Downward Causation: Useful or Misguided Idea?

[untermensche]

How many times do you need to be told like a child that your logic sucks?

Saying the brain somehow and in some unknown manner creates consciousness does not tell us what consciousness can do to the brain.

You keep repeating this absolute nonsense I suppose because your mind is incapable of learning anymore.

Consciousness is a form of brain activity. Again, consciousness does whatever the brain is doing, nothing more, nothing less. That there are multiple feedback loops happening within the brain while conscious activity is taking place does not mean that consciousness has autonomy....as you appear to suggest.

You have no idea what consciousness is.

It is a completely unexplained phenomena.

Nothing is known about it objectively.

You have no grounds to make claims about what it can and cannot do.

There is reflexive brain controlled respiration and there is the ability to take a deep breath at will.

 

[Speakpigeon]

As I already observed before, you don't seem to understand English too well. Which makes any conversation with you like a mission to a retirement home. I can't spend my time pulling a tooth out o' you.
EB

You are very simple.

You only seem to be able to read a sentence one way.

Try to use your mind to eat your brain.

People that really understand English understand I responded to what you badly wrote.

What stops you eating your brain?
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Consciousness is a form of brain activity. Again, consciousness does whatever the brain is doing, nothing more, nothing less. That there are multiple feedback loops happening within the brain while conscious activity is taking place does not mean that consciousness has autonomy....as you appear to suggest.

You have no idea what consciousness is.

Nothing is known about it objectively.

Can you give examples of something we know objectively?
EB

 

[Subsymbolic]

I'm not sure what you intended your quote to achieve, but the bottom line of B-T is that it is one example of an operation that can be performed in logic or maths that cannot be performed outside of logic or maths.

Perhaps you should have a go at explaining rather than just going for the ad hominems? However, DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) is a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It's a treatment rather than a condition and, as if that wasn't bad enough, it's a talking therapy, not a medicine. Either way, implying that I suffer from an intense Borderline Personality Disorder (which DBT was developed for treating) is driving a truck through the TOU and you should know better.

O-kay...

So, you force me now to admit I hadn't a clue Dialectical Behavioural Therapy existed at all. So, I couldn't possibly have meant to refer to that when I used the acronym 'DBT'.

So, no. No ad hominem in my post.

And I'll let you work out what else I could have meant.
EB

It's hard to imagine exactly how 'I could explain but I'd rather see you take your DBT medicine first...' isn't meant as an insult. It's remarkably easy to imagine how you'd want to weasel round the TOU. So no, I'd rather you explain exactly how that isn't an ad hom. If you want to have a go at doing philosophy you can explain how BT doesn't perform the role I claim it does.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Well, kinda.

It's certainly the case that mental states supervene on physical states. That's just a commitment to monism. However, rather than argue something I've demonstrated before, to no discernable effect, I'll just point you at the work of Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim on anomalous monism. This isn't an argument, merely pointing you in a direction that is available. However, if you want to argue the case, rather than making a statement of what seems intuitively obvious to you and assuming that stands as a refutation, as both you and UM have done, I'd suggest that you have a go at explaining how the Banach Tarski paradox is remotely possible if what you imply is true.

If understanding the mind/brain were as simple as following what is intuitively obvious, there wouldn't be a problem with understanding how we work.

As for UM, until he realises that the public relations department isn't the management...

It's not that it is 'intuitively obvious' to me that the ability to do logic is a function of neural architecture/ brain, but that this is what the available evidence supports. If the work of Donald Davidson and Jaegwon Kim suggests otherwise, perhaps you could provide quotes.

Unfortunately, not all philosophy can be done in short quotes. Sometimes one just has to follow an extended argument to its conclusion.

Here's the wiki on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism

Ted H's objection relies on an issue with denotation and assumes that the mental is just another denotation of the physical description. This isn't the case. Quote apart from the constitution arguments of Lynne Rudder Baker, the simple fact is that if he were correct, there wouldn't be a problem of other minds. Mental events can only be experienced from the inside, they are what a users user illusion feels like to the user. That's a damn sight more than mere denotation.

You will not be able to find any evidence that the brain is directlywired to do logic. However, the brain is and can be wired to instantiate virtual machines that emulate doing logic. Computers are directly wired to do logic, brains are not.

...and maths an logic can do things with mathematical objects that cannot be done with isomorphic physical objects. B-T is one unambiguous example of that. Again, there isn't a single quote, there is just doing the hard work of understanding it.

Whether you can be bothered is entirely up to you, but you are in no position to argue about it unless you have.

