Consciousness, Mathematics, Fundamental laws and properties
So I have some thoughts on consciousness. Lmk what you all think.
It seems that we can easily observe informational correlates of consciousness (such as integrated information theory), and from there construct mathematical theories to quantify the degree of consciousness within a system. However, these theories are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. In terms of the nature of qualia itself, and indeed why consciousness should be associated with say, systems displaying higher degrees of information integration, mathematics seems to fall short. We can conclude that consciousness arises in systems of higher informational integration, but why does it? And why are the qualia within the consciousness represented in the way they are?
It seems that there are two options from here. We either regard consciousness as a fundamental property (a property like charge for example in which we accept that there are no more fundamental descriptions of it; some things just exist the way they are without the need for further explanation) or we can try to come up with a more fundamental theory, that goes beyond surface-level descriptions of consciousness.
Let us suppose we go with the first option. So, I suppose that makes sense. We have consciousness as this extra “thing” associated with certain informational processes, just as we have this peculiar concept called “charge” associated with certain particles. Both charge and consciousness cannot be described on any deeper level, they simply exist because that’s the way things are. We can obviously come up with laws to describe the behaviour of charge, descriptive laws, but it reaches a point in which we cannot describe it any deeper. You can observe a phenomenon and rationalise its existence with a set of fundamental laws, then explain these laws with even more fundamental laws etc etc but eventually you’ll arrive at a point in which you cannot go any deeper. Reality isn’t built upon an infinite recursion of more and more fundamental laws and phenomena. Something at this base of this process is “fundamental”.
In a way, with consciousness or charge or something, this feels unsatisfying. We assume that not only does this fundamental property *just* exist, but it is coupled to all other properties via a seemingly arbitrary set of laws that also exist just because. We must be careful with labelling things as fundamental; we could view the whole “fundamental property” idea as we nowadays view “god of the gaps”; we feel as though something cannot be explained more fundamentally, so we label it fundamental. Of course, consciousness and charge could indeed genuine fundamental properties, but it is safer to assume that they are not, in case we wrongfully fall into this trap.
Which brings us to the second option. Perhaps there is a more fundamental theory to consciousness. The first question is, can consciousness be described mathematically on a more fundamental level than simply “this system has x amount of consciousness because it has y amount of this informational correlate”? Personally, I don’t think it can. Surely, mathematics cannot describe why the colour red is represented the way it is, or why an injection of serotonin into the brain has the subjective effect it does.
So overall this leaves us with two options, either consciousness as well as qualia are fundamental properties, or the laws of nature can not all be described mathematically.
It seems that we can easily observe informational correlates of consciousness (such as integrated information theory), and from there construct mathematical theories to quantify the degree of consciousness within a system. However, these theories are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. In terms of the nature of qualia itself, and indeed why consciousness should be associated with say, systems displaying higher degrees of information integration, mathematics seems to fall short. We can conclude that consciousness arises in systems of higher informational integration, but why does it? And why are the qualia within the consciousness represented in the way they are?
It seems that there are two options from here. We either regard consciousness as a fundamental property (a property like charge for example in which we accept that there are no more fundamental descriptions of it; some things just exist the way they are without the need for further explanation) or we can try to come up with a more fundamental theory, that goes beyond surface-level descriptions of consciousness.
Let us suppose we go with the first option. So, I suppose that makes sense. We have consciousness as this extra “thing” associated with certain informational processes, just as we have this peculiar concept called “charge” associated with certain particles. Both charge and consciousness cannot be described on any deeper level, they simply exist because that’s the way things are. We can obviously come up with laws to describe the behaviour of charge, descriptive laws, but it reaches a point in which we cannot describe it any deeper. You can observe a phenomenon and rationalise its existence with a set of fundamental laws, then explain these laws with even more fundamental laws etc etc but eventually you’ll arrive at a point in which you cannot go any deeper. Reality isn’t built upon an infinite recursion of more and more fundamental laws and phenomena. Something at this base of this process is “fundamental”.
In a way, with consciousness or charge or something, this feels unsatisfying. We assume that not only does this fundamental property *just* exist, but it is coupled to all other properties via a seemingly arbitrary set of laws that also exist just because. We must be careful with labelling things as fundamental; we could view the whole “fundamental property” idea as we nowadays view “god of the gaps”; we feel as though something cannot be explained more fundamentally, so we label it fundamental. Of course, consciousness and charge could indeed genuine fundamental properties, but it is safer to assume that they are not, in case we wrongfully fall into this trap.
Which brings us to the second option. Perhaps there is a more fundamental theory to consciousness. The first question is, can consciousness be described mathematically on a more fundamental level than simply “this system has x amount of consciousness because it has y amount of this informational correlate”? Personally, I don’t think it can. Surely, mathematics cannot describe why the colour red is represented the way it is, or why an injection of serotonin into the brain has the subjective effect it does.
