Hard problem of consciousness is hard because...
Everything we know in science dealing with the natural phenomena, every law, discovery, explanation... everything is about some kind of motion, ultimately explained by the dynamics of the underlying elements. At the bottom of it all is just plain mechanics, what moves where and whether it will stick or bounce, essentially.
Subjective experience of consciousness, or qualia, seems to be completely out of reach to be explained by any kind of motion, mechanics, or dynamics. It's something else, and we don't know of anything else. So, the problem is hard because we don't even know the type of answer that could fit here. There is simply no place to start. Or is there?
Subjective experience of consciousness, or qualia, seems to be completely out of reach to be explained by any kind of motion, mechanics, or dynamics. It's something else, and we don't know of anything else. So, the problem is hard because we don't even know the type of answer that could fit here. There is simply no place to start. Or is there?
Comments (499)
Consciousness is hard to be treated scientifically, not because it is hard to explain but because it is hard, if not impossible to detect. There is no objective test or measurement that can be applied to consciousness; it is exclusively subjective.
You might believe that you have evidence that you are conscious, but I have absolutely none.
Indeed, it's beyond all logic. It's a little more difficult for say, the atheist, to square the circle too.
(That is because most atheists believe logic can solve or explain the nature of our conscious existence.)
Strange isn't it that consciousness forms part of the system (logic, pattern recognition, etc.) that explains the world and yet it cannot explain itself?
I see a fundamental problem here which can be better seen within a simplicity-complexity framework.
I believe that, if nature as it is is true, understanding/comprehension has a top-down structure. In a crude sense the complex can grasp the simple but not the other way round. This isn't an outlandish claim for the evidence is plain to our eyes - humans can study and comprehend other animals but the converse is false. The reason being a difference in complexity.
Therefore, "understandably", it would be quite difficult for consciousness to comprehend itself.
In any case, consciousness has been studied scientifically and is amenable to scientific study.
Good point. Throw in Metaphysical/Phenomenology into the mix. Like explaining the color red, or the phenomena of Love, or the sense of wonder, or the Will, et al.
But back to logic; the subconscious and conscious mind working together seems to defy LEM. Of course the infamous example of driving a car while daydreaming and having an accident, rears its ugly head again there... .
What is LEM?
Certainly traditional logic does not currently encompass the newer forms of 'action at a distance' relationships that are emerging in physics and non-linear mathematics. But I'd say that is a limitation of traditional logic, not the "logic of the real."
If you're not familiar with Thomas Metzinger's work, check out Being No One (or his abbreviated, non/less-technical summary The Ego Tunnel). Also this lecture. Complementary to IIT (below).
If, however, you're familiar with Metzinger and you find his work insufficient to (begin to scientifically) explain "subjective experience of consciousness", make (a) case for rejecting Metzinger's 'phenomenal self model', etc.
Quoting A Seagull
This wiki article summarizes neuroscientists Tononi's & Koch's information integration theory (IIT), with citations of papers published in (mostly) peer-reviewed journals, which predicts(?) that "consciousness" (i.e. degrees of self-awareness) can be detected. Complementary to Metzinger's work (above). Thoughts?
Law of Excluded Middle or commonly referred to law of non-contradiction.
Because Being is in the state of becoming [human beings] there is always 'middle ground' in consciousness. Formal ( a priori) logic doesn't like middle ground. It's like saying both A and B are true at the same time. Like morphing between consciousness and subconsciousness while driving a car daydreaming.
Also, when one is in the state of daydreaming, what is one's conscious reality(?). Similar to the idea of sleepwalking...
Technically those are different things. Non-contradiction says it can’t be both true and false. Excluded middle says it can’t be anything but true or false. The two together are the principle of bivalence.
The only type of answer we can give is in terms of motion, something moves somewhere and then poof, that's consciousness. That's all we can do. And panpsychism, but even there it's about motion as to how it is all supposed to come together.
We have the tools to explain consciousness as much as we have to explain god. We have no words to even point anywhere near it, except to call it "magic" and pretend that means something. We do not know if it's supposed to be a process, configuration, state, property, illusion... and even if we knew, all those are again based on some type of motion and mechanics.
