Consciousness

[ryan]

DBT, the mind has a physical property in that it is an effect of matter, but it isn't completely physical because it has no physical purpose after that. It doesn't affect anything physical. It's like a ghost, but it's a predictable ghost dependent on matter.

How do you know that consciousness is not completely physical?

Because the quality/property of what it's like to be something does not appear in any fundamental building block of matter. So far it is either non-physical or it has yet to be a discovered substance.

And back to the questions I've asked you before: what is this 'non physical?'

That's one of the 3 big questions we need to answer about consciousness. But nobody knows.

How does this 'non physical' interact with the physical?

This question is answered in the post you quoted of mine.

How does this 'non physical' explain consciousness?

Now here is the "how" question, 2nd of the 3 big questions. But nobody knows.

Why would physical chemical imbalances alter or diisrupt this 'non physical' consciousness?

This was almost the "why" question to complete the trifecta, but it is really just answerable in the "how" question.

You are now asking the right questions but to the wrong person.

 

[DBT]

How do you know that consciousness is not completely physical?

Because the quality/property of what it's like to be something does not appear in any fundamental building block of matter. So far it is either non-physical or it has yet to be a discovered substance.

There lies your problem. On the hand you say ''the quality/property of what it's like to be something does not appear in any fundamental building block of matter'' - which is a implicit claim of knowledge - ''consciousness does not appear'' as if you know how it should appear, as if you understand the physical world and the workings of the brain to make that call.

You don't.

But instead of just saying 'we don't know' you propose this 'non physical' solution as it was a real solution, as if it resolves the 'hard problem' of consciousness.

It doesn't.

Proposing an inexplicable solution does not solve anything.

What you have is a non solution.

 

[ryan]

Because the quality/property of what it's like to be something does not appear in any fundamental building block of matter. So far it is either non-physical or it has yet to be a discovered substance.

There lies your problem. On the hand you say ''the quality/property of what it's like to be something does not appear in any fundamental building block of matter'' - which is a implicit claim of knowledge - ''consciousness does not appear'' as if you know how it should appear, as if you understand the physical world and the workings of the brain to make that call.

You don't.

But instead of just saying 'we don't know' you propose this 'non physical' solution as it was a real solution, as if it resolves the 'hard problem' of consciousness.

It doesn't.

Proposing an inexplicable solution does not solve anything.

What you have is a non solution.

There are just a few kinds of particles with a few properties in the brain. Cognitive scientists have not found anything new, nor should they. What do you expect them to find some kind of mind substance that pops out of thin air when certain particles are in certain locations; that's just not going to happen.

Things that are physical interact with other physical things, of course because how else would we know they exist. They can only find physical properties because they can only use physical instruments. But how would they know what has the mental property in addition to it's physical property?

Let's say the mind is actually just charges. But then we still have a duality because we have something with the property of a charge but then also the mental property. The mental property stems from the idea that it is like something to be the charges here but not the exact same charges over there in Australia (subjectivity). This gives a non-physical property to them. The charges would have 2 properties: subjectivity and an EM field.

 

[DBT]

Let's say the mind is actually just charges. But then we still have a duality because we have something with the property of a charge but then also the mental property.

Not necessarily. Mental properties may be something that forms from a combination of complex physical interactions, similar to pixel patterns forming images, therefore there being no substance duality. Certainly not the proposed non physical/physical consciousness duality. Which as I pointed out is even more inexplicable than the thing you are trying to explain.

 

[untermensche]

If we can detect something we give it the honorific "physical". Like gravity. We can't see it but we have evidence it exists.

If we believe something does not exist we negate and say it is non-physical.

But that is merely some faith.

There may possibly be things that exist that we have no way to detect.

But this is unlikely in an evolving brain.

It might be able to make use of undiscovered quantum effects, but how it could make use of something we can't detect is difficult to explain except as sheer chance.

Is that involved in evolution?