So overall this leaves us with two options, either consciousness as well as qualia are fundamental properties, or the laws of nature can not all be described mathematically.
Comments (96)
It's like looking at molecules under a microscope and trying to learn about the microscope from the way the molecules look. But with no basis of comparison from other microscopes or instruments or anything else. and no ability to ever see the microscope itself. Just seeing the molecules and trying to use them to know the microscope that has never been seen.
Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the hard problem of consciousness, the illusion of free will, and the ego.
I would agree that for some things, its almost simpler to view it in a non-deterministic setting.
I don't know what mathematical models you are referring to, but it seems to me that it is unwarranted to jump to any metaphysical conclusions from the mere fact that some descriptive mathematical models of conscious systems don't give you certain features of consciousness.
Discussions of consciousness here on the forum always break down because people are not clear about the meaning of the word. Are you talking about self-awareness or the ability to perceive "qualia," a word, by the way, I hate. I assume mice perceive qualia. I assume they are not self-aware. Or maybe you're talking about something else.
Quoting tom111
Quoting tom111
There are certainly more than two options. The one that seems most useful to me is that consciousness is a property that emerges spontaneously from routine mental processes. Those mental process emerge spontaneously from nervous system behavior.
Quoting tom111
I would say that consciousness is a system of higher informational integration.
There are better options. Maybe it is structure that is fundamental and not properties. Properties may be better thought of as emergent features of systems of relations.
Physical reality is best described as mathematical patterns or structures of relations. Quantum theory, relativity, the standard model. The maths describes the causal structure of reality.
When it comes to consciousness, neuroscience is also seeking to find its mathematical model of its essential causal structure.
Both life and mind are themselves code-based modelling relations with reality. That is the kind of structure they are. Semiotic structures. Genes and neurons anchor the business of modelling the environment in terms of an organism's interests and purposes.
So consciousness just is - in a general metaphysical way - the brain modelling the world from an enactive or "selfish" point of view. Consciousness is what it is like to be in a modelling relationship with the world - a model of the world that has "me" in it as its centre.
That general semiotic modelling relationship is now being put on a solid mathematical foundation by Karl Friston and his Bayesian Brain approach. He now claims it to be a fourth branch of mechanics - Bayesian mechanics to add to classical, statistical and quantum mechanics.
See his talk here for details.
That still does not "explain" the redness of red, of course. But that is a different story. Scientific accounts generally don't explain reality in terms of qualities ... being that they deal in the mathematically quantifiable.
It is like being given a useful - measurable and calculable - explanation of magnetism and complaining that an account of its essential causal structure does not give you an understanding of the magneticness of magneticity.
Once you verbally reduce the world to singular qualities, you cut it away from all that is its counterfactual context. You abstract it from its structure of relations. And no wonder not much more can be said.
But even without going into the maths of Bayesian mechanics, or the metaphysics of code-based semiosis, it should be easy enough to see that the brain - in modelling its environment in terms of its embodied self-interest - ought to feel like something. Indeed, something just like being a model of the world as it is with "ourselves" living and acting in it.
How could such modelling not feel like something? (The question that brings the conversation back to the realm of questions which are framed counterfactually and thus allow you to say why zombies can't be actually zombies if they indeed are in a Bayesian modelling relation with the world, exactly like we are.)
:100:
:up:
The brain, mind, and consciousness are 3 completely different things.
"Different" but not unrelated: noun, verb, and preposition, respectively.
Eh? All three are nouns
This is the crux of it. Why should it feel like something? Why can't the modelling happen in the dark?
I'm with 180 Proof, at least as far as brain vs. mind.
Quoting 180 Proof
As I see it, brain is to mind as your TV set is to "Gilligan's Island." Not the same, but inseparable. As for consciousness - what we call "mind" is the set of mental processes. "Consciousness" is one of those processes.
I'll drink to that. :up:
I don't think you actually understand what I mean and blame my "lack of clarity" (so far you're the only one, bert) for your failure to understand me.
Do you understand the Bayesian/semiotic approach to modelling well enough to justify such a doubt?
If not, your proclaimed doubt is “happening in the dark”.
This is a really interesting post. It helped me reframe the subject in a new way I found helpful. I've always found your discussions of semiotics... provocative. By which I mean, I believe what you say but don't understand. I've been trying for the four years since I first read your ideas on the forum. I watched the first 10 minutes of the video you linked and quickly got lost. I'll keep trying.
Quoting apokrisis
I like the relation of complex processes such as life and consciousness as models. That's the part of this discussion I find in tune with my way of seeing things but expanding them.
Quoting apokrisis
I like this especially for a couple of reasons. First - it's a great rhetorical response to the "science can't address qualia" argument. They say "How do you explain the experience of red?" You say "How could such modelling not feel like something?" It turns their argument back on them. Rhetorical ju jitsu. I don't know that it actually explains anything, but maybe it will knock them off their homo-centric high horse.