Consciousness doesn't seem to be anywhere near any of those categories. It's something else, it's out of our dimension, perhaps literally, and these types of sci-fi non-verifiable theories actually make more sense than anything scientific based on bumping of atoms and electrons, or quantum randomness bubbling sentience out of its ass.
That's right. Poof, there's mathematics. Poof, there's history. Consciousness is doing a LOT. You are absolutely right in that coming up with a comprehensive "science" around all that is a daunting task. Dilthey wrote literally thousands of pages on it.... ;)
The problem of Consciousness is "hard" only for those who think in materialistic terms of "motion, mechanics, or dynamics". If instead, we think of Causation, Relationships, and Systems, we can trace the evolution of Qualia back to its origins in the Big Bang -- not in the sense of a physical explosion, but of metaphysical Creation. Consciousness is indeed "amenable to scientific study". But not to materialistic study.
Ironically, the physical account of the Big Bang sounds like an act of magic : "Poof, a universe from nothing!" But it's what the magician does before the "Voila!" that makes all the difference. "Vive la difference!" What I'm talking about is immaterial Information/Enformation/Causation. :wink:
:clap: :cool:
God did it! What a satisfying answer, let us pretend that explains everything about us and our world, so we are only left to explain it all over again for the gods and their worlds. Why make the problem worse for no reason at all?
When consciousness, as a mysteriously emerging property in itself, morphs into subconscious, creates part of the unexplained hard problem. The daydreaming while driving example is one phenomenon. Two brains are acting as one to create the same or 'one' sense of awareness level.
Hence a person could crash because one thinks they're not driving at all. So I'm driving, but yet not driving.
Isn't this just a lot of rationalization to account for distracted driving? I'm having a hard time seeing this as exemplifying a cognitively significant phenomenon.
There is a distinction between distraction and daydreaming, yes?
Consider yourself driving to work while your subconsciousness is putting you in an island by the beach. Then, all of a sudden you crash as a result. At that moment of daydreaming about the island, were you at the beach while driving at the same time? Was it your consciousness driving, while your subconsciousness was dreaming? Or, was your subconsciousness driving and your consciousness dreaming?
Hence; I'm driving and not driving.
I wouldn't say so. If you are ascribing some kind of independence to subconscious phenomena that's a pretty large leap. Undoubtedly buried 'subconscious' processes do affect consciousness, but these are in principle identifiable, even 'editable' - that's the premise of the original Freudian psychoanalytic method.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? I was merely talking about the hard problem of consciousness. Or, the unexplained illogical nature of same.
Now 'independent existence' is another question. For example, the metaphysical Will in nature (Schopenhauer), or the 'independent' language of mathematics, and/or other metaphysical phenomenon that we experience/percieve in life....is that what you mean?
That the subconscious is independent? That was because you specifically made reference to the subconscious doing the driving.
It's not independent, that's the concern/problem. It is perceived as independent yet not independent. Further, it's dependent on each other to function properly in the broader context of cognition viz the human condition.
Why is emergence a problem? Emergence is a well known property of complex physical systems.
So this sentence, which is not reducible to my/your neurological activity, emerges only by "magic"? And the flavor of steak or salmon or tofu or chocolate, which can't be reduced to biochemical photosynthesis (let alone to the constituent quark interactions in the atomic nuclei of its molecules) at the bottom of the food chain, emerges only by "magic"? Or that a melody played through a harmonica emerges only by "magic" from a diaphragm?
:chin:
Clarify what you mean by "magic".
Temperature, for example, emerges from simpler mechanical motion, in a way that makes perfect sense. We can explain what it is about the simple mechanical motion of the constituent particles of a macroscopic object that we are considering in aggregate when we talk about the property of "temperature". Temperature is in that sense reducible to mechanical motion. My body has a temperature. Each my my organs has a temperature. So do each of their cells. And their organelles. At some point we get to talking about individual molecules and then it doesn't make so much sense to talk about temperature, but we can still talk about the kinetic energy of those molecules, which is what temperature is an aggregate measurement of. And then we can talk about energy more generally when we get down past the level of molecules, and so on. There's something that has precursors to "temperature" all the way down, such that if you modeled just those precursors in a simulation, you would end up modeling temperature for free along the way, just in way finer detail that you need to if temperature is all you're concerned with.
Phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand -- the topic of the hard problem of consciousness, the subject of this thread -- is by definition something independent of properties like that. Phenomenal consciousness is what a philosophical zombie is supposed to lack that a real human has, where a philosophical zombie is by definition identical to the real human in every physical way. One could say that there is no such thing as that, that nothing has it, not even humans, and so dismiss the problem completely, but that's not to give an answer to the "hard problem of consciousness", it's just to dismiss it as a non-problem. If one wants to say instead that real humans do have phenomenal consciousness, but that something like a rock doesn't, then you're going to have to explain where along the way this property that is defined to be something wholly irreducible to the properties that humans and rocks have in common "emerged", and how. If you disassemble a bunch of rocks and then reassemble their atoms into cells and assemble those into tissues and assemble those into a human body, where along the way did this new phenomenal consciousness property spring into existence, and from what? There's no doubt that you can in principle show where the access consciousness sprung into being, because that's just a more-or-less mechanical function of neurons (though actually showing the details of that in practice is a much harder problem, but a problem for neuroscientists, not philosophers). But when and where and why did this wholly new thing start happening? That's the spooky magic (@180 Proof) that emergentism about phenomenal consciousness claims happens.
The third alternative, besides nothing having phenomenal consciousness or anything like it, and it suddenly springing into existence out of whole cloth from things that had nothing like it, is that everything has something like it, which is what panpsychism is. A real human brain has it. A chimp brain has a different kind of it. A rat brain has an even more different kind of it. A slime mold has something even more different, and a tree likewise. Even rocks, and electrons, and quantum fields, have precursors of it. This is almost tantamount to dismissing the problem just like eliminativism does, except rather than denying that anything has this first-person phenomenal experience, it just says that everything has that and there's nothing remarkable about merely that -- it's the first-person phenomenal experiences of being the complex access-conscious things that we are that is remarkable. And that complex functionality is describable in ordinary mechanical terms, and can emerge from simpler mechanical systems uncontroversially. But that's not the "hard problem of consciousness" we're talking about any more, that's the "easy" problem instead.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6692/does-neurophilosophy-signal-the-end-of-philosophy-as-we-know-it-/p1
Do you prefer the Magic Bang answer? Is that satisfying to you? Apparently, it's not for many astronomers, who postulate a hypothetical Multiverse as a "turtles all the way down" alternative to the mathematical creation event. How is that better than a One Big Turtle solution? Does an infinity of invisible universes satisfy your curiosity about an origin theory that most scientists at first rejected as a religious explanation?. My thesis does not try to explain G*D, but merely takes the First Cause hypothesis as a reasonable axiom. After that assumption, it's all a process of Enformation (applied mathematics). My reason for pursuing that hypothesis is because all materialistic explanations ignore Qualia, which is of more significance to living humans than dead Matter and aimless Energy.
At least my hypothetical "G*D" creates via gradual evolution and physics, not by instantly inflating space faster than the speed of light. And the attribution of Enformation and Entention to the First Cause explains the existence of Mind & Consciousness much better than mindless Materialism. Besides, which is a faith-based explanation : "Imaginary God did it!", or "Imaginary Multiverse did it!" Which is "lunatic fringe" : a Mother-verse, or Eternal Mind? *1
*1 " a dynamic evolving space that once had some sort of childhood --- and perhaps some sort of birth about 14 billion years ago."
"Inflation is like a great magic show --- my gut reaction is : this can't possibly obey the laws of physics!"
"[i]Q. What caused our Big Bang?
A. There's no explanation --- the equations simply assume it happened.
Q. How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
A. There's no explanation --- the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size.[/i]"
"where multiverses have gone from having lunatic fringe status to being discussed openly at physics conferences. . ."
