The Illusion of Self

[fromderinside]

It can't be so. If it is a machine then you are wasting the value of the word create on what is actually a thing performing a task. The brain may organize information which the being includes with information from his other organ input systems into an experience. The brain will dutifully record this and make it available the being reconstruct (to recall) his experience.

IOW the behaving being is much more than a brain. Whatever part the brain plays in other being systems is not nearly sufficient to call the brain a thing along with the being promoting experience to materiality. You've propped up an Invalid construction with no material basis.

 

[untermensche]

It can't be so. If it is a machine then you are wasting the value of the word create on what is actually a thing performing a task.

The word "construct" is probably a better word as it happens but the construction is an evolutionary creation so I use create. Blue is something the brain constructs from information from cells that has nothing to do with blue. It is a creation.

IOW the behaving being is much more than a brain.

It all depends on the perspective.

We look at others as the complete animal. Facial expressions, hand gestures, sound of voice and all.

But subjectively we always see ourselves as a mind, with memories and proclivities and opinions, with a personality, and a body we are connected to that can be controlled and experienced.

And brain activity is more than a brain.

 

[fromderinside]

Don't include me in that we thing you just wrote.

Brain activity is the passing and processing of information about the state of the world as as signaled by environmental inputs inputs, current behavior, and state of ones ongoing options processing. Sure there are communications with other bodily systems to and from as well.

Mostly the brain is a reservoir of potential actions (cerebellum) current activities (descending pathway information) evaluative transactions (afferent signal processing) and complex conditional computations (auditory, visual, olfactory, touch, motor, language, association, and motor cortex) processes. which, by quantity, are about 2% of total CNS at any given time.

Funny thing is is that the NS is running about half a second to a second and a half behind actual input at any time so all activity must be reactive (conservative) else one gets burnt. What one is 'experiencing" has already happened.

It is never about the brain creating it is about the brain providing recent events timely enough that for most situations one gets by. What you call a creation is a reproduction of recent history cobbled together using an evolutionarily constructed veridical sensory perception network.

It then acts as a baseline for evaluating against incoming data the direction things are going. So the presentations need to be consistent, reflective to the best of the nervous system's capability to represent inputs, and representative of what is in the world.

That scene, the best available actual behavioral environment scenario is to what evolutionary pressure responds producing beneficial solutions that are validated through surviving individuals.

So not only is color important it is critical. No way deterministic processes would result in an inventor of a creator in the cortex. Nor would color be left to the remote brain to construct.

Rather, primary sensors would reflect correspondent activities IAC with input information, then that information would tend to demand connection with a veridical spatial and hue representation with consistent timeliness from the git go all the way up to where an integrated scene could be realized.

All of the above is consistent with how we find the nervous system including that part that communicates external events to be designed. There is just no time to waste on inventing something a second or three after it happens.

As a psyhoacoustiician I've learned that time is of the essence. Signals received in the cochlea are passed to from the cochlear nucleus on the left to right and vice versa within two or three milliseconds where difference signals are passed upstream to neck and eye muscular control systems arriving in as little as 6 to 10 milliseconds. Even then it takes a human from 120-160ms to generate a being behavioral response as starting gun videos indicate.

A cerebral reflex would be a waste of neurons.

 

[untermensche]

Don't include me in that we thing you just wrote.

You are not an exception.

All you have are your experiences.

You have nothing else in this world. When you fully understand that fact you will begin to understand more.

You are that which experiences a cool breeze and abstract thoughts about death that make you anxious.

You are not a foot. Not a spine. Not a brain. Not any of that.

You are nothing that can be seen by another.

You show others only what you want to show them.

What you call a creation is a reproduction of recent history cobbled together using an evolutionarily constructed veridical sensory perception network.

A painter reproduces what he experiences in a landscape.

His painting is his creation.

The difference with a brain is that it creates reflexively. It reproduces the landscape reflexively. There is no will involved like with the painter.

In nothing you say is there any actual experience. No consciousness. No animal with consciousness.

You have not explained or even seemed to understood experience.

Experience is not the process creating it. It is only that which a mind can apprehend in the present.

A memory is a crude and distorted reproduction of experience mixed with things never experienced.

 

[none]

Don't include me in that we thing you just wrote.

You are not an exception.

All you have are your experiences.

You have nothing else in this world. When you fully understand that fact you will begin to understand more.

You are that which experiences a cool breeze and abstract thoughts about death that make you anxious.

You are not a foot. Not a spine. Not a brain. Not any of that.

You are nothing that can be seen by another.

You show others only what you want to show them.

What you call a creation is a reproduction of recent history cobbled together using an evolutionarily constructed veridical sensory perception network.

A painter reproduces what he experiences in a landscape.

His painting is his creation.

The difference with a brain is that it creates reflexively. It reproduces the landscape reflexively. There is no will involved like with the painter.

