COLOUR

[ruby sparks]

! A very good point I missed. Blue is a high level abstraction for a process of absorption and reflection.

Something like that maybe. I don't think anyone knows yet what a conscious experience of any sort actually is, other than that they're all very, very weird phenomena indeed, albeit we mostly take them somewhat for granted if we've had them our whole lives. However, I do admit that saying, 'you have the most amazing 650 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic radiation-reflecting eyes I've ever had a related private mental experience about' might not be as effective a chat up line as the much shorter colloquial version. Or maybe it would be. It's at least a conversation-starter.

 

[ruby sparks]

Let me put it to you so you can chew on it again. We see what light arrives at our receptors.

Light hits our receptors, yes.

We call the plant green....

Whoa. First, there's the bit steve left out too, the having a colour experience.....

......that in that case we learn to call green (and calling the plant itself green is likely a mistake).

.....because the energy getting to our sensors is what is not absorbed by the object we see within our range of perception.

Exactly. What hits our retinas is energy.

...It matters not what are the inherent colors of the plant are since all that is important to us is what gets to our sensors.We know that because we are here as living beings.

Yes. It's important that we at least get the input correct enough for us to respond appropriately. We can get it a bit wrong at times, but usually only if it's useful to do so.

I'm pretty sure that if the inherent color of the objects we 'see' were critical to our being here we would have so evolved to perceive them.

Ah. There you went back to the disputed concept 'inherent colour of the objects'.

Other than that, yes.

It's just a matter of having a sense of radiation range and adapting to report rest of range when A is seen. We didn't so it isn't.

Ok.

Actually I argue that whatever wavelengths excite particular receptor elements reflect what those elements absorb and that remains excitation constant for all like receptor elements.

Yes.

So if we label that excitation as red....

I would say having of the 'raw' colour experience comes before learning the labelling of it.

.... it will always excite like receptors under identical conditions as red.

Yes.

That would be an example of psycho-physical constancy, something we strive to control in the lab. We build color wheels and cubes based on those criteria as we do musical scales around consistent identifications of acoustic signals at particular frequencies and amplitudes.

Sure.

But the unresolved question is whether the redness or whatever is a brain experience only, or not. I'm inclined to think it is. At least, I can't see anything that that does not explain. All entities, systems and organisms could discern and differentiate between light energy inputs without necessarily having an associated conscious brain experience of colour to go along with it. A spectroscope can do this for example. Plants respond differently to different wavelengths of light. So do insects. And our retinal apparatus similarly doesn't need to be responding to colours. So long as the cones respond to wavelengths or oscillations, the next stage of the process (electrical or electro-chemical signals) would happen automatically anyway, as it does for a spectroscope, a plant and probably an insect. Possibly other organisms too, that don't experience consciousness.

 

[ruby sparks]

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQczp0wtZQQ[/YOUTUBE]

Bear in mind the video was made for showing to 11-year-olds.

 

[steve_bank]

! A very good point I missed. Blue is a high level abstraction for a process of absorption and reflection.

Something like that maybe. I don't think anyone knows yet what a conscious experience of any sort actually is, other than that they're all very, very weird phenomena indeed, albeit we mostly take them somewhat for granted if we've had them our whole lives. However, I do admit that saying, 'you have the most amazing 650 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic radiation-reflecting eyes I've ever had a related private mental experience about' might not be as effective a chat up line as the much shorter colloquial version. Or maybe it would be. It's at least a conversation-starter.

The way I see it we communicate and learn by analogy and metaphor, and observation.

A kid sees another kid fall, scrape a knee, and start crying. Next week the kid himself falls and starts crying, realizing what the other kid probably felt. We learn colloquial expressions by immersion in culture. English, French, and Spanish have phrases that laterally make no sense, but have colloquial meaning.

Music communicates feeling. I love Handel's Water Music, it is filled with aristocratic pretention.

Colo(u)r experience, music experience, visual art experience. For me visual art of any king rarely makes any kind of impression. It is mostly sound for me. I will recognize voice before face of someone I have not seen in a while. Nature or nurture? The way my brain is wired?

 

[ruby sparks]

Colo(u)r experience, music experience, visual art experience. For me visual art of any king rarely makes any kind of impression. It is mostly sound for me. I will recognize voice before face of someone I have not seen in a while. Nature or nurture? The way my brain is wired?

The weird thing, of course, is that we have conscious experiences at all.

I'm reading something at the moment which suggests that we are not the only species to feel things. This makes sense. I very much doubt that dogs are merely zombie mimics, for example. However, the author (Antonio Damassio) thinks that they don't know they are having the experiences, that they don't have a sophisticated sense of self (if at all) to do that. According to Damassio, we don't just have experiences, we have the experience that we are having experiences (there's a 'theatre stage' and an 'audience').

