Consciousness

[DBT]

Do you guys and/or gals bother to click on the links Ryan is providing? L O T S of good stuff to read there, and not just from some hacks, but from scientists.

Click this one here:

https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christ...consciousness/

Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science...

Not just some quack armchair theorist, ey? It seems like all you guys and/or dolls want to do is handwave and deny, rather than investigate.

WTF are you people afraid of?

THAT's the thing that I wonder about the most.


***


Someone will type:

"Ignorance", or some such, as if that answers anything.

***

Thinking, and even (Oh heaven forbid!) speculating, are what got humans where they are today, not sitting back, being convinced you know all you need to know, and pooh-pooing anyone with a bit of audacity, imagination, and courage.

Cowardice got humanity exactly nowhere.

Clicked on the link and got the message ''page not found''

I don't know what we are supposed to be afraid of.

Is Christof Koch supposed to be the final word on the nature and source of consciousness?

Anyone can post links.

 

[Juma]

Do you guys and/or gals bother to click on the links Ryan is providing? L O T S of good stuff to read there, and not just from some hacks, but from scientists.

Click this one here:

https://www.wired.com/2013/11/christ...consciousness/

Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science...

Not just some quack armchair theorist, ey? It seems like all you guys and/or dolls want to do is handwave and deny, rather than investigate.

WTF are you people afraid of?

THAT's the thing that I wonder about the most.


***


Someone will type:

"Ignorance", or some such, as if that answers anything.

***

Thinking, and even (Oh heaven forbid!) speculating, are what got humans where they are today, not sitting back, being convinced you know all you need to know, and pooh-pooing anyone with a bit of audacity, imagination, and courage.

Cowardice got humanity exactly nowhere.

Not following the evidence is what got bright thinkers exactly nowhere.
All these fancy speculations are totally needless. We need to focus at the evidence: how do the brain work.

Everything else is just wanking.

 

[fromderinside]

Everything else is just wanking.

I know. I know. I'm 76 and I still need to wank now and again.

 

[ryan]

Well you obviously like it. Good to like things I guess. I'll never be able to incorporate panpsychism. Thought I could use it but I don't even like how it sounds when I say it. I listened to part of a book and read dozens of pages that were honestly more informative than the Goddamn book. It is too much. You can't know this. I'm not saying you can't know this. I'm saying that you can't know this.

Asking why you can't is probably more important than thinking that you can. You need a whole new language and a thousand years of thinkers typing into little boxes. By then I guess typing would be irrelevant. Alas they figure out consciousness completely... and immediately destroy their work, because the truth of the matter destroys all supposed matter. Do you get my point?

No, I don't. You lost me.

 

[ryan]

Clicked on the link and got the message ''page not found''

I don't know what we are supposed to be afraid of.

Is Christof Koch supposed to be the final word on the nature and source of consciousness?

Anyone can post links.

Try the link I gave you.

 

[PyramidHead]

Panpsychism explains this quite elegantly. It says that the plane and the cloud are just two properties of the same object. Every water molecule carried a little piece of the plane. There is simply a mental quality to all or some kinds of the fundamental particles of the universe.

That doesn't sound like panpsychism, it sounds like dual-aspect monism or property dualism. I guess labels aren't as important as what is being said, and in any case I could be wrong about my nomenclature.

So the good thing about this explanation is that there doesn't need to be an emergence or genesis of consciousness. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, "This form of the genetic argument turns on the assumption that evolution is a continuous process that moulds pre-existing properties into more complex forms but which can not produce “entirely novel” properties.". In other words, why would such a novel thing like the consciousness suddenly appear from just more of the same kinds of stuff/matter?

Since we all evolved from single-celled organisms, there are quite obviously many properties that were not moulded from our original template. Evolution is all about the emergence of entirely novel properties (such as respiration, flight, binocular vision, and language) from simple beginnings that completely lack these properties. You might as well ask how something so novel as the plumage of a peacock could appear just from a bacterium undergoing replication over a finite period of time. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that something like a bacterium was an ancestor of the peacock.

 

[ryan]

So the good thing about this explanation is that there doesn't need to be an emergence or genesis of consciousness. As Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, "This form of the genetic argument turns on the assumption that evolution is a continuous process that moulds pre-existing properties into more complex forms but which can not produce “entirely novel” properties.". In other words, why would such a novel thing like the consciousness suddenly appear from just more of the same kinds of stuff/matter?