In nothing you say is there any actual experience. No consciousness. No animal with consciousness.

You have not explained or even seemed to understood experience.

Experience is not the process creating it. It is only that which a mind can apprehend in the present.

A memory is a crude and distorted reproduction of experience mixed with things never experienced.

can you cite some sources to confirm this grade A bullshit you are projecting?

 

[untermensche]

can you cite some sources to confirm this grade A bullshit you are projecting?

Tell me then.

What do you have access to from the world besides your experience of things in your mind?

What could you possibly know of the world besides some experience in your mind?

Humans are born with the ability to experience certain things in their minds. They have memory.

They also have an intellectual capacity that grows and needs experience in the mind to grow and a language capacity that appears after birth and grows as well with experience in the mind.

What else is there.

Tell me.

Where do you experience the table? In your eye? In your mind? Or do you actually experience it somehow?

You will find no source to cite.

No human understands the physiology behind the phenomena of experience. There is no model that explains it.

All humans know is that they do experience many things. Sights, sounds, tastes, thoughts, emotions, drives.

 

[fromderinside]

Don't include me in that we thing you just wrote.

You are not an exception.

All you have are your experiences.

You have nothing else in this world. When you fully understand that fact you will begin to understand more.

You are that which experiences a cool breeze and abstract thoughts about death that make you anxious.

You are not a foot. Not a spine. Not a brain. Not any of that.

You are nothing that can be seen by another.

You show others only what you want to show them.

What you call a creation is a reproduction of recent history cobbled together using an evolutionarily constructed veridical sensory perception network.

A painter reproduces what he experiences in a landscape.

His painting is his creation.

The difference with a brain is that it creates reflexively. It reproduces the landscape reflexively. There is no will involved like with the painter.

In nothing you say is there any actual experience. No consciousness. No animal with consciousness.

You have not explained or even seemed to understood experience.

Experience is not the process creating it. It is only that which a mind can apprehend in the present.

A memory is a crude and distorted reproduction of experience mixed with things never experienced.

Great. Is this where I'm supposed to stand at attention and salute the flag of your ignorance.

Explain how all that evolved since what your present reflects past inputs. Your experience is history not now. The verbal report is among the weakest of all scientific evidence.

Experimenters have demonstrated there are multiple orientations, different experiences, available depending on options provided chemically and electrically, or even cryogenically. More recently on studies where oxygen uptake (fMRI) were used as measures of what was being experienced from a controlled suite of inputs researches produced similar results.

What has been confirmed is what I learned in school validated by studies since right up to the present moment.

On the other hand what I see from you come from statements from dated technical manuals supported by out of discipline layperson descriptions of behavior. What you write is more attuned to the romantic notions of the 19th century. BTW what you write appears to be philosophical declarations, not even best such declarations, They are definitely not based on reports from the scientific community.

 

[none]

can you cite some sources to confirm this grade A bullshit you are projecting?

Tell me then.

What do you have access to from the world besides your experience of things in your mind?

What could you possibly know of the world besides some experience in your mind?

Humans are born with the ability to experience certain things in their minds. They have memory.

They also have an intellectual capacity that grows and needs experience in the mind to grow and a language capacity that appears after birth and grows as well with experience in the mind.

What else is there.

Tell me.

Where do you experience the table? In your eye? In your mind? Or do you actually experience it somehow?

You will find no source to cite.

No human understands the physiology behind the phenomena of experience. There is no model that explains it.

All humans know is that they do experience many things. Sights, sounds, tastes, thoughts, emotions, drives.

no?

 

[untermensche]

Great. Is this where I'm supposed to stand at attention and salute the flag of your ignorance.

Am I supposed to care about worthless claims of ignorance?

Thinking energy contains information about color is ignorance.

Explain how all that evolved...

We can't explain how a neuron evolves no less the ability to experience with a mind.

There are speculations about how an eye evolves but they all presuppose a mechanism that can create experience and something that can experience vision.

The verbal report is among the weakest of all scientific evidence.

My reports to you are always speculative.

But experience is absolute truth.

When you experience red it is an absolute fact you are experiencing red. And the subject knows absolutely what they are experiencing.

Experience for the subject is superior to all the opinions of humans.

No other human can say a subject is not experiencing red when they absolutely know they are.

Experimenters have demonstrated there are multiple orientations, different experiences, available depending on options provided chemically and electrically, or even cryogenically. More recently on studies where oxygen uptake (fMRI) were used as measures of what was being experienced from a controlled suite of inputs researches produced similar results.

If I take LSD and my experience changes it is still my experience.

The fact that experience can be changed by LSD is evidence experience is a creation of the brain and not something dictated by information from the world.

If a steroid can change experience it is because experience is a creation.

