Mirror, Mirror...
Why is consciousness so hard to get your head around? Stanford gives an overview of the various strands of philosophical thought that is worth a look for orientation, but I'd like to try an analogy - an old tired analogy that might have a bit of life in it still.
We pretty much understand mirrors; there is very little mystery about them. Yet when one asks 'where is the reflection?', a confusion can arise. We ordinarily say that the reflection is 'in the mirror', and yet we know that the essence of a mirror is that it is all surface with no 'inside'.
So with a little more care, we talk about the reflection as a virtual image that appears to be located behind the mirror, and with a little experimentation one can actually mark out the position of a virtual object behind the mirror. And already the language is getting paradoxical. A virtual image has an actual location, but there is nothing in that location, because everything happens ('everything' being phenomena of light) in front of the mirror, nothing behind it. The reflection has no source behind the mirror, but a source in front of the mirror, and it is the particular structure of the mirror surface that gives rise to a reflection that is always 'seen as' behind the mirror always 'seen from' in front of the mirror.
Every child knows and is fascinated by the curious effect of reflecting a mirror in a mirror - multiple images disappearing into the far distance. One mirror reflects the world in a fairly straightforward way, but two mirrors gives rise to a fantastic infinite seeming set of nested images that no longer looks very much like the real world. What was simple becomes bizarrely fractal and complex.
So a brain is somewhat like the polished surface of a mirror, and consciousness is like a reflection that appears to have its source inside one's head, but is not physically there, but physically out in the world. And whenever consciousness looks at consciousness, it creates a bizarre fractal complexity that it cannot get to the bottom of.
Mirrors really reflect, but reflections are both real and unreal. Light really bounces back and forth between the two mirrors however many times, but the multiple world image that results is not much at all like the world.
So these thoughts appear to have come from my brain, but are actually more or less distorted reflections of the world, acting in the informational inter web highway, and thereby provoking further thoughts apparently 'in you' but actually 'out here' that are further reflections of the world, and I look forward with child-like glee to the complex fractal pattern of reflections on reflections that will ensue,
We pretty much understand mirrors; there is very little mystery about them. Yet when one asks 'where is the reflection?', a confusion can arise. We ordinarily say that the reflection is 'in the mirror', and yet we know that the essence of a mirror is that it is all surface with no 'inside'.
So with a little more care, we talk about the reflection as a virtual image that appears to be located behind the mirror, and with a little experimentation one can actually mark out the position of a virtual object behind the mirror. And already the language is getting paradoxical. A virtual image has an actual location, but there is nothing in that location, because everything happens ('everything' being phenomena of light) in front of the mirror, nothing behind it. The reflection has no source behind the mirror, but a source in front of the mirror, and it is the particular structure of the mirror surface that gives rise to a reflection that is always 'seen as' behind the mirror always 'seen from' in front of the mirror.
Every child knows and is fascinated by the curious effect of reflecting a mirror in a mirror - multiple images disappearing into the far distance. One mirror reflects the world in a fairly straightforward way, but two mirrors gives rise to a fantastic infinite seeming set of nested images that no longer looks very much like the real world. What was simple becomes bizarrely fractal and complex.
So a brain is somewhat like the polished surface of a mirror, and consciousness is like a reflection that appears to have its source inside one's head, but is not physically there, but physically out in the world. And whenever consciousness looks at consciousness, it creates a bizarre fractal complexity that it cannot get to the bottom of.
Mirrors really reflect, but reflections are both real and unreal. Light really bounces back and forth between the two mirrors however many times, but the multiple world image that results is not much at all like the world.
So these thoughts appear to have come from my brain, but are actually more or less distorted reflections of the world, acting in the informational inter web highway, and thereby provoking further thoughts apparently 'in you' but actually 'out here' that are further reflections of the world, and I look forward with child-like glee to the complex fractal pattern of reflections on reflections that will ensue,
Comments (133)
Can't you have thoughts about your own thoughts?
Your words reached me, not necessarily your internal reflections. What happens to someone who stumbles upon these words but doesn't speak or understand English? Would your internal reflections have reached him?
Where are other minds in relation to your mirror? Do we each have our own mirror?
I've used a similar analogy of a video camera looking back at the monitor it is connected to that creates a video feedback loop. Think of the video camera as one's attention, or focus. Whatever it looks at is what appears clear and focused on the monitor. When it looks back at the monitor - the contents of consciousness - you get a infinite regress of monitor images. In Douglass Hofstadter''s book, "I am a Strange Loop", he uses the same analogy.
Here is a ray diagram. Perhaps someone will paste it into the thread. There are no rays, and thus no images behind, or 'in' the mirror. One can locate the image, but it is not where one locates it. I am saying that one can locate consciousness in one's head, but it is not there. There is no 'behind the mirror' or 'mirror world', but everything is happening in the 'real', 'outside' world.
And as long as one is the only person in the world, there remains only the world. It is precisely when one mirrors another mirror - when one is mindful of other minds - that weird shit happens, and you start to see an internal world with an internal self looking at it and a homunculus in the inner world looking at it, with a homunculus's homunculus looking at the homunculus's internal world, and so on.
So when one asks 'where are other minds?', one can say that they are in other heads, or that they are in other posts, or that they are illusions, or that they are in one's own head, and none of these really answers the case. Just as the image of the tree is and is not in the lake, in the eye, in the mind's eye, in your computer, in wikipedia, and so on.
So the neurologist looks for consciousness in the brain the way a diver looks in the lake for the reflection of the tree, and comes up empty, because the reflection is and is not in the lake.
So the dotted lines are not there, and A' is not there where they are shown on the diagram. So I am saying that neurologists are looking for consciousness behind the mirror of the brain, and it is not there.
How's this different from Marx?
This seems no different than the Hegelian/Marxist idea that one's ego only crystalises and arrives at its self-identity by seeing itself reflected by another. So how is alienation then related to this self-consciousness that man has?
Yes, it is difficult. It is as difficult as denying that one can see one's face in the mirror - as if one were a vampire. :naughty: The image is clearly me, clearly there, clearly real - and yet it is clearly not there, not me, and virtual.
And that is what your mirror story helps to bring out. The scientific puzzle is how the whole world could fit inside our heads. Somehow the brain is representing reality as a sensory image or display - a faithful replication duplicating the world as a model or internal simulation. And that sets up the need for a homunculus to witness the model - to take a further point of view on the mental goings-on.
But really, there just is this thing of a brain taking a point of view of the world. And so that is like how we can look into a mirror and see a mysteriously real world beyond the glass. We can bob our head about and even start to peer around the corners to see more of this world.
And what is striking is that the view shows us to be at the centre of this world looking back out. Our point of view is a view with us in it. What we feel psychologically - the feeling of being a self embodied in the world, always taking just one point of view when the world offers any number of possible points of view - becomes a visible fact. We see ourselves now looking back out of a world which contains us in it.
lol - fine for the sake of argument I'll grant your point. What's the import of all this? Just a discussion for the sake of discussion or what's the aim?
Without specular reflection from water, could consciousness as we know it occurred at all?
This thread reminds me of Lacan
Why is it that when I move closer to the mirror, eventually the only thing I can see are my eyes looking back at me?
I'm not sure. It might just save folks some time wasted looking for something where it isn't, or it might have much bigger implications. One implication is that there is no virtue in the virtual world, but only in what is expressed. It puts value firmly in action rather than thought. You are what you do, not what you think.
It sounds very close, though I don't want the analogy to be taken too literally. In some ways, Apo's 'modelling relation' might be more appropriate.
Quoting apokrisis
The action of brain is to model/reflect the world into the world as if there were a subject at the centre, just as a mirror reflects as if there was a mirror world in/behind the mirror. So then, by hypothesis, it is interpersonal relations, brain modelling brain, self modelling other, rather than a literal mirror, that give rise to the appearance of infinite depth. One sees the other as seeing oneself seeing the other... and since personal relations are what is important for a social creature, this depth of inner world, the mind, becomes reified - eventually to the point where 'individualism' is taken as the fundamental reality.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Well that is a common way of understanding things, that I am questioning. I am saying that there is no inner world, no mind in which images appear. 'Seeing an image' - tree reflected in water is more or less identical to 'seeing a tree' and these seeings occur not in the mind but out there in the world where the tree and the water are; they are what brains do. The mind is a virtual 'behind the mirror' world where nothing happens because it does not exist, just as nothing happens in the mirror world, it merely reflects the happening of the real world.
Thus the attempt to create a conscious computer becomes a matter of finding the right way to fuck it up. :rofl:
So what about someone who always contemplates destroying his enemies, committing adultery with his friends' wives, etc. but never does any of these out of, say, fear of punishment? Is that person virtuous?
I don't believe action and thought are as separate as you make them seem - thinking is also an action. Someone can be deceptive through their actions as well as through their thoughts. And there seems to me to be a close relationship between thinking and acting - St. Augustine speaks about this in the Confessions - how evil penetrates first the heart (and the mind) and only then translates into outward actions.
It is true that in some cases - such as OCD sufferers - people can have thoughts that they do not want to have - in that sense, thinking is passive, and not an action. But there is clearly a sense in which thinking is a doing, an activity, an action.
Quoting unenlightened
I see that you have started to plagiarise yours truly with these emojis. Nice.
