Downward Causation: Useful or Misguided Idea?

[ruby sparks]

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 etymology", 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.

By Eliminativism I presume we are talking about the the elimination of Propositional attitudes, notably belief. I'm not clear as to whether we are talking about pain, mind or consciousness.

When it comes to eliminating beliefs, I have trouble getting my head around it, but, probably partly because I can get my head half around the idea that self is an illusion, coupled with what appears to be the fact that self is involved in having a belief, I'm half open to the suggestion that beliefs are, by extension, an illusion.

By 'illusion' I don't mean that the experience we call a belief does not exist, but that it's an experience about something that either isn't doing anything or doesn't even exist (like a demon). The latter is more difficult to comprehend.

Regarding pain, I admit I'd have a lot of trouble understanding a position which said this did not exist. As to consciousness not existing, I tend to think there is something I might call 'bare consciousness', which does not involve self, and which is therefore akin to pain, and as such I'd have a problem dismissing this too. Ditto mind, if I similarly equate 'bare mind' with 'bare consciousness' and thus pain.

I think we are all familiar with eliminating certain things (eg souls, luminiferous aether, phlogiston) and we understand that eliminating something can lead us profitably to useful answers, so in principle I'm not worried about eliminating anything, and as such, cop, for some reason I'm not as apparently concerned as you seem to be, without being sure why. I had the same feeling when reading Sean Carroll about baseball. I think I have eliminativist leanings.

 

[untermensche]

What is used to eliminate things?

 

[Subsymbolic]

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 etymology", 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.

By Eliminativism I presume we are talking about the the elimination of Propositional attitudes, notably belief. I'm not clear as to whether we are talking about pain, mind or consciousness.

When it comes to eliminating beliefs, I have trouble getting my head around it, but, probably partly because I can get my head half around the idea that self is an illusion, coupled with what appears to be the fact that self is involved in having a belief, I'm half open to the suggestion that beliefs are, by extension, an illusion.

By 'illusion' I don't mean that the experience we call a belief does not exist, but that it's an experience about something that either isn't doing anything or doesn't even exist (like a demon). The latter is more difficult to comprehend.

Regarding pain, I admit I'd have a lot of trouble understanding a position which said this did not exist. As to consciousness not existing, I tend to think there is something I might call 'bare consciousness', which does not involve self, and which is therefore akin to pain, and as such I'd have a problem dismissing this too. Ditto mind, if I similarly equate 'bare mind' with 'bare consciousness' and thus pain.

I think we are all familiar with eliminating certain things (eg souls, luminiferous aether, phlogiston) and we understand that eliminating something can lead us profitably to useful answers, so in principle I'm not worried about eliminating anything, and as such, cop, for some reason I'm not as apparently concerned as you seem to be, without being sure why. I had the same feeling when reading Sean Carroll about baseball. I think I have eliminativist leanings.

In this case, I was using the term in a broad sense; bad ideas in an ontology tend to have one of two fates: reduction, where the idea is basically sound but framed badly. Demonic possession as a model of mental illness, for example. The phenomenon is a thing, but the explanation is screwed. For example, hypericum, as the old folk rhyme goes:

St. John’s wort doth charm all witches away
If gathered at midnight on the saint’s holy day.
Any devils and witches have no power to harm
Those that gather the plant for a charm...

Hypericum is a real treatment, the active ingredient, hyperforin, acting as a serotonin and dopamine uptake inhibitor, with calming, anti depressent and anxiety reducing effects that make it an effective treatment for a range of mental illness. It’s been used in this role for at least 4,000 years and probably much longer. In that time it’s been a cure for possession, humors, elemental overheating and so on until finally, we see that it’s mostly a mild serotonin uptake inhibitor. As such, folk knowledge of St John’s wort is ripe for reduction, keeping much of the craft while dumping the ideology.

Phlogiston, on the other hand, was a perfect candidate for elimination from a scientific ontology, for reasons we all know well.