That doesn't sound like panpsychism, it sounds like dual-aspect monism or property dualism. I guess labels aren't as important as what is being said, and in any case I could be wrong about my nomenclature.

Panpsychism is really just the idea that everything or a kind of fundamental matter has consciousness. But conscious matter or not there are these physical properties that are hard to deny. Chalmers talks for one minute about how panpsychism has aspects of duality and materialism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSmfhc_8gew .

Since we all evolved from single-celled organisms, there are quite obviously many properties that were not moulded from our original template. Evolution is all about the emergence of entirely novel properties (such as respiration, flight, binocular vision, and language) from simple beginnings that completely lack these properties. You might as well ask how something so novel as the plumage of a peacock could appear just from a bacterium undergoing replication over a finite period of time. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that something like a bacterium was an ancestor of the peacock.

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

 

[PyramidHead]

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

That analogy only goes as far as the part I bolded. Unless you choose to remain ignorant, we already know how novel properties can emerge from parts that lack those properties. I agree that the emergence of minds from brains is not understood, but it's not like emergence per se is a great mystery that needs solving. Most of science doesn't make sense unless you acknowledge that the whole has properties that are not found in its parts.

 

[Juma]

That doesn't sound like panpsychism, it sounds like dual-aspect monism or property dualism. I guess labels aren't as important as what is being said, and in any case I could be wrong about my nomenclature.

Panpsychism is really just the idea that everything or a kind of fundamental matter has consciousness. But conscious matter or not there are these physical properties that are hard to deny. Chalmers talks for one minute about how panpsychism has aspects of duality and materialism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSmfhc_8gew .

Since we all evolved from single-celled organisms, there are quite obviously many properties that were not moulded from our original template. Evolution is all about the emergence of entirely novel properties (such as respiration, flight, binocular vision, and language) from simple beginnings that completely lack these properties. You might as well ask how something so novel as the plumage of a peacock could appear just from a bacterium undergoing replication over a finite period of time. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that something like a bacterium was an ancestor of the peacock.

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

You are severly closed for trying to be open...

 

[ryan]

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

That analogy only goes as far as the part I bolded.

LOL!

Unless you choose to remain ignorant, we already know how novel properties can emerge from parts that lack those properties. I agree that the emergence of minds from brains is not understood, but it's not like emergence per se is a great mystery that needs solving. Most of science doesn't make sense unless you acknowledge that the whole has properties that are not found in its parts.

These particles are only changing positions in space; what is emerging outside of the mind??? I understand that if you take a line of particles and put them into a square formation that a square emerges. It emerges in my mind, but out there there is nothing added ontologically. We still have the same exact particles in a space.

Now the mind is a truly emergent thing out there. Presumably others have minds too, but why/how? Isn't it just easier to say that the mind is already a property of some or all kinds fundamental particles.

 

[ryan]

Panpsychism is really just the idea that everything or a kind of fundamental matter has consciousness. But conscious matter or not there are these physical properties that are hard to deny. Chalmers talks for one minute about how panpsychism has aspects of duality and materialism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSmfhc_8gew .

Since we all evolved from single-celled organisms, there are quite obviously many properties that were not moulded from our original template. Evolution is all about the emergence of entirely novel properties (such as respiration, flight, binocular vision, and language) from simple beginnings that completely lack these properties. You might as well ask how something so novel as the plumage of a peacock could appear just from a bacterium undergoing replication over a finite period of time. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that something like a bacterium was an ancestor of the peacock.

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

You are severly closed for trying to be open...

Juma, this isn't just me saying this; it's the main problem with emergentism. It might be the way it is, but it is deeply unsettling.

"Although examples of higher level properties which are not identical to lower order properties are easy to find, examples where they are not reducible to or predicable from their bases are more controversial."

From wiki , I don't know who said this, but doesn't the latter part make sense Juma?

 

[another1]

ryan, water remembers things. A single drop has 446 information panels. How many drops can an ocean on the planets surface have? My figures say all information in what we currently believe is a universe. Explains part of your panpsychist things there, if you can count every drop of water on (and inside) the planet and multiply that by 446. That would take a long time but hey I'd support your cause because it would be more about raising awareness. People should know how sensitive water is.