:wink:
Actually the reflective surface is on the back of the glass, so the reflection is really known to be "in the mirror", to begin with. This becomes evident if the glass gets cracked. Don't break the mirror to see this though because it will bring you bad luck.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't think there is anything which should make you talk about "behind the mirror". The image appears in the mirror, not behind it. We see the mirror as a surface, we know we are not seeing behind it, we are seeing into it. And in the mirror is a reflection of oneself. But the reflection is extremely odd, because the features of the left side of my body are on the right side of my body in the image. Maybe there's a spot in the centre of my nose which is not distorted like this.
It is very simplistic, and not really descriptive of what is occurring, to say that light hits a surface, and reflects back. In reality light interacts with the object, so it must to some extent, penetrate the surface. The interaction between light and the surface is not completely understood, as is evident from the difference between wave descriptions and particle descriptions.
So there is a very real issue to be discussed, concerning what is going on "in the mirror". Likewise, in your analogy, there is a very real issue of what is going on "in your head", which is creating the image of consciousness.
But that is what I am saying, that thought is a real action - the act of modelling, or reflecting, that happens in the real world. But we have passed the limit of the mirror analogy, now, because the brain, unlike the mirror, is not passive. So I need to find another way to talk about it.
I must allow that brain is active in modelling the world, rather than passive in reflecting it, so I must allow 'inner workings' somewhat like a computer. But we allow computers inner workings without allowing them inner worlds, so I think all is not yet lost.
So with a lot of hand-waving and vagueness, I can talk about a modelling process that integrates memory and sensation. I see the lightening, and memory tells me to expect the thunder, and the model is that Shango is forging iron, or some far-fetched tale about electrostatic discharge in the atmosphere.
Quoting Agustino
Here is is a highly complex model that includes (a model of) the modeller as a part of the model and is 'run' just like a program, and it is just such complex reflexive models that are (mis)taken to be an inner world. I wanted to work my way a bit more slowly and carefully towards this, but the modelling error that I think gives the bite of reality to the inner world is the identification of the modeller with the model of the modeller.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There is. As the ray diagram indicates, and I remember doing it in physics 101, one can readily find the location of the virtual image using parallax, and it is behind the mirror.
This seems very similar to Thomas Metzinger's Ego Tunnel and Phenomenal Self Model. A common position in modern philosophy of mind - being common already makes something suspect though. The most interesting philosophy tends to be that which is at odds with the spirit of the times - because one must really think hard to oppose the status quo - to affirm positions that no one else affirms and stands by - positions that seem implausible to one's contemporaries. And when I talk of one's contemporaries, I am talking about the philosophers, not the common people. For the philosophers live in their own world, which is often different than the world of the common people - indeed, it takes the world of the common man quite some time to reach where the philosopher had been. For example, Cartesian assumptions are already downloaded in our popular culture - but it took hundreds of years.
Analogies between the mind-brain and the computer software-hardware aren't very strong. Computer software is mechanical in a way that the mind is not - computer software works by pre-defined rules, and while the mind certainly does have components that have pre-defined rules, it also has freedom that the computer lacks. And this isn't merely the kind of freedom that can be gained by having a self-reflexive program that would modify its own programming to reflect changes in the environment (say). Because then such a software needs instructions that tell it how to modify itself - it needs if/then statements, loops, etc. The mind is more fluid than this, because the mind functions without instructions in many cases. It doesn't need instructions - it can create them - it is not trapped by a fixed structure like computers are.
I think this is where much of modern philosophy of mind goes wrong.
Thinking that you're locating the image "behind the mirror" is delusion, the image is really "in the mirror".
No, it isn't really anywhere. It's a virtual image, not a real image. But to be honest, I don't want to discuss optics, but consciousness. If you do not understand that a virtual image can be located, you won't understand the analogy, but I am already wanting to move on; the analogy was intended to open up a conceptual space to consider the nature of consciousness, that's all.
I'm not sure what this means..
I'm interested to find out what specific notions you have in mind here.
My point is that consciousness is really inside the human body, just like the image is really in the mirror. You've made a faulty representation of the image in the mirror, as if it were somewhere outside the mirror, and compared this to consciousness, as if consciousness was somewhere outside of the human body. But that the image is somewhere outside the mirror is just an illusion. And probably the notion that consciousness is outside the head is just an illusion.
Quoting unenlightened
If you want to support this bizarre notion, that consciousness is not inside one's head, "but physically out in the world", you need something better than the mirror analogy, because it really doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
That is the sense in which the world is a 'construction'. The task of the mind/brain is to generate that construction. The German idealists, particularly Kant and Schopenhauer, were all about that; the first paragraph of WWR states it very concisely. And major cognitive dissonance arises when this is ignored, and 'the world' is assumed to be something that exists completely independently of the constructive 'world-making' activity of the mind.
I would say the image is not "in" the mirror, but on the surface of the mirror. If it were "in" the mirror, then it would be as @unenlightened says, it would be a virtual image located behind the surface of the mirror.
Consciousness, by analogy, is the reflected image that has an apparent location 'in one's head'. The idea I'm wanting to convey is that it can be the case that though consciousness is a physical phenomenon produced by a brain, just as reflections are real phenomena produced by mirrors or water, yet it is not what it appears to be or where it appears to be. We understand, most of us, that when we see a tree, and a reflection of a tree in the lake, we are not seeing a literal second tree in the lake, but rather seeing the same tree 'round a corner'. This becomes more obvious when one considers a periscope, or the wing mirror of a car.
It is perhaps worth noting that in the case of the wing mirror (or the lake) what one sees is displaced from behind one to in front, (or from on the bank to in the lake), but in the case of the periscope it rather that the point of view itself is displaced - one sees as if one's head were that much higher.
"Consciousness is seeing the world round a corner", or perhaps better "the world seeing
round a corner". But don't take it literally. But that is as far as I want to press this analogy; it's time to talk more seriously about brains.
I'll get back to that a bit later.
I'm still a bit fuzzy on the specifics of what the mirror analogy is meant to explain though, with respect to consciousness. There's a novel vocabulary, to be sure: like the image, consciousness is virtual with respect to what is actual 'out there'; but is this just another way of speaking of consciousness as a so-called epiphenomenon, a surface effect according to which all the weight of reality takes place elsewhere? But is this an explanation, or it is closer to a phenomenology of consciousness? And if the latter - as it sounds like - what accounts for this phenomenology?
This is a great example of a "philosopher" who has let his imagination run away with him.
Seeing only occurs in a brain/mind. Not "out there". Seeing is the act of interpreting information in light. The interpreting doesn't happen until after the light enters the eye.
Seeing a reflection of a tree is not the same as seeing a tree. For one, the reflection is always in reverse. How is it that I can read your posts if our brain/minds were seeing everything in reverse? We make distinctions between reflections and non-reflections all the time. You're saying that everything is a reflection and we can't seem to make that distinction between a reflection and a non-reflection because all we experience is a reflection. If everything we experience is a reflection of the world, then what is it when we look in to a mirror?
The light interacts with the substance of the mirror to make the image, just like it interacts with any substance that you see, allowing you to see the object. Therefore the image (what you see) is in the substance of the mirror.
Quoting unenlightened
Right, that's much better than talking about the image behind the mirror. There's a further issue now though. Once you see that the image in the mirror is just a reflection of what's around the corner, can you look at the object itself as just a reflection, like Plato suggested in the cave analogy? Perhaps what we see as "an object" is just a reflection of what's inside. The light shines off the object, giving us just a glimpse of an indication of what's inside. So what you apprehend as "consciousness" is just a glimpse of what's inside the human being.
It's not meant to explain anything; it's intended to make a conceptual space in the mind (ha ha) for 'the virtual' which is not where it seems to be, and not what it seems to be, yet is not something else or somewhere else, and again yet is perfectly intelligible and real. I'm having to work harder than I expected to do even this simple thing; people will insist that the mirror has an inside, or else that the image is on the surface like a painting (see below).
Quoting Janus
One can readily demonstrate that the image is not on the surface of the mirror by moving one's point of view, and noticing that the image is not the same; this is parallax that I mentioned before. The image can be demonstrated to be exactly where the ray diagram shows it to be and where one sees it to be, despite that the rays do not come from there. We can arrange a mirror such that I can see you in it, and you can see me in it. If an image was on the surface, we should both be able to see it the same. In fact the blankness of the mirror is an essential feature, as soon as someone writes on the mirror with their lipstick, we can both see it, and it obscures both our images.
So it's circumscription of conceptual space? Via negativa?
You wanted to put the image outside the mirror, and thus place consciousness outside the human head. But there cannot be an outside without an inside. So why would you think that outside is a better, more real, location than the inside?
What about the boundary between inside and outside? Isn't it rational to assume that the image on the mirror is at this boundary. Perhaps we need to consider that consciousness is on the boundary between inside and outside (whatever that means).
When I see a tree, I see it over there, where the tree is, and if there is any doubt, I can go over there and bang my head on it until I am convinced. But right now, I am not seeing a tree, but imagining seeing a tree, and imagining going over to it and imagining banging my head. I find it very useful to be able to distinguish the world I see and touch etc from the world of imagination, because weirdness results when I try to bang a real head on an imagined tree.
An imagined tree is rather less substantial than a reflected tree, because when I see the reflected tree, as I mentioned before, I am seeing the real tree displaced. The imagined tree is, let's say for the moment, some compound of memory, language, concepts, stuff going on in the brain anyway, that does not directly relate to what's going on in the world, where I am sitting in my chair typing on the laptop.
