Pantheism and panpsychism

[veclock]

I'm originally from Stockholm. There's a Pantheist/Syntheist community centered around Blivande in Frihamnen. I was a founding member. We started it in 2012. We built a massive church in the old Akzo Nobel building. I was one of the people who built it. But it was just a temporary thing. The building is gone now. We moved to Blivande in Frihamnen. This is now a permanent church. But it's not the regular kind of church. By design there's no priests or any figures of authority. Our religious texts is the entire body of human literature. It's a doacracy. Ie, whoever takes initiative to something is in charge. We have a festival each year called Borderland (not last year nor this) and it's swollen beyond just the religion and it's now it's own thing. There's thousands of people who show up, many who have no clue about it's origins or function. Which is also by design. It's by design the opposite of a cult. It's radically inclusive. So you can go to Blivande for years and never understand what all the workshops, prayers and religious stuff are about.

The only rule is that you need to be an atheist to join. Some Syntheists, me included, do talk about God and refer to God. To me it's purely a poetic metaphor. Which, I'm sure you, as a Pantheist, understand all about. But we are very nice to the odd theist who hangs out with us. So it can be a bit confusing to some atheists who join and get the God talk.

We're also not missionaries. We don't talk anybody into converting to atheism or our brand of atheism. That's also by design.

I can't really explain the secret sauce to this or why it's keeping going or why it keeps growing and continuing being successful beyond my wildest dreams. I just thought we'd be a group of 50-100 guys talking philosophy and staring up at the sky in awe together. Now it's a fully functioning and very healthy corporation spawning all manner of successful and lucrative projects. When Covid-19 hit the church was almost immediately converted into a factory for protective gear. I haven't really been a part of it since I moved to Copenhagen in 2017.

My current theory for why it's been so successful is that it's very middle class. It attracts well educated, intelligent and highly effective people, who are good at getting shit done. I could be wrong. Another theory is that it's the zeitgeist. A conservative reactionary movement has hit back against the worst excesses of postmodernism (ie Hegel, thesis, antithesis and Synthesis). But the old timey religion is adapted for iron age goat herders. Not level 50 paladins and people who buy biodegradable glitter online. So the moment anybody mentioned what a lot of people were thinking at the same time it all just exploded.

Me personally I'd been a Syntheist/Pantheist in practice all my life. I've always been a staunch atheist. I've always felt that the supernatural/litteral interpretation of god theories always have been preposterous.

I've travelled extensively all over the world. And my favourite part of travelling is exploring religions around the world. I love temples.

Placing religious temples side by side with secular temples (universities, shopping malls, power stations, bridges etc) the secular counterparts are not very spiritually uplifting. They fill me with stress, pressure and the need to go somewhere. While the religious temples calms me down and helps me reflect. I've known all my life that I prefer the traditional religious temples.

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

I can recommend two Syntheist temples that we built. These are very Pantheist.

We got permission to build a permanent structure. This will stand for a hundred years in a beautiful spot. There's no information on it. It's just a temple for whatever you want it to be for.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/T...20f5b77ca8c93e2!8m2!3d55.6260625!4d12.1684375


But there's a second temple in the woods. Right here.

https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6300169,12.1698146,145m/data=!3m1!1e3

It's well hidden in the deep forest and made to blend into the forest around it. Very Pantheist indeed. Equally impressive with Tokamak.

Oh you mean Noden? I love that place. I'm not a member yet but have been to some events, courses and parties there. Both in the old and new location.
Thank you for telling me all this background stories and about yourself as well.

You know what's funny, you came across like someone who would call anyone doing meditation a hippie. I've been called a hippie for going to Noden events by someone like that. This is so funny. You would be the father of hippies in their eyes if you said you're one of the founding fathers of this place.

Anyways, hats off for being one of its creators. It's a really good initiative.
And the fact that it grew so much larger than you thought just shows what kind of void the synthesis movement filled.

That's something I've also realized after listening to Jordan Peterson for example, how religion is part of us in a way, because it coevolved with us for so long.
Doesn't have to be theist religion, so I'm very happy that the synthesis movement exists.

If you're reducing the universe to "consciousness" you are going full on hippie. It's an absurd belief on par with anything Christians ever came up with. Trying to come across as slightly humble by inserting "it's not a strong belief" is just a rhetorical trick. You're still going very far down an deductive road where, at no point, during your journey have you reached anything that might suggest consciousness further down the road. None.

Hippies start by feeling something. Usually self aggrandizing. They then decide it's true. And proceed to filter reality around it, warping logic itself. Completely bullet proof to any rational argument. How isn't this what you are doing?

So physicists are reducing the universe to lesser and lesser building blocks to see what it's fundamentally made out of. Down to the periodic elements, from there to the subatomic particles, and maybe from there strings fundamentally. All the forces are also reduced to particles. That's quite straight forward. Then the fabric of spacetime might be stitched together by quantum entanglement. Accordning to Brian Greene so that might be an advancement in string theory. Consciousness, qualia, whatever you want to call it, is so different. Yet a phenomena in the same universe. So where to go from there? We are currently stuck on that question, I'm not saying we "should" reduce the universe to consciousness but we are stuck there at the moment. Physics and consciousness. What I'm actually have been trying to do in this thread, if you read carefully, is reducing it to only physics from there. That physics is the foundation of consciousness.

If you think I'm using rhetorical tricks then you think I'm lying?
"Hippies start by feeling something. Usually self aggrandizing. They then decide it's true"
So, first of all, I've never decided it's true, only that it's a valid philosophical view to have until science can point us in one or the other direction.
Second, the whole reason for creating this thread was to challenge these ideas. Do hippies do that?
Because this place is filled with the smartest people I know on the internet. I was sadly almost disproven by you when your only counter argument was to call me a hippie.
I really think you have something valuable to add to the discussion, so please share that instead.

Could it possibly have something to do with his liberal use of scientific words in absurd contexts? Hint hint.

Look, I'm also allergic to hippies using words like quantum to sound scientific. Lets get to the bottom of it then, point out exactly which words you mean.
Because I'm using quantum as carefully as I can, I'm a science nerd. But discussing fundamental properties of the universe gets you to quantum. So no, I wont stop using that word because then I can't discuss the topic. That's a difference between me and a hippie. I have an understanding of the words I'm using.

And to be really clear, when discussing panpsychism I'm really talking about panprotopsychism. So for consciousness to be achieved at our level, I'm guessing brain level complexity is needed. Reducing from that down to the bottom you only get some proto consciousness. It's not like I'm saying rocks can think or anything. It's like gravity. At particle level it's there but barely noticeable. Gravity need increased mass to be noticeable. Consciousness might need increased interconnectivity, complexity, or increase in any other mathematical property of the brain. But that's not the only idea I've put forward. Alternatively, fundamental physics could completely lack any shred of building block for consciousness. In that case it could be based in the information flow itself. There are purely mathematical theories of consciousness as well. In that case consciousness could begin well above the level of fundamental physics. Thirdly, it could still be based in physics but be a "state of matter", resulting from the interconnectivity of the brain, then it would also begin above the level of fundamental physics.

And just to have all the cards on the table. I'm quite open for Max Tegmarks idea (don't know if it's his originally though) that physics ultimately could be mathematics, and if that's the case then consciousness would surely go with it. I don't view maths as a tool but as part of reality. We don't invent PI, we discover it. Everything in math is a discovery.

You don't seem to know the difference between philosophy and pseudoscience.

If you're doing philosophy then why bring in the science? You don't sound like you are talking philosophy. You sound like you are talking science.

This is something hippies do all the time. They suck at philosophy and can't argue their case if their life depended on it. So they use scientific language, because we all know that the scientific method and peer review give science much greater gravitas than philosophical ideas. It's essentially argument from authority. They use all the longest words they can find in the hopes that their audience doesn't understand it. Arguably nobody fully understands quantum theory. So by throwing in Quantum Theory any random hippie idiot can make even the greatest scientist a bit insecure about their position and back down from a fight. It looks to me like this is exactly what you are doing. I'm not convinced at all you're not. I'd say your way of arguing is stereotypical of hippies.

