every phenomenon is bound up with others and changes through time, and has no clear boundaries at all, from (apparently) the smallest observable entity to the universe. We don't know anything (absolutely) is such a difficult admission. We know approximately certain relationships between things we've approximately defined. We don't even know if 'things' exist or not. The dismissal of the language problem is just scientific ego.

So I'm with you, westprog, in saying that it is a problem. I'm not sure whether defining terms more clearly will shed light on consciousness, but clearly our terms are as flexible as methane just now, so it might be a way forward. However, I do rather think that the whole thing rests on ontology and its relationship to labels - what exists (obviously part of the question) and what we're going to call it - how can we seriously believe we're going to separate them? Define anything specifically and without leading to circularity first if you can, then see if you can do it with sloppy old concepts like consciousness!
Instead of - to be is to be perceived - (consciousness precedes matter), it should have been - to be is to perceive - (matter precedes consciousness).

John Von Neumann was right when he said that the evolution of the Schroedinger wave depends on quantum mechanical observables, implying that this information can only come from spacetime. Yet, since the theory considers brains to be quantum measuring devices, it includes the observer as an efficacious agent. The only reason human brains entered the equation was that, as they received light (EMR) coming from the particle, just like all objects in spacetime do, information about momentum and location, which is vital to maintain energy conservation laws, became known to the particle/system, allowing it to complete the feedback control loop and continue to condense.

According to present day theory the total energy available to the Universe was preset at the moment of its emergence and Thermodynamics tell us that each of its parts must register how much energy is being used in relation to the whole. Each object that moves in space must follow the laws of energy conservation. But how else could the Universe register how much energy is being used by some galaxy 5 billion light years away if it wasn't through momentum space, a non-material medium from which spacetime emerges as a product of active information?

As Ernst Mach explained inertia he came to the conclusion that energy usage by objects within the Universe is instantaneously registered through momentum space. This is where phenomena like inertia comes from. Particles sense other particles as they complete the state information exchange and realize the spatial relationships, between them and space, required to collapse the state-wave packet from hyperspace as they crystallize into spacetime. Holistic perception is an intrinsic function of matter explained by the Aether's oneness and this function helps Nature to evolve.

The observer, in the present theory, must refer to any object that is able to interpret environmental information brought to it by EM waves. Observation with the only purpose of establishing the particle's spatial parameters (speed, size, mass...) in any given inertial frame. The particle must first be in thermal equilibrium with the environment before it can exist as matter in spacetime, that is the law.

So Quantum Mechanics' big mystery was - why do I have to observe the cat in order for Schroedinger's cat to live or die? The answer is that our brains are measuring devices, just like the rest of all matter. We are the best quantum measuring device that ever emerged from all the information processing that has transcurred in our neighborhood to date. Interactions within a system, like a brain for example, depend on more than the information it gets through the senses.

Perception is a very old natural function inherent to all matter, not some exclusive human ability. Particles in spacetime perceive, select, and integrate into their state-wave function only that information which is important or useful to them in their endless quest for thermal efficiency and equilibrium. Our mind, with all of its mental waves and accompanying frequencies, became the modern version of that same holistic awareness function after 14 billion years of information processing, autopoiesis and evolution. Wholeness in time and space is what allowed Nature to evolve.

What role does light (EMR) play in determining Schroedinger's cat state (dead or alive)? Is light itself the only important factor closing the loop or, is the observer's conscious acknowledgment which causes the final determination of the cat's fate? In other words, is the wave packet collapse a function defined by the structures of matter, a result from the interactions and relationships of its parts, independent from human observers or, is objective reduction a function of the mind? The answer is yes to both questions, there is no contradiction, self-observation is a function intrinsic to all self-organized systems.

Perception is key to the crystallization of 3D reality. Every particle and object is accompanied by a wave that in-forms it about its shape and environment. The particle exists in 3D only during actuality, at the now moment. EMR feeds molecules with passive information about the environment (information that represents the molecule's past as it exists in a rock-like 3D actuality). Solidity and volume manifest only at present or actuality in a spacetime continuum, there is no material past nor future.

Photons bring us the past, information from the past is locked into photons. This is how we can see what the Universe was billions of years ago. Our capacity to see is closely related to consciousness and our ability for self-reflection, just like EMR is closely related to state-wave reduction and matter's ability for self-reflection.

We are constantly choosing the present out of an infinitude of possibilities through a mechanism of quantum wave superposition. Thoughts are formed very much in the same manner particles are, and just like particle systems depend on matter-waves and wholeness in space and time, so does our mind. Processes forming ideas are very much like the processes that form matter. Mind and matter both depend on phenomena like wave superposition, non-locality and parallel information processing, which gives all matter the possibility and the ability to self-organize into ever more energy efficient systems.

Holistic awareness, or self-reference, emerges from an inward necessity which is satisfied as information is chosen from the context in which a system evolves. That is why experience/perception is fundamental in the development of all matter, especially in sentient matter, because we need it in order to be able to choose. This is why Nature (self-organized matter) transformed into brains with eyes, to more efficiently carry out its function of self-reflection. How could matter get organized if it could not observe itself? Matter, in order to evolve, had to communicate in any way naturally possible (i.e., surface vibrations, air vibrations, EM radiation and non-local communication). Biological organisms evolved to use light to their benefit very slowly. As we already know, it took Nature billions of years (pre-Cambrian to Cambrian) just to develop eyesight.

Human consciousness evolved from the same holistic awareness property all matter has shown to possess. The evidence suggests that the objective Universe was here before human observers and that state-wave collapse is an old function of matter which, through a self-reference mechanism inherent to self-animated matter, evolved to what our consciousness is today, not a new function in Nature.

Consciousness is spacetime dependent, just like matter. No brain equals no consciousness. First there had to be matter before there could be any brains, and matter is spacetime dependent. Brains emerged from the evolution of information that existed in spacetime. Thus, consciousness appears with the emergence of matter, not before. There can be no evolution outside of spacetime. Spacetime is where experience takes place.

Now, after billions of years, this information exchange between matter and the environment in which it evolves has produced ever more complex self-organized systems. Human beings have evolved to take full advantage of this holistic awareness function of Nature, which is what enables us to think outside the grip of time, allowing us to remember the past and imagine the future. Thought can be conceived as the product of that same holistic awareness function through which all matter started organizing itself 14 billion of years ago. Consciousness comes from the same holistic awareness function found in all matter.

The difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is self awareness; not even monkeys can recognize their faces on a mirror. Animals, with the exception of human beings, are bound by time, they exist frame by frame and react accordingly. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to go back and forth in time, we call it imagination, foresight or insight and that is what gives us our sense of wholeness in space and time... which is what human consciousness is all about. State vector reduction occurs thanks to this wholeness in space function of matter, and human consciousness is possible thanks to wholeness in time.

Human consciousness is the ultimate product of a natural, energy balancing mechanism, determined and regulated by the laws of Thermodynamics. Because energy is finite, each object's energetic requirements has to be measured before entering any given spacetime metric, before going from its subtle quantum matter state or wave state, to its objective material state or particle state. These information requirements are met through wave interactions and the mechanisms governing wave superposition as described by Quantum Mechanics.

Brains are these little bio-mechanical tools that emerged with evolution for the only purpose of enabling us to interpret and interface with reality. In order to become more thermally efficient, the Universe needed to improve its ability to observe and perceive the environment so, matter evolved into brains that could take advantage of the properties of spacetime. Brains exist because there is spacetime, not the other way around. Human sentience is the actual evolutive result of all the sensing matter has been doing through time. Matter is aware of its surroundings, but that does not mean it can think, unless it had previously been formed into a brain.

Nature would still be able to exist and observe itself without the human observer... it would just be a more primitive process. Our brains then, are seen as Nature's best developed self-reference tool on this part of the Universe. Human consciousness is an extension of the same holistic awareness function self-organized matter always utilized to observe itself, therefore, in a very real way, consciousness still is Nature observing itself.

Experience is fundamental to existence, but it is not reality, Berkeley was wrong. Reality is the process through which Nature is constantly becoming. As Roger Penrose explained quasicrystal development in "The Emperor's New Mind" (p. 564) he writes that, it appears as if the whole crystal is observing itself, registering all atom configuration patterns embedded into their pilot-wave, using a self-reference mechanism limited by the system's tendencies or potentialities by which their present state is compared to past states and all the possible rock-like outcomes, all at once, until the right atom configurations are found while constructing their "randomly forbidden, very complex icosahedral symmetries".

Experience plays an important role in the correct development of the crystals, as well as in all self-organized systems. The crystals are able to carry out their self-observation by following information contained in their pilot-wave (Bohm-de Broglie) which contains past and even future information about the crystal as a whole. Proto-qualia, or state, for a quasicrystal would be how all the possible atom configurations would feel like, as they remain in superposition, until the right one is found, then and only then, could the collapse of the wave packet finally occur.

From the moment the first self-organizing systems appeared in Nature to the moment the first human brain appeared it has been a few billion years, but in both occasions the function has been the same: to experience existence. Penrose's quasicrystals don't have a brain but they follow their morphic state-waves as the measure by which they must exist, and if by any reason they were to stop following it as they add new atoms to their body, they would end up becoming a totally different type of material. The objective state-wave a human being follows... or the measure by which a human being exists... is also defined by its brain wave-function. That is where the brain-body connection comes from.

Tao, the way of Nature, is also the way of the human mind.

[Piggy]

How is that different from simply reacting to stimuli ? Your definition sounds more like a philosophy about sentience.

I've put it as many ways as I can.

The difference between simply reacting to stimuli and being aware of them is the difference between Marvin's emotional system before and after the stroke.

If you want to insist that you're not sentient, ok, fine by me. But why should I have a conversation with someone who pretends he's not sentient?

Then chatbots are sentient.

I didn't say that anything that could have a conversation is sentient. I said anybody who can have a conversation is sentient.

[Piggy]

Can you be more specific? I'm very happy to learn. Are you saying that Brahman does not represent the "Ground of Being" to Buddhists? Or that the phenomenal self is considered real?

Nick

Neither. I'm saying that you're dealing with fluff. It's a system of thought that, like all religions and imho most philosophies, works well enough if you stay within that self-referential framework of pseudoconcepts, but which simply has no solid connection with reality.

[Hokulele]

Tao, the way of Nature, is also the way of the human mind.


No, it isn't.

[Dancing David]

Nope. But by reading he's posts I can see why you would think that :D


I've never tasted Sushi. Have you?
Can you define the taste of sushi for me?
Please be specific, I dont wanna miss out on anything.



Problem is, we dont have equations / models on how to describe a subjective experience. When both know what the words are reffering to, it gets much more straightforward.

Saying "I am happy" means nothing to you unless you've experienced happiness. You can study the behaviour, but that tells you very little.

You do know that labeling emotional states is a learned process I hope. They are contextual as well and mediated by verbal cognition, conditioning as well as a number of processes. They do not exist is abstentia.

Weird isn't it. Seriously the expression of emotion is a learned response.


Maybe, you want to make "happiness" in to an concept, so you can examine it and understand it.

That is more semantic waffling. Did you have 'happiness' in the absence of any social cuing and learning?

What do you think happiness is, another thing that is beyond defintion?

Did you learn it all by yourself? Have you ever raised a child?

[Beth]

It's a system of thought that, like all religions and imho most philosophies, works well enough if you stay within that self-referential framework of pseudoconcepts, but which simply has no solid connection with reality.

Interestingly enough, I think that description applies to art, music and mathematics as well.



You do know that labeling emotional states is a learned process I hope. They are contextual as well and mediated by verbal cognition, conditioning as well as a number of processes. They do not exist is abstentia.

Weird isn't it. Seriously the expression of emotion is a learned response.

I hope you don't mind if I respond to this DD. I quite agree with what you've said above. But...
That is more semantic waffling. Did you have 'happiness' in the absence of any social cuing and learning? Yes. I believe that joy/fear are the first emotions that babies can be identified as feeling at an age too young for them to be the result of social cuing and learning.

What do you think happiness is, another thing that is beyond defintion?
Yes, actually. I think happiness is a good example of something that can't really be communicated with words alone. Babies (and dogs too!) can communicate their emotions quite effectively without words.

Did you learn it all by yourself? Have you ever raised a child? I have raised two. I agree that people don't learn how to express emotions all by themselves. It's very much a cultural thing.

I also think that it's reasonable to assume that most people feel something as consistent with emotions such as joy, fear, etc. just as it's reasonable to assume most people see colors pretty much the same way and that one's emotional responses are largely innate and not learned. We can learn to control our anger and express it safely, but we don't learn what it feels like to be angry. We learn that a particular feeling is called angry.

[John Freestone]

You can torture a worm, or a jellyfish, or a slug, or a scallop, without fear...Fantastic! That's what I love about this forum: it's not just about skepticism, there's legal advice too. ;)

[John Freestone]

I think we need to stick with the generic nature of objects, here. Otherwise any analogy will break down, and we are getting nowhere. A rock does indeed switch with respect to temperature, because it will melt at some point. It may also crack, change color, and a number of other non-linear things.I don't see the distinction. It's good to have other examples of how a rock 'switches', but you seem only to be insisting that the rock in question is - what?: small? uniform? If a rock can crack, can't a large rock formation crack and slide in a fault? What is this 'generic' quality you're talking about?

The point is that the generic (or symbolic, if you will) rock does none of these things. It just sits there reacting linearly.

HansUh? A symbolic rock sits there reacting linearly?

And anyway, what does a rock (real) do that's non-linear? Is that meant to be the switch thing, because switching could be thought of as linear. A rock cracks by a process, melts gradually, changes colour gradually. A thermostat, in its reality as opposed to its digital output significance to humans opens and closes by degrees, too, for that matter.

[PixyMisa]

Actually there are rocks that switch. Quartz is a temperature sensitive crystal. Of course the point might depend on your definition of switch.
Yes, under appropriate conditions quartz can be made to act as a switch.