That's the second reason I like it. I'm comfortable that we don't need to postulate some extra layer of causation or emergence in order to explain "qualia." Whenever the subject comes up, I try to imagine how it would feel for sparks in neurons to turn into movies in my mind. You say "Of course it feels like something," makes me rethink the defensiveness I sometimes feel in that discussion.
Good post.
You're presuming that experiencing necessitates feeling, but no reason besides raw intuition and consensus to think it must. The uncertainty about what it is to experience merely shifts from "consciousness" to a supposed feature of consciousness, "feeling", without explaining anything.
The explanation has to come from substance being modeled, not mere structure of the model itself, regardless of how efficacious a model's predictive capabilities prove to be. I imagine Bayesian mechanics is, like quantum mechanics, approximate and subject to at least some uncertainty of interpretation, though it might include within its interpretive scope predictions that apply to neuroscience and physics simultaneously. Explanation only becomes exhaustive when the substances it describes are observed to completion, and mechanistic concepts alone never get us to that point.
I might take the trouble to look into it if I think it's worth it. I don't see any reason to. You haven't given a prima facie reason why the modelling must feel like something. You've asserted it and said the burden of proof is on the doubter, which is rhetorical nonsense.
I read the words you wrote. That should be enough no? What else do you want me to do?
You are doubting something before you have even understood what you claim to doubt. So until you can supply some grounds to substantiate your doubt….
Huh?
Quoting Enrique
Did you not understand the part of my post where I argued from the position of a structuralist, as opposed to a substantialist, ontology?
It is the belief that mind is some kind of fundamental reified substance which is where folk go wrong. I start from the opposing belief that mind is a process - a structure of relations. So if mindfulness is substantial, it is in the proper Aristotelean sense, not the Cartesian dualist sense.
Please say something that looks like you're making a case as to why the modelling must feel like something, why it can't happen in the dark. Use the word 'therefore' or something. You don't have to, I don't want to give you homework you don't want to do. I'm just saying what kind of thing would interest me enough to take a look. I'm genuinely interested in non-panpsychist theories of consciousness, but I don't have time to spend hours researching things that I suspect are totally irrelevant to the problem.
I posted the Friston video to show that neuroscience can now claim to show that “modelling” is a physically generic fact of reality. It is not some arbitrary system of thought humans can chose to employ. It is like Darwinian selection or the Platonic solids - an inescapable state of physical organisation. A mathematical necessity.
Peirce got the ball rolling with his semiotic logic. He saw that “meaning creation” is just a mathematical necessity that organises human thought and also makes the Cosmos a rational place. There is a structure of relations that defines what constitutes “order” and so lifts existence out of chaos or vagueness.
Theoretical biology got to the same level of insight in defining life as a modelling relation - see Robert Rosen and his relational biology, Howard Pattee and his epistemic cut.
Now Friston is hitting neuroscience with the same story. With a lot of actual maths.
So it isn’t rhetorical to the degree there is genuine scientific advance being made. There is a new model of modelling which defines it as physically generic and mathematically necessary.
Now you can doubt or dispute this model of modelling. But first you have to show you understand the argument being made.
@bert1 simply declares he isn’t motivated enough to learn about it. I think we can dismiss “rebuttals” that take that form.
Quoting T Clark
This idea that neural firing must somehow produce an experienced representation is just a hangover from Cartesian representationalism and the “naturalisation” of that ontology due to the great success of universal Turing machines as a 20th century technology.
But we wouldn’t say steam engines explain the mechanisms of life. So why would we say computer metaphors would have anything deep to say about the mechanisms of mind?
My point here is that both life and mind - as now clearly understood by the current science - have a very different (semiotic) logic about them.
What was the central problem for the Cartesian paradigm - how to connect the dualistic realms of the material and the mental - just isn’t a problem for the semiotic paradigm.
If there is still a problem, it is the general epistemic one that applies to the scientific method in general - the need to base causal accounts on counterfactuals. But that is, as I say a completely general epistemic issue, and not a specific ontological issue. It is not central to scientific inquiry. It just demarcates the ultimate limits of inquiry as a semiotic process itself. It defines truth as an asymptotic approach to a collective rational agreement - pragmatism, in a word.
This is bullshit. I posted Friston’s presentation. If you can’t muster the energy to consider what the world’s premier thinker on the subject has to say, then that’s on you.
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Quoting tom111
String theory sees charge as a vibrational mode of strings. It's this vibrational mode that gives the coupling strength to other strings. I don't agree with the string approach, but it goes to show charge can be described as emergent. The question of what charge is is shifted though to the question how a string can vibrate as vibration requires forces, and interactions, forces, are described by vibrating strings which obviously is not applicable to the vibrational motion of strings themselves.