Someone told me I could DIE if I drank water the wrong way. If I think about zombies while drinking water, the water will damage my body, and also damage the word due to the zombie information carrying over to the river and eventually the ocean- then back to some unlucky organism born with zombie traits.

Eventually real zombies could start stalking because we convinced our water that it is natural for zombies to exist. In a thousand years we may be full-on zombie, assuming water doesn't find another way to kill us by then. A thousand years is a ridiculous number but that is how long it would take for water to change our physiology as a backlash from our own corrupted thoughts.

I'm not committed to the idea fully but water does have at least short memory they say. If one drop can have a short memory, it can probably sustain all memories as an ocean. One drop may only be able to carry a zombie thought for a few feet, but your body is made of water, so the zombie information wouldn't go away until you pee. Then the pee will infect the toilet, pipes, creeks...

I was told you can even defluoridate city water using only the power of your mind. Haven't seen it tested but you can probably do it this evening and get back to me on that.

 

[Juma]

Panpsychism is really just the idea that everything or a kind of fundamental matter has consciousness. But conscious matter or not there are these physical properties that are hard to deny. Chalmers talks for one minute about how panpsychism has aspects of duality and materialism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSmfhc_8gew .

Since we all evolved from single-celled organisms, there are quite obviously many properties that were not moulded from our original template. Evolution is all about the emergence of entirely novel properties (such as respiration, flight, binocular vision, and language) from simple beginnings that completely lack these properties. You might as well ask how something so novel as the plumage of a peacock could appear just from a bacterium undergoing replication over a finite period of time. Yet, it is an indisputable fact that something like a bacterium was an ancestor of the peacock.

Imagine that you don't know anything at all about chemistry, molecules, physics, etc. You walk into an ice village exhibit. The first thing you see are a few cubes of ice all the same size. Then you see more amazing things like birds and castles with liquid water moats and even an isolated snow storm blowing onto carved out ice palm trees. All of this richness is created from virtually identical pieces h2o molecules, but each with no new/novel intrinsic properties.

The 8 particles that make up the h2o molecules (up, down quarks, z,w,h bosons, electrons, gluons) of that ice village is what makes up practically everything we see in the universe.

The point is that the quote that I quoted from SEP is really saying that nothing new should emerge such as a consciousness. There is no reason why these particles should produce something beyond their own properties. That's why panpsychism/dualism (epiphenomenalism or parallelism) is so appealing to me and I suppose others.

You are severly closed for trying to be open...

Juma, this isn't just me saying this; it's the main problem with emergentism. It might be the way it is, but it is deeply unsettling.

"Although examples of higher level properties which are not identical to lower order properties are easy to find, examples where they are not reducible to or predicable from their bases are more controversial."

From wiki , I don't know who said this, but doesn't the latter part make sense Juma?

Maybe, but in way is it applicable? What the brain does is probably very predictable when you have all info. So I dont say anything against that.
Conciousness is weird. But the only way is to follow the evidence. I believe (!) that if we do, what we find will be mindblowing and something noone thougt of.
And following generations will laugh at all our silly predictions.
Including this.

 

[Juma]

ryan, water remembers things. A single drop has 446 information panels. How many drops can an ocean on the planets surface have? My figures say all information in what we currently believe is a universe. Explains part of your panpsychist things there, if you can count every drop of water on (and inside) the planet and multiply that by 446. That would take a long time but hey I'd support your cause because it would be more about raising awareness. People should know how sensitive water is.

Someone told me I could DIE if I drank water the wrong way. If I think about zombies while drinking water, the water will damage my body, and also damage the word due to the zombie information carrying over to the river and eventually the ocean- then back to some unlucky organism born with zombie traits.

Eventually real zombies could start stalking because we convinced our water that it is natural for zombies to exist. In a thousand years we may be full-on zombie, assuming water doesn't find another way to kill us by then. A thousand years is a ridiculous number but that is how long it would take for water to change our physiology as a backlash from our own corrupted thoughts.

I'm not committed to the idea fully but water does have at least short memory they say. If one drop can have a short memory, it can probably sustain all memories as an ocean. One drop may only be able to carry a zombie thought for a few feet, but your body is made of water, so the zombie information wouldn't go away until you pee. Then the pee will infect the toilet, pipes, creeks...