BTW, Dennett who famously made the point about Thermostats also pointed out that thermostats are not aware that they are aware in the sense that humans are so there is an appreciable difference.
That would be of more interest if I hadn't already pointed it out approximately 700 times in this thread alone.

[John Freestone]

Pixy, do you know of any theorem in computing concerning how much a system can know about itself?

I mentioned earlier that such a theorem would be a corollary of godelian incompleteness, but I think it could be proved without resorting to godelian concepts at all.

I think such a theorem would really help people understand why this search for the "source" of sentience (whatever that is) is ultimately futile, and that in the end a sentient being will see nothing but information processing when it looks at the mind of other sentient beings (or at the society around it, to satisfy Mercutio!).

So lets just throw it out there: A physical system, of any kind, can never be fully aware of all aspects of itself.

Before we move on, does anyone doubt that I.E. do I have to prove it formally for them?Who, me sir? I wasn't doing anything, just looking for something in my desk. :D First, what's "I.E.", then I'll tell you how much proof I need!

[RandFan]

That would be of more interest if I hadn't already pointed it out approximately 700 times in this thread alone. I attended the redundant school of redundancy.

[Piggy]

First, what's "I.E."

It means "in other words".

[skiba]

You do know that labeling emotional states is a learned process I hope.
They are contextual as well and mediated by verbal cognition, conditioning as well as a number of processes. They do not exist is abstentia.

Weird isn't it. Seriously the expression of emotion is a learned response.



We learn to give labels to evereything, inorder to express ideas and emotions. How does this relate to knowing the difference between concept and actuality?



That is more semantic waffling. Did you have 'happiness' in the absence of any social cuing and learning?

Yes. Doesn't everyone from time to time


What do you think happiness is, another thing that is beyond defintion?

Yes, I believe it is. So is the experience of tasting sushi and many other things. You want to try and define it for me?


Did you learn it all by yourself?

I think I did.


Have you ever raised a child?

I have a year old daughter.

[cyberdyno]

At the beginning of time there was a change in state, symmetry was broken, we went from equilibrium and order to instability and chaos, from a singularity to a Universe... from certainty to uncertainty. Reality went from a simple state to an ever increasing complexity, from an empty and perfectly flat vacuum state to curved spacetime full of objects. From not just being but also to existing.

Ponderable matter has its own refresh rate, like a TV screen, just that it happens at a much faster rate and in 3D. Each object being accompanied by a continuously collapsing wave, each full collapsation representing a moment in time, as described by contemporary Quantum Mechanics. This is what makes evolution possible, or how else could state be preserved if or when information were not? It is a learning mechanism. Objects, including the Universe as a whole, go from state to state as each new state supersedes the previous one (Is this where e-motions come from?). All this information replication and preservation being caused by this continuous succession of states. Matter goes from state to state in a direction determined by how balanced or coherent the now state is... or feels (Is this qualia?).

Sentience, in my view, is analogous to Active Information, and just like cell automata can produce infinite complexity from only a few laws, Active Information re-creates itself according to passive information contained within each particular system's pilot wave and the environment, as it follows Nature's four fundamental forces... which are directed at the Aether level. Sentience, the way I see it, comes from a self-reference mechanism intrinsic to Active Information. So, in that sense, meaning continues to be intrinsic to sentience, as we already knew.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/moderncosmology/message/1017

Edited for breach of Rule 4. Do not post others works as your own. You may quote a paragraph or two of someone else's work along with a link to the original.

Any further breaches of Rule 4 will result in a suspension of posting privileges from the forum.

I am Laurent.

[PixyMisa]

I attended the redundant school of redundancy.
Well, okay then. ;)

[PixyMisa]

[Edited for Rule 4]No.
Darn you Rule 4! Darn you to heck!

[Piggy]

Exactly. You're just making my point.

No, I'm not.

You're saying that "ghosts" have been observed.

They haven't.

All sorts of things have been observed and attributed to "ghosts", but no one has ever observed the spirits of the dead. Instead, they have observed lights, sounds, all sorts of stuff, but no spirits of the dead.

Sentience, on the other hand, has been observed. Sentience is merely the experience of feeling that you are you and that things are happening to you. There is no doubt that this phenomenon exists, since anyone who can discuss it has experienced it.

[PixyMisa]

No, I'm not.

You're saying that "ghosts" have been observed.

They haven't.

All sorts of things have been observed and attributed to "ghosts", but no one has ever observed the spirits of the dead. Instead, they have observed lights, sounds, all sorts of stuff, but no spirits of the dead.
Right. Ghosts are illusions.

Sentience, on the other hand, has been observed. Sentience is merely the experience of feeling that you are you and that things are happening to you. There is no doubt that this phenomenon exists, since anyone who can discuss it has experienced it.
There is no doubt that ghosts exist, if you talk to the right wrong people.

[Piggy]

Right. Ghosts are illusions.

There is no doubt that ghosts exist, if you talk to the right wrong people.

I see you're still playing the same old game. Fudging the definitions and ignoring observable facts. Conflating ideas which are not actually similar.

Suit yourself.

[Nick227]

Neither. I'm saying that you're dealing with fluff. It's a system of thought that, like all religions and imho most philosophies, works well enough if you stay within that self-referential framework of pseudoconcepts, but which simply has no solid connection with reality.

Well, many of the concepts have parallels in Western psychology. For a start, the phenomenal self or egoic self, what you experience as You, basically. Advaita Vedanta, for example, accepts totally the egoic reality.

All these doctrines are asserting is that there is also a deeper (equally experiential) reality - one in which the experience or belief in selfhood arises, rather than simply being assumed to be real, a la Descartes. I don't find it so disconnected from reality. A few seconds meditation will verify it. Even mere reflecting upon the notion will show that it's not unreasonable.

If I look at it objectively, then sentience seems to me equally as airy-fairy a concept as this, though it's one I also resonate with.

Nick

[Nick227]

You do know that labeling emotional states is a learned process I hope. They are contextual as well and mediated by verbal cognition, conditioning as well as a number of processes. They do not exist is abstentia.

Weird isn't it. Seriously the expression of emotion is a learned response.

Are you saying that if a brick falls on your foot you would make no sound unless you've seen other people do so? I would say that there can be a degree of social conditioning around emotional response, but that it's basically an autonomous process.

Nick

[Darat]

Are you saying that if a brick falls on your foot you would make no sound unless you've seen other people do so? I would say that there can be a degree of social conditioning around emotional response, but that it's basically an autonomous process.

Nick

Many of the public responses associated with such actions are learned, you can see this by how people in different cultures do in fact respond to pain, and so on. Whilst there is an apparent standard reaction i.e. the physical flinch the public behaviour varies quite a lot.

ETA: Some links to support what I've just asserted:

Book that I've not read but seems to support my assertion. (http://books.google.com/books?id=Qh19Z6WLsqUC&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=different+cultures+respond+to+experiencing+pain&source=web&ots=DJw8_J0ggF&sig=mxAALKcNohsFD-NIRSHs-2pOe1E&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result)

http://www.cahq.org/docs/2003/CulturalDiversityPainManagement.pdf

[Nick227]

Sentience, on the other hand, has been observed. Sentience is merely the experience of feeling that you are you and that things are happening to you. There is no doubt that this phenomenon exists, since anyone who can discuss it has experienced it.

I find sentience to me most easily described as the state of being aware that I am aware. This may not be my final definition! I don't really resonate with the "things are happening to you" bit in yours. For me, it's more like "things are happening which I'm aware of."

Nick

[Nick227]

Many of the public responses associated with such actions are learned, you can see this by how people in different cultures do in fact respond to pain, and so on. Whilst there is an apparent standard reaction i.e. the physical flinch the public behaviour varies quite a lot.


I'd certainly agree that we learn norms of socially-acceptable ways to express emotions via cultural conditioning, no doubt about it. But, to me, there are still basic autonomous emotional responses taking place beneath the surface of conscious awareness that are either being repressed or channelled by the individual ego.

Nick

[John Freestone]

I don't want to imply that I don't start from a viewpoint - a dirty argumenting trick IMO - but I don't start from a formal philosophical viewpoint. This might be just due to plain ignorance.That's fine, I don't think you're ignorant. My questions about whether you were a materialist or a dualist were genuinely my attempt to understand your POV, since you seemed to say things that implied either. I suppose this makes sense in order to discuss and try out different ideas - which therefore do not have to be logically compatible, since they relate to different underlying philosophical bases. I was irritated and a bit critical that you did seem to state things that contradicted earlier things, since I was thinking that you were arguing from a more settled position. Most of this is, as I keep learning here, is because I don't understand, not because the writer is stupid. I appreciate your honesty and freedom to change tack and I don't require anyone to argue from a formal philosophical viewpoint.

[Dancing David]

Interestingly enough, I think that description applies to art, music and mathematics as well.





I hope you don't mind if I respond to this DD. I quite agree with what you've said above. But...

:) Not at all!

Yes. I believe that joy/fear are the first emotions that babies can be identified as feeling at an age too young for them to be the result of social cuing and learning.

Yes, actually. I think happiness is a good example of something that can't really be communicated with words alone. Babies (and dogs too!) can communicate their emotions quite effectively without words.

I have raised two. I agree that people don't learn how to express emotions all by themselves. It's very much a cultural thing.

I also think that it's reasonable to assume that most people feel something as consistent with emotions such as joy, fear, etc. just as it's reasonable to assume most people see colors pretty much the same way and that one's emotional responses are largely innate and not learned. We can learn to control our anger and express it safely, but we don't learn what it feels like to be angry. We learn that a particular feeling is called angry.


Well, I disagree for a number of reasons but I am not being argumentative (except about the extraordinary consciousness thing.)

1. Most adults will have a hard time identify-ing emotions. Seriously, in counseling and under stress most people will have difficulty actualy knowing what they feel.

2. Contextual cues (including self talk) provide the difference between emotions especialy excitement, anxiety, sexual arousal and anger. The physiological response is the same, There is a contextual bundle of ways we 'know' what we are feeling.

Unfortunately I will be out of town tomorrow, so I will be off the board for a while.

(Fortunate vacation, yay ocean.)

[Nick227]

1. Most adults will have a hard time identify-ing emotions. Seriously, in counseling and under stress most people will have difficulty actualy knowing what they feel.

It can be hard to articulate what you feel, for sure. That's because feelings are not words. Words can suggest feelings, or lead people toward feelings, but feelings are basically autonomous. They simply happen in response to perceived reality. The egoic self usually attempts to control them in a manner it deems fitting to the situation, but under the surface they are simply there, seeking expression.

Nick

[Dancing David]

We learn to give labels to evereything, inorder to express ideas and emotions. How does this relate to knowing the difference between concept and actuality?




Yes. Doesn't everyone from time to time



Yes, I believe it is. So is the experience of tasting sushi and many other things. You want to try and define it for me?



I think I did.



I have a year old daughter.

:cool:

My point is that we learn what the contextual cues are that label the eotions. As you will find out there is a lot of social modeling in emotions.

We do not have emotions in abstentia, we get cueing from our parents and peers, we get conditioning to stress. So due to contingent history, we have a huge learned component in emotions.

Now I admit that the direct expression ,even in a Matrix like situation, of perceptions (like the taste of sushi) is well nigh impossible. There is no universal code, each brain is hardwired uniquely and the software is unique. So there is unlikely to ever be a way of direct transfer of perception for a very long time.

Again, I believe that we can discuss things and not mistake them for the actuality. I will be off the board for about five days as well, i will have twenty pages to read!

[leon_heller]

:) Not at all!



Well, I disagree for a number of reasons but I am not being argumentative (except about the extraordinary consciousness thing.)

1. Most adults will have a hard time identify-ing emotions. Seriously, in counseling and under stress most people will have difficulty actualy knowing what they feel.

2. Contextual cues (including self talk) provide the difference between emotions especialy excitement, anxiety, sexual arousal and anger. The physiological response is the same, There is a contextual bundle of ways we 'know' what we are feeling.

Unfortunately I will be out of town tomorrow, so I will be off the board for a while.

(Fortunate vacation, yay ocean.)

Different emotions can result in different physiological responses. I think that Ax was the first person to demonstrate this - he induced fear and and anger responses in subjects using a rather clever technique, and found that different hormones (adrenaline and nor-adrenaline IIRC) were released into the blood.

Leon

[Jeff Corey]

Are you saying that if a brick falls on your foot you would make no sound unless you've seen other people do so? I would say that there can be a degree of social conditioning around emotional response, but that it's basically an autonomous process.

Nick

I believe that is not what DD is saying. Your unconditioned response to a brick falling on your foot needs no conditioning, social or otherwise. Your labelling of the emotion produced by the pain depends upon a lot of contextual and other cues which involved learning.

[Beth]

:) Not at all!



Well, I disagree for a number of reasons but I am not being argumentative (except about the extraordinary consciousness thing.)

1. Most adults will have a hard time identify-ing emotions. Seriously, in counseling and under stress most people will have difficulty actualy knowing what they feel.
Doesn't this just indicate that either a) they are confused about how to label their emotions (a learned/cultural thing) or b) they are suppressing their emotions because they cause conflict with other assumptions? I don't think either of those indicate that they emotion is learned. It is the response to the emotion that is learned.

2. Contextual cues (including self talk) provide the difference between emotions especialy excitement, anxiety, sexual arousal and anger. The physiological response is the same, There is a contextual bundle of ways we 'know' what we are feeling. I'm not sure about the physiological responses being the same, but even if that's true I don't see how it contradicts what I've said. The feeling is an innate response. The way we label it and manage it is learned. Perhaps what we are experiencing is not a disagreement but a failure to communicate. :)

Unfortunately I will be out of town tomorrow, so I will be off the board for a while.


(Fortunate vacation, yay ocean.)