Apparently the conditions of being fully awake and going about one's business, and feeling things but not being consciously aware of them, is not totally unknown for most humans, in certain situations, and especially if some part of the brain has suffered damage.

There is a theory that consciousness only kicks in if something is interesting or novel enough to pay special attention to. Otherwise, we stay on default, non-conscious autopilot. This is given as one reason why if you stare at a static block of colour for a long time, the cones stop responding. For one thing, it conserves valuable energy. Consciousness uses more energy, and the brain is the most energy-expensive part of the body (5% of the weight, 20% of the energy use). Some even say our operating system is set up to resort to consciousness as little as possible, for that reason, for efficiency in other words. There's also the related suggestion that things that enter consciousness are laid down in memory more strongly than those that don't.

 

[steve_bank]

I think it is obvious other critters feel. Wack a dog on the nose with a newspaper and it will squeal and cower.

Piss off a cat and it will let you know. I observed seagulls over time. A lone gull is sitting on a beach. Another will land, push it off its spot, wait a bit, and fly away. A bird watcher told me flocks of crows will single out a particular member for expulsion.

But it is all human experience analogy and conjecture, we can never know.

As to feeling, have you read anything on mirror neurons? There are unprocessed sensory inputs into the brain that allow us to mimic feelings we see in people's faces. If someone cries and you feel like crying it can be because your brain is mimicking the feelings it sees.

 

[fromderinside]

I got a glimpse of what underlies empathy way back in the day before learning was anything but learning which is what I was looking for as I examined processing up the auditory pathways of rats. Our thought was that there would be a significant increase in descending auditory system prior forebrain. What we found were descending influences all the way down to inner hair cell neuron targets in the cochlear nucleus. So monocular changes were being downward conducted as early as the cells taking information from the inner hair cells.

What this means is that information is available for feeling and recognizing throughout nearly the entire brain. Now we know that there are cells in every sensory an motor pathway capable of tracking changing and reporting auditory similarity and modification by affective information, empathy, at least down to the superior olive.

This is at least a long bus ride from sensing affect, should you choose to label energy translates to red.

Of course any such thinking piles a lot on those who use simplistic reasoning to explain how we get from signal to experience through something called the 'mind'.

 

[ruby sparks]

I got a glimpse of what underlies empathy way back in the day before learning was anything but learning which is what I was looking for as I examined processing up the auditory pathways of rats. Our thought was that there would be a significant increase in descending auditory system prior forebrain. What we found were descending influences all the way down to inner hair cell neuron targets in the cochlear nucleus. So monocular changes were being downward conducted as early as the cells taking information from the inner hair cells.

What this means is that information is available for feeling and recognizing throughout nearly the entire brain. Now we know that there are cells in every sensory an motor pathway capable of tracking changing and reporting auditory similarity and modification by affective information, empathy, at least down to the superior olive.

This is at least a long bus ride from sensing affect, should you choose to label energy translates to red.

Of course any such thinking piles a lot on those who use simplistic reasoning to explain how we get from signal to experience through something called the 'mind'.

Sure it's a long bus ride. Even the level of detail that you at times describe is incredible, and well beyond my understanding. Personally, I take the view that at no point along the long, slow, difficult route of greater understanding or more finely detailed explanation will we ever encounter (or need to describe) anything non-material or non-physical. Not even consciousness, mind or qualia. Whatever they are I'd say they're physical/material. How could they even be anything else? Mental phenomena will just have (some) different (physical) properties compared to non-mental phenomena. That's where I'd put my money. I could be wrong.

[As an aside, I wouldn't rule out that (physical/material) information is the common denominator. There are those who suggest that what we currently call 'matter' is not at the bottom of the explanatory chain but is merely a secondary property of information rather than the other way around. They would say that the compact disc is on the information rather than that the information is on the compact disc, which is highly counterintuitive obviously, but then the most interesting things often are. And now that we are entering the so-called 'information age' and have been in the quantum one for quite a while, it's perhaps not as counter-intuitive as it used to be].

When you were investigating the auditory pathways of rats, you were being a bit like the Mary of Frank Jackson's Mary's Room thought experiment. You were on the long bus ride to knowing and understanding everything there is to know and understand about audition in rats. But the one thing you couldn't know, unless you knew it by experience, is what it feels like for a rat to hear something (which it may not, for a rat, but we know that it does for us in any case). Now, Frank Jackson was trying to disprove physicalism, and he thought he had (because the experience of redness would be new to Mary after she left 'the room of full knowledge and understanding of red') but imo he hadn't (and he himself later changed his own mind) and my guess is that like most people, he was afflicted by a hangover from traditionally 'sticky' concepts involving mind-body substance dualism.