One has to involved whatever science is available, otherwise you're lost. Sure, there are philosophical questions that are purely philosophical, but for hard problems in science they start off in philosophy and branch out into science when science is ready to make progress. You know, at this point string theory is mostly philosophy too. They have lots of maths though. But no data, no experiment. Philosophy with scientific language. I wouldn't imagine you calling a string theorist a hippie. And I wouldn't separate philosophy and science like that. Science is the only process that will ultimately give us the answers, but philosophy as a tool of analysis can be used as a starting point, a "primordial soup" where ideas bubble around, and maybe a scientific hypothesis can be built around one idea or another. For such a hard problem as consciousness it's natural that it will be mostly a philosophical discussion at this point. But any philosophical discussion that ignores whatever science is available is not worth having.

So would you really call Sam Harris and David Chalmers hippies? Because they take these ideas seriously. Both are philosophers, and Sam is also a neuroscientist.
You didn't answer, did you listen to Chalmers TED talk? Or the conversation between him and Sam Harris?

I'm very experienced discussing with religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists and pseudoscientific "hippies". I engaged in that activity online for years, and built a very strong immune system against that kind of thinking. But what I also learned was that one can become a hammer and see everything like a nail, when only trying to debunk ideas all the time. In this thread I'm putting forward multiple ideas at the same time, some of them contradictory. I've even argues against myself a few times. All for the sake of trying out what holds up and what doesn't.

As a layperson I'm just going with whatever the scientific community agrees on. If they can't agree on anything my belief is that nobody knows. Therefore my current position is that consciousness is still a mystery.

We don't really know it's function. For all we know it could be some sort of strange evolutionary remnant from an earlier stage of evolutionary development of the mammalian brain. Like the appendix. Or the human equivalent of peacock feathers. Useless to anything but help us get laid. But I am highly dubious that it's anything but a creation of the human body. Once it dies I'm convinced it takes our consciousness with it.

I agree, consciousness is a mystery, nobody knows anything.

I'm not sure it has any function. Is could be an epiphenomenon. Because the brain seem to decide before we consciously make decisions. I'll link it to you as well because I'm not sure you're reading my other responses: https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751

So all the functionality of the brain, all decisions, desires, thoughts, emotions are at the functioning of the brain. Physics only. That's my materialistic view of it at least. Consciousness only seems to be along for the ride.
By claiming consciousness has some function, that really sounds to me like someone arguing for a soul. Because then there is this mysterious phenomena that we can't explain that is affecting physics.
Instead of just physics giving rise to a subjective experience.

An inner subjective experience is subjective and can therefore cannot be proven, nor compared.

I agree, but you originally said:
"Creating a computer with consciousness is trivially simple."
Consciousness. Like it's a fact. You're very confusing.

Just because we can't extract it somehow and share in the experience doesn't mean it's not there. For all you know you're the only human with a inner subjective experience. The rest of us could all be part of an elaborate theater of zombies conspiring to deceive you. Everybody agrees that Qualia is a thing. But we struggle with even constructing experiments to show how we experience colour differently. We all know that we do. But there's fundamental practical obstacles to constructing the experiments. Even the simplest aspect to it is almost impossible.

When Descartes said "I think therefore I am" he was wrong. Thinking doesn't prove shit.

Yes, completely agree. Well described. That's the hard problem in a nutshell.

All we know is that computer programs collect information about the world, create an image of if and then and act on it according to rules we have created. But we don't know what they're feeling about it.

Agree. It's possible to argue both one or the other direction, as has been done in this thread.

When people in these conversations talk about "inner subjective experience" what they're usually talking about is the specialness of humans/mammals.

I'm not. I think I've done the exact opposite. I know it's been my intention.

Neuroscience has shown that the consciousness (of languages we are fluent) isn't involved at all when it comes to language processing. It's a separate process we are not normally consciously aware of. So how can we compare human brains to computers when it comes to language processing?

untermensche was the one who was arguing that language had something to do with consciousness. I argued against.

How aren't you taking human consciousness and generalizing it as the model for universal consciousness? If you are not talking about human consciousness then you have no idea what you are talking about. Then why call it "consciousness"?

It's a good question. And no, I wouldn't claim I have a well defined idea what I'm talking about. I've only experienced human consciousness, enhanced/different kind of human consciousness on psychadelics like LSD (if that's a proper way of describing it), and reduced human consciousness while being at the border of awake/asleep.

Consciousness at a fundamental level of physics would only be some kind of proto consciousness. There are probably better words to be invented or already in existence, but since you're aware that it's such a hard problem I think you understand that we are both stuck with a limited amount of hypotheses and words to describe it.

 

[untermensche]

Presently there are two major views of consciousness.

One view is that consciousness is computational and the brain is "like" a computer making computations.

The other view is that consciousness is not computational. This is the view of people like Roger Penrose.

It is his ideas I spoke of. The idea that consciousness was related to some quantum effect within the cell.

He looked at micro-tubules.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Oh you mean Noden? I love that place. I'm not a member yet but have been to some events, courses and parties there. Both in the old and new location.
Thank you for telling me all this background stories and about yourself as well.

You know what's funny, you came across like someone who would call anyone doing meditation a hippie. I've been called a hippie for going to Noden events by someone like that. This is so funny. You would be the father of hippies in their eyes if you said you're one of the founding fathers of this place.

Anyways, hats off for being one of its creators. It's a really good initiative.

Yes, that's the place. Thank you.

And the fact that it grew so much larger than you thought just shows what kind of void the synthesis movement filled.

Yeah. I think that's the operant word. "Void". We didn't need to invent shit. Once someone mentioned the idea (it was Alain de Botton) it was like pushing a boulder down a mountain. It was a lot of hard work. But large and fast rewards. Which is an indication, not so much of our genius, as more an ability to pay attention to what is happening in the world and act on it.

That's something I've also realized after listening to Jordan Peterson for example, how religion is part of us in a way, because it coevolved with us for so long.
Doesn't have to be theist religion, so I'm very happy that the synthesis movement exists.

Co-evolved makes it sound like religion is some separate entity. I think it's more like we've evolved to be a hunter/gatherer tribe and as such we have a bunch of instincts (ie emotional triggers) that push us in certain directions. After we stopped being hunter gatherers some of our emotional needs/requirements weren't being met by the farming, and later, lifestyles. So we invented religion to satisfy those emotional needs and to curtail human hunter/gatherer behaviors that were less than helpful among the more sedentary. I think that's all religion is. And I do think it's necessary for humans. We can replace all the constituent parts of religion with secular counterparts. That's not even difficult today. But it's way less effort to just join an existing religion. Or as we did, invent our own.

So physicists are reducing the universe to lesser and lesser building blocks to see what it's fundamentally made out of. Down to the periodic elements, from there to the subatomic particles, and maybe from there strings fundamentally. All the forces are also reduced to particles. That's quite straight forward. Then the fabric of spacetime might be stitched together by quantum entanglement. Accordning to Brian Greene so that might be an advancement in string theory. Consciousness, qualia, whatever you want to call it, is so different. Yet a phenomena in the same universe. So where to go from there? We are currently stuck on that question, I'm not saying we "should" reduce the universe to consciousness but we are stuck there at the moment. Physics and consciousness. What I'm actually have been trying to do in this thread, if you read carefully, is reducing it to only physics from there. That physics is the foundation of consciousness.

If you think I'm using rhetorical tricks then you think I'm lying?
"Hippies start by feeling something. Usually self aggrandizing. They then decide it's true"
So, first of all, I've never decided it's true, only that it's a valid philosophical view to have until science can point us in one or the other direction.
Second, the whole reason for creating this thread was to challenge these ideas. Do hippies do that?
Because this place is filled with the smartest people I know on the internet. I was sadly almost disproven by you when your only counter argument was to call me a hippie.
I really think you have something valuable to add to the discussion, so please share that instead.