So I invite you to imagine you are standing by a lake, and opposite you is a solitary tree right by the edge, reflected in the still water. And imagine walking round the lake to the tree, and gently banging your head on it.
My guess is that as soon as you have read it, you have imagined it. Now you might be able to tell me all sorts of details that you have imagined, or you might not. What species of tree, whether the margin of the lake is muddy or stoney, how long it took you to walk round. People vary.
Now I tell you it was a poplar tree, and it took you a good 15 minutes to reach the tree. And again, as soon as you read the words, the adjustments or additions are made in your imagination.
Did you have to start the imaginary walk again, or did you just stretch or compress, or 'solidify' the walk you had already imagined? It doesn't really matter.
What matters for my purposes is that brains do two very distinct, but not necessarily separate things:
1. They interact directly and immediately with the world via the body and senses.
2. They construct and run models of varying degrees of abstraction.
One particular thing I want to emphasise, because I think it is going to be important later; it does not take 15 minutes to imagine walking for 15 minutes - model time is very different to body time.
I'll stop here for a bit, so Ag can say 'so what?' and Harry can say I'm making it all up, and Street can say something I don't quite understand, and others can say things I can't even imagine.
:D
Not much to contribute just yet, but cool to read.
Well, some adjustment would be made if I knew what a poplar is :rofl:
I know it's a tempting metaphor, and it's a metaphor with a rich history in non-dual mystical teachings too, but there's something troublesome and subtly misleading about the mirror analogy for consciousness, I think.
Externalism is better: the key mistake is to think of consciousness as something (that "mirrors" a world "out there") locked inside the skull. Actually it's something out and abroad in the world, it's the name of a a process that threads between things and the brain, and takes in the actual physical objects as part of its process. The actual tree is part of the phenomenon of consciousness of the tree, the presence of the brain and its perceptual apparatus affords an occasion for the tree to exist in a particular way that it couldn't exist otherwise, on its own. (A rough analogy would be the interference pattern you get when two waves interact: it's a pattern that's not the one wave, not the other wave, but a way that the two interacting waves have of existing that isn't there without the interaction.)
This is also different from Panpsychism - Panpsychism is like copying the bad idea (of consciousness being locked in the brain or mind) out into the world. But Externalism is saying something subtly different that's perfectly compatible with physicalism and doesn't have any whiff of woo.
Google images can help you out with that. They are quite varied, but the ones 'I had in mind', are the tall fast growing ones of narrow habit with upward pointing branches, that you often see in France in single file used as a windbreak. Just the thing to reflect in a lake.
Quoting gurugeorge
Yes, Externalism gives a very good account of immediate experience, sensation and perception and it is the absence of an inner world that I have been emphasising so far. But it does not immediately account for acts of imagination such as those proposed in my previous post, that do not seem to be interactions with the external world in the same way. Has anyone given such an account that you know of, or shall I try and continue to think it through?
Well, yes, it could be said the image is 'really' in the eye, or in the visual cortex. So moving around to get different viewpoints is just the same as remaining in one position and moving the mirror. Nonetheless it is the surface that reflects, and from that perspective what we see, despite the illusion of depth is, if it is 'really' 'anywhere' 'outside' the perceiving body, 'painted' on the surface of the mirror. I get that it can also be said to be 'virtually' in the 'position' indicated by the ray diagram, too.
Different ways of thinking about it have their own logic. So my response to MU was just to emphasize that there is no one privileged way to think about the 'location' of the image. On the surface of the mirror, in the mirror, behind the mirror, in the eye, in the brain; the image seems to be everywhere and nowhere, in the sense that it is in every 'spatial domain' external and internal, but not exclusively in any space.
Externalism tells only one half of the story. It is interesting that people feel compelled to choose one or other side of the internalism/ externalism dichotomy. It's as if there is a prejudice which dictates 'it can't be both'.
Well the reason for that is probably an aversion to dualism, and the attendant spiritual woo. I more or less dismiss panpsychism, not on the grounds of woo, but on the grounds that it doesn't explain anything. It is like claiming that everything reflects light, and thinking that that explains mirrors. but dualism in general at least has the merit of covering the ground, and you have pre-empted me in a way by suggesting that a combination of internalism and externalism will do the same job. But I want to keep the internal in its place as a model on a par, at best, with the creations of a model railway enthusiast; wonderfully complex and ingenious, but no substitute for as decent public transport system.
One can spend a deal of time absorbed in one's model railway, or in one's philosophical theory, but one cannot live there.
More nonsense. Brains, and what they think about, are part of the world. Imagined trees can be a causal influence on the rest of the world as much as a real tree can have on the mind. From my perspective the contents of your brain/mind are just as external to me as the tree in the forest.
The contents of the mind are not reflections rather they are representations.
I very glad to hear it. But the question is, where are you and your perspective?
The question should be, if we are not in our heads then why does it appear that we are?
Now I have suggested that the brain functions in two distinct ways, probably both at the same time in most cases.
One is a sensory and motor engagement with the world that is immediately present, physical, pressing keys, walking round lakes, banging into things seeing trees and reflections - all things sensing and acting.
Two is disengaged from the present world and engaged with thought, model, making, imagination, memory, that sort of thing. (This is a model that I am presenting here for you to play with and pull apart or decorate as you wish. You can put it in prominent position in your model of the world, or you can chuck it straight in the bin. )
Quoting unenlightened
I am sat in an armchair in North Wales, typing on my laptop. That is to say I am present in the world, sensing and interacting and - inevitably - making models of the world, or adapting, playing with a model.
I am not in the model, which is what is in my head; only a model of me is in the model.
But here's a problem; I am not present to you. Everything I present to you in the previous paragraph is not me, but the model of me that forms part of the model of the world I am offering for you to use as you wish or chuck in the bin. So I am inscribing on this model, 'the model is not the world, the word is not the thing, I am not my post'. Lest I be accused of nonsense.
Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. It seems a matter of perspective as to whether the material constituency of the world is mutely, brutely dead or animatedly alive. Must the reality be one or the other; or would that apply only to our models?
Quoting unenlightened
I agree, although I would say that we first need the model in order to intelligently construct the living, working system.
So iff I say I don't think I fully understand your post; that's not accurate, because I'm not my post?
Interesting.
I'm playing a bit here. Not exactly sure where I'm going, but trying to actually relate too.
To go back to the mirror example, words are the light and the model is the image. We can share words and see the image in our own mind, but that's different from seeing you. I'd have to be in Wales for that, for starters.
So you might say that since you are not present to me -- or since I am not present to you -- or perhaps I should say that you can't see my images? -- we have these two aspects of experience which seem to operate on different parameters of time, and even physics, and even in terms of experiential access. Which is where we may draw our dualistic inference from, these two aspects of the brain/mind.
One way of uniting the two, if that indeed be your goal, is to de-emphasize their experiential aspects. While I can look at the marker on my desk and confirm that it's blue, and were you here you could do the same without me, you cannot access my thoughts in the same manner on whatever it is I happen to be imagining at the time. But perhaps these experiential moments or modes are less important than we have the tendency to give them credit for. What if these are actually just two sorts of "worlds" -- structures of experience, or structures of discourse, or even metaphysical realities -- which act in different ways of find some kind of unity (depends on what strategy we might take -- transcendental seems to correspond to structures of experience, phenomenological to discourse, and epistemological for metaphysical).
But then, those would also just be models to be shared between our own mirrors. The real would still be right there. And then you really do wonder if these two aspects actually have a relation to one another, as one seems bounded and the other unbounded.
Well it can't be because we ourselves show that nature has its "psyche" bit. So the real problem for any pan-istic story is to actually enshrine a dichotomy which has some universality. Just trying to have it that everything is mindful is as non-explanatory as trying to have it everything lacks a mind. This kind of pan-ism is monadic and lacks a dichotomous distinction which would actually explain anything in terms of a mutual or complementary opposition.
So the more usual dichotomy would be between generalised simplicity and particular complexity. Mind is what you get when material structure is the least simple. Brains are highly negentropic structures, when compared to the highly entropic world in which they exist. So right there is a qualitative difference of a dichotomous nature we could investigate.
I of course argue for pan-semiosis as an ultimate metaphysics.
The difference between the living and the dead comes down to a semiotic or modelling relation. The mind is the brain modelling the world - a world in terms of a self being in it. A view which pretty much accounts for the meat of the OP. And so we can see there is a primal distinction based on information or symbol vs matter or dynamics. Mind arises as the information that regulates material dynamics in complex adaptive systems.
So we establish the dichotomy that separates the living and mindful material structures from the ones that are dead and unconscious. That dichotomy is enshrined in semiotics as a science.
Then the speculative venture - the bit that might connect everything up as a pan-istic whole - is to push this dichotomy of symbol and matter, information and dynamics, all the way down to the fundamental level of scientific description. Which happens to be where physics is at right now.
So there are rules to this game. A pan-istic metaphysics - a unity that ties everything in existence together with a nice bow - has to enshrine some fundamental dichotomy which also explains why this unity is a symmetry that is very breakable. The unity has to be a unity of opposites ... all the way down to the fundamental.
Panpsychism is failed metaphysics as it doesn't put forward such a tale. It sort of tries to at times. As with dual aspect monism. Matter is said to have both material properties and mental properties.
But this is not a real dichotomy. There is no sense in which the two are complementary and so formative of each other. It is a claim about two essentially unrelated things being housed in the same "atom". The smallest grain of matter contains the smallest drop of awareness. Nothing gets explained as there is no sense in which this brokenness is itself the breaking of a connecting symmetry. The brokenness becomes a brute and dualistic fact.
