Downward Causation: Useful or Misguided Idea?

[ruby sparks]

Yet the available evidence supports the proposition that consciousness is an activity of a brain, albeit a mental representation of the world and self that is based on information acquired from multiple sources.....

Yes, and the available evidence supports the proposition that waves are an activity of water molecules. That doesn't mean that waves are also just illusions. If you go down that path, then you are also going to have to admit that brains, too, are illusions, because brains are ultimately an activity of neurons, which are an activity of molecules, atoms, and electrons, etc., etc...

I don't quite understand how anyone could say that consciousness doesn't exist, but perhaps when someone says that, they are referring to self consciousness, because I could see how the self is an illusion. Even then, that couldn't be an illusion in the sense of the experience not existing, but it could be an illusion in the sense that the phenomenon is misinterpreted.

If you experience a phantom limb, your brain is possibly misinterpreting signals, etc. There is the real experience of a limb, but no actual limb.

 

[untermensche]

I could see how the self is an illusion

This is hysterical.

"I" can see this and that.

Yet "I" do not exist.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Interesting optical illusion. Stare fixedly at the centre of the image, without moving your gaze, and the colours gradually fade away:

View attachment 15582

The colours are always there on the screen, the visual information is entering your eyes and you are conscious, but your brain stops paying attention (apparently)

Interesting optical illusion. Stare fixedly at the centre of the image, without moving your gaze, and the colours gradually fade away:

View attachment 15582

The colours are always there on the screen, the visual information is entering your eyes and you are conscious, but your brain stops paying attention (apparently)

It's a bit more complicated than that and has a bit to do with the structure of the eyes, which are what are doing most of the getting 'bored'. Almost all the cones, the ones that detect colour, are in the fovea and actually only detect an area the size of your thumbnail at arm's length. The eye is really set up to work through saccading, that is flicking around testing the rolling model and focussing on points that vary from the rolling model: movement, vaguely detected gradients, edges and so one. For movement, edge and gradient detection google 'Mexican Hat' to get an idea of the class of processing strategy going on. It doesn't work so well when standing still. Movement, edges, contrast and unexpectedness are all popular things to detect and saccade to, that is, point and focus (the very act of focussing works with the information from the information from the eye to confirm at what distance maximum detail (differences between activations on the foveal surface will be greatest when the light is focussed) is achieved . However, stop saccading and you have a image that lacks anything to hold onto and two things happen (or rather one thing happens at multiple levels. From a bottom up perspective all you can remotely cleary see in any detail is that thumbnail. As the image holds still, the receptors and neurons treat that near static pattern as having an increasingly high noise to signal ratio, dropping firing threshold values in the hope of picking up increasingly vague information in the absence of precise information. This trades accuracy and precision for dragging the least bit of signal to noise . As there isn't much information there to glean while attention is being held, you notice any spots or smears on your monitor around the direct foveal area (because it takes a lot of practice to absolutely eliminate saccading and so there will be subconscious micro saccading increasing the area being viewed slightly. As the activation levels get to the point where sod all will cause a receptor to fire and random effects really start to become significant, the image will wash out because there will be more 'voting' going on, some of it quite random. This is why, while fading, it fades intensely.

Meanwhile, from the other direction, the brain, leaning forward into the signal will initially throw in resources at an unexpected image; one that has very fuzzy gradients, no movement, no edges and unexpected and soft pallet colours. However, as this signal fails to actually do anything interesting the brain will slowly default back to the default assumption that such an image will usually be a consistent field of not much. Unexpectedness is great, but unexpectedness that doesn't deliver is worth defaulting back to what it would usually be as most odd images that don't deliver over time are errors.

Put the two together and it's not so unexpected. Obviously I've picked on several specific levels of description, you could drop down and talk about agonists, antagonists, recovery time and so on, but it's more interesting to talk about the effect than the mechanism.

I started this last nioght and have been riding herd on four kids all day, so this is a fast end without reading the thread. I hope it's still relevant.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I could see how the self is an illusion

This is hysterical.

"I" can see this and that.

Yet "I" do not exist.

Yup, that's what the phrase 'user illusion' means. See also fractional reserve banking, money and beliefs.

 

[Subsymbolic]

The colours are always there on the screen, the visual information is entering your eyes and you are conscious, but your brain stops paying attention (apparently)

The visual experience is mostly brain dependent.

But a person can change the perspective of a Necker cube at will.

With their mind and nothing else.

View attachment 15584

And here's where your failure to grasp of the Easy Problem of consciousness leaves you wide open.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749649/

(for example)

That's nice and objective...