Consciousness is a very specific and poorly understood concept. It's mysterious. Hippies use those kinds of words liberally to justify and argue for all kinds of nonsense.

Why call it "consciousness"?

If we dig down to the most fundamental part of physics, why would we find something that's clearly an emergent property of the human body? It's all backward.

So would you really call Sam Harris and David Chalmers hippies? Because they take these ideas seriously. Both are philosophers, and Sam is also a neuroscientist.
You didn't answer, did you listen to Chalmers TED talk? Or the conversation between him and Sam Harris?

I did not listen to the Ted Talk. I'm only aware of David Chalmers work through references by other researchers and authors I've read. Sam Harris is smart, but often talks about things outside his expertise, which he shouldn't. Sam Harris is smart but not as smart as Sam Harris thinks.

An inner subjective experience is subjective and can therefore cannot be proven, nor compared.

I agree, but you originally said:
"Creating a computer with consciousness is trivially simple."
Consciousness. Like it's a fact. You're very confusing.

It depends what we mean by consciousness. If we mean a consciousness as seen from outside comparable to humans then computers have consciousness on par with humans. An inner subjective experience, as I described earlier doesn't mean anything in this context.

It's a good question. And no, I wouldn't claim I have a well defined idea what I'm talking about. I've only experienced human consciousness, enhanced/different kind of human consciousness on psychadelics like LSD (if that's a proper way of describing it), and reduced human consciousness while being at the border of awake/asleep.

Well, there you have it. And since you've done psychadelics you know exactly just how subjective and unreliable our inner view of the world is. And how nonsensicle it is to talk about it in anyway other than as a part of the human body.

Consciousness at a fundamental level of physics would only be some kind of proto consciousness. There are probably better words to be invented or already in existence, but since you're aware that it's such a hard problem I think you understand that we are both stuck with a limited amount of hypotheses and words to describe it.

Dude.... you sound like a hippie. I'm sorry, but you do. If it's any consolation my scientist Christian girlfriend think that I sound like a hippie when I talk about this stuff.

 

[veclock]

Yeah. I think that's the operant word. "Void". We didn't need to invent shit. Once someone mentioned the idea (it was Alain de Botton) it was like pushing a boulder down a mountain. It was a lot of hard work. But large and fast rewards. Which is an indication, not so much of our genius, as more an ability to pay attention to what is happening in the world and act on it.

I'll probably check it out more after corona is over!

Co-evolved makes it sound like religion is some separate entity. I think it's more like we've evolved to be a hunter/gatherer tribe and as such we have a bunch of instincts (ie emotional triggers) that push us in certain directions. After we stopped being hunter gatherers some of our emotional needs/requirements weren't being met by the farming, and later, lifestyles. So we invented religion to satisfy those emotional needs and to curtail human hunter/gatherer behaviors that were less than helpful among the more sedentary. I think that's all religion is. And I do think it's necessary for humans. We can replace all the constituent parts of religion with secular counterparts. That's not even difficult today. But it's way less effort to just join an existing religion. Or as we did, invent our own.

Well risking to sound like a hippie again now, but they can be viewed as separate entities. They are memetic entities, and we are genetic/biological. They compete, survive and evolve according to evolution too. You must be familiar with Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennetts way of describing this. Religions subdivide into subspecies also, and branch out into new religions.

One can view not only religions but any ideology, or even a company as an "entity". We as a biological organism are not the same atoms all the time, I think every 7th year or something all our atoms have been replaced with new ones that we eat. Companies has a flow of employees that start or quit. But the company as an "entity" keeps on navigating even though its building blocks, the employees, are going in and out. Same with us, our atoms are going in and out, we are more than our atoms, we're an ongoing process. Even companies can have "children", it's not unusual that an employee that has been with a big company for a few years have learned everything necessary to be able to start a smaller company in the same business that is more agile and can make more money per employee.

Theistic religions often compete by offering the ultimate reward (heaven) and the ultimate punishment (hell), so one is afraid to leave and yearning too much for the potential reward to not follow the religion.

But yes, apart from that aspect, religion offered us a framework where many of our human needs could be met and stimulated. From what I've know religions might have started earlier with shamans and psychadelics as a religious experience, that was later replaced with priests when we transitioned to more of a society than a tribe. One religion taking over another, priests had to take the place of the shaman. So the forbidden fruit might have been the psychadelic substance that the new monotheistic religion had to get rid of to establish itself.

Consciousness is a very specific and poorly understood concept. It's mysterious. Hippies use those kinds of words liberally to justify and argue for all kinds of nonsense.

Why call it "consciousness"?

If we dig down to the most fundamental part of physics, why would we find something that's clearly an emergent property of the human body? It's all backward.

Waaaait a little bit now. "Emergent property"? Weren't you the one calling me a hippie for referring to emergence? Now your doing it yourself?
You're not making sense at all. I'm not gonna let you dodge this one so don't even try to dodge it.

Let me quote you: "emergent phenomena" is another one of these popular New Age hippie words."
And I wont excuse that "phenomena" and "property" would make any difference.

And let me quote you again, just to show your inconsistency even more:
"Emergent phenomena still has to emerge from somewhere."

So yes, this is why I'm trying to find out from where it emerges. From what building block. Or from which force, or which mathematical property of a system, or what state of matter.

And lastly, to show you how you're inconsistent in yet another way. Here's a quote:
"How isn't this simply built around trying to prove the specialness of human consciousness?"
How does this marry with you now saying:
"something that's clearly an emergent property of the human body"

I'm not the one saying anything about humans specifically, I'm the one trying to generalize it to not be special to humans.
You seem to be the one now referring to humans.

I did not listen to the Ted Talk. I'm only aware of David Chalmers work through references by other researchers and authors I've read. Sam Harris is smart, but often talks about things outside his expertise, which he shouldn't. Sam Harris is smart but not as smart as Sam Harris thinks.

Maybe if you did you would take it a bit more seriously. I'm only a guy on a forum so I see why you're able to just put the hippie category on me to not have to take it seriously. And I'm not as well spoken as these guys, but I'm basically putting forward ideas that I've learned from Chalmers in particular. So if you got to hear how he describes it, maybe you would realize that you're misunderstanding me?

It depends what we mean by consciousness. If we mean a consciousness as seen from outside comparable to humans then computers have consciousness on par with humans. An inner subjective experience, as I described earlier doesn't mean anything in this context.

Of course we are talking about the inner subjective experience. All the other aspects are awareness, perception, memory, intelligence, problem solving, behavior.
I don't think you've describe why it doesn't mean anything in this context. It's still an open question.

Well, there you have it. And since you've done psychadelics you know exactly just how subjective and unreliable our inner view of the world is. And how nonsensicle it is to talk about it in anyway other than as a part of the human body.

I do know that, and how different it can be. What is the human body a part of? The universe. What is it made out of? Physics. So how are you getting consciousness if not from the physics that are involved in the brain? Or alternatively the information flow represented in the brain activity? You're the one saying humans are special now, you hippie.

Dude.... you sound like a hippie. I'm sorry, but you do. If it's any consolation my scientist Christian girlfriend think that I sound like a hippie when I talk about this stuff.

It's a radical idea as Chalmers puts it, but the hard problem of consciousness needs to consider even these ideas to have the chance of getting solved.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I'll probably check it out more after corona is over!

We're having a big Syntheist party on Stora Höggarn later this summer. Outdoors and Corona safe. I'll probably drop by.

Well risking to sound like a hippie again now, but they can be viewed as separate entities. They are memetic entities, and we are genetic/biological. They compete, survive and evolve according to evolution too. You must be familiar with Richard Dawkins or Dan Dennetts way of describing this. Religions subdivide into subspecies also, and branch out into new religions.

