COLOUR

[ruby sparks]

Growl. I saw a duck.

Is the above logical?

Neither was your argument nor your last response.

S'okay. We can stop discussing this already.

 

[ruby sparks]

dp

 

[ruby sparks]

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 as 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 knowledge 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.

Reporting of symptoms wasn't even mentioned though, was it? Two fMRI images were compared with each other.

So how does this qualify as top down anything, vis a vis consciousness?

Sorry, but how does it not?

Do I need to go further in exposing your 'rational' argument?.

Apparently, yes, you do.

 

[fromderinside]

Yes. You should wait until the response is built.

You provided the clue to whether one had symptoms when you wrote placebo: "a harmless pill, medicine, or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect."

...back to bed now....

 

[ruby sparks]

nm

 

[ruby sparks]

Pre- (top row) and post- (bottom row) placebo.

"Studies typically involve delivering the same physically or psychologically aversive stimulus, with and without administering a placebo purported to alleviate the symptoms produced by the noxious stimulus, while the subject undergoes scanning with fMRI or PET. Change in brain activity is related to change in self-reported discomfort across the two stimuli to determine the functional correlates of placebo effects".

"For example, individuals receive the same aversive stimulus twice—with and without a placebo purported to alleviate symptoms produced by the noxious stimulus—while undergoing PET scanning with a radioligand. This method has been used to relate placebo analgesia with change in binding at μ-opioid receptors and at D2-like dopamine receptors in the brain."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3345504/

There you go. Changes in binding at μ-opioid receptors and at D2-like dopamine receptors. That level of detail should be right up your street.

 

[ruby sparks]

Yes. You should wait until the response is built.

You provided the clue to whether one had symptoms when you wrote placebo: "a harmless pill, medicine, or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect."

...back to bed now....

Well, that definition of placebo, wherever you got it from, doesn't exclude physiological effects, does it.

One evidenced process, I read, is that placebos (via the placebo effect) cause the release of natural opoids. Now, suppose that unbeknownst to you, I took a placebo tablet and crushed it up into a powder and put it in your chilli con carne and that you ate it without tasting it or knowing it was there, why would your brain release the opoids? It wouldn't, because nothing would trigger it. One way of explaining that would be to say that you had not acquired any beliefs about it.

And if, while you were eating the chilli con carne with the crushed placebo tablet in it, I told you, in Gaelic (which I presume you don't understand) what was happening, your brain would still have no reason to release the opoids. So it appears I'd have to tell you in a language that you could understand. That is why I say the relevant input, or at least the bulk of it, seems to be arriving at the level of consciousness, and working its way 'down' to neuronal level.

Now obviously, that would not be incontestable proof by any means (we can't rule out conditioning as a contributing factor in the placebo effect for medicines for example, or perhaps we process language at the non-conscious level) but it would at least be evidence in favour of at least some role for conscious mind. And it would only be be one of a number of phenomena that someone who was inclined to deny the existence of (or any role for) mind would have to counter in order to get to the point where they could show that either mind does not exist or plays no role at all. That's you. That's your paradigm, if I understand it right. And it involves a lot of work. Heck, even Skinner acknowledged the existence and role of feelings, even if his main emphasis was elsewhere.

As much as I agree that you could be right (and indeed Skinner wrong) you're not yet giving me enough reasons to think you necessarily are. Mind-eliminativism wouldn't worry me, because I'm already not very far away from it at all and wouldn't have a problem with making the last small step. But then, and to get back to the OP, I have the conscious experience of 'redness' (or pain, etc) and I feel obliged to admit that even if a LOT of things about my consciousness are illusory (which I think they are) there's no denying its bare existence. And I don't readily accept epiphenomenalism, so once I've accepted its basic existence, I tend to think it has a function.

 

[fromderinside]

Way overthinking my views. I adhere pretty much to Bridgman operationalism. Bridgman was a Noble prize winning physicist who was trying to make sense of physical science theory and practice. He focused on the operations defining physics experiment setup and results, in other words the language of science.

Skinner was an operational psychologist who he defined behavior in terms of operations. Since he was defining behavior his platform wasn't really science based. It became very popular with political scientists, logical positivists, analytical philosophers and political movements especially those trending toward socialism and communism. His approach is one of my reasons for rejecting the spouts of such as Chomsky, a clearly marxist tending para-scientist. Yes it may be more satisfying to those with philosophical bent since it doesn't require nailing things down to empirical fundamental physics. Being so built it permits hearsay constructs to be part of it's structure.