Max Tegmark, physicist, cosmologist
Our Mathematical Universe : My Quest For the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Note: Tegmark's Mathematical Universe is equivalent to my Enformationism, except that I use G*D as a First Cause metaphor instead of a "Level 4 Multiverse".
I'm familiar with Laszlo , but not with that abstruse theory. However, the term sounds like Cartesian Dualism to me. His solution was "neat", in that it got the church off his back, by arbitrarily defining Non-Overlapping Magisteria. And materialistic Science has flourished for centuries since cutting itself off from Philosophy and Metaphysics. But since the Quantum revolution in Science, the overlap between Mind & Matter has become ever harder to ignore. Anyway, I'll check it out, because the notion of Complementarity is essential to my own abstruse thesis. :smile:
Agreed, well said. It warrants a refresher:
ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience.
intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.
If qualia of this sort exist, then a normally sighted person who sees red would be unable to describe the experience of this perception in such a way that a listener who has never experienced color will be able to know everything there is to know about that experience. Though it is possible to make an analogy, such as "red looks hot", or to provide a description of the conditions under which the experience occurs, such as "it's the color you see when light of 700-nm wavelength is directed at you", supporters of this kind of qualia contend that such a description is incapable of providing a complete explaination.....
Soooo ... by "magic" you're signifying that you don't understand how emergence works in dynamical complex systems (e.g. inanimate matter --> animate matter --> cognition --> language-thought-intelligence; or simpler: quark interactions --> chocolate-covered strawberries). Nothing "spooky" about that. Assuming you'd overlooked my first post on this thread, Pfhorrest, maybe the link provided will go some way towards showing (via references to neuroscientific literature) how the magic trick (i.e. phenomenal consciousness rabbit gets pulled out of the brain-body-biosphere hat) might be done. No misdirecting sleight-of-mind (woo) needed. :smirk:
(@180 Proof I was typing this paragraph as you replied and it appropriately addresses your response as well). There is absolutely no contention whatsoever that the function of cognition, the likes of which even a philosophical zombie is supposed to have, can emerge from aggregates of other, simpler functions. That is not the thing that is at question here, there is no doubt about it, and that's why it's called the "easy problem".
What is at question in the "hard problem", to use Pantagruel's terms again, is whether nothing has an "internal perspective" (eliminativism), whether some things have no "internal perspective" but if you combine those things right suddenly something does have an "internal perspective" (emergentism), or whether everything has an "internal perspective", that varies along with the function of the thing (panpsychism). I hold to the last position.
On a panpsychist account the specific kind of internal perspective that humans have "emerges" along with our evolving functionality just like the "external perspective" of our behavior does (because the experience and the behavior are just two sides of the same functional coin), but the mere having of an "internal perspective" at all is something that was always there at the fundamental level, and didn't suddenly pop into existence when things with no "internal perspective" were combined just right. @180 Proof you seemed to be applauding this when I said it earlier; to quote myself where you bolded me: "The mere having of a first-person experience isn't some special phenomenon that occurs only in humans and so needs an explanation, it's just a basic feature of existence."
From your wikilink to Emergence, look at the section on Strong and weak emergence, especially the Viability of strong emergence subsection, which includes a quote saying of strong emergence that "it is uncomfortably like magic". There is no contention at all over weak emergence of functional properties like access consciousness; that is, again, why that is the "easy problem". It's the strong emergence of phenomenal consciousness that is a contentious position regarding the "hard problem".
Your thesis explains nothing, it postulates another question as an answer. And questions are not answers, you know?
Besides, far more reasonable axiom is that it is actually me who created both tHe FiRsT cAUsE and *G&O%D#, and you see how that already explains much more.
"Functional analysis" makes me doubt he explains anything. Can you sum it up what does he say about what a 'consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is'?
More to the point, it's about something which is objective. Whether it's the 'ghostly neutrino' or the black hole at the center of the galaxy or about a function of the body or whatever subject you chose, science is concerned with objective measurement and observation.
The simple reason the problem of consciousness is 'hard' is that the observing mind is never an object, by definition. This is a succinct way of expressing the idea at the centre of Chalmer's original paper.