Aren't you now mixing metaphors? Either it's a separate entity that evolves in symbiosis with humanity, OR it's a meme. I don't think they can be both. Memes are more like viruses that spread parasitically through humanity. They may or may not be useful. But they exploit human brain biases to survive and spread.

I think it's more helpful to think of religion as inbuilt, ie genes rather than memes.

I'm not so impressed by Dan Dennett on this. I think Susan Blackmore is more interesting. She took Dawkins meme idea and ran with it. Made it her life's work. I've read all her books. I love her. But I'm not so convinced meme theory works to explain religion. Religion is literally everywhere and everywhere it comes its so similar. Not the things they believe in. But how they believe. And the rituals.

Theistic religions often compete by offering the ultimate reward (heaven) and the ultimate punishment (hell), so one is afraid to leave and yearning too much for the potential reward to not follow the religion.

All those theories can be scraped off religion and the religion works just fine. When we first set up Syntheism I studied all existing (and long dead) religions to scavenge things for Syntheism. I wrote a bunch of articles, (that I think now aren't on the Internet anymore). My theory is that some things we tell children before bed and soldiers before a battle. All religion seems to have them. I like to call it, "childish religion". They all have it. But isn't core to any of them. And is just childish and stupid. So we can dump it out and stay religious.

All religions also speaks extensively about that sometimes life sucks and there's no point getting hung up about it. It's better to accept and move on. And then present rituals, mental exercises and prayers to help you cope.

But yes, apart from that aspect, religion offered us a framework where many of our human needs could be met and stimulated. From what I've know religions might have started earlier with shamans and psychadelics as a religious experience, that was later replaced with priests when we transitioned to more of a society than a tribe. One religion taking over another, priests had to take the place of the shaman. So the forbidden fruit might have been the psychadelic substance that the new monotheistic religion had to get rid of to establish itself.

I've read quite a lot about the forbidden fruit. The academic answer is that nobody knows what the forbidden fruit is supposed to represent. My theory is that the forbidden fruit is sex. Christianity is very anti-sex. No other religion has hang ups about sex to the degree of Judaism and Christianity. Not even Islam is this extreme, even though it's the same root. But then again, it's a religious text, so every line is most likely written to have several possible interpretations, all equally true. So maybe you're correct?

One reason I don't believe psychadelics is the forbidden fruit is because in the ancient world they used psychadelics to talk to God. Or they just inhaled smoke until they started to hallucinate from oxygen deprivation. They had many methods. My point is, why would the "portal" to communion with God be forbidden? Judaism/Christianity never had any hang up about psychadelics. It existed in the Canaan culture. They would have known about it. If they had a problem with it, it would say in the Bible. The Bible has a lot of very explicit rules about life. Why would this rule not be explicit as well? Nah, it doesn't make sense IMHO.

Consciousness is a very specific and poorly understood concept. It's mysterious. Hippies use those kinds of words liberally to justify and argue for all kinds of nonsense.

Why call it "consciousness"?

If we dig down to the most fundamental part of physics, why would we find something that's clearly an emergent property of the human body? It's all backward.

Waaaait a little bit now. "Emergent property"? Weren't you the one calling me a hippie for referring to emergence? Now your doing it yourself?
You're not making sense at all. I'm not gonna let you dodge this one so don't even try to dodge it.

Let me quote you: "emergent phenomena" is another one of these popular New Age hippie words."
And I wont excuse that "phenomena" and "property" would make any difference.

And let me quote you again, just to show your inconsistency even more:
"Emergent phenomena still has to emerge from somewhere."

So yes, this is why I'm trying to find out from where it emerges. From what building block. Or from which force, or which mathematical property of a system, or what state of matter.

And lastly, to show you how you're inconsistent in yet another way. Here's a quote:
"How isn't this simply built around trying to prove the specialness of human consciousness?"
How does this marry with you now saying:
"something that's clearly an emergent property of the human body"

There's nothing wrong about using the term "emergence". If you use it correctly. An emergent phenomena has to emerge from somewhere. Something can't emerge from the body, while simultaneously being a fundamental particle of the universe. To quote Aristotle, "a pot can't make a potter".

I'm not the one saying anything about humans specifically, I'm the one trying to generalize it to not be special to humans.
You seem to be the one now referring to humans.

General consciousness is just a cognitive system that can self reflect. Since it's subjective we have nothing to say about how it feels to be conscious outside the human body (subjective experience).

You are confusing general consciousness with human consciousness and sliding between them. What you are doing is taking human consciousness and applying it to general consciousness and then in turn shoehorning it into some sort of, really bizarre, idea of it being a fundamental aspect of the universe. It's all really backward.

It depends what we mean by consciousness. If we mean a consciousness as seen from outside comparable to humans then computers have consciousness on par with humans. An inner subjective experience, as I described earlier doesn't mean anything in this context.

Of course we are talking about the inner subjective experience. All the other aspects are awareness, perception, memory, intelligence, problem solving, behavior.
I don't think you've describe why it doesn't mean anything in this context. It's still an open question.

Because non-humans can't communicate their feelings about being conscious with us. Human feelings are just the steering mechanism with which our genes steer/encourage us towards procreation (in the hunter gatherer world) and whatever else we need to survive. Since computers also have a steering mechanism (ie the program). I think we can equate these.

Since feelings are embodied, we will never (according Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy) be able to communicate feelings meaningfully species to species. Which rules out consciousness as anything universal or fundamental. Or rather, if it is, we will never be able to identify it as such.

Well, there you have it. And since you've done psychadelics you know exactly just how subjective and unreliable our inner view of the world is. And how nonsensicle it is to talk about it in anyway other than as a part of the human body.

I do know that, and how different it can be. What is the human body a part of? The universe. What is it made out of? Physics. So how are you getting consciousness if not from the physics that are involved in the brain? Or alternatively the information flow represented in the brain activity? You're the one saying humans are special now, you hippie.

Psychadelics mess with the brain in a couple very specific ways. That shifts our perception slightly. That simile with the four blind men touching an elephant and draw four different conclusions about the elephant. Taking psychedelics allows you to take the perspective of one other blind man. But you're nowhere near having the required information with which to make a general statement of the elephant. What it should do is make you humble about how little we know and how human perceptions sucks balls. But hippies they make the opposite conclusion. They see themselves as seeing some deeper truth about the world and the universe through psychadelics. It's delusional and silly.

 

[veclock]

We're having a big Syntheist party on Stora Höggarn later this summer. Outdoors and Corona safe. I'll probably drop by.

That's awesome. I went to another party there last summer. If you have a link to the event I'd be grateful!
I'll dress up as a hippie so you'll find me easier

Aren't you now mixing metaphors? Either it's a separate entity that evolves in symbiosis with humanity, OR it's a meme. I don't think they can be both. Memes are more like viruses that spread parasitically through humanity. They may or may not be useful. But they exploit human brain biases to survive and spread.

I think it's more helpful to think of religion as inbuilt, ie genes rather than memes.

No. Or, the company example is quite separate. It's not as memetic, even though the reputation and publics knowledge of a company might spread memeticly.
But religion is both a meme and a separate entity. How couldn't it be memetic in its nature? And how couldn't it be a separate entity when it has so many survival mechanisms built into it. How religions fight each others for example.
Internet memes don't do that, they are purely memes. There's more to religions.

The one doesn't exclude the other. They are probably ALSO built into us. We have a symbiosis. It's a meme-gene co-interaction, as Susan Blackmore put it.

I'm not so impressed by Dan Dennett on this. I think Susan Blackmore is more interesting. She took Dawkins meme idea and ran with it. Made it her life's work. I've read all her books. I love her. But I'm not so convinced meme theory works to explain religion. Religion is literally everywhere and everywhere it comes its so similar. Not the things they believe in. But how they believe. And the rituals.