 

[Subsymbolic]

Interesting optical illusion. Stare fixedly at the centre of the image, without moving your gaze, and the colours gradually fade away:

View attachment 15582

The colours are always there on the screen, the visual information is entering your eyes and you are conscious, but your brain stops paying attention (apparently)

That is a clever optical illusion. Of course, it has something to do with the foreground/background effect that we impose on perceptions. That is what allows us to control the orientation of the Necker cube and to pick out a voice in a cacophony of voices--the so-called cocktail party effect. When we focus on an object visually, other objects in the visual field go out of focus or become blurred. Other voices in a cocktail party become background noise in comparison to the voices we are listening to.

The colors in the image are intentionally blurry, making it easy to render all of the colors as background when we focus on the surrounding whiteness, but we can see the colors again by refocusing on the image itself rather than its surroundings.

The process of foregrounding is also deeply embedded in all layers of linguistic structure. That is, each phrase in a linguistic expression is built up around a "head" word, and the structure itself is built up recursively by embedding phrases inside of phrases. Focus is a basic functional component of awareness.

I'll respond to our earlier post when I get an hour or two free, but the idea that this is figure and ground is easy to dismiss - theoretically because an unsaccading eye simply will not detect the colour of the border, it's way outside of its focus. alternatively, you can disprove it empirically by framing the image in any way you like without changing the effect. I'm pretty sure that the three effects are different. I'm pretty sure that cocktail party effect is about binding while the necker cube is closer to binocular rivalry. I've just given my take on this illusion.

Getting back to your earlier post, we already know that we disagree utterly about functionalism and multiple realisation in different substrates, is it worth doing?

 

[untermensche]

The colours are always there on the screen, the visual information is entering your eyes and you are conscious, but your brain stops paying attention (apparently)

The visual experience is mostly brain dependent.

But a person can change the perspective of a Necker cube at will.

With their mind and nothing else.

View attachment 15584

And here's where your failure to grasp of the Easy Problem of consciousness leaves you wide open.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749649/

(for example)

That's nice and objective...

What the fuck?

Are you some kind of cheap conman?

Your link does not explain the first thing about the ability of a person to switch their perception at will.

You are clueless.

 

[Copernicus]

...That is a clever optical illusion. Of course, it has something to do with the foreground/background effect that we impose on perceptions. That is what allows us to control the orientation of the Necker cube and to pick out a voice in a cacophony of voices--the so-called cocktail party effect. When we focus on an object visually, other objects in the visual field go out of focus or become blurred. Other voices in a cocktail party become background noise in comparison to the voices we are listening to.

The colors in the image are intentionally blurry, making it easy to render all of the colors as background when we focus on the surrounding whiteness, but we can see the colors again by refocusing on the image itself rather than its surroundings.

The process of foregrounding is also deeply embedded in all layers of linguistic structure. That is, each phrase in a linguistic expression is built up around a "head" word, and the structure itself is built up recursively by embedding phrases inside of phrases. Focus is a basic functional component of awareness.

I'll respond to our earlier post when I get an hour or two free, but the idea that this is figure and ground is easy to dismiss - theoretically because an unsaccading eye simply will not detect the colour of the border, it's way outside of its focus. alternatively, you can disprove it empirically by framing the image in any way you like without changing the effect. I'm pretty sure that the three effects are different. I'm pretty sure that cocktail party effect is about binding while the necker cube is closer to binocular rivalry. I've just given my take on this illusion.

There is nothing wrong with looking for explanations that have correlates in the peripheral nervous system, since that is where the data comes from, but I think you may be ignoring the role of the central nervous system in interpreting that data. How the eye collects and reports visual data is important, but so is how the brain (central nervous system) controls the behavior of its peripheral sensors. As you well know, perception is an active process rather than a passive one. That is, the brain matches incoming sense data against an internally generated model. Once you understand the difference between foreground and background, you can cause perceptual ambiguities to flip between models. The Necker cube is one of the simpler ones to control, once you realize that you can choose which square to think of as the "front" of a cube. With Ruby's latest example, one can control it by consciously deciding not to "saccade" (focus on the image) or stop "saccading" (unfocus on the image). I suspect that the fuzziness of the blotches helps with that, since focusing the eye on specific objects makes others "fuzzy" or out of focus. You do the same thing when you look through a glass window at a distant object and then switch focus to the glass that you are looking through, whereupon you can see small things on the surface of the glass that you had not seen earlier. What is interesting is how the model of reality one chooses to focus on or make the "foreground" controls the behavior of peripheral sensors.

BTW, regarding the cocktail party illusion, you need to be more specific about what you mean by "binding".

Getting back to your earlier post, we already know that we disagree utterly about functionalism and multiple realisation in different substrates, is it worth doing?

That would probably depend on how you frame the discussion. I'm not really sure that we disagree much on those subjects or what we disagree on, if we do. Sometimes, we seem to discover that we are in violent agreement.

 

[Subsymbolic]

And here's where your failure to grasp of the Easy Problem of consciousness leaves you wide open.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749649/

(for example)

That's nice and objective...