And that subjective reality is precisely what can never be made an object - at least, not without completely changing the perspective from which it is being examined.
Some people continue to play piano or drive a car as if nothing happened while having an epileptic seizure, which means totally unconscious. They of course don't remember anything, but can function almost normally - stop at red light, make correct turns, drive home safely. They only fail to react when something novel or surprising happens, they loose ability to act creatively.
Yes. What I mean is that people keep putting forward different theories in terms of some process, function, some dynamics without realizing they are all the same in a very basic sense, which is that this type of mechanical explanation could never really end our curiosity and actually answer the question. It's simply not the category of description that could scratch that itch.
Consider emergent properties of liquidity or acidity. Imagine hypothetical entity living one complexity layer below at the scale of electron, and say, they actually can calculate and describe dynamic of molecules and chemistry, which to their scale are like galaxies are to us. They can describe liquidity and acidity in terms of motion without knowing what is it they are describing. How could they ever really comprehend those emergent properties which on their scale of existence simply have no meaning?
Emergence is what connects all sciences from atoms to galaxies. If emergent, then by content it must be reducible to lower level elements it emerges from, like everything else. Whether emergent properties are irreducible is another question.
Perfectly simple solution is that 700nm actually equals 'red' in some specific circumstances and in a way we yet don't understand.
It is exactly about how in every sense the states you are describing are real and emergent, but, okay. Read the original if you want to be sure.
Guys, Emergence in itself, as a description of how the cognition works (parts working together to comprise the whole), is one very plausible theory. Emergence that would explain the nature of our conscious existence (cognition) is yet another altogether.
To that end, you would still be left with the metaphysical mystery of causation (or Will), right?
No. Simply another emergent phenomenon within a nested-hierarchical system of complex-adaptive systems (CAS). Explicable with respect to the properties of top-level system.
Okay, just a few questions for now:
1. What is your interpretation of a 'top-level' system?
2. A process that creates complex systems out of pre-existing properties but yet cannot make "entirely novel" properties, is what?
Great topic BTW!
Importantly, complex systems are not 'created' in the sense of A makes B. Complex Adaptive systems are that precisely because they arise spontaneously through the ongoing interaction of an initial set of elements.
It is all quite fascinating, and the role of chaotic/fractal mathematics (attractors) and non-linear equations is central to getting the big picture. Basically, these self-organizing emergent systems exhibit causal regularities which are not of a linear (B follows A) nature but are real and measurable nonetheless using complex (non-linear) modelling. Essentially it is like a self-caused a-causally connected mechanism. And a lot of traditionally stubborn problems in virtually every field you'd care to look at it turns out can be successfully modelled following this paradigm.
Thank you. My interpretation is that Emergence/Panpsychism (which is a wonderful paradigm/metaphor for consciousness) would explain the cognition phenomena itself, but it wouldn't explain the actual true nature of conscious existence itself. In other words it's not explaining truly novel phenomena. Or maybe I'm not understanding.
In that way, I don't feel you got the gist of my questions. I don't know if you could logicize your thoughts/theory in this way, but can you explain the hard/soft problem viz Emergence/Panpsychism in a syllogistic bullet-point style?
For example,
1. The metaphysical properties of consciousness work:...…
2. The true nature of consciousness is made from:.....
3. The human sentience is made from:.....
4. Mental properties can be reduced to physical properties by way of:....
5. There are truly no emergent properties of complex systems because:....
What I'm trying to parse is the distinction between a micro v macro view of consciousness. For example, in a micro view, it's conceivable emergence explains EM fields of conscious cognition alone, but to make the leap to a macro view of evolution would require more work.
I think what is missing are the metaphysical elements of existence.
For example:
1. Sentience
2. Wonder
3. Purpose
In other words, why does one care if the color is red, yellow or black? Red makes one feel excited, while yellow makes one feel happy, while black makes one feel... .
Great questions
Edit: if you think about it in terms of coherence vs. correspondence theories of truth. Reductionism essentially relies upon some form of tangibility-correspondence. However quantum physics decisively eliminates this. What you are left with is a mass of equations, theories, which "hang together" without contradiction and form the basis for the 'best approximate world view'. Systems philosophy likewise emerges as the most comprehensive and coherent framework.