Have a good time :)

[Nick227]

1. Most adults will have a hard time identify-ing emotions. Seriously, in counseling and under stress most people will have difficulty actualy knowing what they feel.

Doesn't this just indicate that either a) they are confused about how to label their emotions (a learned/cultural thing) or b) they are suppressing their emotions because they cause conflict with other assumptions? I don't think either of those indicate that they emotion is learned. It is the response to the emotion that is learned.

My thoughts entirely :)

Emotions happen. Whether we allow them to come out or show is another matter.

Nick

[Nick227]

My point is that we learn what the contextual cues are that label the eotions. As you will find out there is a lot of social modeling in emotions.

We do not have emotions in abstentia, we get cueing from our parents and peers, we get conditioning to stress. So due to contingent history, we have a huge learned component in emotions.

No, emotions don't happen in absentia. They need triggering. (For sure parents and peers can be pretty good triggers, as a rule!) But emotions themselves are not learned, least I've never seen anyone meaningfully claim that they are. You're talking about egoic response to emotion, a different thing.

You could say perhaps that our interpretation of reality is learned, and that this is a component in emotional response.

Nick

[INRM]

I thought some emotions were innate?

[westprog]

But self-observation is the only way to access subjective experience.

Much of language, and all of art, is a way to communicate subjective experience in an objective way. When Van Gogh painted sunflowers, he wasn't trying to show people what sunflowers looked like. They knew that already. He was trying to communicate his subjective experience of sunflowers.

To deny the reality of subjective experience is to discard most of what makes us human.

[PixyMisa]

Much of language, and all of art, is a way to communicate subjective experience in an objective way. When Van Gogh painted sunflowers, he wasn't trying to show people what sunflowers looked like. They knew that already. He was trying to communicate his subjective experience of sunflowers.

To deny the reality of subjective experience is to discard most of what makes us human.
No-one here is denying the "reality" of "subjective" "experience". We're just discussing the definition of those three terms.

[westprog]

It would seem so to me. So, however, does the information transmitted by a human being. There are no values in TLOP.


To summarise - I believe that any theory of consciousness will need to be soundly based on TLOP - either as currently known, or as subsequently discovered. I don't think that making up what appear to be entirely wooly concepts and equating them arbitrarily with what happens with human beings will get us anywhere.

Until we have a theory of awareness that relates to actual physical quantities, then comparing thermostats to thermocouples and counting how aware they are is entirely futile. It doesn't tell us anything about the thermostats that it didn't say already, and it doesn't tell us anything about ourselves.

[westprog]

Actually there are rocks that switch. Quartz is a temperature sensitive crystal. Of course the point might depend on your definition of switch.


A rock will change state when it's melting point is reached. Not only that, it will record the event.

[westprog]

Nothing. But nor is there anything wrong with saying that everything from quanta to the Universe is conscious. We're just getting lost in words and drawing arbitrary lines where we want them from our personal biases. Hence my concern that the test of whether something makes decisions or not is because that label is consistent with the rest of science.


Hence my demand that the claim for unaware rocks/aware thermostats be based on some actual physics.

[westprog]

It is just a semantic difference. But that doesn't make it any less stupid to adopt stupid semantics.

I am taking issue with people like westprog differing in semantics only for the purpose of argument.

It is quite clear that he doesn't consider a rock warming in the sun to have any meaning, other than in the context of this argument. The only reason he would say otherwise is because he wants a thermostat to be the same as a rock -- so he assigns the same level of meaning to both.

Everyone knows this is nonsense. A rock sitting in the sun has no meaning, unless you want to assign arbitrary meaning to everything, at which point the meaning of "meaning" is diluted to uselessness and we have to come up with a new term. What is the point of that?

If we are dealing with TLOP, then I'm afraid that, yes, nothing has any more meaning that anything else. If you want meaning, it is to be found in religion and philosophy, not science.

I'm happy enough with a scientific view that leaves me as having exactly the same meaning as a rock, because I get my meaning elsewhere.

[Nick227]

But self-observation is the only way to access subjective experience.

To me, subjective experience is what we get when we try and recall, and convey to others, things that happened to us. It's simply an attempt, in retrospect, to convey something that, for whatever reason, we feel is significant. I don't know what "self-observation" is supposed to have to do with it, or even what it's supposed to mean.

The more I read and consider these things, the more it seems increasingly obvious that any notion of actual selfhood is acutely suspect. There's this illusion being created and the brain buys into it, creating ever more complex fantasies to try and substantiate the belief in selfhood. I think any discussion of this so-called consciousness would be a lot easier with any reference to self.

Nick

[Nick227]

If we are dealing with TLOP, then I'm afraid that, yes, nothing has any more meaning that anything else. If you want meaning, it is to be found in religion and philosophy, not science.

I'm happy enough with a scientific view that leaves me as having exactly the same meaning as a rock, because I get my meaning elsewhere.

If you want meaning...you're going to have to invest in delusion.

Nick

[westprog]

I don't see the distinction. It's good to have other examples of how a rock 'switches', but you seem only to be insisting that the rock in question is - what?: small? uniform? If a rock can crack, can't a large rock formation crack and slide in a fault? What is this 'generic' quality you're talking about?

Uh? A symbolic rock sits there reacting linearly?

And anyway, what does a rock (real) do that's non-linear? Is that meant to be the switch thing, because switching could be thought of as linear. A rock cracks by a process, melts gradually, changes colour gradually. A thermostat, in its reality as opposed to its digital output significance to humans opens and closes by degrees, too, for that matter.

As with ice cubes, the switch between not melting and melting happens at an particular temperature.

[westprog]

That's fine, I don't think you're ignorant. My questions about whether you were a materialist or a dualist were genuinely my attempt to understand your POV, since you seemed to say things that implied either. I suppose this makes sense in order to discuss and try out different ideas - which therefore do not have to be logically compatible, since they relate to different underlying philosophical bases. I was irritated and a bit critical that you did seem to state things that contradicted earlier things, since I was thinking that you were arguing from a more settled position. Most of this is, as I keep learning here, is because I don't understand, not because the writer is stupid. I appreciate your honesty and freedom to change tack and I don't require anyone to argue from a formal philosophical viewpoint.

Some of the confusion might be that at times I've been exploring the implications of certain ideas as if they were true. That doesn't mean that I accept the original premises - indeed, I often adopt them in order to proceed to a reduction ad absurdum.

[Piggy]

No-one here is denying the "reality" of "subjective" "experience".

Belz seems to be.

[Nick227]

No-one here is denying the "reality" of "subjective" "experience".

Belz seems to be.

Well, experiences are inevitably second-hand, are they not? When we talk of our "experiences," all we are actually sharing are our memories. What is an experience? In reality, it's just a memory, if we're honest, or our interpretation of a memory.

Nick

[westprog]

:cool:

My point is that we learn what the contextual cues are that label the eotions. As you will find out there is a lot of social modeling in emotions.

We do not have emotions in abstentia, we get cueing from our parents and peers, we get conditioning to stress. So due to contingent history, we have a huge learned component in emotions.

Now I admit that the direct expression ,even in a Matrix like situation, of perceptions (like the taste of sushi) is well nigh impossible. There is no universal code, each brain is hardwired uniquely and the software is unique. So there is unlikely to ever be a way of direct transfer of perception for a very long time.

Again, I believe that we can discuss things and not mistake them for the actuality. I will be off the board for about five days as well, i will have twenty pages to read!

So we have a situation where the behavioural response is entirely different. One man stamps his feet and shouts. Another says nothing, stares ahead and turns white. And yet, somehow, we've come to accept that their internal state is similar. We've made up a name - 'angry' - that applies across cultures and personalities.

How is this? How can we interpret such diverse behaviours in the same way? Maybe it's because humanity has spent millions of years learning to express the inner states which can't be percieved directly. Even though each human being is different, and we react entirely differently, mankind has, through enormous effort, managed to learn, in some limited way, what we have in common. How we feel the same things.

This is a quite remarkable thing about mankind. Most creatures are happy to eat, procreate, respire, sleep and die. Mankind spends enormous amounts of effort in trying to transfer the contents of their minds. We're doing it right now.

[westprog]

Well, experiences are inevitably second-hand, are they not? When we talk of our "experiences," all we are actually sharing are our memories. What is an experience? In reality, it's just a memory, if we're honest, or our interpretation of a memory.

Nick


In fact, all we have is a momentary experience, which encompasses memory and the immediate sensation. The assumption that memories are an objective record of what happened in the past is as illusory as our perceptions of the world. All we can trust is the momentary sensation - which is. The rest is surmise. When we feel fear, we simultaneously recall times when we were afraid, and assume that because the memory was the same, we really did experience the same thing in the same way in the past. But that's extrapolation.

[John Freestone]

It is just a semantic difference. But that doesn't make it any less stupid to adopt stupid semantics.

I am taking issue with people like westprog differing in semantics only for the purpose of argument.

It is quite clear that he doesn't consider a rock warming in the sun to have any meaning, other than in the context of this argument. The only reason he would say otherwise is because he wants a thermostat to be the same as a rock -- so he assigns the same level of meaning to both.

Everyone knows this is nonsense. A rock sitting in the sun has no meaning, unless you want to assign arbitrary meaning to everything, at which point the meaning of "meaning" is diluted to uselessness and we have to come up with a new term. What is the point of that?Nah, you've lost me there. I don't see him doing that at all, nor does it seem fair (or true) to assume that if you don't agree or understand his words he's wants the two to have the same 'level of meaning', whatever that is.

I can't speak for him, but I'm saying that the significant difference shouting itself from the box it comes in is that a thermostat is something we attribute inputs and outputs to, a rock not obviously so - all the stuff about something switching is shadow play. An electron switches, if we want to use that particular meaning relating to its energy, which, if I'm not mistaken, switches in quanta, i.e. discretely from one state to another, not gradually. Since that is what both thermostat and rock are, the attribution of 'switch' to a thermostat can only be because it performs a function of practical use and so we consider it to have a higher 'level of meaning'. Now, if the thoughts and constructs of a human are the result of switches too, both synaptic and molecular, and everything is ultimately deterministic, none of it has awareness, or all of it has, or we put an arbitrary boundary where we wish concerning awareness, since it is a matter of semantics, none of which makes westprog's any more stupid than PixyMisa's. I don't know what your own scheme is, btw, but I'd like to see you not adopt 'stupid semantics for the sake of argument'. The point I'm making is that that is unfortunately our shared fate.

[John Freestone]

No.

What I said was you can use a rock as a component of a thermostat. The thermostat is aware. Individual bits of the thermostat are not. If you render your own brain down to its component atoms, they're not aware either.

Look, it's very simple: Does it switch?

Thermostat, yes.
Rock, no.If I render my brain down to its component atoms, they're switching quantic states, which is presumably the only possible cause of the action of synapses, which I guess you already consider switches.

If it switches, then the only difference between it and the human brain is quantitative.Agreed.

Wire up enough switches and you can simulate anything at any level of detail.Agreed.

All the most powerful supercomputer or the human brain are is a bunch of switches.Agreed. All a rock is is a bunch of switches.

If it doesn't switch, it doesn't switch. Ten trillion rocks are no more aware than one, no matter how attractively arranged.Ten trillion atoms can be though. How many atoms are there in a human being, btw?

Look, it's very simple: does an atom switch?

[John Freestone]

BTW, Dennett ... pointed out that thermostats are not aware that they are aware....Poor thermostats, they always get roped into these psychology experiments! :D

[John Freestone]

It means "in other words".Oh, thanks. It was the unusual grammar and spelling that threw me.

[John Freestone]

To summarise - I believe that any theory of consciousness will need to be soundly based on TLOP - either as currently known, or as subsequently discovered. I don't think that making up what appear to be entirely wooly concepts and equating them arbitrarily with what happens with human beings will get us anywhere.

Until we have a theory of awareness that relates to actual physical quantities, then comparing thermostats to thermocouples and counting how aware they are is entirely futile. It doesn't tell us anything about the thermostats that it didn't say already, and it doesn't tell us anything about ourselves.I don't understand what wooly concepts you're referring to.

[John Freestone]

So we have a situation where the behavioural response is entirely different. One man stamps his feet and shouts. Another says nothing, stares ahead and turns white. And yet, somehow, we've come to accept that their internal state is similar. We've made up a name - 'angry' - that applies across cultures and personalities.

How is this? How can we interpret such diverse behaviours in the same way? Maybe it's because humanity has spent millions of years learning to express the inner states which can't be percieved directly. Even though each human being is different, and we react entirely differently, mankind has, through enormous effort, managed to learn, in some limited way, what we have in common. How we feel the same things.

This is a quite remarkable thing about mankind. Most creatures are happy to eat, procreate, respire, sleep and die. Mankind spends enormous amounts of effort in trying to transfer the contents of their minds. We're doing it right now.Yes, true, but the words we use for internal states don't map to exactly the same internal states on different occasions because they are categories, simplifications; they divide 'angry' usefully from 'calm'. In a similar way, our words for awareness represent different states in different systems, so that one attributes it to a thermostat, another only to a rat, another only to humans.

You've argued well, I think, and it still comes down to where you get that meaning. Is it circular - TLOP create something we call meaning (which means! that you could also consider it meaningless - perhaps that's the big fat elephant in the room when there are fundamental materialists about), or does our (IMHO) failure to resolve the question of meaning, semantics, etc., suggest that meaning must be taken more seriously, and might be primary?

Mind seems to get in the way of us knowing Matter, since every bit of matter we want to know, we call something, and that name doesn't map isomorphically to matter. We almost seem to 'speciate' - some have suggested it as a future scenario - into those who rest their case on circular definitions, because at least they fit together persuasively and aparently map to something out there, and those who rest their case on this moment, silently if possible.

I honestly don't know what to think now. I came into this discussion celebrating my getting materialism and emergent consciousness in a way I hadn't before, but now I just don't know. You've nudged me back on the fence. Thanks.