 

[PyramidHead]

Just what it says. The effect is not identical to its cause. It has several notable properties that are lacking in its cause.

If consciousness is an electrochemical activity, as it appears to be, then it is identical in composition but different in form, patterns of firings, information recognition processing.

Aye. But if all we can say with any confidence is that consciousness is the result of electrochemical activity, we cannot make that assumption. If we're talking about appearances, the subjective experience of consciousness feels nothing at all like electrochemical activity. It feels like whatever is being experienced at the time. Thus it may be overreaching to say consciousness appears to BE electrochemical activity.

Just like the pixel patterns on a screen that pictures and other systems form sounds, the brain interprets its own signals from its eyes as patterns of firing forming 'pictures' of the external world and pressure wave information via ears as sounds.

But where are these pixels? In the case of a screen, I can point to them. With the right program, I can even zoom in and distinguish individual pixels. They are tangible, publicly observable entities with a definite location in space. The same cannot be said of the smell of burning rubber. No examination of the microscopic rubber particles that enter my nostrils, nor of the receptors on my nostrils themselves, will ever reveal the actual smell of burning rubber. No external observation of the entire olfactory process, taking every detail into account, will yield the actual sensation. Which is why I have to call bullshit when you say:

The qualities of conscious experience are different but still composed of the same stuff, brain matter and brain activity.

1. It's incoherent to say something is 'composed of' activity. Activity isn't a substance. Nothing is made of action.

2. That just leaves brain matter. If you honestly believe that the smell of burning rubber is actually made of neurons and their connective tissues, you should be able to find it somewhere in the brain. You should be able to isolate this slimy object, put it on a microscope slide, and say "here is the smell of burning rubber." Do you not see how ridiculous that sounds?

We have some understanding of physics, matter energy characteristics, principles, etc....but we have no understanding of what 'non material' means.

At the moment it's just undefinable term for an undetectable proposition.

I agree, hence I try to avoid the terms 'material' and 'physical' as much as I can because I don't think they mean anything in opposition to 'non-material' etc. There is only what can be experienced, directly or indirectly. Whatever we choose to call its constituent parts is just a linguistic convenience. We have names for the particles that make up the objects of our experience, but none for experience itself. It's irrelevant whether we call one physical and the other not, or say both are made of the same anomalous substance whose complete nature we have yet to grasp.

All that matters for the purposes of this conversation is the logical relationship of identity and non-identity. For two things to be identical they must have all the same properties, and only those properties. In such a case, we can say they are not two things, but just one and the same thing, without needing to comment on what it's made of or if it's material or whatever. The final word on qualia is simply the inverse proposition: regardless of what metaphysical position one chooses to adopt, it is an unavoidable fact that subjective phenomena are not identical to anything we have so far found in the brain. Can we at least agree on that point?

 

[untermensche]

The brain "creates" experiences that have nothing to do with the stimulations that initiate the "creation".

Smell is one example.

Smell is something like color and sound that only exist as an experience.

No molecule or group of molecules has a smell or color or sound.

You need something that can experience to have a smell.

 

[fromderinside]

I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, you'd drop that foam you've been proposing .....

the mind has a physical property in that it is an effect of matter, but it isn't completely physical because it has no physical purpose after that. It doesn't affect anything physical. It's like a ghost, but it's a predictable ghost dependent on matter.

.... and come back to providing something that isn't already explained. Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of what the physical brain has processed and a very poor one at that which seems to be an ongoing attempt to sustain an arena where it has social relevance. That is in the world of staying fit it finds and articulates positions that might help doing so. Consciousness, at best, is a recapitulation of parts of what the human nervous system has coded about itself and its surroundings. Making something that begins as subvocalizations, articulations of what has passed into some 'thing' is just preposterous. Even if one just reduces consciousness to a visual memory stream, it is something regurgitated from what has already been passed through by the individual nervous system within the being in which it exists.

There is nothing new here. No aura, no field, no substance, nothing new at all. Just a brain doing work (metabolizing in accordance with what has been input through to what is output).