Neither is perceptible to touch.
But then there are ways to look at an atom: with an electron microscope. Or see its effects: in particle cloud chambers.
But I can only experience consciousness in myself. I can infer it in others. But I cannot, for example, say what is not conscious. Perhaps plants are. Once, not long ago, we thought we could only say we were conscious - in science that is. Up to the late 60s and even somewhat beyond, it was taboo to assume animal consciousness (that is awareness). Now we feel like the inference is strong enough. Great. But we have no way to measure it - how much there is. Whether is is present in an organism or not. Whether it is a facet of all matter or not.
We can look at behavior and functions. We can check the memory of something. We can see if reacts to stimuli and decide it is conscious. But we cannot be sure a consciousness, rudimentary or otherwise, is not presence. Just the reactions. The behavior. But behavior need not be present in relation to consciousness.
We don't know what is aware or not.
We cannot measure it.
It is not like atoms or anything else. Not yet can we say it is, at least.
Let us see how low can we get the bottom line. We only have one concept to explain everything - “property”. At atom scale there is electric and magnetic property of individual subatomic elements. Causal interaction between properties gives rise to forces. All the way up through emergent layers this repeats with new emergent properties which give rise to new emerging forces.
Can we agree then, sentience, or basic element of it, must be either property or force?
Does it make more sense if sentience was property or force, or neither? Why?
What experiment you suggest could help explain?
Probably some sort of intrusive examination of the body while it is fully conscious. Who knows, one day we might be able to do so.
System can not be without at least two elements, each of which must have at least one property able to interact with a property of another which will then define the force between them, and the force will define how the system behaves. Right? So I am asking, can we agree then, sentience, or basic element of it, must be either property or force?
Sure. The formulation of the hard problem does not strictly assume emergence, I was being a bit glib. But I think it springs from naturally emergentist assumptions. Namely that the universe started out unconscious, and then, as a result of non-conscious stuff doing things, consciousness arises. And explaining how this happens is hard in the strong sense Chalmers meant it. Eliminativism and panpsychism (and objections based on language and misapplications of concepts etc) sidestep the problem. The only people who have to tackle the hardness of the hard problem are emergentists it seems to me, as they are the ones who have to build this conceptual bridge between the non-experiential and the experiential.
No. My thesis takes a stand, and like math, reasons answers from axioms. The Multiverse theory is likewise a non-answer, but it allows physicists to continue thinking in materialistic terms. Which led them to the Big Bang conundrum in the first place.
The multiverse thesis explains nothing; it just kicks the ball further down the road. At least my approach allows me to think outside the box of classical cause & effect physics, and to apply the implications of quantum queerness to Big Questions.
PS__If it will make you feel any better, I'll note that my Enformationism thesis requires no miracles or magic in the world after the Big Bang. Presumably, only in Eternity/Infinity can creatio ex nihilo occur. Admittedly, some quantum phenomena, and emergences, and phase changes can seem magical, but all require exchanges of Information/Energy. In space-time reality, with natural laws, all Magic is done with smoke & mirrors to obscure the cause & effect steps between the set-up and the volia! :wink:
Indeed. Great discussion nonetheless!
I think if the emergentist can somehow connect, say, [just as a crude example] Schopenhauer's metaphysical Will in Nature to the micro system of consciousness, then perhaps the broad-er bridge can be built....
In general systems theory, "forces" translates to relationships defined or at least represented by non-linear equations. "Properties" are combinations of variables related to one and other through salience.
you dont need evidence, its known omnisciently.
Kant accidentally found this hidden category of knowing, and layed it out in his epistemology, but he didnt realize what it was
it was the 'analytic aposterori' category which he thought was an anomaly and empty category but was actually the greatest category of them all. omniscience. the highest, realest, way to know. and the foundation of all other knowing
All perspectives are defined as "subjective" and anything we can examine is by definition an object of that subjective examination isn't it? If this is right and if consciousness can be examined, then it can be an object and your talk of "completely changing the perspective" is meaningless.