Definitely not my cup of tea.

Conscious needs defining re redness. Or one can eliminate the need for considering it.

How to eliminate need for considering consciousness.

One can measure one's sense of redness by material based protocols in sensory experiments. Yes one is not just a blob of sponge molecules in those settings. Yet, all l that is required is that the method dictate the observer's response constraining it to whether red is seen or not seen during trials in which a suite of intensities of low energy photic stimuli of a particular value and no energy trials mixed in. From your perspective the observer is conscious. From my perspective she is just another sensor. We get consistent and replicable results which we can materially include in correctly predicting other color determining behavior just as we can by using the results from the same experiment with light sensors.

In the above consciousness does not enter into the determination of red detection unless one wants to call a garden variety red sensor conscious. Both human and electronic sensor will respond similarly to identical trial sets. No need for considering mind either unless one is comparing human with such as an ideal sensor. There are physical theory and mathematics for that.

As for you explanation, explaining by selected examples don't result in definitions of material basis. They are no more than political, rational, argument.

Returning to my previous response. I see you got my message. I need precise parameters of experiments so I can relate comparisons of oxygen uptake response to similar structural processes in other process defining experiment attempts just for starters. References to material cited help. Thanks. Two types of receptors don't cut it. There may be some overall behavioral functional basis for this or that receptor type, but my understanding is that receptor types are pretty much opportunistic genetically so why they would necessarily be tied to particular behaviors is doubtful.

On the other hand I'm aware of an alerting substrate originating from the Locus Coeruleus linked to ARAS that subserves general cortical attending function that depends on a family of receptor types. So I'm amenable to an analgesic mechanism demonstration. A what relation between both responses is nice but why isn't there. No evidence for consciousness guided response. What you claimed doesn't reduce to what you quoted in the article. Coming to such generalizations as you seemed to claim seems a reach too far.

 

[fromderinside]

I meant Nobel. Age related I think. Although I've suffered from bad spelling most of my life. Otherwise .....

 

[ruby sparks]

How to eliminate need for considering consciousness.

I've been trying to think of a good analogy for the sort of approach you are describing, but I'm not sure I've come up with one. A very poor one might be to say that you can continue to live in a house without ever going into the attic, but it doesn't mean that the attic is empty. As I said, that's not a very good analogy.

My gut feeling is that by merely eliminating mind from consideration, you run the risk of only ever arriving at incomplete answers (like Mary of the famous Mary's Room, which is probably a much better architectural analogy than my attic one). I note that in 20th century psychology, behaviourists did something very similar, and then behaviourism fell out of favour.

I can see the appeal. You get to leave out the really tricky, messy part and the imprecision that goes along with saying things about it.

One can measure one's sense of redness by material based protocols in sensory experiments. Yes one is not just a blob of sponge molecules in those settings. Yet, all l that is required is that the method dictate the observer's response constraining it to whether red is seen or not seen during trials in which a suite of intensities of low energy photic stimuli of a particular value and no energy trials mixed in. From your perspective the observer is conscious. From my perspective she is just another sensor. We get consistent and replicable results which we can materially include in correctly predicting other color determining behavior just as we can by using the results from the same experiment with light sensors.

In the above consciousness does not enter into the determination of red detection unless one wants to call a garden variety red sensor conscious. Both human and electronic sensor will respond similarly to identical trial sets. No need for considering mind either unless one is comparing human with such as an ideal sensor. There are physical theory and mathematics for that.

Sure, but that's just leaving something out. You are literally 'not investigating consciousness', that's all. Which is fine, if that's not your cup of tea, but I really don't think comparing a light sensor to a human brain in that way is getting to the bottom of things. The rather large fly in that ointment is surely that the fromderinside system does have very vivid conscious experiences and it seems reasonable to assume that the light sensor has zilch.

Or, to go right back to the start of the thread, how does that set of operations tell you anything about whether redness is a brain experience and not a property of the external world? It just doesn't, er, shed any light on that question. Whether you want to answer that question or not is up to you, but suppose you did, how would your approach do it? Or would you just say 'my approach does not even go there, nor does it need to, because I am not interested in answering those sorts of questions'?