With the information~matter dichotomy on the other hand, it all arises from quantum complementarity. Physics has uncovered an exact relation between physical existence and knowledge uncertainty. The relation can be quantified or scaled in terms of the Planck constant.
So there is a way that pan-ism has to work. It must enshrine a dichotomy which expresses a fundamental complementarity that connects all the way down. It can't claim to arrive at a unifying monadism simply by pasting together two unrelated concepts, like a substance called matter and a substance called awareness (or soul, or spirit, or whatever).
Oh absolutely. The architect draws a non-existent house and then the builders build it.
Quoting JJJJS
I suspect you are some dude typing, and your post is an honest expression of your thoughts. So reading your post I get some experience of you, but it is more like a footprint than an encounter. "That looks like the post of someone who is reading and trying to understand and getting a little confused", I might think, the way a bushman reads the trail of an antelope. The trail is not the antelope, but it is a sign of the antelope.
The dichotomy is in relation to what is thought to be the constituents of reality. So, the alternative scenarios (ignoring dualistic substance ontologies) as they are usually conceived are;
You are trying to say instead that matter has to have just one or the other in absolute fashion. Either it is universally alive or it is universally dead. And because we at least are alive, we can't then believe that the rest of existence can be dead. That is the panpsychic argument in a nutshell.
So technically, you are arguing by antinomy. You are insisting that the law of the excluded middle applies. That's different from a metaphysical dichotomy where the polar extremes become the complementary limits of existence.
If there is mind and there is matter, then neither themselves "really exist". All things could only tend towards one or other extreme. Neither aliveness nor deadness could be universal states in themselves. It is only their relativity that is present and real in the world.
And to make sense of that, we would have to be able to see the connection which makes that sound right. Which is pretty much the point of Peircean semiotics.
You can't arrive at a sensible pan-istic tale via a LEM argument. That is designed for reasoning about sets of absolute particulars, not metaphysical generalities. Before a binary logic of the either/or, we must begin with a justification of how the fact of binary possibility - pairs of opposing limits - could even arise within this one world that is Being. That is the critical step that you are missing and which panpsychism is set up to skirt.
I was referring to a dichotomy of views. Apparently you haven't noticed this:
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Quoting Janus
Sure, you talked about dichotomies in terms of both epistemology and ontology. So there is the dichotomy between the model and the reality. And the model of the reality can be of the dichotomies that form reality. And then - the Peircean finale - the dichotomy of model and reality is essentially the semiotic dichotomy that is also the dichotomy that constructs reality.
So it is all connected and intertwined.
But I was addressing the form of your particular ontic claim here - that reality is composed of a substance that is either intrinsically alive/aware or, instead, dead/inert ... whatever that could truly mean.
I'm still waiting for a response on that. Saying that our ontologies are just themselves alternative views is a different issue.
Or rather, what I was saying was you were adopting an epistemology that relies on LEM-derived antinomies. A metaphysical dichotomy has a different dialectical logic. So now we are dealing with the meta-dichotomy of your essentially reductionist approach - a reduction of dualisms to monads - vs my essentially holist approach, where there is the opposite of an expansion towards a triadic or hierarchical systems model in play.
And elsewhere I have agreed that reductionism vs holism is a genuine epistemic dichotomy. They are the asymmetricisation of each other. They are complementary modes of inquiry in most ways. Each goes to its own extreme - one towards logical atomism, the other towards absolute contextuality.
But that is a sophisticated position to arrive at. And panpsychism is the very opposite of a sophisticated position. Which is what would make panzombieism or pandeadism just straw men, not serious alternative ontologies.
You admit that there is a brain. Whose brain?
You admit that there is a mind. Whose mind? Where is it relative to other minds?
As I have said before, there is no image in the mirror when no one is looking at the mirror. There is just a reflective surface reflecting light. The image is only in the mind - formed as a representation of the reflected light. The image is the representation.
Quoting unenlightened
But the model is part of you. No one is saying that you are a post. You are a human being writing a post. Human beings have brains/minds. Brains are the model/representation of minds.
But I wasn't making that claim; I was just saying that the alternate views which constitute eliminative materialism (panzombieism or pandeadism) and some form of panpsychism form a dichotomy insofar as they each claim something opposite to the other, namely ultimate deadness or ultimate aliveness, about the substance of reality.
I haven't claimed that either one of those must be the ontological case (although of course adherents of either standpoint may claim ontological status for their respective view). Rather I was making a poinnt that people often think that either one or the other must really (meaning independently of us and our ontological models) be the case, that there either must be a consciousness or living intelligence at the heart or of matter or not; and I am questioning the coherence of that very 'either/ or'.
And reading over your post before last, it seems that you are agreeing, not disagreeing, with me.
I would say that as a mere model, just as its opposite, eliminative materialism it is coherent. It is when either is claimed to be the absolute ontological truth that the incoherence comes in.
Well nope.
If instead you are saying panpsychism and eliminative materialism are pretty equivalent in their degree of essential incoherency, then maybe yes. :)
Well that's what I am saying anyway, because what I want to mean by 'consciousness', whatever else I want to say about it, is that it is something that I see in myself when I am awake, and definitely don't see when I am on the operating table, thank anaesthetics, and see in other people and to varying degrees in animals, and not at all in rocks and plastic spoons.
Accordingly, I think I have only two options left; either some version of incarnation of soul from a spiritual realm, or some version of emergence from particular structures of matter and energy - so far at least, universally structures of living matter. The theory of evolution seems to speak for the latter option, but my approach here is to leave that question open for the moment, and just look at what I can see and anyone can see, and try to describe it as carefully as I can.
No, I'm just saying that either, as mere models, are coherently thinkable.
What is not coherently thinkable is how they or any other model could be the case beyond their status as mere model.
This is the either/or fallacy. There are more options. You are just ignoring them because they don't fit the presumptions you've made in this thread.
Quoting unenlightened
Right. So we ignore certain facts in order to leave open a question that shouldn't be asked in the first place because it is nonsensical.
Feel free to bring them up and I'll consider them.
Do you notice a difference between what you "see" as consciousness within your self, and what you "see" as consciousness within others? How would you account for this difference? Some people might say that it is a difference in perspective. But what does that mean, other than that the medium between you is doing something weird, like when you look in the mirror, and the features on your right side look like they are on your left side, the mirror is doing something weird? How does the medium create such a difference of perspective?
When I did my first aid course, more or less the first thing you are taught to do is to establish whether the casualty is conscious or unconscious. First you talk to them, and if there is no response you shake them and almost shout, and if there is still no response you pinch their ear hard enough to hurt. And if there is still no response, you take them to be unconscious. There are rare exceptional cases where someone might be conscious in just this sense of being responsive to stimuli, but paralysed such that their response is blocked and ineffective. In such 'locked in' cases it is very hard to tell. But even in these cases I would say, to be conscious consists, in being responsive - brain is responsive even if muscles are not. So I don't see that my own case is any different at all.
But you probably won't like this response, because you used the word 'within', and responses are not generally confined to 'within'.
Why would you have to check yourself for responsiveness? Would you yell at yourself? Would you pinch your own ear? Don't you determine your own responsiveness in a way completely different from the way that you determine another's responsiveness?
I will sometimes yell at myself, or pinch myself to stay awake when I'm driving. But I think this is an indication of the inversion which is created by the mirror of consciousness. I apprehend my own consciousness in a way different from the way I apprehend another's. I might yell at another to wake them up, but I yell at myself to keep myself awake.
Well I have described how I apprehend another's consciousness. Can you describe how you apprehend your own otherwise than by your responsiveness?
Yes, I think it's very near to the exact opposite of responsiveness, meditation. I have to free myself from all interferences, which might demand responsiveness, and reflect within. That is how I apprehend my own consciousness.
Take the example you gave, telling us to imagine a poplar tree by the lake. I would classify this action of yours as initiative rather than responsive. I perceive you starting this thread as an initiative rather than as a response.
It may be the case that you perceive these conscious actions as responses rather than as initiatives, but I'm not privy to this information, which makes you view the op as responsive rather than as initiative.
Anyway, that's what I see about consciousness which makes it other than responsiveness, that it initiates things. Isn't that the difference between the free will perspective and the determinist perspective, one looks at consciousness as initiative, the other as responsive?
Quoting unenlightened
I look at thoughts as creations of the brain, not as reflections of the world.
This exemplifies the distinction between responding, and what I will call 'reacting'; or sometimes I might call it 'overreacting'.
Anyway I'm trying to clarify a bit without being too formal at this stage, what it takes to be responsive, and again a certain presence is a feature - a here and now aspect that is particular to the occasion. Having said that, the ignore button is also a response, somewhat generic, but particular to a poster, unless it becomes a habit. Are you still awake at the back there?
I mentioned time a long time back, and I think next post or soon, anyway, I'll try and go into that a bit more, but I see consciousness as always and only present.
Edit:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ah, I think I understand your point and hopefully I have at least started to answer it above. If I push a non-conscious vase off the mantelpiece, it reacts by falling onto the hearth, and probably breaking. By contrast, if I push the cat off the mantlepiece, it responds, turning itself in midair and landing on its feet, and then stalking off indignantly. A response includes an element of initiative, as you put it, or as I put it earlier an element of imagination. So my op is hopefully a creative response to various bits and pieces that I have come across and most of the responses at least have been similarly creative, at the same time as they are relevant to the op. Hopefully, we are not reciting dogma to each other but thinking about what has been said and moving, if we are lucky, towards a new conception of things. So it is not responses rather than initiatives, but responses are initiatives in relation to what has gone before, (because there is no limit to the possible responses) and thoughts are indeed creations of brains, but also reflections/models of the world.