Every description of consciousness is bound to touch the surface only. Of course there is a correspondence between description and experience. Seeing colors and hearing sounds have their neuronal counterparts. The visual cortex spatiotemporally differently organized than the auditory one. Eyes and ears give a different input and already in the embryonic stage your visual and auditory cortex are stimulated by retinal patterns in the developing eye or comparable patterns emerging from the developing ear, just to prepare you for the world you are thrown in. Likewise for pain, experiences for hot and cold, the feeling of itch on your back (which, when scratched, can give rise to spikes of itch on other body parts), thoughts and feelings, or whatever conscious experience.
The descriptions in terms of flowing patterns of spike potentials on the network of interconnected neuron cells and their relation to the physical world via the senses, offers no explanation for that what's the content of the patterns, i.e, the conscious experience. It offers no explanation why organisms with faces have a conscious experience, though it's hard to imagine how it could be else, i.e, people or animals doing their things without being conscious. You can consider all living creatures as dynamical complex structures with an unbroken bond to the past universe, but in doing so you leave out a component that constitutes that what's beneath the surface. Let's call it charge.
Baseless assumptions.
i could just say the opposite of both statements and it would be equally true
Everything is related
Whatever he has to say, it can't explain consciousness. No matter how premier he thinks about it. All talk about dissipative structures evolving non-reversible into orderly structures, by means of night and day, is bound to leave out what's crucial for consciousness However you look at the problem, the materialistic approach won't work. The materialist might disagree though.
Or more importantly, the “materialist” might in fact be a semiotician and systems thinker. And they might actually have a theory.
What have you got to offer beyond the usual doubts and assertions as your way to excuse an ignorance of where the science is at?
Not sure what you are talking about but I consider the conscious experiences as not explicable by any mechanism. However sophisicated. I'm fully aware how organisms evolved on Earth, but it still doesn't offer an explanation of consciousness. That's why it's called the hard problem. I think life evolved in the majority of stellar systems. There are high chances that there are the right sized planets with the right rotation, and the needed basic stuff. The structures which we call life can do nothing else but evolve towards low entropy states, being situated periodically in the heat baths of the star and the cold bath of the void of night. Nothing special about that. The special part kicks in when the content of these inevitable processes breathes consciousness in these processes. I bet my life that life exist around most stars, and the exception is the lack of life.
You need to study the thermodynamics of dissipative structures that are enclosed by a Markov blanket - that have an epistemic cut or a modelling relation with their environment. Stop arguing from an ignorance of the actual argument being made by Friston and others. Thermodynamics is a larger story than what you want to believe here.
I'm not interested in the specifics and that's not what this thread is about. I'm happy with the general outline applying to all organisms that evolved. If the right stuff is present slow periodic exposure of it to starry heat and nightly cold (like breathing in and out) will force it to get dissipatively in form, never allowing that right stuff to reach thermodynamical equilibrium because the direction of heat low follows a sine pattern, reaching (relatively) +1 on a star day and -1 in the night, which constitutes a dynamical equilibrium. The total will not heat up or cool down. Small initial structures will diverge more and more from thermodynamic equilibrium. That this evolution is dissipative seems pretty obvious, as the structures develop non-reversible. The structures develop in a mutual dependence. And look at the variety of species that came to be! Some structures anchored in the Earth, others decided to roam around, still others wanted to stay small and tiny, while others grew to immense proportions. A part of them stayed in the waters, another part ventured to the land or air, all in a huge variety of habitats. I can't see why the situation around stars should be vastly different from the situation in our solar system.
The thread is about the explanation of consciousness. However sophisticated your theory it doesn't explain consciousness. You can construct theories of the workings of the brain connected inseparably to body and the outside world. But it will remain just that. A theory. Not an explanation. The only thing that can explain is consciousness itself. The felt experience. That's how you can explain your consciousness to others. No theory can do that. You can say that seeing colors is necessary in a world with a lot of chemicals that contain useful information about fodder, but that doesn't explain the conscious experience of colòrs. The processes corresponding to seeing color could just as well occur without an accompanying conscious experience of color. And that's exactly what is the case if you semiotically describe consciousness. It takes the color away and replaces it by structured processes, which are called an explanation.
If it works for you, that's fine. For me, it doesn't.
Here I totally agree. Some organisms even developed brains to simulate the physical world. Still, there is no explanation of consciousness to be found in Friston. Neither in Markov blankets, however usefull they are in describing non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
This is where you get to explain just how the processes could fail to be accompanied by a conscious experience.
You don’t just get to assert it as a fact.
Quoting Cartuna
What about philosophical approaches that begin with consciousness and elucidate its structures? Are they theories, and do they offer explanations of a sort? I am thinking in particular of the ones that claim to dissolve (not solve) the so-called hard problem. Their trick is that they trace the history of the split between subjectivity and objectivity to a couple of turns in Western thought. We brought it on ourselves by separating what was never separate to begin with, creating an ineffable and irreducible ‘inner’ realm . A very hard problem indeed.