Or to put it another way, if that's what you would say, then none of the 3 claims in the OP have been undermined yet. Albeit they haven't been demonstrated to be true either.

As for you explanation, explaining by selected examples don't result in definitions of material basis. They are no more than political, rational, argument.

Returning to my previous response. I see you got my message. I need precise parameters of experiments so I can relate comparisons of oxygen uptake response to similar structural processes in other process defining experiment attempts just for starters. References to material cited help. Thanks. Two types of receptors don't cut it. There may be some overall behavioral functional basis for this or that receptor type, but my understanding is that receptor types are pretty much opportunistic genetically so why they would necessarily be tied to particular behaviors is doubtful.

On the other hand I'm aware of an alerting substrate originating from the Locus Coeruleus linked to ARAS that subserves general cortical attending function that depends on a family of receptor types. So I'm amenable to an analgesic mechanism demonstration. A what relation between both responses is nice but why isn't there. No evidence for consciousness guided response. What you claimed doesn't reduce to what you quoted in the article. Coming to such generalizations as you seemed to claim seems a reach too far.

Sadly, although I would like to and although it would be hugely engrossing and enlightening for me, and probably more interesting for you, I'm probably not going to be able to pursue this very far in that sort of detail with you (μ-opioid receptors and genetics and so on) because doing anything more than quoting snippets from studies I've read, is way above my pay grade, and may even belong in the Natural Sciences forum (where you might say I should better have posted the topic). I accept the criticism that as a result, many of the things I say are non-technical and general. But at the same time, and to somewhat cheekily lob the ball back into your court (because I'd be interested in what you might have to say), I don't have a good reason to say that thoughts do not affect brains, because although it's imprecise, there is nothing to suggest, in either anything you've said or that I've read elsewhere, that even a very finely detailed understanding of all the physical processes involved would show otherwise. That's not me being dogmatic or insisting on being right. Hey, maybe thoughts don't affect brains. To me it seems unlikely, but I'm not wedded to it.

In any case, I'm not sure how I even got onto saying such things. I suspect it's partly because discussions on anything related to consciousness tend to naturally widen into discussions about consciousness in general. Perhaps if I limited (reduced) my claims to the 3 in the OP it would be simpler. So that's what I'm going to do. What say you now (if anything), after we've digressed, about claims 1, 2A & 2B in the OP?

Claim 1: objects are not themselves coloured, they do not have colour.

Claim 2A: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

Claim 2B: Colour is a psychologically-experienced 'mental' phenomenon of consciousness only. Colour does not really exist other than in this way.

I'd assume you're probably good with claim 1.

I'm also assuming you would not go as far as to say that mind and/or consciousness literally do not exist.

You can amend or add precision to the terms used in claims 2A & 2B if you think mine are too vague (which I accept they are).

Note that I was careful enough to include in my OP that I accept this matter is unresolved.

So I'm amenable to an analgesic mechanism demonstration. A what relation between both responses is nice but why isn't there. No evidence for consciousness guided response. What you claimed doesn't reduce to what you quoted in the article. Coming to such generalizations as you seemed to claim seems a reach too far.

Just on that bit in bold, what sort of evidence would you accept, if you are omitting consciousness as a consideration from the start?

I didn't think I was looking for a why. I'm good with whats.

 

[ruby sparks]

ps

Afterthought.

'Consciousness guided'.

I'm not suggesting there's any guiding. I don't believe in free will just for starters. No, if conscious thoughts do have an effect on the brain, it happens as part of a natural, biological, physical, automatic process or processes of some sort. A bit vague, I know, but I just want to clarify about the guiding.

 

[fromderinside]

psychophysics, comparative psychology/sociobiology. Both were teaching areas of training.

The first has to do with the relation between stimulus and observer, usually human. The second has to do with understanding evolutionary evidence of genetic, physical mechanics and dynamics, arousal, emotion, sensation of living things usually in comparison with humans. Both study cognition, arousal, sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, and all those other nerve and squirt performance and capacities of living things via various forms of application of the scientific method.