I agree with Dan Dennett on some stuff and disagree on some other. But I agree about Susan Blackmore! I haven't listened to much of her work but since you recommended her I will listen to everything I can find with her as a started.

What's funny though. Susan Blackmore takes panpsychism seriously. She's aware that the hard problem of consciousness requires pantheism to be investigated.
I guess she is a hippie in your eyes?

All those theories can be scraped off religion and the religion works just fine. When we first set up Syntheism I studied all existing (and long dead) religions to scavenge things for Syntheism. I wrote a bunch of articles, (that I think now aren't on the Internet anymore). My theory is that some things we tell children before bed and soldiers before a battle. All religion seems to have them. I like to call it, "childish religion". They all have it. But isn't core to any of them. And is just childish and stupid. So we can dump it out and stay religious.

All religions also speaks extensively about that sometimes life sucks and there's no point getting hung up about it. It's better to accept and move on. And then present rituals, mental exercises and prayers to help you cope.

I absolutely agree. But that's another example why religions are memetic entities. Some species of religions evolve brutal survival methods. Like some organisms evolving venom, poison, fangs etc. Syntheism is then a species that has other survival mechanisms. Like relying completely on the genetic connection to humans, without the need for those brutal additions that theistic religions often use.

I've read quite a lot about the forbidden fruit. The academic answer is that nobody knows what the forbidden fruit is supposed to represent. My theory is that the forbidden fruit is sex. Christianity is very anti-sex. No other religion has hang ups about sex to the degree of Judaism and Christianity. Not even Islam is this extreme, even though it's the same root. But then again, it's a religious text, so every line is most likely written to have several possible interpretations, all equally true. So maybe you're correct?

One reason I don't believe psychadelics is the forbidden fruit is because in the ancient world they used psychadelics to talk to God. Or they just inhaled smoke until they started to hallucinate from oxygen deprivation. They had many methods. My point is, why would the "portal" to communion with God be forbidden? Judaism/Christianity never had any hang up about psychadelics. It existed in the Canaan culture. They would have known about it. If they had a problem with it, it would say in the Bible. The Bible has a lot of very explicit rules about life. Why would this rule not be explicit as well? Nah, it doesn't make sense IMHO.

"Nobody knows" is not an "academic answer". It's the lack of an academic answer. There's some ancient art of the forbidden fruit depicted as a mushroom.
The portal to communication with god became forbidden because it was the wrong god. But yeah I'm not sure. It could be sex also, it is a reasonable theory. But IMO psychadelics is a better theory.
I got an introduction to that theory from this podcast with Aron Flam and Alexander Bard, who is also a syntheist. I'm sure you know about them.
Maybe you know any of them personally? I know they (Bard in particular) are involved in the stockholm syntheist movement. I've met him a few times in those circles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNTLEHqeAis (In swedish, sorry any english speaker who is reading)

There's nothing wrong about using the term "emergence". If you use it correctly. An emergent phenomena has to emerge from somewhere. Something can't emerge from the body, while simultaneously being a fundamental particle of the universe. To quote Aristotle, "a pot can't make a potter".

So let's compare.
I said:
All I'm saying is consciousness as an emergent phenomena should have a building block
You said:
something [consciousness] that's clearly an emergent property of the human body

We're using it in the same way. I said consciousness is emergent. You said consciousness is emergent.
When I'm using the term you respond:
"emergent phenomena" is another one of these popular New Age hippie words."
When you use the term in the exact same way you try to dance around it by saying:
"There's nothing wrong about using the term "emergence". If you use it correctly."

This is total hypocrisy. Just admit it. This is not intellectually honest at all. It's quite embarrassing IMO.
This is what you get for playing the "you're a hippie card" instead on focusing on what's being said.

"Emergent phenomena still has to emerge from somewhere."
Which is why I said, it should be represented at somewhere at the smallest scale of the system giving rise to it. The system, being the brain and its activity, that works through chemical processes that is governed by quantum physics.
I'll put this back to you: Emergent phenomena still has to emerge from somewhere.
Because it seems like you're the one who thinks that it's just magic popping up once you have a brain, or something separate from physics.
If the physical universe is all we got, then we have to link, whatever gives rise to consciousness as an emergent phenomena, to physics.
That's my argument.

General consciousness is just a cognitive system that can self reflect. Since it's subjective we have nothing to say about how it feels to be conscious outside the human body (subjective experience).

You are confusing general consciousness with human consciousness and sliding between them. What you are doing is taking human consciousness and applying it to general consciousness and then in turn shoehorning it into some sort of, really bizarre, idea of it being a fundamental aspect of the universe. It's all really backward.

Which is another example of your non-ability to comprehend what I'm saying, or skipping to read, or whatever it is. Or is memory the problem? Only you can tell.
I've again and again said that if different systems can give rise to consciousness then they would differ, because the systems differ.
And since we've agreed on that an emergent property (consciousness, subjective experience) has to come from somewhere - then... it needs to be represented at some lower level of the system that gives rise to it.
Maybe is the neuron the fundamental building block? The smallest subjective experience. Maybe some process in the neuron? Maybe even smaller, the at the quantum level of what is going on in the neuron? But then that would also be represented anywhere.
That doesn't mean that consciousness at our level is everywhere, because as an emergent phenomena stuff like complexity, brain structure, some mathematical property, is needed. Compare to gravity. Gravity needs lots of mass to be noticed, but is still not zero at the quantum scale. It's basically zero though until you have a large enough brain. Consciousness might need the complexity of our brains to become our level of consciousness. I said that if panprotopsychism is true, then the lowest level of subjective experience would be like an infinitesimal above black. Basically zero but not zero. So that when being involved in a complexed structure in the brain, consciousness can emerge. Because as you said, it has to emerge from somewhere.

Even though I've explained this agan and again, you go on interprete all this as I'm saying: HUMAN CONSCOIUSNESS IS EVERYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE!!!
So you can go on to call me a hippie.

Beyond belief. I don't think you want to understand. I think you might realize it but don't want to admit it.
I think you're like a politician that purposely misunderstands so that you can go one to throw pies. It's the lowest form of "intellectual" debate.
I'm disappointed that this goes on on my favourite intellectual place on the web. But even more disappointed that our democratic process is being fought out this way.
I would hope that you can do better that this really.

Because non-humans can't communicate their feelings about being conscious with us. Human feelings are just the steering mechanism with which our genes steer/encourage us towards procreation (in the hunter gatherer world) and whatever else we need to survive. Since computers also have a steering mechanism (ie the program). I think we can equate these.

Not yet. If we have an super intelligent artificial general intelligence, it will be able to communicate that, if it is conscious of course.

Since feelings are embodied, we will never (according Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy) be able to communicate feelings meaningfully species to species. Which rules out consciousness as anything universal or fundamental. Or rather, if it is, we will never be able to identify it as such.

If that is true (which I doubt because feelings are not the same thing as consciousness), then it's just a communication problem and says nothing about the question.
The last bit, yeah I'm not sure how of if we will ever solve the hard problem of consciousness.

Psychadelics mess with the brain in a couple very specific ways. That shifts our perception slightly. That simile with the four blind men touching an elephant and draw four different conclusions about the elephant. Taking psychedelics allows you to take the perspective of one other blind man. But you're nowhere near having the required information with which to make a general statement of the elephant. What it should do is make you humble about how little we know and how human perceptions sucks balls. But hippies they make the opposite conclusion. They see themselves as seeing some deeper truth about the world and the universe through psychadelics. It's delusional and silly.

If shifts it radically. Not slightly.