My proposed way of seeing things is more credible and consistent with cognitive sciencce than the "hard problem of consciousness" bologna the rejiggered ghost in the machine partisans like you espouse.
Quoting Miller
So, as you see it, brain is to mind as " as "Gilligan's Island" is to your TV set. [/quote]
Because these processes are just theoretical constructions, no matter how refined, evolved, sophisticated, or advanced they are. They are projected onto subject stuff that isn't material by nature. So how can they explain it? There has to be more present than matter, no matter how complex the processes involved. Do you really think that a complex material process, with eyes and ears, a face, a body, a brain, etc, can experience pain if hit by a piece of stone? You can of course say it can, and it is necessary in order to react, hence the face to show the pain, express it. You can say the pain is an illusion accompanying these proces, but still it doesn't explain it. It merely puts material processes in the driving seat of reality, hence it's called an illusion. I don't put material processes in the driving seat, though I don't deny them. They are the surface. The content is consciousness.
TV is just a medium. I could compare air and people shouting in it in the same way to the brain and the mind. But somehow, that image is less convincing, not to mention useless. Where is the connection to cognitive science you mentioned? You made me curious.
actually the brain is part of gilligan's island, just like everything else.
tv set is a supposed objective reality that is assumed to exist beyond the tv show, but has never been seen
see solipsism and hard problem
There's systems more fundamental than conscious systems. Consciousness only occurs in biological systems. One would expect therefore that a complete theory of biology would be more fundamental than any particular theory of consciousness, though one would also expect the latter to be easier to create models from.
I was speaking of the TV set - a fully material electronic device. Inside, it has circuits, switches, and all that signal processing stuff. It is powered and receives patterned
signal input from outside. It processes the signals and provides a patterned, meaningful output. It is clear that the patterned output is not the same as the TV set. So, clearly I've solved the mind/brain problem. Just as clearly, to me at least, I don't need any additional information in order to explain where Gilligan, Ginger, Mr. and Mrs. Howell, the Professor, Maryanne, or the Skipper come from.
I've read various articles. The one book I read is "The Feeling of What Happens" by Damasio. I certainly can't speak to all the issues with any authority. I'll just say that I am convinced that the mind, including consciousness, emerges from biological, primary neurological, processes. Cognitive science/psychology are what we use to study them.
See my response to Cartuna, above.
You are arguing against someone else. I’m a structuralist, not a materialist.
I understand that you are speaking about more than rhetoric. I was being ironic, or maybe trying to be funny, in discussing the rhetorical uses of your language.
Quoting apokrisis
As I've noted, I've been perplexed by your discussions of semiotics from the first time I read your posts. Certainly nothing wrong with your explanations. It's just an alien way of thinking for me. It sometimes seems to verge on the mystical, which I understand is not your intent.
Quoting apokrisis
When you say "neural firing must somehow produce an experienced representation," is that different from saying that the experienced representation emerges from neuronal firing. In your view, is that wrong too?
Exactly the same holds for air. The direct medium. Like you put it, a newspaper should be comparable to a brain and the stories in it to the mind. Or air to a brain and the songs traveling in it to the mind. The problem is that all media belong to the same physical world as the information contained in them. The brain is no medium though.
I don't get the comparisons you're trying to make. A newspaper is not a processing device. Air is not a processing device. A TV set is not a medium. It's just a box of wire and plastic.
I have a feeling you repeating your argument then me repeating mine again won't get us anywhere. Let's not do that.
A TV, like the computer you are talking with me now, is just a medium. Air won't do because the distance between is is too big, I think. We could check by screaming out of the window loudly. A TV needs all kinds of internal machinery to translate the signals of a faraway event (even in the past, when recorded) to make it pallatable for eyes and ears, like a newspaper uses printed words. The programs sent are different each time, like the stories told in newspapers (though many times the stuff looks awfully uniform). Like the stories told in air. The fact that a TV and computer are electronics, wires, and integrated circuitry with an interactive feature doesn't mean they are no media. They are mass-media, in fact. Like the newspapers.
How can I repeat myself if I have responded only once to you?
Structuralists look at the structure of matter. Their relations. Without matter there can be no structure. Even if it could, structure can't explain consciousness. It can say if it's present though, say by looking at structures in the nervous system. I'm not saying studying structures in the brain, body or physical world is useless either. It can be very enlightening. But not to explain seeing red or hearing music, or seeing a dream. You could ask how structured processes could ever fail to be accompanied by consciousness. But you could also ask how consciousness ever could exist without the patterned structures they are embedded in. Looking at the structures only will not do. I can imagine all structured neuron activity taking place without a conscious experience. It would be very strange though then, if for example a child cried after she felt and hurt her knee.