I'm not sure if this relates to Pierce at all, but I see consciousness as in the first place a response to the immediacy of sensation - a connection with the world, but that response is informed, modified, extended, liberated into creativity, by memory and thought.
I locate consciousness in the present; it is presence, it is the now. I can describe the contents from the senses, the computer is on my lap, a cup of coffee steaming to the right, the armchair is red, and I am typing with two fingers. Also, the contents are memories, that I just made the coffee, that I made a post yesterday, and models, that if I scroll up I can read it, that I am intending to continue an exploration in this thread.
This gives rise quite naturally to the idea of a distinction between internal and external; sight, sound, touch present to consciousness the external world, and memory, thought, modelling, present the internal world. Now it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the external world - the coffee, the armchair, etc is not conscious, not the location of awareness, but only the content, the provocation.
It is rather more radical though to claim that the internal world, memories, models, thoughts, are not conscious either, but are also only more contents and provocations. I mentioned earlier that model time is not real time. You can probably replay the events of yesterday in a few minutes at most, and re-present the past to consciousness. Re-membering, re-presenting is now, all of it is present, or else it is absent. Memories might be 'there' in the brain, just as there is crap behind the sofa that I cannot see, but these things are not 'here' in consciousness.
And then, there is action. And let's include inaction, let's include internal action - building a new model, meditating, calculating, exploring an idea. This internal action goes on while I am away from the computer, as well as while I am typing. Consciousness acts in the world, and also in the brain.
Again, the way I am describing things sounds a bit like inputs and outputs, and it is a bit misleading. Seeing the coffee cup is an action and drinking the coffee is a sensation, there are not really inputs and outputs that are different kinds, but everything is both and neither, everything is integral, in the same way that a response integrates the creative initiative with what is already there as provocation.
Good stuff.
I wonder if it sounds like inputs/outputs just because we are accustomed to that way of thinking. I agree that it is both and neither, though. It's not as if I don't react or invent because of the world about me, but it's also not as if I am a puppet to the world about me too. At least as far as consciousness is concerned.
But it may sound as if we are automatons just merely by the way we are trained to think.
***
I sort of wonder which way you're leaning. Nothing is conscious or everything is. Or there is this thing called consciousness and there is also the world.
I member, I present, I re-member, I re-present. All that is now, in the here and now. They are kinds of actions, though maybe a bit different from wielding a hammer.
Is consciousness the sort of thing (I hate to use the word "thing", but alas, English) which acts whether I am moving bodily or no? Just a thought.
Well so far, I cannot eliminate the possibility of a full-blown spirit/matter dualism, but it seems like an unfruitful model in which the spiritual is either invented or left blank. Eliminativism and panpsychism I have also ruled out as not explaining the thing that wants explaining, that I am not a rock. So until @Harry Hindu or someone else sets forth the alternatives that I haven't thought of, I am left with emergentism, but emergence from "brainy-bodies-in-environments". When a blind man feels his way with a stick, his consciousness is in the curb he feels, at the end of the stick, in the hand holding the stick, in the brain modelling the environment, and the feet propelling him and confirming his model. When an earthbound astronomer uses the Hubble telescope his consciousness is amongst the stars just as much as it is in his head. Or to put it better - consciousness is not located, because it is virtual.
But here is one consideration that might move one in the direction of dualist woo. Physics seems to have no account of the uniqueness of now. It treats time as a dimension which is given direction by entropy, but does not privilege any place on the dimension as the present. Consciousness does. Physics has the film 'in the can', but consciousness is watching and acting in that same film. Perhaps physics is missing something.
David Chalmers is famous for having made that suggestion.
OK, so conscious activity is a combination of these two elements, reaction, and creation. Therefore I conclude that you are describing consciousness in terms of what it does, what it is doing. It is reacting and it is creating, in a way which combines these two elements. My opinion is that there is a very real need to separate these two, in principle, so that we can proceed to separate them in practise, when we make judgements concerning what consciousness is doing.
Look at the mirror. Notice that the features on the right side of your body appear to be on the left side of your body, and vise versa. The mirror is doing something weird. But we don't say that the mirror is making a mistake; nor do we say that the mirror is "wrong". We appeal to the physicists who use fancy terms like "chirality", and "higher dimensions", to explain exactly what the mirror is "doing". So it turns out that despite the fact that the mirror appears to be doing something weird, it is not really doing anything wrong, it's actually doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
Now look what happens when human consciousness "models" the world. We cannot say that the model is a "reflection", because human consciousness has that creative element which the mirror does not have. Because that creative element is there in human consciousness, and manifests within the model, we can judge the model as right or wrong. So when you ask us to imagine a poplar tree by the lake, and someone doesn't know what a poplar tree looks like, and imagines a birch tree instead, that's creativity, and we can judge creativity saying that the person is "wrong" in that model. That element of creativity within consciousness allows us to look at what the conscious person is doing, and judge those doings as right and wrong.
Quoting unenlightened
Will you allow me to separate the contents here from the "agent"? When I say "agent", I mean it in the most general sense possible, like the grammatical subject, the thing which is active, doing something. So the mirror is an agent in the sense that it is doing something, making a reflection. What I am asking, is that when you separate the contents from the consciousness, as you do here, do you still maintain that it is the consciousness which is acting, "doing"? That way we still maintain the capacity to judge the actions as wrong and right.
Quoting unenlightened
What if I say your model of consciousness is wrong? There is no such thing as the present, so it is impossible that consciousness is located in the present. The present is an imaginary division which separates the temporal duration of the past from the temporal duration of the future. This is just an artificial boundary, a point which separates two contiguous durations of time, like "noon" separates morning from afternoon. But there could be absolutely nothing there, so it's impossible that consciousness is there.
Quoting unenlightened
Maybe this is an issue of preaching to the choir... but I definitely feel that even all of science, from physics on up, is missing something. And I say that as a used-to-be scientific realist materialist type guy.
But I will speak against emergence, too. Maybe because of my history as a used-to-be, but I think I have arguments too. The problem with emergence, from my perspective, is that it suffers from all the same arguments against dualism. Emergence is a kind of answer to the main question of dualism, "How do these two substances relate?" -- but without a real answer other than "Well, this one makes the other one somehow". Maybe I'm being a bit of a pedant, but at this point at least I feel that's not too far off, when you strip away the linguistic maneuvers
To be honest I have flirted with dualism in the past -- both property and substance dualism -- but now-a-days I feel a real ignorance, and a sort of wonder about the problem of consciousness. I don't feel that my thoughts obstruct the facts anymore. But I don't know what to make of it all. I guess that's where I'm at on the problem of consciousness -- just in-between and not quite committed.
Then I would be anxious to hear your account.
Quoting Moliere
Well there is potential for it to be more than complete hand-waving; we understand how solidity and liquidity emerge from the mass behaviours of molecules under certain conditions, and we know not to look inside molecules or atoms for these properties, but rather to their relations to each other. So a theory of emergence would likewise tend to suggest that it is relations between brains, bodies, and conditions as I would have it, or between neurons as neuroscience has it, from which consciousness arises.
Re-read my posts.
As we were saying, part of consciousness is responsive and part is creative. If we try to model reality, then the model must precisely "reflect" reality. But the creative aspect adds things which are not there, made up things, artificial things, imaginary things. If these imaginary things get into the model, they are fictions, making the model wrong in respect to those fictions. That is what I think "the present" might be, such a fiction, something imaginary, created, which has gotten into the model.
You've said consciousness is "in the present". I dispute this, saying "the present" may be a fiction, created by the imagination. So the challenge for me is to remove "the present" from the model, while maintaining an adequate model. What I think is that consciousness is in the future and the past. Part of it consists of anticipations toward the future, and part of it consists of memories of the past. When we reflect on the activities of consciousness, as you are doing in this thread, we apprehend a substantial difference between the future and past, so we imagine a division between these two. Just like I insisted that we ought to maintain, in principle, a division between the responsive (related to the past), and the initiative (related to the future), you appear to insist on a division between past and future. This imaginary division between future and past inclines one to assume "the present".
That is what I think is wrong with your model of conscious. Consciousness is really composed of elements which are related to the past, and elements which are related to the future. So I think consciousness is "in" the past and "in" the future, both at the same time. It appears like you apprehend a clear and crisp division between future and past, which you call "the present". And, assuming that nothing can cross this boundary, to exist in both the future and past at the same time, because that would be contradictory, you locate consciousness "in" the boundary, "in the present".
My opinion, is that this fictitious "present" you (or whomever lent you this idea) have created, will give you endless problems for your model. You will never be able to fit consciousness into reality, because reality consists of future and past times, and you have created an unreal, imaginary "present" where you locate consciousness. So your model allows that consciousness is completely removed from reality, by placing it in a fictitious, imaginary "present", permitting you to say that consciousness is anywhere, or everywhere, as you do in this passage:
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The first sentence makes perfect sense to me, the second seems bizarre. Elements related to the past are memories and knowledge, and these I associate with things I encounter - the overflowing bin I didn't empty yesterday, the tree I remember standing last time I passed, that has or hasn't blown down in a storm, the photo of the kids when they were little, those amazing dinosaur footprints. Sometimes I 'relive the past' and sometimes it is very vivid - lifelike. But it is never as lifelike as living; memories of hot summers in the South of France do not keep me warm in the Welsh winter. All these things are related to the past, but all are present to me, and that is why I can talk about the past at all.
