Psychology experiments
A friend told me last year about certain psychology experiments that had been done and I recently saw something from Sam Harris that seemed to confirm something about them. Basically the experiments flashed images of animals in front of people at a speed they could not consciously process. As this was happening the subjects were asked to name a random animal. A huge percentage of the time the people named the animal that was flashed in front of them. However each time they were asked why they named that particular animal they said "because I saw a picture of it the other day" or something and very seldom said "i don't know". This is very strange because the person seems to know why he is choosing to say a certain animal yet it keeps coming up as correlated to images flashed at the subjects eyes too fast for him to process. If anyone knows where I can find these studies please let me know. Anyway, if large such experiments do exist just as here explained, what do you make of them? If you disbelieve such a study can even be performed, think of it as a scenario in a novel and ask "what would I think of this if I were in the novel".
Again I don't have the studies at hand yet, but I'm interested in how ideas like this relate to philosophy. Thanks.
Again I don't have the studies at hand yet, but I'm interested in how ideas like this relate to philosophy. Thanks.
Comments (28)
The qualitative actions we determine and initiate without conscious deliberation don’t require certainty or logic. They’re probabilistically determined based on an ongoing prediction of attention and effort (from our conceptual reality) in relation to an ongoing interoception of affect. If you put time pressure on the subject to think of an animal, their momentary attention directed towards the subliminal animal image will be enough to feature in the limited amount of information they can access in that time, despite being insufficient to feature in apperception.
When the subject goes back to explain their choice, they have time to draw from a larger bank of information to sufficiently bolster the rationality of their choice, and will actively seek only data that supports it. They may have matching visual data without sufficient temporal orientation, and may be confident the image wasn’t viewed today or even yesterday, but less confident that it wasn’t viewed in previous days. All of this fuzziness helps to support a sufficiently reasonable explanation.
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s meta-analyses of psychology/neuroscience research in relation to constructed emotion concepts supports this.
I guess what I'm saying is if you display all the animals an average person is generally familiar with, for certain the animal the subject thinks of will appear in the set of images displayed.
Did the experimenters include exotic animals, insects, birds, animals that people generally have never encountered in their lives, even on TV?
Well for starters I would like to point out that:
Quoting Gregory
Quoting Gregory
...these two things seem to conflict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTEmu-jUqA
People, just as they feel like they have complete free will, also feel like they know what exactly why they are recallingideas. However,
Quoting InPitzotl
if the researcher flashes the picture of a chicken and the person immediately says "chicken", the researcher's gonna think it's just because of the picture he sent to the subjects mind. But the subject has a subjective reason as to why he said chicken. Now maybe they are not contradictory. Maybe the signal made the subject's brain think of chicken and in the subjects mind he remembered something about chickens and believes this alone was the reason. However, they are becoming very sophisticated in science where they can tease out these factors and know when something is known (by the subject) subconsciously only and when it's in the conscious mind
Quoting Possibility
Yes
Quoting Possibility
Good, more information. My friend had said that the object of the study was to prove that people fool themselves all the f-ing time about what they REALLY think.
Quoting TheMadFool
You're right, the study would have to be very controlled. How much we fool ourselves is something psychology maybe, perhaps, be able to answer
Quoting unenlightened
Ah, thank you
Quoting Dharmi
Not yet, but I will look it up. Thanks
It's decisive proof against the idea that brain creates consciousness. Since the folks involved had no brain hemispheres, or were missing massive volume of their brain hemisphere, yet were fully conscious and had intelligence. Many were even students at university.
Is not "where consciousness is located" a debated question?
I don't think so. I think that experiment has decisively debunked the idea that consciousness is located in the brain. If there's no brain, how could consciousness be in the brain? It could be elsewhere in the body, but I think that's, just as Neil Degrasse Tyson put it, "an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on."
Consciousness is not in the body. It might still be material, somehow, like some sort of quantum wave or something, but I firmly believe it is immaterial.
Consciousness is fundamental, materiality is not. As Plato says.
You can't just make this shit up. If you want to discuss philosophy, discuss philosophy, but I get really pissed off when folks start discussing empirical matters as if they could just stick a finger in the air and take a guess.
Lorber's patients did not have 'no brain' they had between 80% and 5% brain capacity according to his measurements, which were never verified. Hydrocephalus usually results in sever mental incapacity, in cases where it doesn't the reasons may be linked to the survival of glial cells, or to do with the condensing of scale-free neural networks in surviving brain structures. Lack on one-to-one mapping between neurons and their effects. The paper is here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571441/
It has absolutely fuck all to do with proving consciousness is not created by the brain.