What the fuck?

Are you some kind of cheap conman?

Your link does not explain the first thing about the ability of a person to switch their perception at will.

You are clueless.

I find it a useful heuristic that the ruder you are and the more desperate the straw man you use gives me some idea of how much you grasp how utterly you have been rebutted.

This is one short of you going quiet for a few days before returning pretending it didn’t happen.

Either way, the paper demonstrates handily that what is going on is going on in the brain. I even posted the paper that explained the difference between the hard and easy problem. As with everything else, being clueless undermines anyone’s ability to make sense of things. You want to argue, you need to get up to speed with the world beyond oversimplified YouTube videos and what seems right to you.

 

[untermensche]

I get rude to conman trying to sell me nonsense.

What did you do? Google "Necker cube" and then post the first thing you found?

There isn't a hint of how a human switches from one cube to another in that paper.

That is why all you can do is link to it. You can't say anything about it.

 

[Subsymbolic]

And here's where your failure to grasp of the Easy Problem of consciousness leaves you wide open.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749649/

(for example)

That's nice and objective...

What the fuck?

Are you some kind of cheap conman?

Your link does not explain the first thing about the ability of a person to switch their perception at will.

You are clueless.

There is nothing wrong with looking for explanations that have correlates in the peripheral nervous system, since that is where the data comes from, but I think you may be ignoring the role of the central nervous system in interpreting that data. How the eye collects and reports visual data is important, but so is how the brain (central nervous system) controls the behavior of its peripheral sensors. As you well know, perception is an active process rather than a passive one. That is, the brain matches incoming sense data against an internally generated model. Once you understand the difference between foreground and background, you can cause perceptual ambiguities to flip between models. The Necker cube is one of the simpler ones to control, once you realize that you can choose which square to think of as the "front" of a cube. With Ruby's latest example, one can control it by consciously deciding not to "saccade" (focus on the image) or stop "saccading" (unfocus on the image). You do the same thing when you look through a glass window at a distant object and then switch focus to the glass that you are looking through, whereupon you can see small things on the surface of the glass that you had not seen earlier. What is interesting is how the model of reality one chooses to focus on or make the "foreground" controls the behavior of peripheral sensors.

Getting back to your earlier post, we already know that we disagree utterly about functionalism and multiple realisation in different substrates, is it worth doing?

That would probably depend on how you frame the discussion. I'm not really sure that we disagree much on those subjects or what we disagree on, if we do. Sometimes, we seem to discover that we are in violent agreement.

That’s certainly true. I’m pretty sure that conceptual content is utterly reproducible in a range of media, but I’m equally sure most non conceptual content isn’t.

I also think that the two great Eliminitivists, Dennett and Churchland, have strong cases that they are eliminating nothing but fiction.

In both cases, I see the force and brilliance of their arguments and my disagreement is minimal, but crucial.

Both, I think, are basically right, but go one step too far.

 

[untermensche]

Let's discuss the Event-related potential (ERP) and what exactly we can make from it.

From Wikipedia:

An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event.

So an "ERP" is a measured change in brain activity that has a correspondence to a subjective report or observed movement of the body. It indicates merely that "something has happened". What exactly has happened is unknown except for subjective reports about it. It does not give any information about how brain activity produces any subjective experience. It tells us nothing about what caused the "ERP", how it arose.

Calculation: ERPs can be reliably measured using electroencephalography (EEG), a procedure that measures electrical activity of the brain over time using electrodes placed on the scalp. The EEG reflects thousands of simultaneously ongoing brain processes.

So an "ERP" is something that can be measured by measuring the activity of thousands of cells across the brain.

Nomenclature of ERP components: ERP waveforms consist of a series of positive and negative voltage deflections, which are related to a set of underlying components.[8] Though some ERP components are referred to with acronyms (e.g., contingent negative variation – CNV, error-related negativity – ERN), most components are referred to by a letter (N/P) indicating polarity (negative/positive), followed by a number indicating either the latency in milliseconds or the component's ordinal position in the waveform.

The "ERP" is a stereotypical phenomena with a specific wave form associated with it.

Hopefully this can help with understanding the title: 'Neural generators of ERPs linked with Necker cube reversals'

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2749649/

Before reading the article one should understand from the title that the only thing that will be found is some location in the brain.

And from the abstract:

...Generators of the late positive component were estimated to reside in inferior temporal and superior parietal regions.

This is confirmed.

So we have an article that talks about very crude locations in the brain where some activity occurs when a person switches their perception at will.

It is very interesting.