[INRM]

Rocketdodger,

Since you said you meditated to find the solutions to the consciousness question, have you ever been wrong when meditating?


INRM

[Mercutio]

So we have a situation where the behavioural response is entirely different. One man stamps his feet and shouts. Another says nothing, stares ahead and turns white. And yet, somehow, we've come to accept that their internal state is similar. We've made up a name - 'angry' - that applies across cultures and personalities.

How is this? How can we interpret such diverse behaviours in the same way? Maybe it's because humanity has spent millions of years learning to express the inner states which can't be percieved directly. Even though each human being is different, and we react entirely differently, mankind has, through enormous effort, managed to learn, in some limited way, what we have in common. How we feel the same things.

Excuse me... but... if we act so differently, by what right do you claim we feel the same things? You can see the behavior--you cannot see the feelings.

[PixyMisa]

If I render my brain down to its component atoms, they're switching quantic states
Quantic? Quantic?!

But yes.

which is presumably the only possible cause of the action of synapsesWell, synapses aren't quantum devices; they're bulk-property devices. The quantum properties are already averaged out at that scale.

Whether you could make working synapses if the quantum properties of matter were different (like... not quantum...) is a complex question that fortunately we don't need to answer. :) Conway's Game of Life is Turing Complete, but it's also quantum, so it's not a counter-example.

which I guess you already consider switches.Absolutely.

Agreed. All a rock is is a bunch of switches.Yes, that's necessary but not sufficient.

The difference is quantitative, but it also matters how you arrange the switches. (Guess I should have said that before, huh?)

Wire them up at random (like, for example, the average rock), and you end up with a non-switch again. And once you have a non-switch, accumulating lots more non-switches doesn't help.

Quartz can switch in the right conditions because of the arrangement of its compnent atoms.

Ten trillion atoms can be though.
Not if those atoms are a rock... Uh, microscopic dust grain.

How many atoms are there in a human being, btw?Something on the order of 1027.

Look, it's very simple: does an atom switch?Yes, or we wouldn't.

[westprog]

Nah, you've lost me there. I don't see him doing that at all, nor does it seem fair (or true) to assume that if you don't agree or understand his words he's wants the two to have the same 'level of meaning', whatever that is.

I can't speak for him, but I'm saying that the significant difference shouting itself from the box it comes in is that a thermostat is something we attribute inputs and outputs to, a rock not obviously so - all the stuff about something switching is shadow play. An electron switches, if we want to use that particular meaning relating to its energy, which, if I'm not mistaken, switches in quanta, i.e. discretely from one state to another, not gradually. Since that is what both thermostat and rock are, the attribution of 'switch' to a thermostat can only be because it performs a function of practical use and so we consider it to have a higher 'level of meaning'. Now, if the thoughts and constructs of a human are the result of switches too, both synaptic and molecular, and everything is ultimately deterministic, none of it has awareness, or all of it has, or we put an arbitrary boundary where we wish concerning awareness, since it is a matter of semantics, none of which makes westprog's any more stupid than PixyMisa's. I don't know what your own scheme is, btw, but I'd like to see you not adopt 'stupid semantics for the sake of argument'. The point I'm making is that that is unfortunately our shared fate.


Your point about every electron being a switch is significant. If awareness is simply a matter of quantity, with switches being the element to be counted, then as the rock has far more electrons than the brain has neurons, it should be massively aware.

But since the rock doesn't demonstrate awareness in any way, it appears that accumulation of switches isn't sufficient. I don't think that the fact that a neuron has some kind of switching capability says anything about the awareness of a single neuron or a single thermostat or a single electron.

[westprog]

I don't understand what wooly concepts you're referring to.

In terms of TLOP, awareness is a very wooly concept.

It might be possible to create a meaning for it - number of possible connections between switching devices, say - but that would be at the cost of losing what we mean by awareness in an everyday sense, without gaining in understanding.

[westprog]

Yes, true, but the words we use for internal states don't map to exactly the same internal states on different occasions because they are categories, simplifications; they divide 'angry' usefully from 'calm'. In a similar way, our words for awareness represent different states in different systems, so that one attributes it to a thermostat, another only to a rat, another only to humans.


I think human beings spend a vast amount of their time trying to show their inner states to ever finer detail, in spite of the limitations of language and all the other means of communication. It's always partly successful and partly futile.

You've argued well, I think, and it still comes down to where you get that meaning. Is it circular - TLOP create something we call meaning (which means! that you could also consider it meaningless - perhaps that's the big fat elephant in the room when there are fundamental materialists about), or does our (IMHO) failure to resolve the question of meaning, semantics, etc., suggest that meaning must be taken more seriously, and might be primary?


I'd take the issues of emotion and meaning as being seperate. It might be that around the corner will be a fully materialistic theory of consciousness that will explain all our inner states entirely through physics. We will then have to derive meaning entirely independently of our "self".

Mind seems to get in the way of us knowing Matter, since every bit of matter we want to know, we call something, and that name doesn't map isomorphically to matter. We almost seem to 'speciate' - some have suggested it as a future scenario - into those who rest their case on circular definitions, because at least they fit together persuasively and aparently map to something out there, and those who rest their case on this moment, silently if possible.

I honestly don't know what to think now. I came into this discussion celebrating my getting materialism and emergent consciousness in a way I hadn't before, but now I just don't know. You've nudged me back on the fence. Thanks.

I wouldn't say I've significantly changed my position since I started participating in this thread, but I've certainly broadened it. Just thinking about this stuff is healthy mental exercise.

[westprog]

Excuse me... but... if we act so differently, by what right do you claim we feel the same things? You can see the behavior--you cannot see the feelings.

I don't know it. But mankind has developed tools of communication largely in order to communicate these things.

It seems strange to spend billions of man-years working out ways to tell each other things that aren't true. That may, of course, be the case. I tend to assume that if we're making an enormous effort to have conversations, that knowledge is, however imperfectly, transferred.

So when I say "I am angry" and the person I am talking to says "So am I", there really is some genuine overlap between our mental states.

[PixyMisa]

In terms of TLOP, awareness is a very wooly concept.
Nope.

It might be possible to create a meaning for it - number of possible connections between switching devices, say - but that would be at the cost of losing what we mean by awareness in an everyday sense, without gaining in understanding.
Which only means that you have a woolly conception of awareness.

[Nick227]

In fact, all we have is a momentary experience, which encompasses memory and the immediate sensation. The assumption that memories are an objective record of what happened in the past is as illusory as our perceptions of the world. All we can trust is the momentary sensation - which is. The rest is surmise. When we feel fear, we simultaneously recall times when we were afraid, and assume that because the memory was the same, we really did experience the same thing in the same way in the past. But that's extrapolation.

Yes, I agree. And that is why I believe the whole notion of subjectivity does have to be thoroughly examined to see how real it really is.

In addition to the fact that notions like "subjectivity" and "consciousness" are created only by the brain in reflexion, you also have to consider subjectivity in the light of what is now known about selfhood, as subjectivity and selfhood are inevitably closely tied in together.

Selfhood arises through a combination of illusion and inherited biological process. The "I" aspect of selfhood is illusion. "The experiencer" is illusion. When so many aspects of subjectivity can be seen to be illusory you have to ask how real is subjectivity.

There is a uniqueness in what is experienced which is inevitable given the differing locations and orientation of each brain, but is there really anything so special about this subjectivity?

eta: I think the real hard problem in consciousness research is working out just how (and perhaps why) the brain manages to delude itself so much.

Nick

[Nick227]

Excuse me... but... if we act so differently, by what right do you claim we feel the same things? You can see the behavior--you cannot see the feelings.

Because these processes are autonomous. They don't actually happen to anyone. The only likely significant factor in modulating experiences which cause emotional arousal is the form of the acquired belief in personal selfhood which each brain has created. In concieving of its selfhood in such and such a way it can utilise its capacity to repress or channel emotional response in order to present itself to the world in a manner it believes reasonable. But actually the experience is not happening to anyone. There is just the belief that it is and the response created through this belief.

Nick

[Mercutio]

So when I say "I am angry" and the person I am talking to says "So am I", there really is some genuine overlap between our mental states.

There is some genuine overlap in your learning histories, associating verbal labels with sets of observable behavior (including verbal behavior). That is sufficient, and that is quite literally what we have to learn from. Again, as per the Rachlin paper, we do not and cannot know anything about another's "mental states" (such dualistic language so late in this thread? Private behavior, please!).

Of course you have a set of private behavior that is correlated with this publicly observable set. So do I. And it is likely that they are quite similar (more so for easily agreed upon things like "seeing red", and less so for fuzzier concepts like "feeling nonplussed"), since we share both an evolutionary history and a great deal of our learning history within a verbal community (the further apart verbal communities are, the less similar their concepts of these private behaviors--"love" really is different in, say, China than in the US). But since we do not and cannot have access to another's thinking or feeling, to take the colloquial short-cut and say we have "overlap in our mental states" is not merely untrue, it is misleading. It is this sort of language which creates and nurtures the HPC.

[Mercutio]

Because these processes are autonomous. They don't actually happen to anyone. The only likely significant factor in modulating experiences which cause emotional arousal is the form of the acquired belief in personal selfhood which each brain has created. In concieving of its selfhood in such and such a way it can utilise its capacity to repress or channel emotional response in order to present itself to the world in a manner it believes reasonable. But actually the experience is not happening to anyone. There is just the belief that it is and the response created through this belief.

Nick

Pretend, just for a moment, that I am really stupid, and that I did not understand a word of that. Could you repeat this, in a vocabulary that such a stupid person as myself might understand?

[Belz...]

The difference between simply reacting to stimuli and being aware of them is the difference between Marvin's emotional system before and after the stroke.

That sounds fine, only I have no clue who this Marvin person is, besides your short description a while ago.

If you want to insist that you're not sentient, ok, fine by me. But why should I have a conversation with someone who pretends he's not sentient?

For the same reason why I, assuming that I "insist" that I'm not sentient, would have a conversation with you knowing that you're not sentient.

I didn't say that anything that could have a conversation is sentient. I said anybody who can have a conversation is sentient.

What the hell's the difference ?

[Belz...]

No, I'm not.

You're saying that "ghosts" have been observed.

They haven't.

Of course they have. They just don't exist.

Sentience, on the other hand, has been observed.

Sounds like special pleading to me. Allright, then. Let's not use "observe" since you don't seem to use the word the same way I do. Let's say "sense", okay ? Or is "experience" better ? Anyway, let's pick a word, any word, which means that you percieve something, whether or not it's there. I choose "carrot". So, sentience has been carroted just like ghosts are carroted. My point was: what's the difference ? How can we know that "sentience" isn't like any other thing we can carrot but isn't there ?

[Belz...]

Belz seems to be.

Of course not. All I'm doing... or NOT doing, actually, is that I'm not placing "subjective" "experiences" in some sort of special category.

[Belz...]

So when I say "I am angry" and the person I am talking to says "So am I", there really is some genuine overlap between our mental states.

Not necessarily. How would you know ? this is the same question that's been asked about how and if we percieve colours in the same way. There really isn't any way to know... at least for now. So how would you know ?

[Nick227]

Because these processes are autonomous. They don't actually happen to anyone. The only likely significant factor in modulating experiences which cause emotional arousal is the form of the acquired belief in personal selfhood which each brain has created. In concieving of its selfhood in such and such a way it can utilise its capacity to repress or channel emotional response in order to present itself to the world in a manner it believes reasonable. But actually the experience is not happening to anyone. There is just the belief that it is and the response created through this belief.

Pretend, just for a moment, that I am really stupid, and that I did not understand a word of that. Could you repeat this, in a vocabulary that such a stupid person as myself might understand?

I'm happy to try! As I understand the monist materialist perspective - there is no self. There are no experiences, for experiences imply an experiencer, and there is no experiencer.

What there is, however, is the belief in an experiencer. And the capacity to veto impulses or emotional response. Emotional reactions are taking place. In the brain they are interpreted as happening to someone. They are not happening to anyone, but the belief is present that they are. The brain thus exercises its capacity to repress arising feelings based around its conception of selfhood and social reality.

Is this any better?

Nick

[westprog]

Not necessarily. How would you know ? this is the same question that's been asked about how and if we percieve colours in the same way. There really isn't any way to know... at least for now. So how would you know ?

We don't know anything, come to that. But I think that the fact that mankind has devoted millions of years describing what our mental states are leads us to a good chance that we are describing something that is objectively similar - in the same way that we assume that we are both talking about the same wall.

[Nick227]

No-one here is denying the "reality" of "subjective" "experience".
Belz seems to be.
Of course not. All I'm doing... or NOT doing, actually, is that I'm not placing "subjective" "experiences" in some sort of special category.

Oh, go on, Belz. Be a man and challenge it! Ok, I'm happy to challenge the reality of subjective experience. How is subjective experience affected by the reality that there is no one who is experiencing? If the brain is simply constructing for itself an illusory sense of selfhood, in what way does this alter the phenomenon of subjectivity?

Nick

[westprog]

There is some genuine overlap in your learning histories, associating verbal labels with sets of observable behavior (including verbal behavior). That is sufficient, and that is quite literally what we have to learn from. Again, as per the Rachlin paper, we do not and cannot know anything about another's "mental states" (such dualistic language so late in this thread? Private behavior, please!).


But I don't regard mental states as being a matter of behaviour. (Though I'm not wedded to the precise phrase). It's precisely the non-behavioural nature of mental states that I am claiming.


Of course you have a set of private behavior that is correlated with this publicly observable set. So do I. And it is likely that they are quite similar (more so for easily agreed upon things like "seeing red", and less so for fuzzier concepts like "feeling nonplussed"), since we share both an evolutionary history and a great deal of our learning history within a verbal community (the further apart verbal communities are, the less similar their concepts of these private behaviors--"love" really is different in, say, China than in the US).