I’ll explain why I’ve gone to the trouble of explaining the idea so carefully later...

 

[WAB]

Ooooooh ooooooooh [Mr. Kotter's Arnold Horshack], that sounds like it would be right up my alley [if you'll excuse the disgusting imagery [Woody Allen, from Manhattan]:

hyperforin....Hyperion, by John Keats, grand master poet (dead at 25 from TB/consumption) !

When I go inpatient within the next week or so, they are going to be looking for a medication, or medications (cocktail in their parlance), that will work for me. I wonder if I can suggest this drug.

?

 

[Speakpigeon]

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'm not sure it's just the brain. What about the retina itself?

Suppose you're in a dark room. You wait till your eyes have accommodated. Then you light up as briefly as possible a small electric lamp, to make it appear as close as possible to the centre of your visual field. You're back now in complete darkness except you have now a very neat bright spot, with the appearance more or less of the electric lamp, that follows the movement of your eyes. The bright spot will fade away very gradually and disappear after some time, possibly, say, 4 to 10 minutes, I'm not sure.

The thing is, you can also effectively focus your "attention" on this "remanent" image. It's only your attention because there's nothing you can do as to focusing your gaze on it since it's burnt on your retina. It moves with your eyes. Now, rather surprisingly, focusing your attention on it will make it fade away more quickly. The effect is striking. Initially, it may look somewhat brighter, but it will be in fact only more contrasted, with sharper delineations. And then it's start to fade away much faster.

You can also do something similar by directing the lamp to lit somebody else's face, or yours in a mirror, some object or a corner of the room. Once the light is off, you'll have this very neat image of the scene now moving with your eyeballs even though you're in complete darkness. If you focus your attention on it, it will acquire a very, very realistic feel, as if the brain was now taking this image seriously, "for real" so to speak. And again, focusing your attention on it will make it fade away more quickly.

So, in the case of ruby's fading picture, I would guess, if you really stare at the picture, it's the brain mistaking the stable image for a remanent image "burnt on tour retina", and trying to make it fade away as quickly as possible to regain a fully operational vision. So far so good.

Yet, the case of the bright light in the dark room shows the mechanism is really useful when there is really an image "burnt" onto your retina. So, the fading is really occurring at the level of the retina itself. It's not just some backroom treatment of the image by the brain. The retina is doing something and what it does can go faster if you focus your attention on the remanent image.

So, can the brain somehow send a signal to the retina to speed up the fading? It certainly looks like it in my experience.

Or could it all be occurring within the brain? Why in this case would the image fade away more quickly if the retina is not affected?
EB

 

[untermensche]

It's St John's Wort and it is nonprescription.

The effects of these kinds of drugs are suspect however.

You find placebo rates as high as 30% in anti-depressant trials.

Hard to know if these drugs do more than act as a placebo.

But if people report improvement they generally are safe.

 

[WAB]

It's St John's Wort and it is nonprescription.

The effects of these kinds of drugs are suspect however.

You find placebo rates as high as 30% in anti-depressant trials.

Hard to know if these drugs do more than act as a placebo.

But if people report improvement they generally are safe.

Thanks, unter. No nonprescription drug has ever worked for me (except DXM, at excessive amounts). All that about certain teas that have a sedative effect, none of it does the slightest thing to me, etc.

All that off-topic stuff aside, I think you asked a good question:

What is used to eliminate things?

emphasis mine.

 

[ruby sparks]

In this case, I was using the term in a broad sense; bad ideas in an ontology tend to have one of two fates: reduction, where the idea is basically sound but framed badly. Demonic possession as a model of mental illness, for example. The phenomenon is a thing, but the explanation is screwed. For example, hypericum, as the old folk rhyme goes:

St. John’s wort doth charm all witches away
If gathered at midnight on the saint’s holy day.
Any devils and witches have no power to harm
Those that gather the plant for a charm...