 

[ruby sparks]

To my limited brain (I will never understand the BT Paradox fully for example) maths (and probably logic) can 'do' certain things which appear to be intuitively 'un-doable' in the real world because they use concepts which we cannot intuitively grasp, or perhaps even grasp in any way and which may in fact be abstract (existing in thought only). Perhaps the best example, and the one that causes the most paradoxes (and is involved, I think, in the BT Paradox) is the very annoying example of infinity. So, a simpler illustration of a related paradox, than the BT one, I think, would be that if we cut an infinitely long string in half, we have two infinitely long strings. In fact, we could cut the string in half again, and half again, and in theory 'make' a very large number (an infinite number in fact) of infinitely long strings from just one.

 

[untermensche]

You are very simple.

You only seem to be able to read a sentence one way.



People that really understand English understand I responded to what you badly wrote.

What stops you eating your brain?
EB

Lack of motivation.

- - - Updated - - -

Consciousness is a form of brain activity. Again, consciousness does whatever the brain is doing, nothing more, nothing less. That there are multiple feedback loops happening within the brain while conscious activity is taking place does not mean that consciousness has autonomy....as you appear to suggest.

You have no idea what consciousness is.

Nothing is known about it objectively.

Can you give examples of something we know objectively?
EB

How an internal combustion engine works.

 

[ruby sparks]

Or, try this (I read it somewhere in relation to the BT Paradox). Take a balloon and fill it up with gas. So you have a balloon of a certain volume. Now decant the gas into two balloons, and you will get two balloons, each with half the volume of the original. But now reduce the surrounding air pressure by half and you will get two balloons each with the same volume as the original. And keep going. Decant again into 4 balloons and reduce the air density by half again. Voila, 4 balloons of the same volume as the first one. And so on, to infinity.

If this sounds like a cheat to demonstrate the BT Paradox in reality, then maybe it is. But maybe the BT Paradox involves a cheat of a different kind, the dividing 'real' volumes up into abstract, uncountable mathematical infinitesimals (points). So maybe it's conflating two opposing concepts, measurability and immeasurability. Just wondering.

[/tuppenceworth]

 

[untermensche]

You will quickly get to a point where the balloon has one molecule of gas in it then no more meaningful reductions can take place.

The so-called infinity will end slightly short of infinity.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Or, try this (I read it somewhere in relation to the BT Paradox). Take a balloon and fill it up with gas. So you have a balloon of a certain volume. Now decant the gas into two balloons, and you will get two balloons, each with half the volume of the original. But now reduce the air pressure in the room and you will get two balloons each with the same volume as the original. And keep going. Decant again into 4 balloons and reduce the air density by half again. Voila, 4 balloons of the same volume as the first one. And so on, to infinity.

If this sounds like a cheat to demonstrate the BT Paradox in reality, then maybe it is. But maybe the BT Paradox involves a cheat of a different kind, the dividing volumes up into abstract mathematical infinitesimals.

Except you will not get to infinity, you'll get to internal and external equilibrium pretty damn quickly.

As for BT, I'm, just not sure it's helpful to think about volumes in abstract objects with uncountable porosity.

However, it's not the maths I'm much interested in, it's merely the brute fact that there are things that can be done in the platonic spaces of mathematics and logic that cannot be done anywhere else. I think B-T establishes this (and more importantly, my middle kids, both, unlike me, rather fine mathematicians) assure me that this is the case. As this area is what youngest is doing his Phd on (at Cork) I'm pretty sure I'm on safe ground.

Once established, the philosophical knock on effects of proving that the logical and the physical are not isomorphic are pretty spectacular. It's an accessible route into anomalous monism, it establishes that even in a physical determinism fantasy world, we are bicameral, being potentially determined both logically and physically a fact that introduces some real elbow room...

More importantly, it demonstrates that, even in a respectably naturalistic ontology; that is one with no gaps suitable for hiding a god in, there are irreducibly emergent properties and no matter how fine the dissection, there are things that will be missed from the purely physical stance. Finally, it opens up a class of things that can be added to with more ease once the existence of the class has been demonstrated. Following Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Anscombe and even Dennett, pre 'Real Patterns', I'd like to suggest intentional states as a member of this class...

Because I'm not predictable at all

 

[ruby sparks]

You will quickly get to a point where the balloon has one molecule of gas in it then no more meaningful reductions can take place.

The so-called infinity will end slightly short of infinity.

The gas is made up of infinitesimally small 'bits', in which case you could even start with one what you call 'molecule' and go on forever from there.

 

[untermensche]

You will quickly get to a point where the balloon has one molecule of gas in it then no more meaningful reductions can take place.

The so-called infinity will end slightly short of infinity.

Assume the gas is made up of infinitesimally small 'bits', in which case you could even start with one what you call 'molecule' and go on forever from there.