Lorber's patients either had no brains, or impaired hemispheres. That severely lowers the probability that brain produces consciousness.
It doesn't matter what "usually" happens with hydroencephaly. Lorber showed that many normal people have it, and they have no mental impairments.
None of Lorber's patients had no brains.
Quoting Dharmi
So not
Quoting Dharmi
then.
And how exactly does it lower the probability? If have a smaller car than usual does that lower the probability that cars facilitate transportation? What exactly does size have to do with the probability that an organ produces any given phenomena?
Are you really going to argue that a brain stem without a cortex or hemispheres is a brain?
You're free to do that, but that's very reaching.
You're free to believe your dogmatic worldview. I won't tell you not to.
The immaterial is not supernatural (grace). These are different experiences. The former is akin to experiences on shrooms. As for the brain (which it might all come from) if you have a brain stem and some other cerebral activity you can have consciousness. Fish and reptiles only have brain stems basically. A fish (interestingly) is older than the dinosaurs and reptiles are a type of dinosaur.
I think Sam Harris's point was that people had pre-coffee thoughts as to how to be friendly and the coffee kicked these thoughts into gear
Any experiment that tries to show that you didn't do what you did because of what you consciously thought was the subjective cause would have to be very intricate
It's not any different than the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
The subtle body is alleged to have a chakra which is above the head like a halo. Does it originate from the pineal gland like daytime dream sequences? I don't know if any type of experiment that could prove this. Science has assumptions and it's first assumption is "assume it's material unless proven otherwise"
More interesting studies about degeneracy in the brain can be found in Norman Doidge’s book ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’.
I don’t consider myself a materialist, but I am convinced that human consciousness as such is contingent upon a self-organising relational structure between variable ongoing events occurring amongst organic systems. I think we commonly overlook the ‘variable ongoing events’ part of this structure, and tend to view a living organism as a singular event. This singular event is consciousness, but Feldman Barrett argues that it is manifest in an interaction between two internally constructed events - interoception and conception - in a predictive system. In the same way that DNA interacts with chemical variability in a living organism to manifest mRNA instructions, our conceptual system interacts with the variable interoception of affect in a conscious organism to manifest an ongoing predictive instruction of distributed attention and effort.
Consciousness, therefore, has a four-dimensional (meta)physical structure - its location in spacetime is probabilistically determined at best, but just because we can’t definitively locate it, does not mean it isn’t there. Incidentally, the self-consciousness of the human mind is a five-dimensional (meta)physical structure that enables me to differentiate my consciousness from yours, but that’s another discussion, I think.
No, science doesn't assume matter exists. Metaphysics is not the domain of science.
Science assumes "identical OBJECTS act identically in identical situations", not that "ideas" or "blank" act in this way. That's how they are able to do physics at all. They recognize what matter IS ( "esse")
Yeah? So? Ideas operate regularly too, they partake of an eternal unchanging Form, of course they would operate regularly.
I guess
I think you have the wrong video... I've played through this and there didn't seem to be any references to such experiments in them.
Quoting Gregory
But the conflict that I'm seeing has nothing to do with a feeling of complete free will, or feeling of knowing why exactly we do things. There were two statements that I quoted. The first claimed that the images were being flashed too quickly for subjects to consciously process. But in the second, the subjects correctly report their motivation of naming that animal as being based on seeing an image of the animal. (Mind you, they incorrectly report the time, but you're not claiming for example that they remember eating chicken last night, or reading about chickens, or watching cartoons about chickens, or having a pet chicken when they were little, or any of a number of alternate potential triggers).
Quoting Gregory
This does not explain why the subject's report is of seeing an image of the chicken.
Quoting Gregory
The conflict I see gives some reason to doubt this very thing. Whatever speed these subjects were flashed those images, it was apparently sufficient enough for them to self report seeing images.
Minute 5 to 7. People seem to make up stories as to why they do things and "believe their own shit" so to speak. Since no one so far has referenced studies in this area, it IS hard to discuss this further
nonetheless.
I think we're talking about different things then. Or not. In your reporting of these experiments, people are confabulating. It's completely untrue that they saw the image "yesterday"; rather, they saw the image moments ago. But what appears to be true is that they were influenced by seeing an image, and their self report of why contains the account of seeing an image.
Quoting Gregory
Yes; it would be interesting to see the studies. I'm solely describing the report you have given; if you run across particular citations of the experiments I'll be interested (though reserve the right not to comment).