The idea of consciousness being in the future is even more odd. I am tempted to ask, if yours is there, if you could let me have next week's lottery numbers. Memories and knowledge of the past lead me to model the future - the daffodils are in flower, spring is coming again. My pension is due next week, the government is usually pretty reliable. But I do not become conscious of these things themselves ( as distinct from the ideas that I have relayed here), before they happen. I cannot spend next week's pension today, or bathe in the spring sunshine.
The best sense I can make of it is that you are speaking as thought and in a thought world, because in the thought world, the model world, time has exactly that property, the model can be run forwards or backwards, restarted, altered, relived, and so on. One has equal access to every moment at any moment. But the painful frustrating world I live in does not afford that freedom; the compensation though is that it is real, not thought.
Well, isn't this the point? You are talking about consciousness. What is consciousness other than "the thought world"? You dismiss my description of consciousness by saying that I am talking about the thought world. What sense does that make? Consciousness is the thought world.
Quoting unenlightened
I expected you to say something like this, so I am not surprised. The fact is, that I have reflected on this matter many times, and I just cannot determine the reality of the present. If I try to pinpoint it by saying "now", it is into the past by the time I have said it. If I think of a future time, and expect to say it is present, when it arrives, I have the same problem. It disappears into the past by the time it even arrives. I can't find a real present because anything which I think might qualify as 'the present" always disappears into the past.
So it appears to me, like my consciousness has been deceived into believing itself to be in the present. People like you have probably told me that I am "in the present", and I have been inclined to believe that without giving it any real thought, when this is really an illusion, because when I reflect on it I realize that there is no present. "The present" is a product of the imagination. Your consciousness is not in the present, the present is in your consciousness, as a product of your imagination.
Quoting unenlightened
How can you say that you are not conscious of your pension when you are talking about it? These things you say don't make sense. Of course you can spend your pension before you receive it, that's what credit is for. You speak as if there is a point in time, like noon next Friday when prior to that time you have no money, and posterior to that time you have money. Suppose this is really the case, how does that point in time become "the present". As soon as it gets here, that point which you receive money is in the past Now it is in the future, and when it comes it will be in the past. It will never be at the present. "The present" is only in your mind. All these things around you, in "the real world", are either in the past or the future. So if you are in the real world, you are in the past and in the future. You are not in the present, the present is in you, as a product of your imagination.
See, you are telling yourself, that you are living in the present, when in reality all the occurrences you relate to are either in the past or in the future, and this idea of "the present" is just something you've made up to help you understand the difference between things which have already occurred and things which have not yet occurred.
Quoting unenlightened
I think you are trying to give to consciousness something which is not proper to it. You say that the frustrating world you live in is real, and not just thought. But how could this frustrating world be part of your consciousness except through thought? You appear to be saying that there is some part of consciousness which is other than thought, and this is the real frustrating world, when in reality that thing you call the real world is not part of consciousness at all, and that's why it's so frustrating.
Yes, I think this is the point of disagreement. I say I am conscious of the thought world, and I am conscious of the physical world, you say you are the thought world, and (I presume,) are conscious of the physical world. I'm not sure there is anywhere much left to go with this. Is there an experiment or an argument that would decide it?
Well, I wouldn't say "I am the thought world", I would say "consciousness is the thought world". So I would agree with you that I am conscious of both the thought world, and of the physical world, just like you say. But "conscious of the thought world" is very similar to "self-conscious". It is really nothing more than being conscious of my own consciousness.
I wouldn't say "I am consciousness" because I recognize that there is a significant part of my being which doesn't appear to be part of my consciousness. There are activities of my being which do not seem to enter into my consciousness, the unconscious part of me.
Where we seem to disagree is in how we relate to the presence, of our conscious being. You say that your consciousness is "in the present", explaining that there is a "present" in the physical world around you, which you are a part of. I am saying that there is only a future and past in the physical world around me, and "the present" only exists within my consciousness, as a thought.
However, I do recognize that if there is a substantial difference between future and past, then I ought to allow that there is actually a present in the physical world as well, to substantiate this difference. So the experiment, or demonstration which would settle this would be a demonstration which would indicate whether or not there is a real difference between past and future in the physical world.
.
Are you talking about unconscious thought, or more bodily processes? Usually, as you seem to suggest, people talk about self-consciousness in terms of being aware of thoughts, but do not talk about self-consciousness in terms of being aware of having an erection or a sore thumb. They identify as having a body, and being a mind. This is largely unchanged by the idea that the mind extends beyond what is conscious. And in such case, I would expect you to say, if not 'I am consciousness', then something like 'I am the mind of which I am incompletely conscious'. Which is to locate oneself as an inner world, in the body but other than it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then a glance at this thread should convince you. You can readily scroll back and look at all the past posts, but where the future posts will be is blank.
I think of my "self" as every part of me, my mind and body, not just mind. So if I say "I have a body", I mean that my body is part of me. But by saying "I have a body" I am implying that I am more than just a body. The problem I find, with talking about being aware of, or conscious of, different parts of the body, is that there are many parts which one is not aware of. I know I have lungs, kidneys, and liver, and I am to some extent aware of my lungs when I think about my breathing, but I don't think that I can say that I am aware, or conscious of my kidneys. Perhaps if something went out of order, like your example of a sore thumb, I might become aware of my kidneys, or even other types of changes might attract my attention like the case of an erection. That's probably why I can say that I'm aware of my lungs, because they are making changes. And I can be aware of my heart because it is beating.
This brings up a point of interest for me. How is it that I can know about a whole lot of internal parts, like intestines and such, yet I can't really say that I am consciously aware of them? It seems strangely contradictory that I could say I know about my duodenum, but I am not conscious of it. Am I using "conscious" in a bad way? Or am I really conscious of my duodenum, but not directly conscious of it?
In any case, it doesn't seem appropriate to locate my consciousness as my "inner world", because I know that so many inner parts escape my consciousness. I think I'd prefer to locate my consciousness as my "outer world", because being conscious describes more accurately how I relate to things other than me. So long as the things inside me are working properly, they escape my consciousness, because the problems which I need to think about, are mainly coming at me from outside.
Quoting unenlightened
That's an interesting way of putting it. But how do I know that the future posts are not out there, and I just can't see them? When I scroll back, I am not really seeing the posts in the past, I am seeing the past posts in the present. I cannot see the future posts in the present, so you think that this amounts to a substantial difference between past and future.
I'd agree with that, but where does this leave the future? The past is out there, and I can scroll back, or see evidence of what happened. You think that consciousness is "in the present", and I think that the present is "in consciousness". It appears like we would need to determine where the future is to resolve this.
Well it's all hearsay isn't it? I have no direct evidence that I have a brain and not a spaghetti monster in my head. But then it is only hearsay that Australia exists. I just assume people are not making up all this stuff. So the candle of consciousness doesn't even light up the whole candle, and certainly not the whole of the inside of the candle, let alone the rest of the world. And all the rest is stories... All I know about the duodenum is that it gets ulcers. I assume I have one because the story is that we all have the same complement of bits, but if you cut me open and fished it out, I wouldn't recognise it, and if I did feel it, I would have no idea that that is what I was feeling.
All of which goes to say that to a huge extent, what I think I am is a story I have been told.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, exactly. I am not seeing the past, I am seeing in the present the marks of the past. The thread I can see now is a (transform by electro-magic of a) record on some hard drive created by our interactions in the past, and the memories I have of our interactions are similarly a (rather vaguer) record in my alleged brain. This all being 'received wisdom'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
When you put it that way, It seems not so much of a disagreement. Especially because I would rather say, 'The present is consciousness, consciousness is the present'. It is the 'place' where all posts are created. I think this perspective works for most of the theories of time; presentism, obviously, but even a fully determined block universe, in which life is read-only. The future is there and the past is there in the book/block, but I (and the remote hard drive) haven't read the future and have read the past, at any arbitrary 'present' moment.
Yeah, so that's the point, we seem to say "I am conscious of X", using "conscious of" in a number of completely distinct ways. And that difference is evident, and sometimes confusing here at TPF. Sometimes I might use "conscious of" to include all those stories I have been told, without even questioning the truth of some of them. But other times I might use "conscious of" to refer strictly to things which I am immediately aware of through my senses.
Quoting unenlightened
I think that this is an over simplification now, to say "the present is consciousness". If we look back to what you were saying about modeling reality, I think that "the present" within consciousness is part of a model. So the question for me was, if the present is part of the model of reality, then what aspect of reality is it a reflection of. And I was trying to answer this as the division between past and future. But your example made me think that maybe the future is not even part of reality at all. Where are the posts of the future? Maybe the future is completely imaginary.
I cannot say that I am conscious of the future, in the sense that I use "conscious of" to refer to what I am immediately aware of through my senses. However I am conscious of the future in the sense that I know about it through stories. And, I think that I am conscious of the future in another sense of "conscious of". I am aware of things that are imminent, and I anticipate them without referring to stories. I am not immediately aware of these things through my senses, nor am I aware of them through stories, but I am still conscious of them, in another sense of "conscious of".