True, if we imagine an infinity we can have an imaginary infinity.

But a molecule is not imaginary. It can be broken but you don't end up with two smaller molecules.

And how far things can be broken apart is finite as far as we can tell.

 

[ruby sparks]

Except you will not get to infinity, you'll get to internal and external equilibrium pretty damn quickly.

Maybe. Maybe not.

 

[Subsymbolic]

You will quickly get to a point where the balloon has one molecule of gas in it then no more meaningful reductions can take place.

The so-called infinity will end slightly short of infinity.

The gas is made up of infinitesimally small 'bits', in which case you could even start with one what you call 'molecule' and go on forever from there.

Ah, you didn't say that the gas was an imaginary gas. In that case, of course. That's nice and simple. When being chased by Laplace's demon along to the right of a cliff edge and decide to turn left as soon as you reach equilibrium. You'll keep going straight while Laplace's demon, having calculated precisely when you should reach equilibrium would suddenly veer left and plunge to its doom.

Useful stuff imagination!

(Yes, this is a joke, no, I haven't thought it through carefully.)

(Although to be clear I don't think we can imagine infinity, we can merely imagine imagining it. That doesn't stop us using it in logic, ironically.)

- - - Updated - - -

Except you will not get to infinity, you'll get to internal and external equilibrium pretty damn quickly.

Maybe. Maybe not.

My axiom is that it's your choice...

 

[ruby sparks]

Ah, you didn't say that the gas was an imaginary gas.

Well I thought it was allowed, since Banach and Tarski used an imaginary sphere.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Ah, you didn't say that the gas was an imaginary gas.

Well I thought it was allowed, since Banach and Tarski used an imaginary sphere.

Yes but their sphere was an imaginary mathematical sphere, your gas is an imaginary physical gas and only elves can imagine that, or people who can see elves...

 

[Speakpigeon]

It's hard to imagine exactly how 'I could explain but I'd rather see you take your DBT medicine first...' isn't meant as an insult. It's remarkably easy to imagine how you'd want to weasel round the TOU. So no, I'd rather you explain exactly how that isn't an ad hom.

I just meant this DBT:

Consciousness is a form of brain activity. Again, consciousness does whatever the brain is doing, nothing more, nothing less. That there are multiple feedback loops happening within the brain while conscious activity is taking place does not mean that consciousness has autonomy....as you appear to suggest.

_____________

If you want to have a go at doing philosophy you can explain how BT doesn't perform the role I claim it does.

I'll have something to explain in relation to that but I wanted you and DBT to have a chance to complete the discussion you started on this topic without my interfering.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't think we can imagine infinity, we can merely imagine imagining it. That doesn't stop us using it in logic, ironically.)

Yes, we cannot imagine the infinite. We can conceive of it.

And concepts are logic-based, so no wonder it "doesn't stop us using it in logic".
EB

 

[untermensche]

I don't think we can imagine infinity, we can merely imagine imagining it.

We don't imagine imagining it.

We try to imagine it and fail.

It is just a concept. And it is a concept that relates to progression.

The progression of a line or series or anything else that can be imagined to progress. Even just progression through the addition of random elements.

And then you simply add the concept of never ending to the progression.

You have defined the concept.

But it is not something that can exist for real or be imagined. It is something that can only exist as a concept.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Rather than testing each other’s psychic powers, how about everyone pauses a moment and reviews how their particular intuitions about what a concept fits in with the various definitions in the literature. It would be terribly helpful in stopping people talking past each other if everyone defined this most slippery of concepts. As people much smarter than us have spent a lot of time on this, it’s probably easier to make the effort to survey the field of possibilities and discover whose wheel we have reinvented.

For me, conceptualisation is the point at which biological representation, that is, directly in the neural structures: firing rates, weighting, thresholds and so on, is transformed into linguistic representation in words, beliefs and so on.

Conceptualisation is the point that content goes from being private, and for me, type identical, such that a mental state, say pain, just is the physical state of the neural vehicle of pain. The same event from two perspectives.

A concept is the shadow of all that activity recast in the virtual machines that support language, grammar, logic and all that. All conceptual content is tokened, symbolic, serial and public. Fundamentally, mastery of a concept is the ability to discriminate between the concept and all other other concepts. You hold the concept of a duck when you can discriminate between all ducks and all non ducks,

Thanks to this bicameral approach, I am free to assert that words are the vehicles of the content of concepts, which is almost the same as words just being concepts, but not quite.

The fact is that while the theoretical boundary between conceptual and non conceptual content is as stark as one could wish for, in reality, the boundary is messily and recursively ragged, littered with ad hoc mind tools and feedback loops, not to mention connotation.

That’s before we get to the minefield of propositional attitude talk.