Hypericum is a real treatment, the active ingredient, hyperforin, acting as a serotonin and dopamine uptake inhibitor, with calming, anti depressent and anxiety reducing effects that make it an effective treatment for a range of mental illness. It’s been used in this role for at least 4,000 years and probably much longer. In that time it’s been a cure for possession, humors, elemental overheating and so on until finally, we see that it’s mostly a mild serotonin uptake inhibitor. As such, folk knowledge of St John’s wort is ripe for reduction, keeping much of the craft while dumping the ideology.

Phlogiston, on the other hand, was a perfect candidate for elimination from a scientific ontology, for reasons we all know well.

I’ll explain why I’ve gone to the trouble of explaining the idea so carefully later...

I admit I get confused about when something moves from reduced (with something retained) to eliminated.

Personally, I would have considered demonic possession pretty much 'fully eliminated'. Mental illness of course, retained, along with the efficacy of St John's Wort.

But which is analogous to beliefs? Or pain.

One more thing, I know that distinctions are made between beliefs, emotions and desires, but are these really different things? If I feel that I love my wife, is that not a candidate for being all of them?

 

[untermensche]

All that off-topic stuff aside, I think you asked a good question:

What is used to eliminate things?

emphasis mine.

It was an appropriate question.

It is rhetorical of course.

 

[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?

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Go back and read for the first time.

I answered your question.

Sure, you gave an answer. Your 'answer' did not address the issue. All of your answers dance around the central issue of the mechanisms and means of your conscious experience, never addressing anything, only repeating your assertion of smart consciousness operating a dumb brain.

 

[WAB]

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Go back and read for the first time.

I answered your question.

Sure, you gave an answer. Your 'answer' did not address the issue. All of your answers dance around the central issue of the mechanisms and means of your conscious experience, never addressing anything, only repeating your assertion of smart consciousness operating a dumb brain.

I have read the entire article, so I already suspect (won't say know ) that there is no explanation at all about how the brain creates consciousness, or what consciousness is.

There is a lot of quantitative data, of course: a lot about what is happening, but nothing about how it happens.

ergo: the hard problem remains the hard problem. There is no need to pretend otherwise.

Just show unter exactly and precisely where in the article the explanation for what consciousness is, and how it goes about resolving the hard problem.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/27/8675

This is to Sub, ruby, and DBT.

 

[Copernicus]

...

I think we are all familiar with eliminating certain things (eg souls, luminiferous aether, phlogiston) and we understand that eliminating something can lead us profitably to useful answers, so in principle I'm not worried about eliminating anything, and as such, cop, for some reason I'm not as apparently concerned as you seem to be, without being sure why. I had the same feeling when reading Sean Carroll about baseball. I think I have eliminativist leanings.

Just to be clear, I have no problem at all with eliminativism in its broad sense, e.g. eliminating the concept of "phlogiston" with a better model of what causes combustion. Sean Carroll makes a strong point of this. His problem is with mixing ontologies--frameworks for describing relationships between concepts--to argue that a concept ought to be "eliminated". When you have an emergent system, the properties that describe that system do not necessarily make any sense with respect to the properties that describe components of the system--what it "supervenes" on. And one can't necessarily predict the properties of the emergent system in terms of the properties of the components that give rise to it. However, the emergent system does need to be compatible with its constituents. Carroll just thinks that it is misleading to say that the emergent system somehow causes the behavior of its components, because that mixes ontologies. One can talk about the individual behavior of molecules in a cloud of gas, but that kind of description needs to be kept walled off from describing the fluid properties of a gas, where one might want to talk about properties such as "pressure".

When Subsymbolic talks about "Eliminativism", he isn't necessarily talking about eliminating poor explanations such as the phlogiston theory. I take him to usually be talking about  eliminative materialism which tends to be a rival position to the so-called  theory of mind (often given the pejorative label of "folk psychology" by philosophers).

 

[DBT]

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Go back and read for the first time.

I answered your question.

Sure, you gave an answer. Your 'answer' did not address the issue. All of your answers dance around the central issue of the mechanisms and means of your conscious experience, never addressing anything, only repeating your assertion of smart consciousness operating a dumb brain.