I'm not sure that's true. If someone says "I love fried noodles" that might mean the same thing in both places. "Love" covers a wide range of states.

But since we do not and cannot have access to another's thinking or feeling, to take the colloquial short-cut and say we have "overlap in our mental states" is not merely untrue, it is misleading. It is this sort of language which creates and nurtures the HPC.

I don't accept that we have no access to another's thinking or feeling. We don't have certain access to another's thinking or feeling. I think that part of being human is a capacity for empathy.

[Nick227]

Not necessarily. How would you know ? this is the same question that's been asked about how and if we percieve colours in the same way. There really isn't any way to know... at least for now. So how would you know ?
We don't know anything, come to that. But I think that the fact that mankind has devoted millions of years describing what our mental states are leads us to a good chance that we are describing something that is objectively similar - in the same way that we assume that we are both talking about the same wall.

Whilst you might not know to the nth degree, it is I submit highly reasonable to suggest that the experience is acutely similar. This is because there is no one who is experiencing, it is simply that two very similar machines are processing very similar information. In reality, there is no experience here, it is simply the action of processing that is taking place.

Nick

[Piggy]

Of course they have. They just don't exist.

Something which doesn't exist has been observed?

Mmmmmm kay....



Sounds like special pleading to me. Allright, then. Let's not use "observe" since you don't seem to use the word the same way I do. Let's say "sense", okay ? Or is "experience" better ? Anyway, let's pick a word, any word, which means that you percieve something, whether or not it's there. I choose "carrot". So, sentience has been carroted just like ghosts are carroted. My point was: what's the difference ? How can we know that "sentience" isn't like any other thing we can carrot but isn't there ?

I'm sorry, but how can you perceive things that aren't?

I believe what you're getting at is perceiving X, Y, and Z, and mistakenly concluding that you've perceived A.

And no, I'm not going to use the word "carrot". Sorry.

But to the point, since sentience is merely defined as conscious experience, then anyone who is conscious perceives it. Now, the question of how the brain generates that experience... that's a different question.

[Piggy]

Of course not. All I'm doing... or NOT doing, actually, is that I'm not placing "subjective" "experiences" in some sort of special category.

Good. We agree on that.

[Nick227]

But to the point, since sentience is merely defined as conscious experience, then anyone who is conscious perceives it. Now, the question of how the brain generates that experience... that's a different question.

The brain isn't generating any experiences. What it's doing is creating the belief in experiences. The brain is just processing information. When did you ever actually have an experience? Only in retrospection does the concept of experience come up, and with it the concept of the experiencer. All of this stuff is only created retrospectively through ancillary processing.

eta: the brain is like a flatlander, learning tricks to get into the 3D prom.

Nick

[skiba]

The brain isn't generating any experiences. What it's doing is creating the belief in experiences. The brain is just processing information. When did you ever actually have an experience? Only in retrospection does the concept of experience come up, and with it the concept of the experiencer. All of this stuff is only created retrospectively through ancillary processing.

eta: the brain is like a flatlander, learning tricks to get into the 3D prom.

Nick

What if we make a distinction between the "I" and the "experiencer"?
The "I" is only a mental construct of past memories / experiences.
We derive our sense of self from memories and past experiences.

If we take an imaginary scenario where a person has total amnesia and is unable to create new memories. The persons only focal point would be the now. With out the past and imaginary future theres no "I" left anymore, theres only what's happening at the moment. Only momentary experience.

can't there still be an "experiencer" without the "I"?

[Darat]

I think you answer your own question:

"If we take an imaginary scenario ...."

[skiba]

I think you answer your own question:

"If we take an imaginary scenario ...."

Ok, bad example.

Lets consider newborns. They haven't formed a mental construct of "self" that early on. I think mainstream psychology confirms this pretty well.

Theres still experience of hunger, limited sight, hot, cold,etc.

[Nick227]

What if we make a distinction between the "I" and the "experiencer"?
The "I" is only a mental construct of past memories / experiences.
We derive our sense of self from memories and past experiences.

Well, at a guess I'd say we get our sense of continuity of self from short-term memory. I'm no expert on these things though. I would agree that "I" is different from "the experiencer."

If we take an imaginary scenario where a person has total amnesia and is unable to create new memories. The persons only focal point would be the now. With out the past and imaginary future theres no "I" left anymore, theres only what's happening at the moment. Only momentary experience.

can't there still be an "experiencer" without the "I"?

I think in anterograde amnesia the short-term memory is gone. There is the sensation of constantly realising, as though for the first time, that you are conscious. I think there is still "I." It's just that it's not connected to the past "I."

"I" seems to me to be a side-effect of identification with thought. Why would an animal act upon thoughts that didn't relate to its evolution-derived seeking behaviour? It wouldn't, if you ask me. Thus there is some form of transference of seeking behaviour to thinking and thus a biochemical reward for acting upon thought. The side-effect of this transference is the seeming presence of an "I" within a material brain. This is strictly just imo!

The experiencer is another anomaly that has no basis in monist reality. Acting out the need to connect with other people we inevitably create the duality experience/experiencer. Something like this anyway!

I don't know exactly where this leaves the HPC, but I think subjectivity needs to be examined in the light of the illusory nature of most aspects of selfhood. In reality there's no "I" and there's no "experiencer." I would consider other aspects of selfhood more strong, body-map for example. But these two are weak if you ask me.

Nick

[Nick227]

Ok, bad example.

Lets consider newborns. They haven't formed a mental construct of "self" that early on. I think mainstream psychology confirms this pretty well.

Theres still experience of hunger, limited sight, hot, cold,etc.

You can have all these things without anyone experiencing them. You don't need an experiencer to be hungry. It's just an autonomous sensation. The belief in experience and experiencer is just the result of retrospective processing.

eta: as a side note...consider a PC. It doesn't get identified with its processing and start believing that it has an "I." Yet, in many ways, the PC has more right to do this than we do, given that it does actually have a CPU - a place where all the info is going back to. Human brain doesn't even have this. It's just a mass of networks running all around the place.

Nick

[Piggy]

The brain isn't generating any experiences. What it's doing is creating the belief in experiences.

Since belief is a kind of experience, this makes no sense.

Unconscious or brain-dead people have no beliefs.

And again, I'm using experience as a verby kind of thing, something the brain the does, not as a nouny thing, not as something it actually has, like I have shoes.

And I'm not being dualistic about it. I don't see that there's any "person" who is "having" some "experience" -- even if we're forced into that kind of language -- because the person and the experience are of a piece.

[Mercutio]

I'm happy to try! As I understand the monist materialist perspective - there is no self. There are no experiences, for experiences imply an experiencer, and there is no experiencer.

What there is, however, is the belief in an experiencer. And the capacity to veto impulses or emotional response. Emotional reactions are taking place. In the brain they are interpreted as happening to someone. They are not happening to anyone, but the belief is present that they are. The brain thus exercises its capacity to repress arising feelings based around its conception of selfhood and social reality.

Is this any better?

Nick
Maybe you could color-code for your beliefs, unfounded assertions, and empirically supported observations. Cos you are saying things in sentences that look declarative statements of fact, and I am not certain that they are even commonly agreed upon.

[Mercutio]

But I don't regard mental states as being a matter of behaviour. (Though I'm not wedded to the precise phrase). It's precisely the non-behavioural nature of mental states that I am claiming.
How do you justify starting with a dualistic stance?

I'm not sure that's true. If someone says "I love fried noodles" that might mean the same thing in both places. "Love" covers a wide range of states.
In Greek, there are 6 different words for love. If your love for friend noodles is expressed with the wrong word, people will certainly understand you, you pervert.

Come on, not even dating couples are certain they mean the same thing by "love":
She: "When you say you love me, do you mean the same thing as I do when I say I love you?"
He: "Of course! [silently: "you do mean you want to screw like crazed ferrets, don't you?] "
She: "Aww... You do love me! [silently: "and we can start picking out china patterns and picking baby names tomorrow, and you are so going to love Aunt Agnes, who will perform the wedding ceremony at dawn at my Grandmother's house in Rhode Island...]"

I don't accept that we have no access to another's thinking or feeling. We don't have certain access to another's thinking or feeling. I think that part of being human is a capacity for empathy.
Please put in your application to the bearded guy at the top of the page. I submit that you are responding to a person's public behavior, and nothing more. My view has the slight advantage over yours in that it is consistent with everything we know about physics, biology, and psychology, whereas yours is not.

[rocketdodger]

After watching "Wall-E," I realized that half of the people in this thread really are deluding themselves.

[skiba]

I think in anterograde amnesia the short-term memory is gone. There is the sensation of constantly realising, as though for the first time, that you are conscious. I think there is still "I." It's just that it's not connected to the past "I."

Yes, I believe you're right.


You can have all these things without anyone experiencing them. You don't need an experiencer to be hungry.
It's just an autonomous sensation. The belief in experience and experiencer is just the result of retrospective processing.

Yes, but a new born dosen't create an experience/experiencer, there no belief there. There's no "I experienced this". Theres simply an experience in the moment, which creates no duality. Similar in you're thoughtless awareness of a chair. In the moment there was no experiencer or "I", but there was an experience happening.

Language inevitably creates this duality because its all "retrospective processing".

[Nick227]

Yes, but a new born dosen't create an experience/experiencer, there no belief there. There's no "I experienced this". Theres simply an experience in the moment, which creates no duality. Similar in you're thoughtless awareness of a chair. In the moment there was no experiencer or "I", but there was an experience happening.

Retrospectively, what we recall is packaged as "an experience." In the moment to me there are just things. To me, in the moment, the chair is a chair, it's not the experience of a chair. It's just a chair.

Language inevitably creates this duality because its all "retrospective processing".

Yes, completely. We create all these notions of "what is happening to us." The brain is a drama queen!

Nick

[Nick227]

Maybe you could color-code for your beliefs, unfounded assertions, and empirically supported observations. Cos you are saying things in sentences that look declarative statements of fact, and I am not certain that they are even commonly agreed upon.

Are you saying that monism allows for an experiencer? This is what I started with and much of the rest proceeds from it. How about we start there?

Regarding the capacity to repress impulses, this notion of the "free won't" (as opposed to "free will") has been suggested by various other researchers and does fit with observed reality, imo.

Nick

[westprog]

How do you justify starting with a dualistic stance?


I can say that I am thirsty, and there's no more dualism involved than if I say that I'm dehydrated. They are both conditions that I experience. One condition can be publicly detected, the other not. They are both part of me. If I were claiming the little man behind my eyes driving the machine that would be a different matter. I'm talking about parts of the machine that operate under the hood.


In Greek, there are 6 different words for love. If your love for friend noodles is expressed with the wrong word, people will certainly understand you, you pervert.


I think we can disagree civilly. There was no need to reveal entirely harmless and essentially innocent details about my private affairs.

Come on, not even dating couples are certain they mean the same thing by "love":
She: "When you say you love me, do you mean the same thing as I do when I say I love you?"
He: "Of course! [silently: "you do mean you want to screw like crazed ferrets, don't you?] "
She: "Aww... You do love me! [silently: "and we can start picking out china patterns and picking baby names tomorrow, and you are so going to love Aunt Agnes, who will perform the wedding ceremony at dawn at my Grandmother's house in Rhode Island...]"


I think that while there may, indeed, be scope for cross purposes when people are discussing things of importance to themselves, the very fact that we have the concept of deception with regard to inner feelings is testament to the reality of those feelings.


Please put in your application to the bearded guy at the top of the page. I submit that you are responding to a person's public behavior, and nothing more. My view has the slight advantage over yours in that it is consistent with everything we know about physics, biology, and psychology, whereas yours is not.

I am not responding solely to the other person's public behaviour. I'm responding to that and my own experience of my own mental states.

[westprog]

After watching "Wall-E," I realized that half of the people in this thread really are deluding themselves.

I think we all agree about that.

[Belz...]

We don't know anything, come to that. But I think that the fact that mankind has devoted millions of years describing what our mental states are leads us to a good chance that we are describing something that is objectively similar

You mean like God ? That's another thing that's been described for "millions" of years.

in the same way that we assume that we are both talking about the same wall.

Indeed, but the wall can be tested for.

[Belz...]

Oh, go on, Belz. Be a man and challenge it! Ok, I'm happy to challenge the reality of subjective experience. How is subjective experience affected by the reality that there is no one who is experiencing? If the brain is simply constructing for itself an illusory sense of selfhood, in what way does this alter the phenomenon of subjectivity?

It doesn't really change anything, just like any illusion doesn't change reality.

[Belz...]

Something which doesn't exist has been observed?

Mmmmmm kay....

Allright, then, Piggy. Why don't you tell me which verb I should use for when someone has an illusion. Do they perceive the illusion ? Sense ? See ? What word should we use that will help you understand what I'm talking about ?

And no, I'm not going to use the word "carrot". Sorry.

And I was so proud of it !!

But to the point, since sentience is merely defined as conscious experience, then anyone who is conscious perceives it. Now, the question of how the brain generates that experience... that's a different question.

Perhaps you're right, but I suspect it will be something far more dissapointing and mundane than humanity expects. In fact, the answer might actually not be to the same question.

[Nick227]

Oh, go on, Belz. Be a man and challenge it! Ok, I'm happy to challenge the reality of subjective experience. How is subjective experience affected by the reality that there is no one who is experiencing? If the brain is simply constructing for itself an illusory sense of selfhood, in what way does this alter the phenomenon of subjectivity?

It doesn't really change anything, just like any illusion doesn't change reality.

It can change how we consider reality. It indicates that things may not be as complex as they seem. If all of these beliefs about "consciousness," "experience," "subjectivity," and "self" that we have are simply the result of retrospective processing and not grounded in a priori reality, then this "consciousness" would seem really not so complex after all.