By itself it is not a medium. It only is when included in a network of input and power. By itself, it's ballast. I have a TV in the room I'm sitting in now - unplugged and not hooked up to cable or an antenna. If I drop it in the water it will go "kerplunk." How is that different from a brain disconnected from it's oxygen and nutrient sources and sensory input? The only difference is the loudness of the kerplunk.
Quoting Cartuna
You're right. I was getting my posts with Miller mixed up with yours.
outside? you cant see outside your consciousness. see solipsism
everything is inside it. part of the tv show
you imagine a magical tv set somewhere outside. this imagined tv set is in your mind which is also inside.
It is. There is no information passing it though. Like the silent air at night. A brain is no transmitting medium. Both will go kerplunk in water. The kerplunk varies, depending on brain and TV size.
I think you and I have been having different discussions with each other.
Quoting T Clark
This was intended for @Cartuna.
Things are getting quite complicated now...
A naive realist might say that. A structural realist adopts a more sophisticated ontology.
Quoting Cartuna
You are free to imagine whatever you want. I simply ask for a clear reason why all that structured action would fail to produce what it ordinarily produces.
And again, you are showing that you are unable to supply a causal argument for why the same process might sometimes be conscious, sometimes result in a zombie.
Why would a normally developing brain in a normally developing human fail to be conscious in the normal developing way? Answer me that. Don’t simply make extravagant claims of what you could imagine.
The difference between a TV is that a working brain provides you with a conscious world. A working brain cannot be seen outside a living body. Every working TV set or functioning computer, no matter how complicated or however intelligent artificially made, and no matter in what artificial robot body placed, are just media through which information is pushed under the influence of voltage and program.
That makes the reality referred to not less real. However complicated the strucures are, they still need stuff out of which the patterns and structures are formed.
Quoting apokrisis
Here you presuppose that it produces consciousness. Which is exactly the question. If one elementary particle is just matter, why shouldn't a highly structured bunch of them not just be that? Structured and coherent processes are no guarantee for consciousness. A vital component is missing.
Where do I make extravagant claims. "Naive", "extravagant", "fail", "unable", to mention a few words of the vocabulary you use in battling me. All the more proof that your outlook on the problem is in deep trouble. Yes I am unable to explain consciousness. Because it isn't explainable.
same with the brain
activity in the brain is the conscious representation of what is creating consciousness outside of consciousness
And as such consciousness is indeed inexplicable by a conscious representation in terms of materialistic processes.
The difference being though that information in the brain isn't pushed around in a programmed way. The information flows through the neuron pathwaysnot by external voltages pushing it. The information flow isn't governed by a program, but only by strengths of neuron connections. Which could be considered as programmed. But not in the digital computer sense.
Most people never get it. :grin:
Quoting T Clark
Yep. Emergence is generally employed as a hand-waving patch for the failure of materialism/reductionism. You get a claim about higher level properties “popping” out due simply to “enough complexity”.
Water having the property of liquidity, for example. Confine a bunch of H2O molecules at the right temperature and pressure, and they collectively interact to form one phase of matter and not one of the three others. Thus liquidity becomes merely a label for a state that is still constructed, bottom up, from the fundamental properties of material parts. Good old fashion reductionism still gets to win as the higher level property is not fundamental, merely an accident of an arrangement.
But structuralism is about taking top-cause - the shaping hand of form or constraint - seriously. And so causality then has the irreducible triadic complexity of a causal world where bottom up and top down causes work in combination. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom in turn (re)build the larger context, the global reality, that is making them. The causality is synergistic - as Hermann Haken describes.
So I would talk of emergence too. But it is the proper holistic view of emergence and not the arse-covering notion of emergence peddled by eliminative reductionists.
Thus even the term “consciousness” is not a lot of use to me, or neuroscientists like Friston, because it is language already loaded with all the presumptions of reductionism and its bottom-up, magic popping out, way of thinking.
For me, I prefer to talk of brain function in terms of it known bottom up and top down processes - like the distinction between habit and attention. Habits are routines that the brain simply “emits” in a bottom up fashion. Attention is then the brain coming at things from the other direction - starting with a global effort to suppress to halt and suppress the habitual so as to make room for a novel and voluntary state of intention and planning to rule.
The two streams of processing - which can be described neuroanatomically - generally work so seamlessly together that we don’t even notice there is this dance going on.
But what happens when I drive my car in busy traffic while fully absorbed in my own thoughts? Am I conscious of one and unconscious of the other?
These are the kinds of questions we can answer scientifically once we drop the folk metaphysics that thinks it already knows what it is talking about.
To talk of experienced representation already bakes in the information processing dualism that a semiotic understanding of mind and life would want to avoid.
The tricky bit is that instead of a broken dualism, the way forward is not back to any kind of monism, but instead a step up to the hierarchical causality of holism. You have to move to an irreducibly triadic understanding of “consciousness” as a “semiotic modelling relation”.