I have read the entire article, so I already suspect (won't say know ) that there is no explanation at all about how the brain creates consciousness, or what consciousness is.

There is a lot of quantitative data, of course: a lot about what is happening, but nothing about how it happens.

ergo: the hard problem remains the hard problem. There is no need to pretend otherwise.

Just show unter exactly and precisely where in the article the explanation for what consciousness is, and how it goes about resolving the hard problem.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/27/8675

This is to Sub, ruby, and DBT.

As far as I know, nobody is claiming to understand how a brain forms consciousness. I certainly have not made that claim.

The issue being, is there sufficient evidence to support the proposition that it is the brain that's responsible for generating consciousness even if we don't understand how that is achieved.....and the general consensus amongst researchers is yes, there is evidence that the brain forms and generates consciousness and that the physical condition of a brain is reflected in its output, pathologies effect consciousness, chemical imbalances effect consciousness, physical trauma effects consciousness, lesions effect consciousness, etc, etc.

So, it is widely accepted by researchers that the brain is responsible for generating consciousness even though it's not understood how that is achieved by the brain.

 

[WAB]

I have no disagreement with that, and never have (apart from posts made during my religious euphoria, brought on, most likely, by my brain disorder).

Nonetheless, the hard problem remains, re Chalmers.

 

[DBT]

Sure, and it'll probably be a very long time before it is understood how a brain forms consciousness......

 

[WAB]

Sorry, DBT, my memory is in shambles. Heven't there been statements (not by you) in this thread, and others, that the hard problem has been resolved? Certainly, many scientists do not believe there is a problem, such as Dennet.

Newton knew it as well, L O N G before Chalmers, which Chalmers admits:

Newt: to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie

Quoth Locke:

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the philosopher and physician John Locke argued:

Divide matter into as minute parts as you will (which we are apt to imagine a sort of spiritualizing or making a thinking thing of it) vary the figure and motion of it as much as you please—a globe, cube, cone, prism, cylinder, etc., whose diameters are but 1,000,000th part of a gry, will operate not otherwise upon other bodies of proportionable bulk than those of an inch or foot diameter—and you may as rationally expect to produce sense, thought, and knowledge, by putting together, in a certain figure and motion, gross particles of matter, as by those that are the very minutest that do anywhere exist. They knock, impel, and resist one another, just as the greater do; and that is all they can do... t is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or without motion, could have originally in and from itself sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence that then sense, perception, and knowledge must be a property eternally inseparable from matter and every particle of it.[11] - Wikipedia.

there are many others, of course, who do or do not think there is a hard problem.

the worst from Dennet at a glance, IMhO]:

Dennett compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.[18] - Wikipedia

and this, from Hacker, sounds almost idiotic, or just petulant.

The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd—they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don't make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

- Wikipedia.

 

[Speakpigeon]

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

I've come to assume that science has somewhat reshuffled the semantics of our ontology. We're giving up the old notion of "real things" in favour of something like, broadly, what seems to work in practice. If it can't be made to perform active duties, then it's an "illusion". Our initial sense of reality has been displaced by our commitment to operationality. It's a paradigmatic shift on a massive scale. We're different from our forebears.

Also keep in mind that some, possibly many, scientists are basically too busy not to have become somewhat illiterate and semantically confused. They're unable to articulate their views in any sensible form beyond very basic notions. Some may even feel somewhat resentful that the rest of the world doesn't seem to care much about what they do to discover "what seems to work in practice". They may have a tendency to overstate their case as a result, something very apparent with many people around here.
EB

 

[DBT]

Sorry, DBT, my memory is in shambles. Heven't there been statements (not by you) in this thread, and others, that the hard problem has been resolved? Certainly, many scientists do not believe there is a problem, such as Dennet.