Well in this context, we want to be very general and inclusive, and that presents a problem, that we are trying to account for life the universe and everything in a way. Certainly I want to include the immediacy of the senses, but even there, they are bound up with memory. The green verticality I see over there - memory and understanding is involved in being able to say 'it is a poplar tree reflected in a lake'.
Without memory and interpretation, the visual sensation is meaningless; it acquires meaning in relation to remembered experience, learned stories, models of world and self. I have been emphasising the sensory, because philosophy tends to neglect it's importance, and because my claim is that it is prior to what one might call the inner life, because all these stories, including the one we are building here, must enter through the senses.
I hope my story makes sense. I've been told it is nonsense in this thread.
It is nonsense if it does not accord with the senses. If it does not accord with other stories we might have heard, then it might be that those stories don't quite make sense. So if it is non-story, I don't mind too much, but if it is non-sense I'm in trouble. So immediately, most of my senses slot easily into a story of my familiar home my laptop, my favourite site, and my focus is on this new post that is trickling out as I type. All the background readily 'fits' the story of my life - the story makes sense of the senses. Where I have to pay attention, is to making sure if I can that the story I am telling of the nature of consciousness also makes sense of the senses.
All day long, I'm seeing, hearing, touching, etc, and importantly, acting -typing, walking, carrying, eating, etc. At the end of the day, I seek out a place that is dark, quiet, and lie down for preference on something soft enough that I can hardly feel my own weight. And just to be on the safe side, I close my eyes. Then, if the stories don't insist on telling themselves, I go to sleep.
And of course, that little story is told from memory, because actually, I'm still typing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is where we get into the realm of strange loops. I'm going to stick by my story, that the immediacy of the senses is the present, and is at least the constant companion of consciousness, without which it becomes at best, weird and dreamlike. But of course I am presenting a model to you in which "the present" plays a prominent part. But "the present" is not the present. Perhaps I can illustrate this, by projecting my story forwards.
I am still typing, but when I have finished this post, and my glass of wine, I will go to bed as described above, and sleep. I will get up tomorrow about 8AM, and have a coffee and...
I roll the story forward into the future, based on memories of other days. The train timetable does the same thing, and when there is unforeseen snow, or a crash, or a terror alert, the timetable becomes wrong. The future is always a story that becomes true or false - later - when the senses confirm or disconfirm it. That's my story, anyway. I think the same process, non-verbally, accounts for the anticipation involved in, say, catching a ball. One learns, and gets better at it.
But psychologically, it is the entrance of memory actively into present thought that gives us a sense of time. There is a peculiar, rare illness where the ability to lay down new long term memories is lost quite suddenly. In such cases psychological time stops on the day the ability is lost, and although they retain the earlier memories, and short term memory, so that they can talk, as far as they are aware, no time has passed or will ever pass. They think forever, that it is June 5th 1973, or whatever, and if you explain to them, they do not remember you or what you said five minutes later.
So in that sense thought is time, but also geology is time regardless of thought.
(I do hope people can make sense of the way I am playing with the different senses of 'sense' in this thread.)
When I fall asleep, psychological time stops, but physiological time continues. When I awaken, I have to look at the clock, or where the sun is in the sky to reconnect the two times. And then there are those occasions when I'm not sure what day it is.
I agree that all of the stories enter through the senses, but don't you think that there is a part of consciousness which is not a story? What about instinct and intuition? Things come to consciousness through these sources, and I don't think that this is a story, nor do I think that what comes to consciousness from intuition and instinct, comes through the senses.
Let's go back to the difference between a simple reaction, and a creative response. If all aspects of consciousness were simply reactions to what the senses were perceiving, there'd be no creative element. So we can appeal to that inner element, instinct and intuition, to account for creativity within responses. My question is, why would you give priority to the stuff which enters through your senses, over the inner element, when the inner element must give us the capacity to make sense of what enters through the senses?
Quoting unenlightened
Here is the issue, expressed in this passage here. If you could not make sense of what your senses are doing, what they're giving to you, all of your sensations would be nonsense. And it is the inner world, of instinct and intuition which allows for that making sense. Of course we find out that the more we make sense of things, the more capable we become at making sense of things, and this is very evident in "the stories", where we increasingly learn to understand the language, as we learn the language. But I think that there must first be an inner capacity to make sense of things, and this inner capacity allows us to construct things from what we perceive with the senses. That is why I would rather place the "inner" aspect of consciousness as prior to the sensing aspect.
Quoting unenlightened
See, even here you speak of the stories "telling themselves", and this is the creative role of the inner element of consciousness. It's very evident in dreaming. This type of thing, dreaming, calls into doubt the idea of the priority of the sensory experience. Yes, it is very true that the inner element makes use of sensory input in this dreaming, but this is from memory, and the inner aspect is actively creating a world, without the active sensory input. Now dreaming itself is not actually consciousness, but the inner activity which is responsible for dreaming may be prior to the sensory activity, only producing consciousness when the two are united.
This is all relevant to your notion of "present", and my question of where is the future. I find that I can only relate to the future through the inner element of creativity. I have no relation to the future through my sensory experience. I must be creative with my memories of sensations, in order to construct a future.
The internal world prevents one from being awake, it is akin to dreaming.
Most dreaming is the result of disorder in the brain, and disorder comes from the ego
Dreaming is a disorder? I thought it was completely normal and necessary.
Well yes I do. There is a point at which I step back from scientism, and even philosophism, and resort to mysticism. One might say that the whole human, as a general form that has this connection to the world through senses and a propensity and capacity to form narratives from the interactions of memory and senses, comes from the 'static' (in relation to the individual) memory of DNA, an evolutionary memory. So the first story is written in the body and brain, and tells the story of the story-teller. That is instinct and intuition as I see them, and nothing mystical there.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is when you use the words 'capacity', 'freedom', and 'creativity' that I start to reach my mystical singularity, where stories must end as explanations, and where they come from. Everything one can know, everything one can grasp, everything that makes sense, comes from the past, and this is the physicalist story that is all stories - almost. But we know, as part of that story, that the past is inadequate to the future; we know too that the emptiness of the vacuum is seething with activity.
So there is a capacity, an emptiness, that is capable of originating the new at any moment, and there can be no explanation of it, because an explanation would relate it to the past and it is new, original. Not the capacity is new, it is always there, but what comes from it comes from nothing, and that is what makes it original and creative. It is not thought, not memory, not sensation, though it functions through all of these. Let's call it 'consciousness', as it appears in humans.
No the I is the nexus of disorder, dreaming is the brain's attempt at rectification of this disorder
Aren't "nexus" and "disorder" mutually exclusive, making this statement contradictory?
So how would disorder have a centre?
The centre of disorder is the I
Let me explore this "mystical singularity", will you? Consider the word "original". Something original, as you use the word, is something new, created, something which comes from nothing. Also, there is another sense of "original" which signifies going back to the beginning, the very first. Do you see, that despite very different meanings, there is a similarity here, because they both refer to something coming from nothing, a first.
However, "original" in the sense that you used it isn't really something coming from nothing, because creating something new is a matter of turning to the inside, the intuition and instinct, and using that part of one's consciousness to create something new. It's what you described already, the imagination. And if it's not coming from nothing, it's coming from that evolutionary memory within, what you referred to as DNA. So this directs us back toward "original" in the sense of the very first. In a way then, to create something "original", to be productive in this way, to produce something out of nothing, is to turn toward "the original", which is the coming into being of life and DNA in the first place.
But this idea of a first, a something coming from nothing seems rather repugnant to me. It seems unreasonable to me, to think that something could come from nothing. That's why when you described being creative, and original, as producing something from nothing, I turned to the inner instinct and intuition, imagination, to say that it didn't really come from nothing. So when I turn to the evolutionary memory, the DNA, and think about the first, the original life on earth, I don't think of this as something coming from nothing.
Quoting JJJJS
But how could there be a centre of disorder? Only specific ordered forms actually have a centre. Disorder could not have a centre, and to refer to a centre is to say that it isn't really disorder. So it would be contradictory to say that disorder has a centre because giving it a centre is to give it some order.
Can we separate the I from the apparent "disorder" which surrounds it? The I is not part of the disorder then, it is a little piece of self-determined order in the midst of disorder. Since it is surrounded by disorder, it apprehends itself as in "the centre". But isn't this a kind of delusion, to apprehend oneself as the centre?
Yeah it is, hence the inherent disorder
But the disorder is not in the "I", which is the self-determined "order", it surrounds the "I". The delusion is in thinking that the I is the centre of the disorder. It is delusional to think of the I as part of the disorder, as its centre, because this is to claim that the disorder has an order (a centre).
The I being self-determined sounds like a contradiction..
It's not the "I" which is self-determined, but the order is self-determined by the I. Have you never thought that the reason you are an orderly person is because you order yourself? It might be contrary to what you believe, but I don't see how that it is contradictory.
It is certainly an odd notion I have, but there is a logic that I find persuasive. If something 'comes from' somewhere, it is not new, but merely a rearrangement and continuation of the old; this is the dictatorship of the reasonable, and it governs much of our lives, and much of the universe. But if that is all there is, then it seems to me there can be no freedom, one is reduced to a cog in the deterministic machine. DNA arises from the shuffling of the molecular cards, man arises from the shuffling of the genetic cards, and the theory of relativity arises from the shuffling of the conceptual cards. It leaves consciousness without any function, because choice and decision has to presume freedom.