 

[Copernicus]

There is nothing wrong with looking for explanations that have correlates in the peripheral nervous system, since that is where the data comes from, but I think you may be ignoring the role of the central nervous system in interpreting that data. How the eye collects and reports visual data is important, but so is how the brain (central nervous system) controls the behavior of its peripheral sensors. As you well know, perception is an active process rather than a passive one. That is, the brain matches incoming sense data against an internally generated model. Once you understand the difference between foreground and background, you can cause perceptual ambiguities to flip between models. The Necker cube is one of the simpler ones to control, once you realize that you can choose which square to think of as the "front" of a cube. With Ruby's latest example, one can control it by consciously deciding not to "saccade" (focus on the image) or stop "saccading" (unfocus on the image). You do the same thing when you look through a glass window at a distant object and then switch focus to the glass that you are looking through, whereupon you can see small things on the surface of the glass that you had not seen earlier. What is interesting is how the model of reality one chooses to focus on or make the "foreground" controls the behavior of peripheral sensors.

Getting back to your earlier post, we already know that we disagree utterly about functionalism and multiple realisation in different substrates, is it worth doing?

That would probably depend on how you frame the discussion. I'm not really sure that we disagree much on those subjects or what we disagree on, if we do. Sometimes, we seem to discover that we are in violent agreement.

That’s certainly true. I’m pretty sure that conceptual content is utterly reproducible in a range of media, but I’m equally sure most non conceptual content isn’t.

It isn't necessarily true that the same nonconceptual content is absolutely crucial to producing the emergent systemic effect. Just as we have convergent evolution across species, we could have different paths to cognitive macrostructures.

I also think that the two great Eliminitivists, Dennett and Churchland, have strong cases that they are eliminating nothing but fiction.

You are far more versed in that literature than I am, so I'm not equipped to debate you on what they think. I'm not too happy with pejorative labels like "folk psychology", which few people other than philosophers use. There is a kind of generic sense of "eliminitavism" that I have no problem with, but I don't see much value in making claims that the mind or consciousness don't "exist". We talk about those concepts all the time, and everyone knows what we are talking about. There is always going to be a sense in which even physical objects don't exist, so I'm not concerned that mental "objects" disappear when you get down into the weeds of how our brains are wired. That's a bit like saying that Newtonian physics doesn't exist, because--you know--Relativity. The fact is that Newtonian mechanics are perfectly useful for certain applications, so they are worth studying and knowing about. IMO, the question is more about what kind of answers we are looking for. I am not at all confident that eliminative materialism leads us profitably to useful answers when we haven't really defined what it is we are trying to explain.

 

[DBT]

I get rude to conman trying to sell me nonsense.

What did you do? Google "Necker cube" and then post the first thing you found?

There isn't a hint of how a human switches from one cube to another in that paper.

That is why all you can do is link to it. You can't say anything about it.

You get rude whenever you are put on the spot and have no answer, except repeat your claims with insults thrown in. You are rude whenever your untenable claims are shown to be what they are, baseless.

 

[Copernicus]

/mod

 

[ruby sparks]

It's a bit more complicated than that and has a bit to do with the structure of the eyes...... I started this last night and have been riding herd on four kids all day, so this is a fast end without reading the thread. I hope it's still relevant.

Useful and interesting. Thx.

 

[untermensche]

I get rude to conman trying to sell me nonsense.

What did you do? Google "Necker cube" and then post the first thing you found?

There isn't a hint of how a human switches from one cube to another in that paper.

That is why all you can do is link to it. You can't say anything about it.

You get rude whenever you are put on the spot and have no answer, except repeat your claims with insults thrown in. You are rude whenever your untenable claims are shown to be what they are, baseless.

You have no objective claims to make.

There is nothing objective to say about how a human changes their perception at will or moves their arm at will.

The "will", the part of the consciousness that can effect the brain, is not understood at all.

It most likely is some quantum effect or some other unknown effect.

So looking at chemical or electrical activity will never explain it. It hasn't yet.

Dennett made his arguments decades ago and we have not moved a millimeter closer to understanding the consciousness. We do not even know what it is.

Some have claimed it does not even exist. With all the energy they can muster to direct their mind they conclude their mind does not exist. It is amusing.

 

[untermensche]

You are far more versed in that literature than I am, so I'm not equipped to debate you on what they think....

FACT: Crude ignorant name dropping without one bit of understanding attached or ability to explain is not being "well versed".

It is what people who have barely read the Bible do all the time.

They claim it is infallible without even understanding it.

They quote snippets as if they have magic powers on their own.

 

[DBT]

There is nothing objective to say about how a human changes their perception at will or moves their arm at will.

How do you think it happens? Magic?

What do you think makes it possible for you to lift your arm at will?

Can you explain?

 

[untermensche]

There is nothing objective to say about how a human changes their perception at will or moves their arm at will.

How do you think it happens? Magic?

What do you think makes it possible for you to lift your arm at will?

Can you explain?

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Go back and read for the first time.

I answered your question.