We know very little about psychadelics, and to learn about that fully we'll need to learn more generally, and especially about the brain.
What is clear is that psychadelics helps us learn about ourselves and how we interpret the universe. What might be true is that we can learn about some aspects of reality, since the brain is a tool for interpreting the world.
Our subconscious might process stuff that we do not yet understand intellectually.
Look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGOy9rqGX1k
So there are lots of neural networks that can detect different objects, animals etc. When we investigate the "hidden" neurons in these networks, we see that it has an understanding of separate parts of what it is seeing, for example eyes, faces, wheels, roofs, edges, shapes, etc. It'd be interesting to hear what you think about this since you're a computer scientist. So this is what I've speculated about, that psychadelics might let us reach parts of our brains that decodes fundamental aspects of nature like fractals, patterns, geometric shapes etc. Stuff that are involved for us to construct our mental image of the world. I think that is something that psychadelics might let us explore.

But I'm also sure that a mathematician who takes psychedelics and perceives 5 dimensional space might get some mathematical inspiration to explore. As well as an artist might get new ideas. I'm not one of those who claims that the mathematician literally was in 5 dimensional space though.

 

[veclock]

Presently there are two major views of consciousness.

One view is that consciousness is computational and the brain is "like" a computer making computations.

The other view is that consciousness is not computational. This is the view of people like Roger Penrose.

It is his ideas I spoke of. The idea that consciousness was related to some quantum effect within the cell.

He looked at micro-tubules.

Thanks for mentioning it. That's very interesting, haven't been familiar with Penroses views on consciousness but will investigate it.
untermensche, I don't know if you're aware but I answered to your longer post a while back.

Edit: Listening to Pennrose is confirming this idea of panprotopsychism. Nice to get it from a physicist/matematician too and not just from philosophers. Thanks!

 

[veclock]

Consciousness at a fundamental level of physics would only be some kind of proto consciousness. There are probably better words to be invented or already in existence, but since you're aware that it's such a hard problem I think you understand that we are both stuck with a limited amount of hypotheses and words to describe it.

Dude.... you sound like a hippie. I'm sorry, but you do. If it's any consolation my scientist Christian girlfriend think that I sound like a hippie when I talk about this stuff.

It's funny now when I listen to Roger Penroses, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, talking about consciousness. He's talking about how quantum states collapsing to one or the other can be viewed as the building block of conscoiusness, and using the term proto conscoiusness. https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0?t=1128
Sorry Zoidberg, but it just shows again and again how it's you who are clueless.

 

[bilby]

Presently there are two major views of consciousness.

One view is that consciousness is computational and the brain is "like" a computer making computations.

The other view is that consciousness is not computational. This is the view of people like Roger Penrose.

It is his ideas I spoke of. The idea that consciousness was related to some quantum effect within the cell.

He looked at micro-tubules.

Thanks for mentioning it. That's very interesting, haven't been familiar with Penroses views on consciousness but will investigate it.
untermensche, I don't know if you're aware but I answered to your longer post a while back.

Edit: Listening to Pennrose is confirming this idea of panprotopsychism. Nice to get it from a physicist/matematician too and not just from philosophers. Thanks!

Why not ask a physical chemist, a meteorologist, or a milkman?

The only expert opinions on this will come from neurologists, and as far as I am aware, their consensus is that there's no important contribution to thought (including consciousness) below the cellular level - that is, if you treat neurons as a 'black box' whose inputs lead to given outputs, then you can completely model thought, without needing to know or care how the inputs lead to those outputs; And you can do this because, given any set of inputs (which includes both electrochemical signals from other neurons, and purely chemical signals from the endocrine system), a given neuron will generate the exact same outputs every time.

This is directly analogous to other large scale effects - they are independent of any component behaviour on smaller scales.

Calling on quantum effects to explain consciousness in brains is no more sensible than calling on quantum effects to explain the trajectory of an artillery shell during a bombardment.

Of course, consciousness is undetectable, so philosophers can get away with pretty much any wild speculation they like on the issue. If a computer or an ant colony were conscious, how could we tell? I can't even be sure that other humans are conscious - it's just an assumption based on their appearance of being very similar to me (the only consciousness I have ever knowingly encountered).

 

[untermensche]

Calling on quantum effects to explain consciousness in brains is no more sensible than calling on quantum effects to explain the trajectory of an artillery shell during a bombardment.

Tell that to Roger Penrose.

You know the guy that won the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems.

You know the guy that won one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity".

 

[veclock]

Why not ask a physical chemist, a meteorologist, or a milkman?

The only expert opinions on this will come from neurologists, and as far as I am aware, their consensus is that there's no important contribution to thought (including consciousness) below the cellular level - that is, if you treat neurons as a 'black box' whose inputs lead to given outputs, then you can completely model thought, without needing to know or care how the inputs lead to those outputs; And you can do this because, given any set of inputs (which includes both electrochemical signals from other neurons, and purely chemical signals from the endocrine system), a given neuron will generate the exact same outputs every time.

This is directly analogous to other large scale effects - they are independent of any component behaviour on smaller scales.

Calling on quantum effects to explain consciousness in brains is no more sensible than calling on quantum effects to explain the trajectory of an artillery shell during a bombardment.

Of course, consciousness is undetectable, so philosophers can get away with pretty much any wild speculation they like on the issue. If a computer or an ant colony were conscious, how could we tell? I can't even be sure that other humans are conscious - it's just an assumption based on their appearance of being very similar to me (the only consciousness I have ever knowingly encountered).

No, it's not the "only" expert opinions. I just listened to this one:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU[/youtube]
It's the most interesting work I've ever heard on consciousness (thanks again untermensche)

It's a theory formulated by Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff.

Are you really comparing a team of a medical doctor/anesthesiologist and a theoretical physicist/matematician to a milkman? And thinking they would be equally bad at explaining consciousness?
Jeez maybe I should leave this website, I thought this was were smart people hung out.

Of course the theory has been critiqued, and seem to yet have been tested. Although they've formulated experiments that can be preformed. So it will be very interesting to see.

 

[veclock]

Funny enough untermensche, electrons are part of Penroses & Hameroffs theory! Inside of the microtubulars. The anesthetics are hindering an electron moving back and forth in each microtubular, arguably stopping consciousness. Along with quantum entanglement and other quantum effects, as you were pointing out. Maybe we would have been a good team too haha.

Considering this theory it's possible to make a case against the argument about the ants nest, simply with the fact that the ants nest is probably not quantumly entangled. At least I don't see how the pheromones could transmit an entanglement. The simulation step is still an open question if we postulate quantum computers. But I think this theory would settle the argument about the classical computer.

 

[untermensche]

It is not an electrical effect though.

It is a quantum effect.

Propofol is a potent anesthetic. You start a propofol IV and the person is unconscious in a couple of seconds.

When I went to pharmacy school they had no idea how it worked.

It is interesting to find this:

An allosteric propofol-binding site in kinesin disrupts kinesin-mediated processive movement on microtubules

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844014/

 

[DrZoidberg]

Consciousness at a fundamental level of physics would only be some kind of proto consciousness. There are probably better words to be invented or already in existence, but since you're aware that it's such a hard problem I think you understand that we are both stuck with a limited amount of hypotheses and words to describe it.

Dude.... you sound like a hippie. I'm sorry, but you do. If it's any consolation my scientist Christian girlfriend think that I sound like a hippie when I talk about this stuff.

It's funny now when I listen to Roger Penroses, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, talking about consciousness. He's talking about how quantum states collapsing to one or the other can be viewed as the building block of conscoiusness, and using the term proto conscoiusness. https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0?t=1128
Sorry Zoidberg, but it just shows again and again how it's you who are clueless.

Roger Penrose is a theoretical physist working in a field where most of the map is undiscovered territory. Yes, it's a theory. It's a whacky theory. But it is a theory. So what is a theory? A theory is a story that explains a phenomena without contradicting existing evidence. That's not saying much in today's world of theoretical physics.

His job is to come up with new whacky theories that may advance the field of physics. That's his day job. He's supposed to go up to the edge of human knowledge, and then jump over it.