In Friston’s Markov Blanket formalism, the neural firing “represents” the difference between the organisms actions on its physical environment and the physical environments actions on its sensory receptors. So as a system, the brain is trying to minimise that difference - reduce the prediction error as the brain pursues the holistic goal of being in perfect synch with “its” world. The neural firing “represents” the running interaction of an organism’s goals and with the challenges of its environment.
And being in a well synched state of flow - as when driving without having to pay attention - becomes something as unconscious as we can get. The aim is the very opposite of what the Cartesian reorientations presume.
It just is a different paradigm. But folk metaphysics is stuck in its own Cartesian rut. Reductionism prevails - because the success of computer technology appears to confirm a linear input/output model of data processing as the most useful view of the natural world.
As I noted, we are just repeating arguments that haven't convinced the other in previous posts. I say "un hunh." You say "nunh hunh." Nuff said.
No arguments used here can convince the others if they start from different premises. This doesn’t mean though that a TV and programs transmitted by it can be compared to a brain and mind. No matter from which premises you start, that's just a fact of life.
Unh hunh.
Well the structure is what shapes the material stuff that it needs. Thus it is a closed and self organising view of nature.
The Standard Model of particle physics is an exercise in ontic structural realism. The constraints of invariant group symmetry is what conjures all the elementary particles into formed being.
Do you want to argue with the physicists as well as the neuroscientists now? :confused:
Quoting Cartuna
No. I trust the amount of evidence gathered in favour of this particular hypothesis. The scope for doubt has been carefully minimised.
If you want to imagine something different - like all of the neuroscience, none of the consciousness - then of course I will call you out on your sloppy argumentation.
Quoting Cartuna
I refer you back to the modern physical understanding of “matter” that has long replaced your folk metaphysics understanding of matter.
Quoting Cartuna
You are not doing anything except regurgitating half baked folk wisdom about the nature of reality and the nature of mind.
The problem you're grappling with is intrinsic to the modern formulation of science itself. It starts with the posit that only what can be mathematically described can be considered a proper object of knowledge, presuming that the knowing subject, and the qualitative aspects of phenomena, are left aside or bracketed out. The laws of nature, insofar as these involve the primary qualities of objects and their relations, are satisfactorily dealt with in terms of this paradigm - up to a point, anyway.
So all of the attempts to 'describe' or 'explain' consciousness (or, actually, 'being', which is what is really the subject of the discussion) in terms of that paradigm are doomed to failure because of the way the problem is framed or set up in the first place, because 'being' 'mind' or 'consciousness' - take your pick - are never really an object of such analysis in the first place, and attempting to treat them as such is purely a problem of perspective, or the lack of it.
Brain has no more free will than a tv
I suspect that basically you are right. Consciousness must be taken as granted rather than explained - especially if the only explanation one is willing to accept is physical.
Puts me in mind of Mary Midgley.
Ah! There you make a naive, but understandable mistake.Structures don't flow independently somewhere to create the material it needs. The structure lies in the matter itself. Structure is not some extramundane thing magically creating the matter it needs to jump in it. But looking at it this way indeed explains consciousness as structure. I, on the other hand, explain consciousness without reference to such a construction, far removed from reality. I experience consciousness, without placing it in structure that creates matter to click into. And that experience is consciousness, so why explain it?
:100:
So when it comes to the Standard Model of particle physics, the group symmetry doesn’t limit the material possibilities?
Sounds legit.
That's a far-fetched but interesting comparison! :smile:
The groups though are derived from material processes. For example, in the strong interaction SU(3) was chosen and not U(3). The structures of the groups don't determine material possibilities, but vice versa. Of course later on you can use it the other way round.
Indeed not. But it's not programmed.
Chosen by who? Are you saying the particles - as the matter - got to choose their SU(3) interaction as their structure of relations, rather than the particles being characterised by the restriction of having to arrive at a gauge invariance that could give them their stable material identity?
As I understand it, U(3) reduces to SU(3) because one of the 9 interactions would effectively self cancel and hence be unphysical. A distinction that failed to make a difference.
And note, I don’t eliminate materiality from my argument. I would agree that structural realism, in its enthusiasm, can throw out the baby with the bath water there.
My argument is that materiality reduces to “material possibility”. The bare unformed potential for some action with some direction.
So it is a structuralism in the tradition of metaphysicians like Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce. And in the spirit of quantum field theory, condensed matter physics and loop quantum gravity.
Order out of chaos. The emergence of structure to limit the uncertainty of bare spontaneity.
So in a broad sense, there must be some material cause for the formal cause to act upon. But then also, the game is to reduce this materiality to its least concrete state of being. That then gives formal cause a real job to do.