There may still be an epistemic gap, between knowing everything about something (eg the processes involved in audition, or vision) in the second person, and experiencing it in the first person (having conscious experiences that feel like something) but it doesn't have to represent a gap between the physical and the non-physical, imo. And as such, there's no need to run from or object to words like 'mind'. The word comes with baggage of the potentially woo variety via long tradition of dubious thinking, yes, but it doesn't have to. If we just mean the physical material mind, then we're on safe ground, imo. Note that this goes beyond even just saying that mind is fully describable or understandable in physical/material terms to saying that it is physical/material, even before we get to the end of the bus ride.

So although it's a bit of a cop out for me to say (just as it arguably was for the physicist in that little video) that we don't understand how EM energy translates to the brain experience of redness, at least it doesn't involve an unwarranted segue into the idea of a supposedly immaterial mind.

 

[fromderinside]

How does one arrive at 'mind' when; one finds most everything informative is subject to influence by most everything else informative; there appear to theaters generating options depending on where one has perceived to where one is about to perceive. It's already there in so many ways one considering things might be forced to retreat from mindfulness to optionalness. I'm pretty certain one is certain. I believe you agree. I'm just not certain what one is actually certain about, or, that finding that is meaningful.

So mind? Not so much.

 

[ruby sparks]

How does one arrive at 'mind' when; one finds most everything informative is subject to influence by most everything else informative.....

I arrive at mind quite easily and without even understanding its causal origins (which is what the second half of the above snippet of your post refers to) and I do it all the time, and I suspect you do too, because for both of us, individually, it is undeniably obvious that there are private, conscious sensations (thoughts, emotions and pain for example) at least some of the time.

And saying that such things are material, or behaviors, or information or whatever, while arguably true, does not seem to be the full picture, because there is still the very, very weird and separate 'feeling like something'.

I wonder where your aversion to 'mind' comes from? I can only guess. Maybe it's just the word itself that you don't like, and you have a preferred alternative, or maybe it's the entire concept. If the latter, maybe it has its roots in some preferred paradigm or other that you adopted long ago (some form of post-behaviourism perhaps, or some form of scientific reductionism), and/or (in other words possibly in conjunction with, possibly separately) your having a wariness about woo, or 'magik', it being a short step (that many take) between the mental and the supernatural or paranormal, or from something called consciousness to something dubiously called 'higher consciousness', or worse, panpsychism, or whatever. Maybe you subscribe to the ideal of 'cold' rationalism, in which case the bad news for that would seem to be that for humans, there is always, it seems, an emotional component to reasoning and deciding.

I'm not criticising the having of preferred paradigms. I do that too. For example, I'm very much a physicalist/materialist. But, if it turned out to be convincingly the case that that was an incomplete paradigm and that, for example, in a hypothetical worst case scenario for my physicalism, thoughts are (drum roll....) immaterial, which I'm not suggesting they are by the way, I'd be intrigued more than anything else. It'd be fascinating.

Sure, the fact (if it were a fact) would be seized on by those hoping to use it to support, for example, a god-paradigm or one of the others listed above (Universal Consciousness, anyone?), but that wouldn't necessarily be my problem.

 

[fromderinside]

S>R is a good place to start. Sum(S) > sum(R) = Approximate(B)?, my best estimate. What's needed is narrowing the amount of approximate through experiment better defining what is B. No need for mind except to sooth the ignorant beast, my best guess.

Only I'm not in the guessing business. So I'm not in the rationalism business by association. Mind, intuition, instinct, are trivia that needs sweeping into the dust bin or storage if you actually need to keep them. Some high abstraction level 'what if' you are trying to invent to justify past ignorance that has already been replaced by scientific method theory and practice not interesting to me.

Just be aware that I'm not going to try to negate the empty. IOW I don't have some 'splaining to do.

'nuff sed.

 

[Treedbear]

How does one arrive at 'mind' when; one finds most everything informative is subject to influence by most everything else informative.....

I arrive at mind quite easily and without even understanding its causal origins (which is what the second half of the above snippet of your post refers to) and I do it all the time, and I suspect you do too, because for both of us, individually, it is undeniably obvious that there are private, conscious sensations (thoughts, emotions and pain for example) at least some of the time.

And saying that such things are material, or behaviors, or information or whatever, while arguably true, does not seem to be the full picture, because there is still the very, very weird and separate 'feeling like something'....