There's a huge difference entertaining this as a layperson and a theoretical phsysist. There's no reason to give this theory any credence until there's any evidence to back it up. I mean, let's face it, wow is this theory a stretch. It's not even a little bit credible. It's all in loony farm. Sure, it doesn't violate known physics. But so what?

 

[DrZoidberg]

I'll dress up as a hippie so you'll find me easier

Cool. I will also dress as a hippie. There's just no way we can miss each other at the party.

But I agree about Susan Blackmore! I haven't listened to much of her work but since you recommended her I will listen to everything I can find with her as a started.

I have a platonic man-crush on her brain. But also Thomas Metzinger. He's awesome.

What's funny though. Susan Blackmore takes panpsychism seriously. She's aware that the hard problem of consciousness requires pantheism to be investigated.
I guess she is a hippie in your eyes?

I think Susan Blackmore's attitude is that all other theories are worse. That's not saying much. She still thinks it's a whacky and far stretch of an idea.

"Nobody knows" is not an "academic answer". It's the lack of an academic answer.

"Nobody knows" is totally an academic answer. It's often the best academic answer.

There's some ancient art of the forbidden fruit depicted as a mushroom.

Meh. The symbolism of ancient art is all over the place and ALWAYS requires extensive knowledge about the particular time in which it was produced, especially local politics. And very often, we have no fucking clue what's going on in the art. That's just a fact.

A lot of what we are taught about how they thought in the ancient world is conjecture. Nearly everything people say on forums or in documentaries about ancient art and what it means is full on 100% bullshit.

We know a lot about cultures that used clay tablets for writing. Because they become baked when their cities are burned to the ground. Cultures that use papyrus or pergament ... not so much. We have massive collections of soggy lumps of what once was papyrus. The stuff that isn't destroyed wouldn't even fill a closet. Bottom line, we know very little about what they thought in the ancient world. We know some stuff. But based on how much art we've found, it's not saying a lot. And for the art made on perishable materials... which would be most of it we have almost nothing.

The portal to communication with god became forbidden because it was the wrong god.

Pre-literate religion could switch on a dime. Something that was forbidden in one generation became mandatory in the next.

Snake worship was big in early Judaism. The Adam and Eve story is likely a comment on that somehow. But what is that comment? Who knows? It's lost in time.

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

But yeah I'm not sure. It could be sex also, it is a reasonable theory. But IMO psychadelics is a better theory.
I got an introduction to that theory from this podcast with Aron Flam and Alexander Bard, who is also a syntheist. I'm sure you know about them.
Maybe you know any of them personally? I know they (Bard in particular) are involved in the stockholm syntheist movement. I've met him a few times in those circles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNTLEHqeAis (In swedish, sorry any english speaker who is reading)

Cool. I like Bard.

Yes, I know about them. I've actually read all of Bard's books, except Syntheism. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But I should.

I think Bard is pretty open about this being speculative.

But drug use was widespread in the ancient world. It was all over religion. The Torah has over 600 commandments regulating everything from slaughter of animals to how to prepare your sacred tents to how to be a good Jew. They somehow neglect to mention psychadelic drugs. I think it was such a natural and normal part of Jewish life that it didn't occur to them that they might need rules about it.

A common psychadelic in ancient Canaan was Ergot. Often lethal to ingest. Yet, they didn't think it needed rules.

Because non-humans can't communicate their feelings about being conscious with us. Human feelings are just the steering mechanism with which our genes steer/encourage us towards procreation (in the hunter gatherer world) and whatever else we need to survive. Since computers also have a steering mechanism (ie the program). I think we can equate these.

Not yet. If we have an super intelligent artificial general intelligence, it will be able to communicate that, if it is conscious of course.

It won't matter. We're not going to be able to relate to one another. Our experiences will be so different that comparing them won't be meaningful. We can only talk about it operationally. What does it do? And since we don't know what consciousness does in humans, it's a fucked conversation.

Since feelings are embodied, we will never (according Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy) be able to communicate feelings meaningfully species to species. Which rules out consciousness as anything universal or fundamental. Or rather, if it is, we will never be able to identify it as such.

If that is true (which I doubt because feelings are not the same thing as consciousness), then it's just a communication problem and says nothing about the question.
The last bit, yeah I'm not sure how of if we will ever solve the hard problem of consciousness.

It's unsolvable. Universal consciousness can't be anything but special pleading. It's not a meaningful conversation.

Psychadelics mess with the brain in a couple very specific ways. That shifts our perception slightly. That simile with the four blind men touching an elephant and draw four different conclusions about the elephant. Taking psychedelics allows you to take the perspective of one other blind man. But you're nowhere near having the required information with which to make a general statement of the elephant. What it should do is make you humble about how little we know and how human perceptions sucks balls. But hippies they make the opposite conclusion. They see themselves as seeing some deeper truth about the world and the universe through psychadelics. It's delusional and silly.

If shifts it radically. Not slightly.

No, it doesn't. It shifts perception in a tiny tiny way. You only think it's a radical shift because you spend the rest of your life with your perception locked in another way.

If any drug would shift your perception radically you...

1) wouldn't be able to make sense of the input.
2) would most likely die immediately. The brain is sensitive.

The most radical shift of perception is the fact that it teaches us just how limited human perception is and how much bullshit we tell ourselves on a daily basis. All that stuff you thought was so super important while sober is suddenly pointless when you're on DMT.

It's still not a radical shift of perception.

We know very little about psychadelics, and to learn about that fully we'll need to learn more generally, and especially about the brain.
What is clear is that psychadelics helps us learn about ourselves and how we interpret the universe. What might be true is that we can learn about some aspects of reality, since the brain is a tool for interpreting the world.
Our subconscious might process stuff that we do not yet understand intellectually.
Look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGOy9rqGX1k
So there are lots of neural networks that can detect different objects, animals etc. When we investigate the "hidden" neurons in these networks, we see that it has an understanding of separate parts of what it is seeing, for example eyes, faces, wheels, roofs, edges, shapes, etc. It'd be interesting to hear what you think about this since you're a computer scientist. So this is what I've speculated about, that psychadelics might let us reach parts of our brains that decodes fundamental aspects of nature like fractals, patterns, geometric shapes etc. Stuff that are involved for us to construct our mental image of the world. I think that is something that psychadelics might let us explore.

But I'm also sure that a mathematician who takes psychedelics and perceives 5 dimensional space might get some mathematical inspiration to explore. As well as an artist might get new ideas. I'm not one of those who claims that the mathematician literally was in 5 dimensional space though.

Yes, there's a lot we don't know about the brain. I'm pretty sure that mathematicians, in all ages, have had a lot of fun with drugs. I recommend reading up on the sect around Pythagoras. It was crazy.

 

[untermensche]

It's funny now when I listen to Roger Penroses, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, talking about consciousness. He's talking about how quantum states collapsing to one or the other can be viewed as the building block of conscoiusness, and using the term proto conscoiusness. https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0?t=1128
Sorry Zoidberg, but it just shows again and again how it's you who are clueless.

Roger Penrose is a theoretical physist working in a field where most of the map is undiscovered territory. Yes, it's a theory. It's a whacky theory. But it is a theory. So what is a theory? A theory is a story that explains a phenomena without contradicting existing evidence. That's not saying much in today's world of theoretical physics.

His job is to come up with new whacky theories that may advance the field of physics. That's his day job. He's supposed to go up to the edge of human knowledge, and then jump over it.

There's a huge difference entertaining this as a layperson and a theoretical phsysist. There's no reason to give this theory any credence until there's any evidence to back it up. I mean, let's face it, wow is this theory a stretch. It's not even a little bit credible. It's all in loony farm. Sure, it doesn't violate known physics. But so what?

He is not just trying to be whacky.

If you watch the video he talks about "knowing" as opposed to computing.

He concludes that consciousness has aspects that are not computational.

He uses mathematics because that is his field.

It is not whacky to conclude that if the micro-tubules are the site of conscious sedation they may be the site of consciousness itself.