A major tent of the SM is to reduce observation to one or two variables controlling (negating or keeping constant) other variables likely to intervene. So when one studies sense or percept one goes to great lengths through instruction, environment constancy and accountability,and controls of other sorts to sustain maximum emphasis on detecting or perceiving. One may be interested in consciousness. However, consistent with SM one attacks the problem by parts, looking at input, process, output, and subcategories like arousal, attending, awareness, history keeping, capacity, effort, distraction, etc.


Gathering all these and others one then sets about explaining overall, combination, pairs, situations, circumstances in other experiments in attempts to buildup a cohesive theory of human behavior that may or may not include something called consciousness. One never resorts self reporting, historical hearsay, or beliefs in determining the structure and function of behavior, human or otherwise. Imagine if one presumed Higgs Boson as something pre-existing. It would never be discovered in a quantum theory where observation becomes the index of existence. So it goes for consciousness. Presuming is not establishing.

What I'm saying is consciousness in not relevant to one's sense performance. Yes one's mental state may be something one considers when comparing one's material ideals or situation capacities and performance. We deal with that stuff separately. One doesn't go in to a placebo process study setting the experimental hypothesis as consciousness drives the whole thing. We may speculate in discussion. However discussion isn't experiment and discussion hypotheses don't resolve issues. They are simply basis for further experiment. The SM for an experiment ends in the results section with results relations to experimental hypotheses. I'v always favored studies hypotheses suggesting direction of result, one tailed statistical tests, win/lose. What ifs are for the faint of heart.

 

[ruby sparks]

psychophysics....... has to do with the relation between stimulus and observer, usually human.

One never resorts [to] self reporting......

How did you manage to do the first without doing the second?

 

[fromderinside]

Stimulus is presented on a schedule randomized across a range of stimulus levels. Observer is cued that a stimulus is coming by cueing signal through another sense modality and she is required to press a response device reporting signal or no signal when response request signal is presented.

She's reporting that she heard, saw, felt, smelled, or tasted or became aware something happened. We don't give a damn about self anything. She is just a sensor with are reporting feature. She is one of several observers run across a range of times in a location not taking into account whether feeding or shitting is likely in the near future since instructions include guidance for eating and other needs being taken prior to or scheduled after test time.

To handle such as patterns of behavior and changes in capabilities associated thereto observers can be run at all times of the day and night.

Self reporting is one giving and interpreting the signal. IOW one is not giving one anything but one being inserted in place of a sensor with response indicator with all control ceded to others.

 

[ruby sparks]

So although you consider consciousness irrelevant, and discount self-reporting of experience, you are saying that the response data in psychophysics is in the form of self-reporting of conscious experience.

 

[fromderinside]

No I don't. One being being directed to follow protocol composed of cues and tasks is no different than putting a rat or fish or salamander or ant - a little bit tricky but it has been done - in an apparatus where it is conditioned, usually by trial and error, to press a peddle to receive food. Observers receive anywhere from four hours to 200 hours training in their prescribed task prior to experimental data trials.

Would one say that after driving for whatever hours one is necessarily conscious of what one is doing moment to moment while driving after becoming proficient in the task? If you do then you have a way to high regard for what specialists call consciousness in everyday human behavior.

 

[ruby sparks]

No I don't. One being being directed to follow protocol composed of cues and tasks is no different than putting a rat or fish or salamander or ant - a little bit tricky but it has been done - in an apparatus where it is conditioned, usually by trial and error, to press a peddle to receive food. Observers receive anywhere from four hours to 200 hours training in their prescribed task prior to experimental data trials.

Would one say that after driving for whatever hours one is necessarily conscious of what one is doing moment to moment while driving after becoming proficient in the task? If you do then you have a way to high regard for what specialists call consciousness in everyday human behavior.

Sure. Even fruit flies can be conditioned, apparently. And even plants exhibit stimulus-response behaviour. It seems obvious that consciousness is not necessary in either case.

But first, I don't think that would say anything much about the role of consciousness and its associated features when they are present, and second and more importantly, I'm not sure what it has to do with what we are talking about, especially not if we are getting back to the OP.

Take pain for example. I'm sure there are a lot of ways of calibrating that in (typical) humans, but psychophysics, it seems, relies on self-reports of conscious experience in a group of human subjects. Otherwise, how is the perception of pain calibrated? Something similar could be asked about colour.