In summary there is no place for philosophy here because philosophy only handles belief.

 

[untermensche]

Blue is nothing but experience.

The light energy that causes a brain to create it isn't blue.

The activity of cells is not blue.

Blue is an experience.

Something very new.

 

[ryan]

Let's say the mind is actually just charges. But then we still have a duality because we have something with the property of a charge but then also the mental property.

Not necessarily. Mental properties may be something that forms from a combination of complex physical interactions, similar to pixel patterns forming images, therefore there being no substance duality. Certainly not the proposed non physical/physical consciousness duality. Which as I pointed out is even more inexplicable than the thing you are trying to explain.

Pixels forming on a screen is like taking some rocks on the ground and moving them around to form an image. For a new rock arrangement, there is nothing there that wasn't there before. The emergence from these rocks is in our minds because the mind has a mysterious "wholeness" to what it observes. Out there the rocks are always individual; they are never a whole like the holistic projection we get in our mind. This is the "unity problem" which is under the "what" and "how" general questions.

 

[fromderinside]

Not new at all. Blue is a combination of receiving pigments and aligned pathways to particular receptors in the brain, more or less fixed before birth through genetic decoding. If experience shapes all that then I accept your declaration. Since it doesn't, philosophers get out of the way and let experiment resolve the actual phenomena, or, admit you are playing parlor games with what you can't believe of fathom.

 

[ryan]

I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, you'd drop that foam you've been proposing .....

the mind has a physical property in that it is an effect of matter, but it isn't completely physical because it has no physical purpose after that. It doesn't affect anything physical. It's like a ghost, but it's a predictable ghost dependent on matter.

.... and come back to providing something that isn't already explained. Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of what the physical brain has processed and a very poor one at that which seems to be an ongoing attempt to sustain an arena where it has social relevance.

What I am about to say may seem like I am trying to catch you in a semantic trap, but I assure you I am not.

You say, "Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of ...". That's it; that's where I am at with all of this. It's an abstraction of a physical process; that's the handcuffed ghost in the machine. The abstraction emerges, or is integrated within particles already, from the brain, "from" being the key word here. The abstraction is a non-physical thing. Whether this is right or wrong, it is where everyone is truly at when they really work it out. It is the best option given with what science and philosophy has given us.

That is in the world of staying fit it finds and articulates positions that might help doing so. Consciousness, at best, is a recapitulation of parts of what the human nervous system has coded about itself and its surroundings. Making something that begins as subvocalizations, articulations of what has passed into some 'thing' is just preposterous. Even if one just reduces consciousness to a visual memory stream, it is something regurgitated from what has already been passed through by the individual nervous system within the being in which it exists.

The mind may have only emerged (I hate emergence) at a very recent point in evolution.

 

[fromderinside]

What I am about to say may seem like I am trying to catch you in a semantic trap, but I assure you I am not.

You say, "Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of ...". That's it; that's where I am at with all of this. It's an abstraction of a physical process; that's the handcuffed ghost in the machine. The abstraction emerges, or is integrated within particles already, from the brain, "from" being the key word here. The abstraction is a non-physical thing. Whether this is right or wrong, it is where everyone is truly at when they really work it out. It is the best option given with what science and philosophy has given us.




The mind may have only emerged (I hate emergence) at a very recent point in evolution.

You need to find something other than consciousness as particle. Consciousness, as we usually experience it is articulation or visual replay. The only reason we need an explanation for that is we are arrogant SOBs who think we are different.

Sharks have visual experience of other, which may be near the first consciousness. It was related to a visual system that could separate objects that was tied to acting attributes of NS with effector systems permitting it to pursue said objects.

We can form sentences and paragraphs, we can compare the visual with the auditory among other things, and our memory is spooky. Still our consciousness is as physically constrained as is that of the shark. That particle you are playing De Soto about is just a process being executed that is more or less hard wired. NO need for further expaination since such can only take us backward from what we now know about us.