Those that think consciousness is an electrical effect have had decades to show how it is possible.

They have not even produced a hypothesis for how electricity creates consciousness.

 

[veclock]

It is not an electrical effect though.

It is a quantum effect.

Propofol is a potent anesthetic. You start a propofol IV and the person is unconscious in a couple of seconds.

When I went to pharmacy school they had no idea how it worked.

It is interesting to find this:

An allosteric propofol-binding site in kinesin disrupts kinesin-mediated processive movement on microtubules

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29844014/

True, its not an electromagnetic effect. I just thought it was a funny detail.

 

[veclock]

Cool. I will also dress as a hippie. There's just no way we can miss each other at the party.

It would be a funny meeting. Is it an open event or only for Noden members?

I have a platonic man-crush on her brain. But also Thomas Metzinger. He's awesome.

She is brilliant indeed. Haven't heard of Metzinger before, I'll check him out.

I think Susan Blackmore's attitude is that all other theories are worse. That's not saying much. She still thinks it's a whacky and far stretch of an idea.

Well that's kind of my attitude as well. It's a radical idea. To even come close to solving the mystery of consciousness, I think it would be surprising to not need a radical idea.
I mean, Einsteins idea that time is relative was a radical idea. The idea of panprotopsychism, that there's proto conscious properties built into quantum physics, so that the brain has something to build from when it creates our higher level consciousness... It's a radical idea, but it's not surprising that it's a theory that is now taken seriously by serious philosophers and theoretical physicists.

Meh. The symbolism of ancient art is all over the place and ALWAYS requires extensive knowledge about the particular time in which it was produced, especially local politics. And very often, we have no fucking clue what's going on in the art. That's just a fact.

A lot of what we are taught about how they thought in the ancient world is conjecture. Nearly everything people say on forums or in documentaries about ancient art and what it means is full on 100% bullshit.

We know a lot about cultures that used clay tablets for writing. Because they become baked when their cities are burned to the ground. Cultures that use papyrus or pergament ... not so much. We have massive collections of soggy lumps of what once was papyrus. The stuff that isn't destroyed wouldn't even fill a closet. Bottom line, we know very little about what they thought in the ancient world. We know some stuff. But based on how much art we've found, it's not saying a lot. And for the art made on perishable materials... which would be most of it we have almost nothing.

Pre-literate religion could switch on a dime. Something that was forbidden in one generation became mandatory in the next.

Snake worship was big in early Judaism. The Adam and Eve story is likely a comment on that somehow. But what is that comment? Who knows? It's lost in time.

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

But yeah I'm not sure. It could be sex also, it is a reasonable theory. But IMO psychadelics is a better theory.
I got an introduction to that theory from this podcast with Aron Flam and Alexander Bard, who is also a syntheist. I'm sure you know about them.
Maybe you know any of them personally? I know they (Bard in particular) are involved in the stockholm syntheist movement. I've met him a few times in those circles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNTLEHqeAis (In swedish, sorry any english speaker who is reading)

Cool. I like Bard.

Yes, I know about them. I've actually read all of Bard's books, except Syntheism. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. But I should.

I think Bard is pretty open about this being speculative.

But drug use was widespread in the ancient world. It was all over religion. The Torah has over 600 commandments regulating everything from slaughter of animals to how to prepare your sacred tents to how to be a good Jew. They somehow neglect to mention psychadelic drugs. I think it was such a natural and normal part of Jewish life that it didn't occur to them that they might need rules about it.

A common psychadelic in ancient Canaan was Ergot. Often lethal to ingest. Yet, they didn't think it needed rules.

I wont argue against you since I don't know enough about the subject. I recommend listening to the podcast, it's quite sensible. If you do, please give me your thoughts afterwards.
And thanks for the links, I'll have a look.

It's unsolvable. Universal consciousness can't be anything but special pleading. It's not a meaningful conversation.

It might be unsolvable. But as I mentioned earlier. If it would be possible to link brains and overlap consciousness, that might be a way of investigating it in a totally new way.

No, it doesn't. It shifts perception in a tiny tiny way. You only think it's a radical shift because you spend the rest of your life with your perception locked in another way.

If any drug would shift your perception radically you...

1) wouldn't be able to make sense of the input.
2) would most likely die immediately. The brain is sensitive.

The most radical shift of perception is the fact that it teaches us just how limited human perception is and how much bullshit we tell ourselves on a daily basis. All that stuff you thought was so super important while sober is suddenly pointless when you're on DMT.

It's still not a radical shift of perception.

I think this is a semantic discussion, what is radical and what is not.

1) is very much possible.

I think that floating around in a 11 dimensional rubics cube is radically different from our everyday perception.
Or floating around in 5 dimensional space and seeing time as a space dimension.

I'd call that radically different anyways.

Yes, there's a lot we don't know about the brain. I'm pretty sure that mathematicians, in all ages, have had a lot of fun with drugs. I recommend reading up on the sect around Pythagoras. It was crazy.

Did not know that, but sounds like an awesome read!

Roger Penrose is a theoretical physist working in a field where most of the map is undiscovered territory. Yes, it's a theory. It's a whacky theory. But it is a theory. So what is a theory? A theory is a story that explains a phenomena without contradicting existing evidence. That's not saying much in today's world of theoretical physics.

His job is to come up with new whacky theories that may advance the field of physics. That's his day job. He's supposed to go up to the edge of human knowledge, and then jump over it.

There's a huge difference entertaining this as a layperson and a theoretical phsysist. There's no reason to give this theory any credence until there's any evidence to back it up. I mean, let's face it, wow is this theory a stretch. It's not even a little bit credible. It's all in loony farm. Sure, it doesn't violate known physics. But so what?

It's you who are using the word whacky in a misplaced way. They have formulated how the theory can be tested through experiment already. The theory also talks about how psychadelics affect this part inside the neuron.
So we have this mysterious thing called conscoiusness, nobody knows anything about it. Yet we can turn it off with anesthetics. Studying how anesthetics affects the brain is the most logical approach to study consciousness. And you're sitting here on an online forum saying it's whacky and out in loony farm.

The theory has gotten criticism from other scientists, so you're right it's not yet credible. But it has lots of substance to it.

"There's a huge difference entertaining this as a layperson and a theoretical phsysist."
As a syntheist you should understand that not only religion is central to humans, but also science, discussion around science, philosophy and existential philosophy in particular. It's a human activity that goes all the way back. I understand that scientists will ultimately bring the answers, but that doesn't mean we can't shouldn't engage in this conversation as laypersons. Because it's human, it's a fun activity, it's a way of sharing knowledge and learn more. I think throwing pies (calling people hippie) is a conversation killer. Don't you agree? I got to explore lots of interesting subjects with untermensche for example, it was really fun. Because we focused on the subject.

When I showed you that credible people take panprotopsychism seriously, you stopped using hippie and started using whacky. It's ok, you can think that and ones criticism of ideas are part of the philosophical debate and scientific process! As long as one goes on to explain why and not just leave it there as a conversation killer.

I noticed that you skipped answering the part where I showed you how you were misunderstanding me. I interpret that as you finally realized it. Which makes me happy.

 

[untermensche]

Here are some other biological effects that are linked to quantum effects:

Photosynthesis.

The homing of birds and a quantum compass associated with vision.

The experience and sense of olfaction.

The metamorphosis of a frog.

Genetic mutation.

It would be strange if evolving life did not make use of quantum effects.

 

[veclock]

Here are some other biological effects that are linked to quantum effects:

Photosynthesis.

The homing of birds and a quantum compass associated with vision.

The experience and sense of olfaction.

The metamorphosis of a frog.

Genetic mutation.

It would be strange if evolving life did not make use of quantum effects.

Yes, I think I've seen that documentary. Very interesting subject... I have a book on "quantum biology" which I have yet to read. It's about the phenomenas you listed.