Newton knew it as well, L O N G before Chalmers, which Chalmers admits:



Quoth Locke:

there are many others, of course, who do or do not think there is a hard problem.

the worst from Dennet at a glance, IMhO]:

Dennett compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things.[18] - Wikipedia

and this, from Hacker, sounds almost idiotic, or just petulant.

The whole endeavour of the consciousness studies community is absurd—they are in pursuit of a chimera. They misunderstand the nature of consciousness. The conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent. The questions they are asking don't make sense. They have to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.

- Wikipedia.

Yes, well, some of that is open to interpretation.....however, if anyone has claimed to understand how a brain forms consciousness, they are wrong. Some of the examples above refers to the role, purpose or nature of consciousness rather claim to understand how it is achieved.

For instance - ''Dennett compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things'' -is not claiming the how of consciousness but the expression of it.

 

[Speakpigeon]

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 etymology", 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.

By Eliminativism I presume we are talking about the the elimination of Propositional attitudes, notably belief. I'm not clear as to whether we are talking about pain, mind or consciousness.

When it comes to eliminating beliefs, I have trouble getting my head around it, but, probably partly because I can get my head half around the idea that self is an illusion, coupled with what appears to be the fact that self is involved in having a belief, I'm half open to the suggestion that beliefs are, by extension, an illusion.

By 'illusion' I don't mean that the experience we call a belief does not exist, but that it's an experience about something that either isn't doing anything or doesn't even exist (like a demon). The latter is more difficult to comprehend.

Regarding pain, I admit I'd have a lot of trouble understanding a position which said this did not exist. As to consciousness not existing, I tend to think there is something I might call 'bare consciousness', which does not involve self, and which is therefore akin to pain, and as such I'd have a problem dismissing this too. Ditto mind, if I similarly equate 'bare mind' with 'bare consciousness' and thus pain.

I think we are all familiar with eliminating certain things (eg souls, luminiferous aether, phlogiston) and we understand that eliminating something can lead us profitably to useful answers, so in principle I'm not worried about eliminating anything, and as such, cop, for some reason I'm not as apparently concerned as you seem to be, without being sure why. I had the same feeling when reading Sean Carroll about baseball. I think I have eliminativist leanings.

I think our rational explorations of ontological possibilities requires some ability to suspend disbelief, like when we read fictions we know full well are invented stories. Our rational schemes are nowadays so complex and complicated that we need to be able to assume even what seems idiotic, counterintuitive or just plain wrong. We need to be bold and venture far out on a limb, just hoping we're going to discover something entirely new which will then allow us to explain it all, including how what seemed idiotic, counterintuitive or just plain wrong initially is true after all. It's worth it I think, even if it may be wrong on occasion, or even most of the time.

I guess it's akin to a change in paradigm, or a change in your conceptual framework, which is sometimes the only way you will get out of the apparent contradictions you're experiencing.

That being said, I also certainly fail to see how qualia could possibly be "eliminated".

To accept that, I would need to switch to a different conceptual framework whereby I'd be really stupid. Not alluring, to me at least.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

You clearly didn't read what I wrote.

Go back and read for the first time.

I answered your question.

Sure, you gave an answer. Your 'answer' did not address the issue. All of your answers dance around the central issue of the mechanisms and means of your conscious experience, never addressing anything, only repeating your assertion of smart consciousness operating a dumb brain.

I have read the entire article, so I already suspect (won't say know ) that there is no explanation at all about how the brain creates consciousness, or what consciousness is.

There is a lot of quantitative data, of course: a lot about what is happening, but nothing about how it happens.

ergo: the hard problem remains the hard problem. There is no need to pretend otherwise.

Just show unter exactly and precisely where in the article the explanation for what consciousness is, and how it goes about resolving the hard problem.

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/27/8675

This is to Sub, ruby, and DBT.

I too think that the hard problem has not been solved. But I think we can find out a lot about consciousness nonetheless.

One way of looking at it is that there are many hard problems. I'm not sure I know how gravity appears either. Or life. Somehow, a description of both suffices to allow me to set the ultimate mystery aside.