As I see it personally, materialism is inevitably monist. And there is very little actually going on in what we term "consciousness." Yet the brain carries out large amounts of ancilliary retrospective processing which creates for itself a whole range of exciting illusions. It treats these illusions as reality, and mostly gets away with it, but runs into trouble when it tries to ratify them empirically.

Nick

[Nick227]

I can say that I am thirsty, and there's no more dualism involved than if I say that I'm dehydrated. They are both conditions that I experience. One condition can be publicly detected, the other not. They are both part of me. If I were claiming the little man behind my eyes driving the machine that would be a different matter. I'm talking about parts of the machine that operate under the hood.

If that is so, and not dualism, then where under this hood is "I?" If you can't locate it, then that's dualism, because you're hypothesising a non-physical entity. You can say "my body" but then you are again infering a non-physical "I" which the "my" refers to. You could go for "the body is thirsty," which is more correct by monism but might get you some funny looks at the drinks counter!

Duality, it's like the Hotel California. Easy to think you've checked out but look around and you're still there. Whilst you're just discussing of course this is fine. But when you start to drag a learned behaviour needed for social contact into an empiric discussion about so-called "consciousness" it's good to be aware that you're doing this.

Nick

[John Freestone]

Quantic? Quantic?!Sorry, that's an airline.;)

But yes.

Well, synapses aren't quantum devices; they're bulk-property devices. The quantum properties are already averaged out at that scale.

Whether you could make working synapses if the quantum properties of matter were different (like... not quantum...) is a complex question that fortunately we don't need to answer. :) Conway's Game of Life is Turing Complete, but it's also quantum, so it's not a counter-example.

Absolutely.

Yes, that's necessary but not sufficient.

The difference is quantitative, but it also matters how you arrange the switches. (Guess I should have said that before, huh?)

Wire them up at random (like, for example, the average rock), and you end up with a non-switch again. And once you have a non-switch, accumulating lots more non-switches doesn't help.

Quartz can switch in the right conditions because of the arrangement of its compnent atoms.


Not if those atoms are a rock... Uh, microscopic dust grain.

Something on the order of 1027.

Yes, or we wouldn't.

[...switch.] It seems like you're saying that all matter may or may not be made up of little quantum switches, but the significant point about whether somehting is aware or not is that whatever switches it is made of are arranged so that their sum is also a switch. Hence the molecules in a thermostat make up a machine that switches, as they do in synapses, but not in rocks. They also align in humans, which are also 'switches'. If I've got that right, it's an odd definition of awareness, to me, but I can see that it has a certain kind of sense, and would have particularly to a computer programmer, etc., looking at consciousness. Certainly it would align processing and information with consciousness and 'bulk matter' with unconsciousness. Something still irks me about it, but that's no reason to criticise your view. Thanks for explaining that. Personally, at the moment, I find the differentiation suspiciously convenient. Certainly it would be a good way for a materialist to push awareness back down the evolutionary tree, but avoid the embarrassment of not stopping somewhere respectable.

In my view, a bulk-matter condensation nucleus is a switch from the point of view of a raindrop, and a bulk-matter raindrop can be a switch (pretty randomly aligned with others) to a flood.

[Jeff Corey]

...I think in anterograde amnesia the short-term memory is gone. There is the sensation of constantly realising, as though for the first time, that you are conscious. I think there is still "I." It's just that it's not connected to the past "I." ...
No. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to process long term memory after some traumatic brain damage. The most famous case is Mr. H.M., who had his hippocampus surgically damaged in 1953. He could form no new permanent memories, but his short term or working memory was normal. He knew who he was and could remember events from before the operation, but not what he had for breakfast.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=861

[Mercutio]

I can say that I am thirsty, and there's no more dualism involved than if I say that I'm dehydrated. They are both conditions that I experience. One condition can be publicly detected, the other not. They are both part of me. If I were claiming the little man behind my eyes driving the machine that would be a different matter. I'm talking about parts of the machine that operate under the hood.
Then you need to work on your language; you spoke of a "non-behavioral nature of mental states". Behavior, defined as "what you do", encompasses both walking (public) and feeling thirsty (private); both are, as you point out, things you do. (Actually, you say "conditions that I experience", which is an odd phrasing, also leaning toward a duality of objective things happening to a subjective experiencer, but close enough for a rough draft...) When you say "non-behavioral nature of mental states", I cannot conceive of any interpretation but a dualistic one.

I think we can disagree civilly. There was no need to reveal entirely harmless and essentially innocent details about my private affairs.
We all have our quirks. I do not judge.

I think that while there may, indeed, be scope for cross purposes when people are discussing things of importance to themselves, the very fact that we have the concept of deception with regard to inner feelings is testament to the reality of those feelings.
So, were they talking about the same thing? They were talking about love... And why do you assume deception? Both speakers were perfectly honest in their expression of love for one another! Or take "patriotism"--for one person, it means flag-waving; for another, protest. Or take "beautiful"--for one person, it means curves; for another, a walking stick-figure. We can very easily think we are in agreement and be utterly at odds, or think we are at odds and be in agreement. The only way we find out is when we start putting our labels onto actual examples in the environment. "Oh--is that what you meant by jazz--I thought you meant Kenny G!" *shudder*

Once again, the Rachlin paper discusses precisely this point--the primacy of public referents rather than private perception as the bedrock of meaning.

I am not responding solely to the other person's public behaviour. I'm responding to that and my own experience of my own mental states. Sorry, but you said you knew that your mental states overlapped with theirs; I am saying that you cannot possibly know this. Suppose you are responding to your own experience of your own mental states--how does this get you their mental states? Again, you have absolutely no access to their mental states at all. None. Nada. Any and all information about their mental states (and if I have to keep using that term, I am going to have to wash my brain out with detergent) is what you are inferring from their public behavior. Period. And we can add to this, that the people from whom you learned to label your own private behavior (ah, much better) did not have access to anything but your public behavior; your own labels for your private behavior were taught to you by people who only inferred them from your observable actions, and were able to show you only their own observable actions.

This is not a difficult concept. It is sufficient to explain both the overlap in definitions (due to shared language community) and individual differences in definitions (due to unique learning history within that language community), without any need to posit some ability to magically know another person's thinking or feeling.

[westprog]

If that is so, and not dualism, then where under this hood is "I?" If you can't locate it, then that's dualism, because you're hypothesising a non-physical entity. You can say "my body" but then you are again infering a non-physical "I" which the "my" refers to. You could go for "the body is thirsty," which is more correct by monism but might get you some funny looks at the drinks counter!

Duality, it's like the Hotel California. Easy to think you've checked out but look around and you're still there. Whilst you're just discussing of course this is fine. But when you start to drag a learned behaviour needed for social contact into an empiric discussion about so-called "consciousness" it's good to be aware that you're doing this.

Nick

I don't regard the "I" as living under the hood. The "I" is the whole thing. I'm not sure whether I regard, say, my toenails as being quite as much "I" as my thoughts, but it's a spectrum of identity, and I don't locate the "I" anywhere.

[Nick227]

I don't regard the "I" as living under the hood. The "I" is the whole thing. I'm not sure whether I regard, say, my toenails as being quite as much "I" as my thoughts, but it's a spectrum of identity, and I don't locate the "I" anywhere.

But where is this "I" that is doing this regarding? When you write "I'm not sure whether I regard, say, my toenails as being quite as much "I" as my thoughts" - where is this "I" that's deliberating about these things? And who's thoughts are "my thoughts?" To whom does this "I" refer? It is self-evident, I submit, from how you write that you do not regard this "I" as the whole thing. In deliberating in this way to me you are covertly stating a belief in duality.

This to me is cool, but if you are using it as the basis for a discussion about the nature of so-called "consciousness" then I think you should come out of the closet and be honest that you are a dualist.

My perspective is that in acting upon thought, so this sense of "I" is created by the brain. But it is an illusion.

Nick

[Nick227]

No. Anterograde amnesia is the inability to process long term memory after some traumatic brain damage. The most famous case is Mr. H.M., who had his hippocampus surgically damaged in 1953. He could form no new permanent memories, but his short term or working memory was normal. He knew who he was and could remember events from before the operation, but not what he had for breakfast.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=861

Thanks. You're right. However, it doesn't change the outcome, I think - the guy still creates the "I" anew with each bout of short term memory. Is this right?

Nick

[Jeff Corey]

Thanks. You're right. However, it doesn't change the outcome, I think - the guy still creates the "I" anew with each bout of short term memory. Is this right?

Nick

I don't "think" so. He has full memories of growing up, stock market crash, WWII and all. He knows who he is, he just doesn't remember any new events since Scoville operated on him in 1953. When he sees himself in a mirror 50 years older, he doesn't recognize himself.

[Nick227]

I don't "think" so. He has full memories of growing up, stock market crash, WWII and all. He knows who he is, he just doesn't remember any new events since Scoville operated on him in 1953. When he sees himself in a mirror 50 years older, he doesn't recognize himself.

OK. I looked it up and I'm actually referring to C.W., who lost his memory through encephalitis. Blackmore quotes him as having written "I have just become conscious for the first time" over and over again in his diary. Not sure if he was diagnosed with anterograde amnesia or not.

Nick

[Jeff Corey]

Is this the C.W. you are referring to? If so, it's not anterograde.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/23/biography.features3

[Nick227]

Is this the C.W. you are referring to? If so, it's not anterograde.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/23/biography.features3

Certainly sounds like it. Quite a story.

It seems to me that it might also put the kibosh on dualist "soul" theories, unless one considers that the soul requires the hippocampus to communicate with the brain. I'm not sure. It seems like his sense of "I" is constantly being created and then lost again within 30 mins.

Nick

[Nick227]

Since belief is a kind of experience, this makes no sense.

Is belief a kind of experience really? This statement seems like more ancilliary processing on top of itself to me. Perhaps one can take that position. I would still dispute that the brain is actually creating experiences though, aside of couching its impressions in certain linguistic terms.

Unconscious or brain-dead people have no beliefs.

And again, I'm using experience as a verby kind of thing, something the brain the does, not as a nouny thing, not as something it actually has, like I have shoes.

And I'm not being dualistic about it. I don't see that there's any "person" who is "having" some "experience" -- even if we're forced into that kind of language -- because the person and the experience are of a piece.

Fair enough. Though person seems stronger to me than experience. There are people. There's no such thing as experience.

Nick

[Piggy]

Is belief a kind of experience really? This statement seems like more ancilliary processing on top of itself to me. Perhaps one can take that position. I would still dispute that the brain is actually creating experiences though, aside of couching its impressions in certain linguistic terms.

Looking back, I think my language there was just too sloppy when I said belief is a kind of experience. So I won't try to save that one. I spoke too quickly and didn't think it through.

But sure, the brain is creating the phenomenon of conscious experience. There's no other candidate.

Fair enough. Though person seems stronger to me than experience. There are people. There's no such thing as experience.

There are human beings. So if human being = person, then sure, there are persons.

One of the functions of the human brain is sentience, so "experience" is also a real phenomenon.

If I cut myself with a knife, I experience pain. If I'm under a local anesthetic during surgery, and I'm cut with a knife, I don't experience pain.

That's a very real difference.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

It seems to me that it might also put the kibosh on dualist "soul" theories, unless one considers that the soul requires the hippocampus to communicate with the brain. I'm not sure. It seems like his sense of "I" is constantly being created and then lost again within 30 mins.
That's exactly what Interesting Ian thought. He claimed that brain damage broke the soul's ability to interact with the physical body in various ways.

Another fellow I talk to thinks that the brain is a receiver for an extra-corporeal mind and that brain damage interferes with the reception. He thinks we evolved an ESP filter so that we won't be constantly bombarded with other people's thoughts.

~~ Paul

[gentlehorse]

What is the difference between "I" and a brian-generated, illusory "I" that's indistinguishable from "I"?

[Mercutio]

What is the difference between "I" and a brian-generated, illusory "I" that's indistinguishable from "I"?

Nothing, until you define "I". Then, maybe, something.

And, for the record, I say "wewease bwian!"

[nescafe]

Dammit, I hate it when I miss threads of this nature. Anyways...

What I'm skeptical of, in considering the HPC, is whether a machine can be created which exhibits all the traits of human consciousness.

My wife is building one right now. We expect to take it out of the fab environment/incubator in a couple of weeks, then it will have a few more months of self calibration/fine tuning before starting to exhibit the basic traits of consciousness. We expect it to take another 5 or so years before starting to acquire a fully adult human consciousness. The awesomer thing is that the machine will be capable to creating more machines mostly like itself.

Or were you excluding squishy meat-based machines from consideration?

[westprog]

Dammit, I hate it when I miss threads of this nature. Anyways...


I don't think it's going away quickly. It will probably continue until we arrive at a happy consensus that satisfies everyone. That is, for ever.

[Nick227]

Looking back, I think my language there was just too sloppy when I said belief is a kind of experience. So I won't try to save that one. I spoke too quickly and didn't think it through.

But sure, the brain is creating the phenomenon of conscious experience. There's no other candidate.

Well, I have to quibble a bit here. I would say that the brain is storing impressions of what's happening. These impressions it may later construct into "experiences." Thus it is "creating experience" in the sense that it creates little linguistic packages usually for communication, but I would dispute that it does it other than in this sense.

The side effect of this creation of "experiences" is the inevitable belief that there is "an experiencer," which imo is not valid. This is why I'm picking this point apart a bit.

There are human beings. So if human being = person, then sure, there are persons.

One of the functions of the human brain is sentience, so "experience" is also a real phenomenon.

If I cut myself with a knife, I experience pain. If I'm under a local anesthetic during surgery, and I'm cut with a knife, I don't experience pain.

That's a very real difference.

There is pain. The notion that "I experience pain" is, I submit, not a priori real, but a later construct that the brain manufactures.

Nick

[Nick227]

That's exactly what Interesting Ian thought. He claimed that brain damage broke the soul's ability to interact with the physical body in various ways.