If matter is fundamentally defined in terms of a complete absence of form - naked fluctuation, a quantum foam, an Apeiron, whatever - then existence naturally evolves as whatever structuring set of relations can impose a cohesive and generalised order on such a chaotic state.
Thus it might seem that matter comes first in the creation of a complexly structured Cosmos. But that it just equivalent to saying the maximally unformed and unstructured was the ground from which the formed and the structured arose… due to mathematical inevitability.
To exist is to gain the important quality of stable persistence. And that means to arrive at an equilibrium state, or generalised invariance. Differences might freely still happen, but now they no longer make any general difference.
brain is programed by genetics and then environment. there is nothing else.
and the environment programming cannot exceed the genetic limitations.
Are relations between stuffs or between nothings?
You have to look at it the other way around. Chaos is so much “somethingness” that it is effectively a nothingness. Just an unstructured torrent of possibilities. The task of global structure - the evolution of laws and regularities - is to suppress that wildness to the degree that you are left with stuff that is definite and individuated.
The Atomists imagined this state as atoms in a void. That tells the story of the day after creation, but not the story of creation itself.
Programmed by genetics? How the #$@%? can genes program? Maybe in school you can get programmed systematically, but normally I don't feel programmed by my environment. Well, maybe when I ride on my bike to the supermarket, by the road and the cyclic motion my feet have to make. But apart from that, there is no program excecuted in my brain.
your feelings are irrelevant. free will is an illusion caused by ignorance
Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the hard problem of consciousness, the illusion of free will, and the ego.
That's what you think. Just show me the program. I don't mean the laws of nature. Nature doesn't follow an explicit program, and neither does the brain. A complete self image is impossible. Why should that cause the hard problem? The hard problem is just the inability to explain conscious experiences. That has nothing to do with an incomplete image of the self. Nor do free will and and the ego. Of course you gotta have some self image in your mind. It would be very hard living if you hadn't. But why should an incomplete knowledge of yourself cause the hard problem? Obviously, the knowledge of the self by itself can't be included in that knowledge. As soon as you include that knowledge there is a bigger body of knowledge. But then you have to include that new body too. Etc. There is indeed no complete self reference. The brain cant indeed have a complete self image, as the proces involved in that knowledge can never be included. Well it can, but then only knowledge about knowledge, etc. is involved, not knowledge about other processes. But, again, what does this have to do with the hard problem? Why should only a complete knowledge be able to explain consciousness (I believe though that even if you had this it still couldn't explain it).
Either way you have no free will.
That ?epends on who you are with and in what culture you are in. If you feel that your wil is free than it's free..
ya feelings decide truth haha
"This feeling arises from moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions." -sam harris
The feeling I am talking about isn't part of emotions. Emotions come and go. The feeling of a free will determines if the will is free or not. Not an abstract theory that according to you is keeping the will in its grip and chains it.
Even if I knew these causes, I could still have the feeling my will is free or unfree.
Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the illusion of free will, and the ego.
sure but that is still part of cause and effect determinism
So if I have complete knowledge of you you and your illusion of free will no longer exist (for me)?
I get your point. If I know all about what will happen to you, then in my eyes you are not free anymore and you wrongly think that it's you who acts. Everything is determined. But I don't think the ego and free will are dependent on knowledge about the free will and the ego. It depends on what you call the ego and free will.
the only thing that exists is one eternal reality. there is no people. there is no you
If only it were that easy...
it is
Well, a block universe needs matter in it. It is a static entity but not eternal, as time already stretches in both ways to eternity. All the worldlines of particles are already there. Particles can only move in positive time direction. Why not in the negative direction? Because in that case, time would be reversed. This would amount to a beginstate at infinity, i.e, no begin state at all. Only around t=0 there can be a beginning state, evolving irreversibly to infinity. The begin state can occur many times. So behind us a new beginstate will develop. Before us there are other block universes with their own beginning of time. They are the cause of our universe. Likewise, our universe precedes the one coming behind us, though preceding is not the exact expression, as every new block has it's own shaky beginning. While this infinity of spatially 3D closed universes (spatially 6D with 3 curled up ones) are following each other up, they are causally disconnected as they are accelerating away from each other on a 4D (7D) hyperbolic space, signaling a next universe (and its mirror part on the other side) to start from time-around-zero via that space that has one spatial dimension more than the universes it spawns that are embedded in it (ll matter confined to 3D space).
This image entails a complex network of worldlines. They are spatially and temporarily disconnected and originate shortly àfter time-zeros, which are actually states where time fluctuates up and down, as expressed by fluctuating worldlines, corresponding to fluctuating (virtual) matter fie?ds.
The static structure of the wordline spaghetti doesn't impede my free will a bit.The strict structure doesn't pull me through in predetermined fashion. The structure offers me and all a means. Only in the eyes of detached observers, like yours, there is no ego or free will. All matter crawling along the myriads of the worldlines is free as long not forced. Worldlines don't force. People do.