I was told you can even defluoridate city water using only the power of your mind. Haven't seen it tested but you can probably do it this evening and get back to me on that.

However entertaining these post of yours are... this is a forum for philosophy, not poetry.

 

[ryan]

ryan, water remembers things. A single drop has 446 information panels. How many drops can an ocean on the planets surface have? My figures say all information in what we currently believe is a universe. Explains part of your panpsychist things there, if you can count every drop of water on (and inside) the planet and multiply that by 446. That would take a long time but hey I'd support your cause because it would be more about raising awareness. People should know how sensitive water is.

Someone told me I could DIE if I drank water the wrong way. If I think about zombies while drinking water, the water will damage my body, and also damage the word due to the zombie information carrying over to the river and eventually the ocean- then back to some unlucky organism born with zombie traits.

Eventually real zombies could start stalking because we convinced our water that it is natural for zombies to exist. In a thousand years we may be full-on zombie, assuming water doesn't find another way to kill us by then. A thousand years is a ridiculous number but that is how long it would take for water to change our physiology as a backlash from our own corrupted thoughts.

I'm not committed to the idea fully but water does have at least short memory they say. If one drop can have a short memory, it can probably sustain all memories as an ocean. One drop may only be able to carry a zombie thought for a few feet, but your body is made of water, so the zombie information wouldn't go away until you pee. Then the pee will infect the toilet, pipes, creeks...

I was told you can even defluoridate city water using only the power of your mind. Haven't seen it tested but you can probably do it this evening and get back to me on that.

Are you talking about information theory? I think it was Seth Lloyd that said that the entire universe is a quantum computer processing its own evolution. If I remember correctly, he also said that the air in a balloon has so many bits of information (information entropy) that it would take a computer the size of our solar system to store the information.

 

[ryan]

Maybe, but in way is it applicable? What the brain does is probably very predictable when you have all info. So I dont say anything against that.
Conciousness is weird.

It's applicable to explain what we are, especially as we approach technological possibilities like downloading our information. Will it be me if I get a new body? Will transporting my body transport my personal identity of my mind?

But the only way is to follow the evidence.

I don't think evidence is going to help us much more. We practically know the main correlations; any more details would just fill in the gaps.

This is just a different kind of problem because of the nature of the consciousness.

 

[Juma]

It's applicable to explain what we are, especially as we approach technological possibilities like downloading our information. Will it be me if I get a new body? Will transporting my body transport my personal identity of my mind?

But the only way is to follow the evidence.

I don't think evidence is going to help us much more. We practically know the main correlations; any more details would just fill in the gaps.

This is just a different kind of problem because of the nature of the consciousness.

No it isnt. The problem with anektodical evidence only bames more acute than ever.

 

[ryan]

It's applicable to explain what we are, especially as we approach technological possibilities like downloading our information. Will it be me if I get a new body? Will transporting my body transport my personal identity of my mind?


I don't think evidence is going to help us much more. We practically know the main correlations; any more details would just fill in the gaps.

This is just a different kind of problem because of the nature of the consciousness.

No it isnt. The problem with anektodical evidence only bames more acute than ever.

I don't know what you are saying here, but what happens when we have a full model of the brain and a full "set" of correlations to mental states? Where would we go from there; where could we go from there?

 

[Juma]

No it isnt. The problem with anektodical evidence only bames more acute than ever.

I don't know what you are saying here, but what happens when we have a full model of the brain and a full "set" of correlations to mental states? Where would we go from there; where could we go from there?

What is "a full set of correlations to mental states" mean? You wouldnt search for "a full set of states" when investigating how a computer works. That is impossible and not interesting. What we need is to map how information flows in the brain.
And that is enogh work for many many personyears...
IF, and only if, we have fully mapped how the brain works but still not seen anything explaining the inner theater, THEN we have a problem to solve. But as it stands now? No, we have too little information to even speculate.

 

[DBT]

Clicked on the link and got the message ''page not found''

I don't know what we are supposed to be afraid of.

Is Christof Koch supposed to be the final word on the nature and source of consciousness?

Anyone can post links.

Try the link I gave you.

Links are not really useful when it comes to the interpretation of this information by the poster...you in this instance.

You need to provide the information that you believe supports your claims so that we can see what you mean and how you interpret what you read, and not just look at links.