 

[fromderinside]

Before we descend down the rabbit or gopher holes any further maybe a few baseline references are in order. In that regard I'm bring one from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which turns out to be a lay examination of neuroscience against philosophical pursuit of a theory of consciousness.
To wit: The Neuroscience of Consciousness in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/...nIyHiFfDa9BYHX4NaYXPpr1JxPdzN7lsGgg4Thx8vuI8w

Which begins with:

Conscious experience in humans depends on brain activity, so neuroscience will contribute to explaining consciousness. What would it be for neuroscience to explain consciousness? How much progress has neuroscience made in doing so? What challenges does it face? How can it meet those challenges? What is the philosophical significance of its findings? This entry addresses these and related questions.To bridge the gulf between brain and consciousness, we need neural data, computational and psychological models, and philosophical analysis to identify principles to connect brain activity to conscious experience in an illuminating way. This entry will focus on identifying such principles without shying away from the neural details. The notion of neuroscientific explanation here conceives of it as providing informative answers to concrete questions that can be addressed by neuroscientific approaches. Accordingly, the theories and data to be considered will be organized around constructing answers to two questions (see section 1.4 for more precise formulations):

• Generic Consciousness: How might neural properties explain when a state is conscious rather than not?
• Specific Consciousness: How might neural properties explain what the content of a conscious state is?

A challenge for an objective science of consciousness is to dissect an essentially subjective phenomenon. As investigators cannot experience another subject’s conscious states, they rely on the subject’s observable behavior to track consciousness. Priority is given to a subject’s introspective reports as these express the subject’s take on her experience. Introspection thus provides a fundamental way, perhaps the fundamental way, to track consciousness. That said, consciousness pervasively influences human behavior, so other forms of behavior beyond introspective reports provide a window on consciousness. How to leverage disparate behavioral evidence is a central issue.

...


Given the breadth of neuroscience so conceived, an overview of sufficient depth must restrict breadth. On the neuroscience side, this review focuses on the central nervous system and the electrical properties of neurons, particularly in the cerebral cortex. On the side of consciousness, it focuses on perceptual consciousness, with emphasis on vision. This is not because visual consciousness is more important than other forms of consciousness. Rather, the level of detail in empirical work on vision often speaks more comprehensively to the issues that we shall confront.
That said, there are many forms of consciousness that we will not discuss. Some are covered in other entries such as split brain phenomena (see the entry on the unity of consciousness, section 4.1.1), animal consciousness (see the entry on animal consciousness), and neural correlates of the will and agency (see the entry on agency, section 5). In addition, this entry will not discuss the neuroscience of consciousness in audition, olfaction or gustation; disturbed consciousness in mental disorders such as schizophrenia; conscious aspects of pleasure, pain and the emotions; the phenomenology of thought; the neural basis of dreams; and modulations of consciousness during sleep and anesthesia among other issues. These are important topics, and the principles and approaches highlighted in this discussion will apply to many of these domains.

Which ends with:

A productive neuroscience of consciousness requires that we understand the relevant neural properties at the right level of analysis. For generic consciousness, this will involve manipulation of relevant properties in a way that can avoid the access/phenomenal confound, and recent work focuses on pitting the many theories we have considered against each other. For specific consciousness, the critical issue will be to understand neural representational content and to find ways to link experimentally and explanatorily neural content to phenomenal content. We have tools to manipulate neural contents to affect phenomenal content, and in doing so, we can begin to uncover the neural basis of conscious contents. There is much interesting work yet to be done, philosophically and empirically, and we can look forward to a productive interdisciplinary research program.

Followed by discussions in these chapters:

• 1. Fundamentals
  • 1.1 A Map of the Brain
  • 1.2 Neurons and Brain
  • 1.3 Access Consciousness and Phenomenal Consciousness
  • 1.4 Generic and Specific Consciousness
  • 1.5 The Hard Problem
  • 1.6 Neural Correlates of Consciousness
• 2. Methods for Tracking Consciousness
  • 2.1 Introspection and Report
  • 2.2 Access as a Condition on Phenomenal Consciousness
  • 2.3 No Report Paradigms
  • 2.4 Confidence and Metacognitive Approaches
  • 2.5 The Intentional Action Inference
  • 2.6 Vegetative State and the Intentional Action Inference
• 3. Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness
  • 3.1 The Global Neuronal Workspace
  • 3.2 Recurrent Processing Theory
  • 3.3 Higher-Order Theory
  • 3.4 Information Integration Theory
  • 3.5 Frontal or Posterior?
• 4. Neuroscience of Generic Consciousness: Unconscious Vision as Case Study
  • 4.1 Unconscious Vision and the Two Visual Streams
  • 4.2 Blindsight
  • 4.3 Unconscious Vision and the Intentional Action Inference
• 5. Specific Consciousness
  • 5.1 Neural Representationalism
  • 5.2 The Contrast Strategy: Binocular Rivalry
  • 5.3 Neural Stimulation
    • 5.3.1 Visual Motion Perception
    • 5.3.2 Tactile Vibration
    • 5.3.3 Visual Word Form
  • 5.4 Neural Representation and Probabilistic Coding
• 6. The Future

That is the first reference we need since it comes from a philosophy source.