I Know he's a bit dated now but looking at Jon Dylan Haynes work around 2010 will get you more or less up to speed.

 

[ryan]

What I am about to say may seem like I am trying to catch you in a semantic trap, but I assure you I am not.

You say, "Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of ...". That's it; that's where I am at with all of this. It's an abstraction of a physical process; that's the handcuffed ghost in the machine. The abstraction emerges, or is integrated within particles already, from the brain, "from" being the key word here. The abstraction is a non-physical thing. Whether this is right or wrong, it is where everyone is truly at when they really work it out. It is the best option given with what science and philosophy has given us.




The mind may have only emerged (I hate emergence) at a very recent point in evolution.

You need to find something other than consciousness as particle. Consciousness, as we usually experience it is articulation or visual replay. The only reason we need an explanation for that is we are arrogant SOBs who think we are different.

Sharks have visual experience of other, which may be near the first consciousness. It was related to a visual system that could separate objects that was tied to acting attributes of NS with effector systems permitting it to pursue said objects.

We can form sentences and paragraphs, we can compare the visual with the auditory among other things, and our memory is spooky. Still our consciousness is as physically constrained as is that of the shark. That particle you are playing De Soto about is just a process being executed that is more or less hard wired. NO need for further expaination since such can only take us backward from what we now know about us.

I Know he's a bit dated now but looking at Jon Dylan Haynes work around 2010 will get you more or less up to speed.

Yes, physically constrained, we can agree on that. But what is this mental reflection that is physically constrained is the big question.

There are physical properties. But then these physical properties also have a very real mental property; you can't deny this. Does it emerge or is it fundamental to some or all kinds of matter?

 

[PyramidHead]

I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, you'd drop that foam you've been proposing .....

the mind has a physical property in that it is an effect of matter, but it isn't completely physical because it has no physical purpose after that. It doesn't affect anything physical. It's like a ghost, but it's a predictable ghost dependent on matter.

.... and come back to providing something that isn't already explained. Consciousness isn't the addition of anything. It's an abstraction of what the physical brain has processed and a very poor one at that which seems to be an ongoing attempt to sustain an arena where it has social relevance. That is in the world of staying fit it finds and articulates positions that might help doing so. Consciousness, at best, is a recapitulation of parts of what the human nervous system has coded about itself and its surroundings. Making something that begins as subvocalizations, articulations of what has passed into some 'thing' is just preposterous. Even if one just reduces consciousness to a visual memory stream, it is something regurgitated from what has already been passed through by the individual nervous system within the being in which it exists.

There is nothing new here. No aura, no field, no substance, nothing new at all. Just a brain doing work (metabolizing in accordance with what has been input through to what is output).

In summary there is no place for philosophy here because philosophy only handles belief.

What you seem to be describing is a brain that provides information about its environment to the organism. A crude abstraction of reality produced by filtering particles of light or vibrations of air through a series of electrochemical detectors and transmitters, the end result of which is data about some event. I get that aspect just fine. But you're being disingenuous if you expect me to believe your experience of a bird chirping is merely information about the fact that a bird is chirping. That can be gained without hearing anything at all. No, apart from the informational content there is what it is like to hear a bird chirping, an experience that seems to be superfluous with regard to whatever information it may convey.

One could imagine the vibrations produced by a bird call reaching the eardrum and sending an electrochemical signal through the brain, resulting in the organism now being aware that a bird is chirping, without any phenomenal/subjective element occurring in the mind. The organism would simply gain the bare, featureless datum that a bird is chirping and go about its business. But this is not what actually happens. For some reason, alongside the zaps happening in the skull, there comes an actual audible sensation that need not be there at all. I don't believe you when you say this sensation is just the information conveyed by the zaps, or just the movement of currents in a damp place inside my head. Something is clearly being left out of that description.