So it seems to me that even if it is not true, the story we tell of ourselves must necessarily include our freedom, and freedom means unconditioned by the past, just as determined means determined by the past. It's curious how a discussion of consciousness involves these other philosophical strands of time and determinism...
Do you not believe in "change"? For me, the concept of change allows that something new comes from the old. A butterfly is something completely new, despite the fact that it came from a caterpillar. A human baby is something new despite the fact that it came from its parents.
You rightfully claim, that a continuity of existence through time, denies one the right to claim newness. But I can question whether this continuity is real, or just assumed. Perhaps, your odd notion that there is a continuation of the old, is just an unsupported assumption. If we analyze "what" exists at each moment of time, and find that it is different from one moment to the next, then isn't each moment something new? Why are you inclined to say that this newness is a rearrangement? Does the caterpillar rearrange itself to make a butterfly? Do mom and dad rearrange themselves to make a baby?
My opinion is that we need to separate the thing which is continuous from the new things which pop into existence. This would be a categorical separation, such that one type of thing exists in a way of continuous rearrangements, while another type of thing determines new rearrangements.
Quoting unenlightened
I think consciousness is a very odd thing. It is the means by which we try to sort things out, to bring order to things, and understand them. But sometimes when things appear to be simple, we accept them as being simple, and ignoring the existing complications may cause us to proceed in misunderstanding. So for example, we hear the story you've told, about how nothing is new, everything is a rearrangement of the old, a continuity, and we have physical laws of conservation which enhance that story, so we accept the story, in its pure simplicity and ease of understanding.
Meanwhile, the mystic is insisting wait a minute, something is not completely right here, your story is leaving something out. That story cannot account for origins, newness, creativity, and freedom. So we have to look for another story to account for these things. However, the mystic's story consists of demonstrations of creativity, things coming from nothing, magical appearances, so it is completely incoherent as "a story" and not even a story at all. The mystic's "story" demonstrates that history is full of incoherencies, things coming from nothing, magic. So even the idea that there ought to be one coherent story is misleading, a misunderstanding, because any story glosses over, obscures all of the creativity, the things coming from nothing, in order that it be a coherent story. And the origins, creativity must be accounted for by something other than a story.
Quoting JJJJS
But isn't your intelligence part of yourself? So for instance, if you use your hands to bring order to something around you, wouldn't you allow that this is yourself which is engaged in bringing order? And if you use your intelligence to bring order to things within your mind, wouldn't you allow that this is yourself which is bringing order?
Well yes, the caterpillar does exactly the same thing in millions of cases and over millions of years. Not mum and dad, but their genes are rearranged to make a 'new' individual. In that sense, a fully deterministic system allows for change, and if you add a salting of randomness, evolution in the full sense can get going, producing not only new individuals but new species.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An account is a story. 'A caterpillar turns into a butterfly' accounts for a butterfly in terms of a prior caterpillar. So the mystic is pointing to creativity, and saying that if there is creativity, there can be no account of it, because all accounts are of how the past became the present, or projections of how the present will be in the future and creativity simply is what is not accounted for by the past. Hence 'it comes from nothing' does not count as an account, but as a denial of accountability.
Quoting unenlightened
I suppose there is an issue of what differentiates a "rearrangement of parts' from a "creation of new parts". If you are one to insist that everything new is just a rearrangement of old parts, then you'd be inclined to insist that all new creations are just rearrangements. Consider "energy" though. To break things down into parts, energy is required. And sometimes when things are broken down into parts, energy is freed. That released energy may ne used in creating new parts. So the rearranging of parts is only a part of the story because there is a matter of the act of rearranging. The rearranging requires energy. Furthermore, there is also evidence that parts, physical things, can come into existence from energy. So the issue of creating something new is much more complicated than the description of rearranging parts.
Quoting unenlightened
Do you agree that the coherency of the story is a function of continuity? If you are telling the story of how a butterfly comes to be from a caterpillar, for example, and there is a break in your continuity, something unaccounted for in that break, then there is a problem with the story at that point. A critical analysis of the story will indicate that something has come from nothing at that point in the story. The new part is not accounted for by a rearrangement of the old parts, perhaps it's an electron or something like that, which has come from energy, and energy is not a part of any particular thing. A part comes into existence from energy and this cannot be described as a rearrangement of parts.
So we have a new part, which does not come from the rearrangement of old parts, nor does it come from nothing, it comes from energy. But in the story, energy is only supposed to account for how the parts are moved around, rearranged, to create new parts through this rearrangement. Now it becomes evident that energy actually creates new parts. The whole story of "rearrangement" is suspicious. Why would we think that energy is rearranging parts, when the evidence is that it is annihilating old parts and producing new parts?
Quoting JJJJS
That's a good point. You used it first, or more precisely you used "disorder", so do you have a definition?
Here's a story. A brick with kinetic energy X hits a sheet of glass and the energy is transmitted from the brick to the glass causing lines of fracture to radiate outwards from the point of impact. The exact arrangement of those lines becomes more unpredictable as the glass becomes more uniform. The glass will break, but exactly where it will break is unknowable.
This incompleteness is not incoherent. Energy is acting, but the unpredictable novelty is not what either of us mean by 'creative'. Or is it exactly that same creativity of the mind, but mindless? I'm not sure.
I don't think it's the same because breaking the glass is a matter of breaking down a complex structure, while creativity produces complex structures. So I think applying energy to randomly break something apart, and applying energy to create a complex structure, are two different types of actions.
I'm not sure what you mean by this
What came to mind for me was Gibb's Free Energy. -- I linked the section without all the mathematical whatzits because it seems more pertinent, one, and wikipedia is horrible for actually explaining this stuff, IMX. It's written by people wanting to show off their knowledge rather than transmit it :D.
Oftentimes what looks like a decrease in entropy for a given system (say, a body) is an increase in entropy for the universe.
The phenomena of life is like that. At least, so the story goes. I'd be all for reading something more precise than the hand-wavey (though admittedly readable) section on wikipedia.
The bit that is harder to get my head around, though is the idea that complexity and disorder are somehow the same, and the nearest I can get to this is in terms of information. To the extent that information is patterned or structured, it can be compressed by specifying the structure. So the maximum information density is the same as random. Somehow this is equivalent to the energy thing, because it is the structure in the distribution of energy that allows for some 'free energy' to be released in it's dissipation.
That's much clearer now isn't it?
Heh, naw. I was hoping that last paragraph might be.
Quoting unenlightened
Complexity I'm less certain on. But I can speak to the notion of "disorder", at least -- disorder, I think, is a bit of poor wording.
Consider a more simplified system: two jars connected by a small tube. The initial condition of said jars, for purposes of this thought experiment, has 10 molecules in the left-hand jar and 0 in the right-hand jar. Given time what you would expect is for there to be 5 molecules in the left-hand jar and 5 in the right-hand jar. This is because the entropy is increasing -- "disorder". But it's not exactly like disorder is chaotic or unstructured. It's simply the direction, meaning time-direction, in which we observe energy to flow.
In another theoretical world we could reverse the thought experiment, with 5 molecules in each jar and we would expect to find 10 accumulate in one of the jars -- in this world the arrow of time would be observed to flow in the opposite direction from the world we actually live in.
In one sense of the word "ordered" it would be more ordered. But not necessarily in a way that relates to complexity and simplicity.
I'm not sure how you would actually relate the two. Like, what would unpatterend or unstructured information be, exactly? Would it just be unspecified? Or would it be exactly analogous, in that the states we might find any given bit are greater than they were before?
My class on Statistical mechanics is what really helped me wrap my head around the 2nd law of thermo, especially the concept of entropy.
One thing I want to note though: Quoting unenlightened
Free energy actually works on a system -- where a system is just anything that happens to be under consideration, and the universe is everything else (usually a room or a building, but it could also be the actual universe too). Not sure if it's pertinent here, but it's not being released from a system as much as it's either preventing or allowing some process to occur within the system under consideration.
But, yes, the structure in the distribution of energy is what allows (or prevents) some process to occur.
But I'm not read up enough on information theory to be able to say how these two things relate. Just trying to lend a helping hand where I can.
It wouldn't be information at all if it were unpatterned or unstructured. That's the problem with this theoretical structure, the concept, "information", itself presupposes order. If there is no order, there is no information. So as information dissipates, it can never rid itself of the character of "information". Likewise, information cannot come into existence from a randomly unpatterned, unstructured existence, because something needs to "inform" it, giving it the character of "information".
All this does is obscure the "something coming from nothing" problem.
I think you need at least to be more respectful to these ideas, that have been thought through very carefully by folks much cleverer than me.
Consider a square 10 pixels to a side, consisting of equal numbers of red and blue pixels. Start with a highly ordered state, where all the red pixels are at the top. This ordered state can be specified by a list:
RRRRR... up to fifty, and then BBBBB... up to 100.
Compare this with a totally disordered state; the same pixels in a completely random configuration. Now, I cannot specify the state other than by giving the full list, whereas the ordered state was specified above in half a line. To the extent that there is order, one can say something like "and so on" by way of abbreviation This is the principle that file compression works on, and a maximally compressed file is maximally disordered.
Entropy, and thus the arrow of time then falls out of information theory as a statistical law, that for any isolated system that is changing, it is more likely to become more disordered than more ordered to the extent that there are more disorderly possibilities than orderly ones. Swap the colours of a random red and blue pixel, and disorder is introduced. Repeat until a completely disordered state is reached, and then carry on until an ordered state obtains again. Don't hold your breath for this last bit.