The second would good Neuroscience citations covering the breadth and depth of this topic.

Perhaps one such as: Towards new concepts for a biological neuroscience of consciousness
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11571-020-09658-7

or

or like this: Towards a cognitive neuroscience of self-awareness https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763416300410

Or any others you might recommend.

Clearly its come down to a discussion of "take this, no! You take THIS!"

No progress whatever.

 

[untermensche]

From your source:

Scientists primarily study phenomenal consciousness through subjective reports.

 

[fromderinside]

I introduced this article as

... one from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which turns out to be a lay examination of neuroscience against philosophical pursuit of a theory of consciousness.

You are nothing if not persistent in supporting your lame views. Introspection is prominent in that article because, in part, it is a review of phenomenal consciousness study. The article does not support Introspection. If you read the conclusion summary you won't find introspection at all.

For specific consciousness, the critical issue will be to understand neural representational content and to find ways to link experimentally and explanatorily neural content to phenomenal content. We have tools to manipulate neural contents to affect phenomenal content, and in doing so, we can begin to uncover the neural basis of conscious contents.

So much for an independent critical read.

As for Wundt and Introspection I put him and it with Lysenko and Lamarckian interpretation supporting communist theory as criminal to science.

Lame.

 

[untermensche]

Your source clearly says the prime source of information about phenomenal consciousness, the phenomena of experience, are subjective reports.

That is all we have.

Looking at the brain is not looking at the phenomena of experience.

Acting on the brain and merely looking at subjective reports is not knowing anything about the phenomena of experience or the ability of a mind to experience.

Your vigorous hand waving is noted young lad.

 

[fromderinside]

Of course it isn't all we have as I quoted in my last response. You jut want to continue charging headlong, actually acting like Trump in total denial.

Oh, look I'm did it again, I even highlighted it the tasks required.

For specific consciousness, the critical issue will be to understand neural representational content and to find ways to link experimentally and explanatorily neural content to phenomenal content. We have tools to manipulate neural contents to affect phenomenal content, and in doing so, we can begin to uncover the neural basis of conscious contents.

Introspection is completely discarded as explanation.

 

[untermensche]

I am glad you understand there is no explanation for the phenomena of experience.

Because all we know about phenomenal consciousness are subjective reports.

We don't know how a subject arises or how the things that subject experiences arise.

We know a few ways to monkey around with the consciousness of test subjects though.

Followed by a lot of tall tales passing for understanding.

 

[fromderinside]

Check out carefully the conclusion I presented to you which is more or less a scientific program model. One can jump from subjective to the material processes underlying the being generating the subjective thing.

There is no way to subjectively explain a subjective. One will never get there by introspection since introspection is just phantoms chasing phantoms. Subjective 'experiment' cannot become empirical study because the 'matter' of introspection is purely subjective.

However subjective speculation can be followed by empirical experiment on that which generates the subjective statement., The empirical experiment tracing inputs and outputs finds areas where processes that produce subjective expressions flow. Those can be expand to an experimental program, then to models and theories and finally to understanding of how the illusion of self serves the usefulness of phenomenal subjective experience in successful existence.

We don't directly know because what we can't directly chase subjective experience. We report physical models of what is being done when subjective experience takes place. In fact we could articulate outputs of the elements underlying subjective process and generate our own representation of subjective experience from out model. It isn't but it would be impressive, fooling most.

 

[untermensche]

Check out carefully the conclusion I presented to you which is more or less a scientific program model. One can jump from subjective to the material processes underlying the being generating the subjective thing.

One can pretend they understand something because they are relying on subjective reports to supply all information about experience.

There is no way to subjectively explain a subjective.

So you are saying explanation is impossible. Not that you have anything close to one.

However subjective speculation can be followed by empirical experiment on that which generates the subjective statement.

You have no way to test any of it unless you use a human capable of having subjective experience.

 

[none]

One can pretend they understand something because they are relying on subjective reports to supply all information about experience.



So you are saying explanation is impossible. Not that you have anything close to one.

However subjective speculation can be followed by empirical experiment on that which generates the subjective statement.

You have no way to test any of it unless you use a human capable of having subjective experience.

something, "something"?

 

[untermensche]

That is so incredibly clever it means nothing to me.

 

[DBT]

From your source:

Scientists primarily study phenomenal consciousness through subjective reports.

The report is not subjective, anyone can listen or record the subject describing their experiences, which are subjective but clearly can be described.