Another fellow I talk to thinks that the brain is a receiver for an extra-corporeal mind and that brain damage interferes with the reception. He thinks we evolved an ESP filter so that we won't be constantly bombarded with other people's thoughts.

~~ Paul

Well, they may be right. Who knows? But I think it would be useful for them to deliberate how this proposed soul-body interface manifests. Is there some brain organ which starts off physical but has a bit which is non-manifest?! Seems hard to imagine.

Nick

[Nick227]

What is the difference between "I" and a brian-generated, illusory "I" that's indistinguishable from "I"?

There's no difference until you start debating concepts like "consciousness" or "subjectivity."

Nick

[Nick227]

My wife is building one right now. We expect to take it out of the fab environment/incubator in a couple of weeks, then it will have a few more months of self calibration/fine tuning before starting to exhibit the basic traits of consciousness. We expect it to take another 5 or so years before starting to acquire a fully adult human consciousness. The awesomer thing is that the machine will be capable to creating more machines mostly like itself.

Or were you excluding squishy meat-based machines from consideration?

Congratulations for your new arrival! Though I might have to question whether she's really "building" it. I hope you're not paying by the hour.

Nick

[skiba]

The side effect of this creation of "experiences" is the inevitable belief that there is "an experiencer," which imo is not valid. This is why I'm picking this point apart a bit.

Would it be more accurate to say, theres awareness of an experience?

I think the problem arises when we objectify awareness, thus making it into an "experiencer"

[Darat]

A report that could have been designed for this thread: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7532162.stm

[Nick227]

Would it be more accurate to say, theres awareness of an experience?

Doesn't feel very promising to me! Perhaps you could be aware of the brain's experience-creating activities.

I think the problem arises when we objectify awareness, thus making it into an "experiencer"

Yes, I agree, in a way. Though I think it's more a question of objectifying the brain's impressions, rather than awareness.

On a side note, I find objectivity another very sticky subject here. If one should agree that monism means that there is no experiencer, then where does that leave objectivity? Up **** Creek, if you ask me. It seems to me that monism and objectivity are mutually exclusive positions. Any objective monists care to debate this?

Nick

[westprog]

But where is this "I" that is doing this regarding? When you write "I'm not sure whether I regard, say, my toenails as being quite as much "I" as my thoughts" - where is this "I" that's deliberating about these things? And who's thoughts are "my thoughts?" To whom does this "I" refer? It is self-evident, I submit, from how you write that you do not regard this "I" as the whole thing. In deliberating in this way to me you are covertly stating a belief in duality.

This to me is cool, but if you are using it as the basis for a discussion about the nature of so-called "consciousness" then I think you should come out of the closet and be honest that you are a dualist.

My perspective is that in acting upon thought, so this sense of "I" is created by the brain. But it is an illusion.

Nick

I don't see where the dualism comes in. I don't regard the person who thinks as being different from the person who does. When I say "I went to the shops" I view that as being the same category as saying "I thought about prunes". There's just one I, which is capable of thinking and doing and experiencing.

I also note that the use of the first person pronoun is quite common. Does the mere use of "I" imply a dualist viewpoint?

[Nick227]

I don't see where the dualism comes in. I don't regard the person who thinks as being different from the person who does. When I say "I went to the shops" I view that as being the same category as saying "I thought about prunes". There's just one I, which is capable of thinking and doing and experiencing.

I also note that the use of the first person pronoun is quite common. Does the mere use of "I" imply a dualist viewpoint?

I would say that it does. Indeed, pretty much all conversation implies duality. I don't consider that this matters one bit until one starts to discuss concepts like "consciousness." At this point I think it's important to distinguish between the language and terminology we use to communicate, and the reality of what can be demonstrated to physically exist. Because if you start from the position of believing that there is a physical "I" simply because you use the word "I" to communicate then imo you are subscribing to illusion.

However, this is not what I was commenting on when I wrote that you came across to me as a "closet dualist." What I was commenting on was the manner in which you so immediately seemed to use the word without apparently reflecting on the issue or acknowledging it.

In my experience, people often don't like having the notion of a physical "I" challenged. Even ardent fans of objectivity are often reluctant to really examine this core presumption. There is a certain perceivable resistance, and one way in which this manifests is in the brain claiming that "I" represents the sum total of processes going on beneath their skin. However, in communication they usually demonstrate that this is not what they actually believe. They invariably do relate to the world as though there is some non-physical experiencer or observer who's body this is, or who's thoughts these are. I figured you were doing this earlier in your reply.

Personally, I think that if you're discussing "consciousness" or related topics then you have to acknowledge the issue with terminology or to me it looks like you are simply not aware that, in actuality, there is no "I" that has been physically shown to exist. Are you aware of the communication issue?

Nick

[cyborg]

However, in communication they usually demonstrate that this is not what they actually believe. They invariably do relate to the world as though there is some non-physical experiencer or observer who's body this is, or who's thoughts these are.

And I may talk about software on a day to day basis in terms of what functions it performs like, "open a file," or "parse data," "build a list," "display a number," but that doesn't mean it doesn't all boil down to electrons moving about.

The power of abstractions is that I don't need to talk about electrons, binary, machine code, assembler or even C in most cases. The relating of the higher-order concepts to these lower-order ones is not necessary to communicate the ideas they represent. But we notice when the higher-order concepts fail to capture lower-order behaviour and we call these "bugs" - or perhaps in the case of people "communication difficulties," where we fail to align the lower-order to the higher-order.

It's hardly surprising that one would forget this distinction in normal conversation because it just doesn't normally matter and just because one might still talk of "opening files" or "I" doesn't mean they actually believe that the abstraction exists in and of itself.

[cyborg]

MEH

[Mercutio]

I would say that it does. Indeed, pretty much all conversation implies duality.

I would say it does not. And I certainly hope that my explanation of publicly available referents has given an acceptable alternative to dualistic models of meaning of words (which explanations go back at least to Plato).

[Jeff Corey]

I would say not, too. How does conversation between two meat machines imply duality?

[Nick227]

I would say not, too. How does conversation between two meat machines imply duality?

Use of the self-referential term "I" or possessive adjectives to me implies a duality. When you say "my body" or "my feelings" or "I know..." to whom are you actually referring? To me the sense is clearly that there is some coherent "I" somewhere to whom these terms refer.

When I've heard people answer this question before, they sometimes state that "I" refers to the sum total of physical or mental processes going on within their body, but to me this is just trying to fudge the issue, though I can't prove this! I submit that using "I" or "my" creates a clear sense of duality. The feeling is invariably reported that there's a sense of someone living inside the head, having "experiences." It's duality.

When one considers "consciousness" as simply processing in action it's clear that there's no experiencer. But the feeling created by retrospective thinking is that of there being one. It's an illusion.

Nick

[Nick227]

I would say it does not. And I certainly hope that my explanation of publicly available referents has given an acceptable alternative to dualistic models of meaning of words (which explanations go back at least to Plato).

But, I submit, the feeling is dualistic. People say "my body." To me it's clear that they do not consider themselves the body but instead consider that there is someone who owns this body, someone that is their "real self."

Thus it's little wonder that so much confusion arises over notions like "consciousness" or there are debates about "hard problems," when even the people researching these things cannot distinguish between artificially-created brain constructs and reality. I mean, on the net one can find endless tracts by so-called researchers, coming up with all kinds of complex-sounding explanations for "consciousness," but on closer examination it's clear that they actually have not even undertaken the most basic steps in self-examination which, had they done so, would allow them to refute likely the whole lot of it!

Nick

[Darat]

But, I submit, the feeling is dualistic. People say "my body." To me it's clear that they do not consider themselves the body but instead consider that there is someone who owns this body, someone that is their "real self."

...snip...

Aren't we going around in circles?

Your argument is the same as saying that because we use the word "sunrise" the sun does "rise above the earth". Our language is replete with phrases that if this argument held would mean the world is an even stranger place than it is!

[Nick227]

Aren't we going around in circles?

Your argument is the same as saying that because we use the word "sunrise" the sun does "rise above the earth". Our language is replete with phrases that if this argument held would mean the world is an even stranger place than it is!

I'm just trying to demystify this "consciousness" thing a bit! Personally, I think once someone can see the reality that "I" is only created through retrospective thinking processes so the hard problems start to disappear. The HPC is mostly caused, I think, by people proceeding from too many assumptions.

Really I'd like to discuss what effect the reality of artificial selfhood has on subjectivity. I just haven't found anyone who wants to go there yet!

Nick

[westprog]

Then you need to work on your language; you spoke of a "non-behavioral nature of mental states". Behavior, defined as "what you do", encompasses both walking (public) and feeling thirsty (private); both are, as you point out, things you do. (Actually, you say "conditions that I experience", which is an odd phrasing, also leaning toward a duality of objective things happening to a subjective experiencer, but close enough for a rough draft...) When you say "non-behavioral nature of mental states", I cannot conceive of any interpretation but a dualistic one.


There's certainly a possible dualistic interpretation, which could be applied.

Is "feeling thirsty" something I do? Is it a behaviour? I would say not. It's something I experience, which might lead me to behaviour. It is quite possible that I will react quite differently to the same "feeling" due to circumstances.

Feeling thirsty may be associated with certain biological/chemical/physical reactions that are going on. Indeed, in the case of feeling thirsty, there's almost always a particular physiological state with which I can objectively associate the sensation. But the sensation itself is not a behaviour.

If we restrict ourselves to describing sensations solely in terms of behaviours, then, yes, the Hard Problem does dissolve.


So, were they talking about the same thing? They were talking about love... And why do you assume deception? Both speakers were perfectly honest in their expression of love for one another! Or take "patriotism"--for one person, it means flag-waving; for another, protest. Or take "beautiful"--for one person, it means curves; for another, a walking stick-figure. We can very easily think we are in agreement and be utterly at odds, or think we are at odds and be in agreement. The only way we find out is when we start putting our labels onto actual examples in the environment. "Oh--is that what you meant by jazz--I thought you meant Kenny G!" *shudder*


There's certainly the possibility of ambiguity. But are we really to suppose that our sensations as human beings are entirely distinct in every way, with no commonality? That is possible, of course, until we have some way to objectively access someone else's experience - but it seems highly implausible. A vast array of human discourse depends on the assumption that feelings are similar for different people.

Naturally there are areas where ambiguity is stronger. The aesthetic sense is one. But is fear, hunger or sexual desire felt differently from person to person?


Once again, the Rachlin paper discusses precisely this point--the primacy of public referents rather than private perception as the bedrock of meaning.


Could you post the reference again, if you have it to hand? I tried to find it, but this thread has already generated over thirty pages.


Sorry, but you said you knew that your mental states overlapped with theirs; I am saying that you cannot possibly know this. Suppose you are responding to your own experience of your own mental states--how does this get you their mental states? Again, you have absolutely no access to their mental states at all. None. Nada. Any and all information about their mental states (and if I have to keep using that term, I am going to have to wash my brain out with detergent) is what you are inferring from their public behavior. Period. And we can add to this, that the people from whom you learned to label your own private behavior (ah, much better) did not have access to anything but your public behavior; your own labels for your private behavior were taught to you by people who only inferred them from your observable actions, and were able to show you only their own observable actions.


And yet the lables were there - and I had no difficulty in applying them. Even if I learned "fear" from someone's external behaviour, I was able to distinguish it from other feelings I had.

I agree that this is something we cannot certainly know - but consider the alternative. If someone else experiences "fear" in an entirely different way to my own - why is that? What evolutionary pressure would cause the inner experience to be different?


This is not a difficult concept. It is sufficient to explain both the overlap in definitions (due to shared language community) and individual differences in definitions (due to unique learning history within that language community), without any need to posit some ability to magically know another person's thinking or feeling.

Given the inability to access the inner states, what is remarkable is the extent to which definitions for the various feelings are common across multiple cultures.

[Belz...]

Use of the self-referential term "I" or possessive adjectives to me implies a duality. When you say "my body" or "my feelings" or "I know..." to whom are you actually referring?

You mean you don't know ?

[Nick227]

You mean you don't know ?

I've no idea.

Nick

[Dancing David]

Hi,

Brief toss out:

Behavior is the action of a system, so sensation is a behavior.

There need be no I to have an experience, there is the system, the body, and the actionsof the body.

[Mercutio]

But, I submit, the feeling is dualistic. People say "my body." To me it's clear that they do not consider themselves the body but instead consider that there is someone who owns this body, someone that is their "real self."
There is a difference between saying "I did it" and saying "my body did it"; the second is dualistic language, but the first need not be. "I made up my mind", or "my body knows better than I do" are clearly dualistic, but "I decided to do X" does not create a controller/controlled relationship of separate parts of your body.

(For the record, at the level of analysis I find appropriate for discussions of consciousness, I even dislike the use of brain/body dichotomies, as functionally dualistic.)

[Mercutio]

There's certainly a possible dualistic interpretation, which could be applied.
Indeed, it leaps out from the language you use.

Is "feeling thirsty" something I do? Is it a behaviour? I would say not. It's something I experience, which might lead me to behaviour. It is quite possible that I will react quite differently to the same "feeling" due to circumstances.
Thank you for illustrating my point. Feeling thirst is a private behavior--it is clearly something you do. Calling it "something I experience" imposes a dualistic language, which clouds the issue terribly, pretending to explain something by introducing fictional elements which themselves must then be explained... except, as fiction, they cannot be.

Feeling thirsty may be associated with certain biological/chemical/physical reactions that are going on. Indeed, in the case of feeling thirsty, there's almost always a particular physiological state with which I can objectively associate the sensation. But the sensation itself is not a behaviour.
"The sensation itself" is not a behavior, but a reified metaphor. "Feeling thirsty" is indeed a private behavior; "the sensation" has no more existence than Darat's "ran". Going without water for some period of time leads to many things--the behavior of drinking, the behavior of feeling thirsty, the biological/chemical changes you speak of... (Those, by the way, are an effect of going without water; to speak of them as the cause of the behavior of drinking is shortsighted--not that you did claim that. They are part of a causal chain, but are a mechanism rather than a cause; they are not why we feel thirsty, but rather how we feel thirsty.)