I'll jump in with my 2 cents worth. First. I define mind as everything the brain does. Not just the consciousness part. Using both words to describe the state of being conscious just makes it more confusing to discuss. I think we need to separate out the various aspects of mind into the "easy" problems and the "hard problem". It might turn out to be just a conceptual problem when we simplify things. Which brings me to the second point, which is that it seems to me all feelings are relative to how good or bad something is, or how it produces anxiety or serenity. It's only in how those basic sensations are "colored" by particular circumstances that we learn to categorize them into things like love or anger, etc. And so then as one of the basic components of consciousness, feelings can be simplified by separating the "easy" aspects dealing with how the brain makes particular associations to where now it is only necessary to deal with the basic sensation of the brain's level of arousal. Which I think can probably be traced back to the very beginnings of brain evolution when it first became necessary to modulate that level in order to efficiently increase size, complexity, and functionality.

 

[ruby sparks]

Mind, intuition, instinct, are trivia that needs sweeping into the dust bin or storage if you actually need to keep them. Some high abstraction level 'what if' you are trying to invent to justify past ignorance that has already been replaced by scientific method theory and practice not interesting to me.

Just be aware that I'm not going to try to negate the empty. IOW I don't have some 'splaining to do.

'nuff sed.

Well, 'nuff sed about your paradigm perhaps, whatever it is.

It is one thing to claim that mind will ultimately be explained in terms of lower-level neurophysiological processes, or that beliefs about mind can be awry, I would be reasonably happy to say both those things, but it's another thing to say that mind (and intuition and instinct) do not exist, which is more or less what you seem to be trying to say.

I think it would be very useful in that regard to go back to where you said pain was in electricity. Recap on that. Then we can do tickles being a property of friction. Surely not. Surely the brain has properties that are not 'out there'?

 

[ruby sparks]

I'll jump in with my 2 cents worth. First. I define mind as everything the brain does. Not just the consciousness part. Using both words to describe the state of being conscious just makes it more confusing to discuss. I think we need to separate out the various aspects of mind into the "easy" problems and the "hard problem". It might turn out to be just a conceptual problem when we simplify things. Which brings me to the second point, which is that it seems to me all feelings are relative to how good or bad something is, or how it produces anxiety or serenity. It's only in how those basic sensations are "colored" by particular circumstances that we learn to categorize them into things like love or anger, etc. And so then as one of the basic components of consciousness, feelings can be simplified by separating the "easy" aspects dealing with how the brain makes particular associations to where now it is only necessary to deal with the basic sensation of the brain's level of arousal. Which I think can probably be traced back to the very beginnings of brain evolution when it first became necessary to modulate that level in order to efficiently increase size, complexity, and functionality.

I can't find anything there to disagree with.

No, hang on. I'm not sure I'd use that definition of mind. I would tend to say that mind is a word to describe some of what the brain does. Or maybe your definition is better. I don't know. Would you say that someone in a vegetative state or even a coma still had a mind?

I would agree that mind is a lot more than just the consciousness part though. Whether it extends down to autonomic functions such as maintaining homeostasis I don't know. Actually, on reflection, in the end I reckon the definition of mind could indeed perhaps be extended to everything the brain does, as you say. I can't seem to think of an exception.

 

[ruby sparks]

Just be aware that I'm not going to try to negate the empty. IOW I don't have some 'splaining to do.

Well, you say that, but....

There is some evidence that the behaviour of the 'micro-stuff' you are (imo possibly over-simplistically) reducing the issue down to can itself be affected by some of the 'mental stuff' you seem to be saying is non-existent. If that is the case, you would have a paradigm under which 'nothing' appears to cause 'something'.

With the placebo effect, for example, the relevant information enters the system at the 'top', at the level of and via consciousness in other words. Then what we call beliefs appear to be causal agents 'downwards' (or just causal if you don't go along with the somewhat arbitrary direction analogy). This can be checked using an fMRI scanner. Nor are placebos the only candidate example of similar effects, the brain activity for which can also be checked on an fMRI scan. The upshot is that thoughts seem to do stuff to brains.

And that, if correct, does not of course suggest thoughts are immaterial. It's arguably strong evidence against it in fact.

 

[fromderinside]

It's only mental stuff because we don't know what actually drives it so we throw it into the bin with all the other chicken shit stuff we are too lazy to address.

When something becomes an obstacle to understanding it needs either be removed or addressed. If you weren't following my exemplar it was of mind (thoughts ...) getting in the way of understanding sensory-perceptual function. If you are satisfied with mind (thoughts ...) welcome to the dark ages.

Look. I understand. People like Coffee Table books. They make for safe conversation in polite society until .....