 

[ryan]

Fromderinside, I read the findings of one of John-Dylan Haynes' papers in 2010 and ironically, he shines a light on just how strange selective awareness is, from the quote,

"This suggests that neural evaluation of products and associated choice-related processing does not necessarily depend on attentional processing of available items.".

By "attention" I think "awareness" was what was meant. Anyways, the very idea that we are aware of certain incoming information and the processes of such but not aware of other incoming information and the processes, really isolate the idea of subjective experiences.

Do you see how being aware of some something versus not being aware of something which results in, say, a decision is quite strange? I mean did we have to be aware of any of it? What is so special about the matter that gave us this awareness versus the matter that did not have the awareness?

 

[Juma]

And you are clueless as usual. Emergence is all about behaviour. When are you ever going to learn.

Everything has behavior, so when aren't things emerging then? But you know that I am talking about "hard" emergence, not things like behaviors and other obvious kinds of emergence.

Come back when you have stopped playing silly.

 

[ryan]

Everything has behavior, so when aren't things emerging then? But you know that I am talking about "hard" emergence, not things like behaviors and other obvious kinds of emergence.

Come back when you have stopped playing silly.

Four dots can emerge a square, or straight line, or etc. But nothing was added, and especially nothing as real as a mind.

 

[Treedbear]

...
What you seem to be describing is a brain that provides information about its environment to the organism. A crude abstraction of reality produced by filtering particles of light or vibrations of air through a series of electrochemical detectors and transmitters, the end result of which is data about some event. I get that aspect just fine. But you're being disingenuous if you expect me to believe your experience of a bird chirping is merely information about the fact that a bird is chirping. That can be gained without hearing anything at all. No, apart from the informational content there is what it is like to hear a bird chirping, an experience that seems to be superfluous with regard to whatever information it may convey.

One could imagine the vibrations produced by a bird call reaching the eardrum and sending an electrochemical signal through the brain, resulting in the organism now being aware that a bird is chirping, without any phenomenal/subjective element occurring in the mind. The organism would simply gain the bare, featureless datum that a bird is chirping and go about its business. But this is not what actually happens. For some reason, alongside the zaps happening in the skull, there comes an actual audible sensation that need not be there at all. I don't believe you when you say this sensation is just the information conveyed by the zaps, or just the movement of currents in a damp place inside my head. Something is clearly being left out of that description.

I'm increasingly open to the idea that it is just composed of an assortment of "zaps" of information. That is, it's about how various information comes to be related. When I close my eyes and imagine a slice of watermelon I see something that's composed of red and green and white with some little black specs. But it's missing the vibrancy or something. Maybe you can see bright colors behind your closed eyes, but I don't. I know what should be there. But I only know this from learned experience. I recall the associated colors. Probably by how they relate to many other experiences of these colors. But I don't get the full experience of red, green or white until I open my eyes and get that additional zap from my senses. Not to mention that this zap has been subjected to substantial filtering through expectations based on the context of the scene. What it comes down to is that whatever the sensation of color or sound or smell is, it probably would lack any quality we would call experience without the ability to correlate it with past experience. It seems to me that when a baby first opens its eyes what it sees is a flood of stimulation that's probably meaningless at first. Only gradually does the brain figure out what patterns go together.

 

[fromderinside]

Haynes: "This suggests that neural evaluation of products and associated choice-related processing does not necessarily depend on attentional processing of available items.".

By "attention" I think "awareness" was what was meant. Anyways, the very idea that we are aware of certain incoming information and the processes of such but not aware of other incoming information and the processes, really isolate the idea of subjective experiences.

Do you see how being aware of some something versus not being aware of something which results in, say, a decision is quite strange? I mean did we have to be aware of any of it? What is so special about the matter that gave us this awareness versus the matter that did not have the awareness?

No ryan. Haynes meant attentional. Attending is the head point in a direction click or flash. Awareness is consciousness. So we attend to everything primed for us to attend, We become aware of stuff that fits ongoing developing scenarios being developed.

Life isn't as complex as you seem want to make it.