 

[fromderinside]

If you can point out a single aspect of animal conditioned behavior that that is different from a human conditioned to a protocol other than the animal is a human give me that example and we'll talk.

In reporting to a doctor one's impression of what one's pain level is using a modified Cooper-Harper format one is giving a conscious impression of what one feel is her pain level. That will be a clinical conscious experience report. It can be compared with results of aversion testing experiments.

Results in the form of behavioral response of oneself or one moving some indicator in the direction of the lessor stimulus, an aversion response, is such a test. When one is setting standard pain levels which become references for the Cooper-Harper like pain scale observers are trained to a two stimulus protocol where one stimulus is the reference and the other stimulus is the test instance.

Experimenters are forbidden to cause harm and that includes pain.

These types of test are permitted for situation in which volunteers are given stimuli up to a three or four level on normal pain scales. These are aversive, but not considered harmful.

One can also just have the observer indicate the larger or lessor obnoxious (pain inducing stimulus) one views injury by button press. It is an indirect test which is sometimes supported by tests in by doctors studying military. Again the experiment is the same as an animal would receive in an aversion conditioning experiment. Results of such experiments are used to generate a level of confidence scales for comparison with subjective responses to script description reports used by doctors.

I have already described protocols for color testing in post https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?20904-COLOUR&p=775139&viewfull=1#post775139

 

[ruby sparks]

If you can point out a single aspect of animal conditioned behavior that that is different from a human conditioned to a protocol other than the animal is a human give me that example and we'll talk.

I'm not sure why you're even asking me that. Human behaviour can be conditioned. See my previous reply regarding conditioning. I'm sure the concept of conditioning in humans (and how it compares to conditioning in other organisms) could be explored, but the thread is about perception, not conditioning.

In reporting to a doctor one's impression of what one's pain level is using a modified Cooper-Harper format one is giving a conscious impression of what one feel is her pain level. That will be a clinical conscious experience report. It can be compared with results of aversion testing experiments.

Results in the form of behavioral response of oneself or one moving some indicator in the direction of the lessor stimulus, an aversion response, is such a test. When one is setting standard pain levels which become references for the Cooper-Harper like pain scale observers are trained to a two stimulus protocol where one stimulus is the reference and the other stimulus is the test instance.

Experimenters are forbidden to cause harm and that includes pain.

These types of test are permitted for situation in which volunteers are given stimuli up to a three or four level on normal pain scales. These are aversive, but not considered harmful.

One can also just have the observer indicate the larger or lessor obnoxious (pain inducing stimulus) one views injury by button press. It is an indirect test which is sometimes supported by tests in by doctors studying military. Again the experiment is the same as an animal would receive in an aversion conditioning experiment. Results of such experiments are used to generate a level of confidence scales for comparison with subjective responses to script description reports used by doctors.

I have already described protocols for color testing in post https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?20904-COLOUR&p=775139&viewfull=1#post775139

When a person indicates, verbally or otherwise, a position on any given scale for, say, pain, or alternatively when they indicate that two 'colours' appear to match, or that a certain image is this or that brightness, those are all self-reports of conscious experience.

If anything, that, and possibly most if not all psychophysics, is support for, or is at least consistent with, the OP claims.

 

[fromderinside]

So if a bird is conditioned to compare tow photic intensities and successfully accomplishes that task it's doing it's doing it consciously? No. Of course not. It is trained to get reinforcement for using it's capability to be conditioned to do so. Since humans are fools, they'll work for grades, which they do for the opportunity to be conditioned to do the same things bird do for seeds. Not conscious in either case, just flexing a wing so to speak.

Your claim justifications were discarded with those of Wundt before the turn of the nineteenth century. The difference between self report and conditioned response is the difference I laid out in example in my previous response on pain.

Obviously you're having problem distinguishing between self initiated act and recruited act/machine response. A well trained pilot learns to reach and activate a control efficiently over many trails. She doesn't think about what she's doing when she performs the task efficiently. She just executes a learned activation response. We do learning because thinking and invoking consciousness every time we perform operations results in too many failures and never becoming proficient.

In fact some have written that we are not conscious of what we do much of the time we are awake, that learned and well conditioned activities control much of what we do during wakefulness. The work of which I'm aware come from studies of military and industrial studies on such as  Situation awareness,  Cognitive load, and well trained complex task performance