 

[ruby sparks]

Well, I was hoping for my points to be addressed, but I guess I’ll have to make do with that denial of the existence of cognitive science instead.

 

[fromderinside]

Not denying the discipline, just doubt much of the science of it. Its the discipline that uses most of those words I find troublesome to the conduct of scientific work. Rather than call myself a retired cognitive scientist, which I could, I prefer being known as a retired sensory neuropsychophyicsist. Pinker is one of the good ones who admits membership in the cognitive classification. Yet he's primarily a soft neuroscientist specializing in language aspects of brain function who has real bones to pick with Chomsky.

Let me repeat what you wrote:

With the placebo effect, for example, the relevant information enters the system at the 'top', at the level of and via consciousness in other words. Then what we call beliefs appear to be causal agents 'downwards' (or just causal if you don't go along with the somewhat arbitrary direction analogy). This can be checked using an fMRI scanner. Nor are placebos the only candidate example of similar effects, the brain activity for which can also be checked on an fMRI scan. The upshot is that thoughts seem to do stuff to brains.

obviously you have a model there. Consciousness model? But that can't be because you insert conscious as a level of process inthe model/ Then by some magic beliefs appear as causal agents. Then whatever it is can be checked by fMRI.

You are going to have to provide a lot more this then that just to justify your consciousness model so I can at least try to find proper mechanisms with which to describe something fMRI can show oxygen uptake about.

You'd more likely get a response to your points if you didn't couch them in such archaic and non scientifically meaningful terms.

I mean like Wow. Wait! What?

 

[ruby sparks]

Not denying the discipline, just doubt much of the science of it. Its the discipline that uses most of those words I find troublesome to the conduct of scientific work. Rather than call myself a retired cognitive scientist, which I could, I prefer being known as a retired sensory neuropsychophyicsist. Pinker is one of the good ones who admits membership in the cognitive classification. Yet he's primarily a soft neuroscientist specializing in language aspects of brain function who has real bones to pick with Chomsky.

Let me repeat what you wrote:

With the placebo effect, for example, the relevant information enters the system at the 'top', at the level of and via consciousness in other words. Then what we call beliefs appear to be causal agents 'downwards' (or just causal if you don't go along with the somewhat arbitrary direction analogy). This can be checked using an fMRI scanner. Nor are placebos the only candidate example of similar effects, the brain activity for which can also be checked on an fMRI scan. The upshot is that thoughts seem to do stuff to brains.

obviously you have a model there. Consciousness model? But that can't be because you insert conscious as a level of process inthe model/ Then by some magic beliefs appear as causal agents. Then whatever it is can be checked by fMRI.

You are going to have to provide a lot more this then that just to justify your consciousness model so I can at least try to find proper mechanisms with which to describe something fMRI can show oxygen uptake about.

You'd more likely get a response to your points if you didn't couch them in such archaic and non scientifically meaningful terms.

I mean like Wow. Wait! What?

Given that there have been a number of times during our conversation when you have avoided addressing points, including when I try to explore your own points, I'm not really convinced that in this case the apparently reasonable request for more detail is essentially anything more than a dodge. Most recently, you seemed to imply that mind does not exist, as far as I can tell. I offered an example of something entering the 'sausage-making machine' at one end, and sausages coming out the other. I'm good with that in principle. It seems thoughts can do stuff to brains. It's lacking detail, sure, but there does not seem to be a good reason to think it is not the case, or does not challenge strong reductionism, or indeed mind eliminativism, unless you can offer one.

I can't quite put my finger on what preferred paradigm you are using but I think that whatever it is, it's giving you a few problems, not least that you have to do a lot of pedalling to explain how you can deny the existence and/or role of mind (and the associated phenomena of attitudes, instincts, feelings, thoughts, emotions , intuitions, etc).

Most notably perhaps, your aversion to mind more or less forced you to have to claim that pain was already a property of whatever caused it outside the body. If that doesn't tell you you might be being a bit dogmatic about whatever paradigm is your preferred flavour, I don't know what would.

 

[fromderinside]

Growl. I saw a duck.

Is the above even logical? It's certainly not a scientific statement.

Neither was your argument nor your last response.

An act was performed, delivery of something is response to "I have symptoms" by some one appearing to be an expert and you build a model for her response you purport to be that as an example of placebo effect. Seems to me that placebo is more than just sugar pill. At the very least it requires to subject to have some reason to believe that the one delivering the 'medicine' was a qualified expert, ie some previous consciousness, your term, of a priori information, to conclude the one delivering the 'medicine' was one qualified to provide treatment.

So how does this qualify as top down anything, vis a vis consciousness? Do I need to go further in exposing your 'rational' argument?

I think not.