If we restrict ourselves to describing sensations solely in terms of behaviours, then, yes, the Hard Problem does dissolve.
If we refuse to impose dualistic language where none is needed, the HPC does dissolve, I agree.

Again, you use the reified noun "sensations". Do sensations exist, apart from the act of sensing? Does "ran" exist, separate from the act of running? Where does Darat's ran go when he stands still? Must it be stored somewhere? Similarly, a sensation does not exist, apart from a linguistic construction because we are accustomed to speaking of nouns; sensing, of course, is something that we do all the time. It is a (collection of) private behavior(s).

There's certainly the possibility of ambiguity. But are we really to suppose that our sensations as human beings are entirely distinct in every way, with no commonality? That is possible, of course, until we have some way to objectively access someone else's experience - but it seems highly implausible. A vast array of human discourse depends on the assumption that feelings are similar for different people.
We need not suppose that; we need not suppose anything about them in order to adequately address them. And yes, the assumption is that feelings are similar--I am simply noting that the reason for that assumption must be found in publicly observable behavioral referents.

Naturally there are areas where ambiguity is stronger. The aesthetic sense is one. But is fear, hunger or sexual desire felt differently from person to person?
We certainly describe it differently--heck, my son no longer feels hunger at all; as a Type I diabetic, he doesn't get to eat when he is hungry, but rather when his meter says he needs to. So, since hunger no longer signals "time to eat", it has lost its importance and is no longer felt. Do you really think you feel hunger the same way someone in a famine situation does?

Could you post the reference again, if you have it to hand? I tried to find it, but this thread has already generated over thirty pages.
I'll try--or, do a forum search for "Rachlin"--there can't be that many of them!

And yet the lables were there - and I had no difficulty in applying them. Even if I learned "fear" from someone's external behaviour, I was able to distinguish it from other feelings I had.
Well... you did have both the feelings of sympathetic arousal, and the situations you were in, to help you label your fear. Research on "misattribution of arousal" does show us that we look to our situations to label our arousal states; that is, it is clearly not simply distinguishing feelings. (That said, the early researchers clearly over-reached with their conclusions; you do feel differently toward different stimuli. It is not a matter of all public or all private.)

And of course, you cannot distinguish it from other people's feelings. (I remember one time, seeing the wide eyes and flushed face of a companion at an amusement park. I assumed excitement; she reported abject terror.)

I agree that this is something we cannot certainly know - but consider the alternative. If someone else experiences "fear" in an entirely different way to my own - why is that? What evolutionary pressure would cause the inner experience to be different?
Your alternative presupposes a few assumptions--what if (hypothetical; I am not advancing the hypothesis) the evolutionary purpose of emotions was as a social signal? A means of alerting others in your social environment about your probable behavior, or of sharing information with others? The important thing then would be the public display, and the accompanying private behavior would be (evolutionarily) irrelevant. There would be no necessary pressure for anything other than an ability to learn by watching others.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that natural selection has a plan.

Given the inability to access the inner states, what is remarkable is the extent to which definitions for the various feelings are common across multiple cultures.
Cross-cultural psychology, on the other hand, is quite fond of pointing out differences. What is consistent with my explanation is the extent to which the similarities are greatest within language communities, and the differences follow the distances between cultures. If we are all simply reporting on some "feeling" accessed from some Platonic Ideal Space, and experienced identically by each of us, there would be no reason to find that sort of distribution.

[Mercutio]

The Rachlin paper. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_bp/2005/3_rachlinfinal.pdf) (pdf)

[Belz...]

I've no idea.

Then you're thinking in 5-dollar philosophy course terms. I see no problem with it, myself.

[Nick227]

There is a difference between saying "I did it" and saying "my body did it"; the second is dualistic language, but the first need not be. "I made up my mind", or "my body knows better than I do" are clearly dualistic, but "I decided to do X" does not create a controller/controlled relationship of separate parts of your body.

In stating "I did it" is there not a sense of someone who is doing? Where actually is this someone, as it is sensed, when speaking? To me, it clearly suggests a someone who, when sought, cannot be found.

Nick

[Nick227]

Then you're thinking in 5-dollar philosophy course terms. I see no problem with it, myself.

So who are you referring to when you say "my body?" Where's the "I" that has this body?

Nick

[gentlehorse]

... in actuality, there is no "I" that has been physically shown to exist.

Reminds me of a question once asked by my friend Win:

"How can the third-person requirements of the scientific method be reconciled with the first-person nature of consciousness?"

[westprog]

Reminds me of a question once asked by my friend Win:

"How can the third-person requirements of the scientific method be reconciled with the first-person nature of consciousness?"

Science isn't third person. It's based on the principle that it's always possible to verify something oneself, rather than rely on someone else's account. One's own consciousness is the test for scientific truth, as it is for all other truth.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

We certainly describe it differently--heck, my son no longer feels hunger at all; as a Type I diabetic, he doesn't get to eat when he is hungry, but rather when his meter says he needs to. So, since hunger no longer signals "time to eat", it has lost its importance and is no longer felt. Do you really think you feel hunger the same way someone in a famine situation does?
Has the feeling of hunger been replaced with anything related to his blood sugar level? Can he "sense" when he needs to adjust it?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

One's own consciousness is the test for scientific truth, as it is for all other truth.
What does that mean?

~~ Paul

[westprog]

The Rachlin paper. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_bp/2005/3_rachlinfinal.pdf) (pdf)

Ta very much.

[Mercutio]

In stating "I did it" is there not a sense of someone who is doing? Where actually is this someone, as it is sensed, when speaking? To me, it clearly suggests a someone who, when sought, cannot be found.

Nick

I really do not understand this question. A "sense" of someone? As opposed to just a someone?

Where is the someone when speaking? Um... unless you start with an assumption of dualism, the answer is obvious.

Suggests someone who, when sought, cannot be found? I suggest that you can only really think this if you begin by presupposing dualism; once again, I thank you for illustrating my point.

[Mercutio]

Has the feeling of hunger been replaced with anything related to his blood sugar level? Can he "sense" when he needs to adjust it?

~~ PaulGood question! I don't know that I can answer it. There are a few things, and maybe more. Feeling weird... light-headed, or grouchy, or tired... I have not heard him describe a unitary "sensation" that works.

[westprog]

What does that mean?



I mean that I judge whether something exists or is true by what effect it has on my consciousness.

It's been pointed out that we have no direct access (or some would say, any access) to the inner states/private behaviours of other individuals. I'd extend that to say that any access we have to any external reality is as limited. We guess at the "real world" every bit as much as we guess at the inner states of other people. There is no absolute measure of truth - there's only our own experience to rely on.

[Mercutio]

I mean that I judge whether something exists or is true by what effect it has on my consciousness.
Not by, say, whether or not you see it? Suppose you see two things, and one has an effect on your consciousness. How do you know? How do you know that A has had an effect on your consciousness? How do you know that you have seen B if it had no effect on your consciousness? What possible good does "consciousness" add to this explanation?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I mean that I judge whether something exists or is true by what effect it has on my consciousness.
Perhaps you mean to say that your "experience" of the external world is entirely based on your internal model of it, built from sensory inputs. Or possibly we should say that it is based on the internal behaviors that arise from those sensory inputs. In any event, I think we would all agree that the tree you are looking at is not actually part of your brain and so your knowledge is indirect.

But---at the risk of repeating Mercutio---what does this have to do with consciousness?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I mean that I judge whether something exists or is true by what effect it has on my consciousness.
Perhaps you mean to say that your "experience" of the external world is entirely based on your internal model of it, built from sensory inputs. Or possibly we should say that it is based on the internal behaviors that arise from those sensory inputs. In any event, I think we would all agree that the tree you are looking at is not actually part of your brain and so your knowledge is indirect in some sense.

But---at the risk of repeating Mercutio---what's consciousness got to do with it?

~~ Paul

[nescafe]

Use of the self-referential term "I" or possessive adjectives to me implies a duality. When you say "my body" or "my feelings" or "I know..." to whom are you actually referring? To me the sense is clearly that there is some coherent "I" somewhere to whom these terms refer.
When I say "I", I am referring to that blob of meat which, if eaten, would drastically lower that blob's reproductive fitness and/or ability to provide for the blob's offspring.

The "I" concept may be inherently dualistic, but there are really good reasons for thinking meat to distinguish between "that which is me" and "that which is everything else". Failing to do so may result in some other meat ingesting you and/or making more blobs at your expense.

When I've heard people answer this question before, they sometimes state that "I" refers to the sum total of physical or mental processes going on within their body, but to me this is just trying to fudge the issue, though I can't prove this! I submit that using "I" or "my" creates a clear sense of duality. The feeling is invariably reported that there's a sense of someone living inside the head, having "experiences." It's duality.
It certainly is. Some of us just recognize to for the useful fiction that it is. :)

When one considers "consciousness" as simply processing in action it's clear that there's no experiencer. But the feeling created by retrospective thinking is that of there being one. It's an illusion.
Indeed.

[westprog]

Perhaps you mean to say that your "experience" of the external world is entirely based on your internal model of it, built from sensory inputs. Or possibly we should say that it is based on the internal behaviors that arise from those sensory inputs. In any event, I think we would all agree that the tree you are looking at is not actually part of your brain and so your knowledge is indirect in some sense.

But---at the risk of repeating

I think that has actually happened. I get the same thing - I press submit and when nothing happens, I press it again.

Mercutio---what's consciousness got to do with it?

~~ Paul

Only when I consciously think about the world can I evaluate it.

The extent to which I'm consciously aware of the world around me is interesting. I have a model of the world which is quite fuzzy at times. However, there are no holes in it. I might not be able to describe everything I see, but if a tree were replaced with a lamppost I'd probably notice it.

[Belz...]

So who are you referring to when you say "my body?" Where's the "I" that has this body?

When "I" say "My body", I mean it as synonymous with "I", since it's obvious that I can't separate the two. It's just language, Nick. Get over it.

[Belz...]

I mean that I judge whether something exists or is true by what effect it has on my consciousness.

So if you see a ghost, the ghost exists ?

[Nick227]

When "I" say "My body", I mean it as synonymous with "I", since it's obvious that I can't separate the two. It's just language, Nick. Get over it.

I'm not having a personal go at you, I'm just pointing out that there is an innate level of implicit duality in the way we self-conceptualise and communicate. What seems to happen is that, at some point, the mind starts to behave as though the implicit duality is real and begins to imagine that there really is an "I" somewhere to whom it is constantly referring. This imo is how all these dramas with HPC, "consciousness", "experience" etc start. The mind imagines its constructions are reality.

If you contrast the brain here with a computer, you will see that the computer simply processes information. It does not identify with the information and start to imagine it has an "I." Likewise, I submit, the brain simply processes information. But, in constrast to the computer, there seems to also be a subsidiary function running in the brain that is monitoring the impressions being stored. This monitoring takes the form of thinking and the action of identification with these thoughts creates the sensation of there being an actual "I" who is experiencing them. Thus the sensation of duality (experiencer-experience) is created from a monist reality.

If the above is roughly correct then it can be seen that the whole deal with subjectivity and HPC is actually nowhere near as real as it seems.

Nick

[Nick227]

I really do not understand this question. A "sense" of someone? As opposed to just a someone?

Where is the someone when speaking? Um... unless you start with an assumption of dualism, the answer is obvious.

Suggests someone who, when sought, cannot be found? I suggest that you can only really think this if you begin by presupposing dualism; once again, I thank you for illustrating my point.

There is a body having thoughts. What I'm basically saying is that, through the act of articulating these thoughts in the first-person a sense of duality, of "experiencer and experience," is being created.

Nick

[Nick227]

When I've heard people answer this question before, they sometimes state that "I" refers to the sum total of physical or mental processes going on within their body, but to me this is just trying to fudge the issue, though I can't prove this! I submit that using "I" or "my" creates a clear sense of duality. The feeling is invariably reported that there's a sense of someone living inside the head, having "experiences." It's duality.
It certainly is. Some of us just recognize to for the useful fiction that it is. :)

Nice to know someone else knows what "I'm" talking about! Even if the "I" is fictional.

When one considers "consciousness" as simply processing in action it's clear that there's no experiencer. But the feeling created by retrospective thinking is that of there being one. It's an illusion.
Indeed.

How does this affect subjectivity and the HPC, do you think?

Nick

[Belz...]

I'm not having a personal go at you, I'm just pointing out that there is an innate level of implicit duality in the way we self-conceptualise and communicate.

Assuming for a moment that I grant you this, what's your point ?

If you contrast the brain here with a computer, you will see that the computer simply processes information. It does not identify with the information and start to imagine it has an "I."

How would you know, since you can't know its mind ?

Likewise, I submit, the brain simply processes information. But, in constrast to the computer, there seems to also be a subsidiary function running in the brain that is monitoring the impressions being stored. This monitoring takes the form of thinking and the action of identification with these thoughts creates the sensation of there being an actual "I" who is experiencing them. Thus the sensation of duality (experiencer-experience) is created from a monist reality.

That's a fine set of words, but what does it mean ?

[calebprime]

When I say "I", I am referring to that blob of meat which, if eaten, would drastically lower that blob's reproductive fitness and/or ability to provide for the blob's offspring.

The "I" concept may be inherently dualistic, but there are really good reasons for thinking meat to distinguish between "that which is me" and "that which is everything else". Failing to do so may result in some other meat ingesting you and/or making more blobs at your expense.


It certainly is. Some of us just recognize to for the useful fiction that it is. :)




while I wouldn't put the meat blob's predicament in such stark terms, this is more or less what I was going to say.

"I" is a perfectly good word. We know what it means.