Unfortunately, some people interpret Emergence Theory as a technical-sounding term for Magic. But it's not a perceptual gap, obscured by smoke & mirrors & black capes. Instead, Emergence is simply a conceptual phenomenon.
In my thesis, the universe began as non-conscious creative Energy, or as I call it, EnFormAction : the power to enform. Then via a long gradual process of Phase Transformations (emergences) raw Information (mathematics) was developed into the complex chemistry of Life (animation), and thence into the compounded complexities of Mind (intention). The Potential for Consciousness was there all along, but only at the tipping-point was it actualized, or crystallized, into the power to know. The link below is a brief overview of Evolution via EnFormAction. No magic; just continual incremental changes.
Emergence : a continuous process that appears to be sudden only because the mind reaches a tipping-point of understanding between an old meaning and a new meaning, causing a phase-change from one logical category to another.
The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Get human thought and belief right. That's where to start. The purported 'hard problem' is dissolved - as is many other so-called 'problems' - when we quit using utterly inadequate frameworks to talk about stuff.
Maybe if you are a robot and wish to claim qualia is an illusion. But what is it you want to say anyway, you forgot to explain.
I was just saying that that kind of thing, not what OmniscientNihilist was calling "omniscience", is what analytic a posteriori knowledge is about.
But to defend Kripke, what you are saying is that it is not necessary that names "Bruce Wayne" and "Batman" refer to the same individual; those words can be used to refer to other people besides that one individual we're talking about. That is true, but Kripke's point is that that individual (the one we're talking about) is necessarily identical to himself, like all individuals are, and so if that is the person being referred to by both the names "Bruce Wayne" and "Batman", then it is necessarily true that Bruce Wayne (the "Bruce Wayne" we're referring to) is Batman (the "Batman" we're referring to); but we cannot know a priori that those names are used to refer to the same individual, we learn who those names are used to refer to (and that they're used to refer to the same person) a posteriori. This is a kind of analytic knowledge, because it's about the meaning of words; but not all analytic knowledge is a priori.
For another example: the classic example of a necessary, a priori, analytic truth is that "all bachelors are unmarried". But that hinges on the meanings of "bachelor" and "married". And we acquire the knowledge of what those words mean a posteriori. That "bachelor" means "unmarried man of marriageable age" is an analytic a posteriori (and contingent) fact; that bachelors (meaning unmarried men of marriageable age) are unmarried is an analytic a priori (and necessary) fact.
You keep making empty statements. How does that have anything to do with this thread and what I said in the opening post?
The problem is based upon a gross misunderstanding(misconception) of human thought and belief as a result of being based upon the objective/subjective dichotomy. As is qualia...
Empty statement with no explaination, again. I conclude it is you who has gross misunderstanding of what the problem is.
This 'speculation on mind' called "panpsychism" has always seemed to me nothing but a facile woo-of-the-gaps compositional fallacy proffered as a solution to the MBP which, for my money, was effectively dissolved in the 17th century by Spinoza (re: dual-property parallelism - my coinage (which, unfortunately, has been, academically degenerated into quasi-speculative flavors such as "reflexive monism", "dual-aspect monism", "neutral monism", "anomalous monism", etc)). But ok - if not fallacious as I contend it is - as a conjecture about the world of facts, what extraordinary evidence is there that corroborates this extraordinary claim? Btw, how is "panpsychism" even testable? :chin:
This just says that if two names refer to one person then inasmuch as they do refer to that one person, they do so necessarily. This is true in one sense, but trivially so. If that is all there is to it, then I am puzzled as to why so much fuss has been made about Kripke's contribution.
The irony of one who charges another with exactly what they are guilty of doing. I'm not interested in continually explaining with someone who doesn't even accept and/or understand when an adequate explanation has been given. I'll add this and see how it goes...
If consciousness is not adequately accounted for in terms of "objective" and "subjective", then any and all notions of human thought and belief based upon that dichotomy cannot take consciousness into proper account. Consciousness consists - in very large part - of human thought and belief.
The problem is the historical notion of "necessary". When the criterion for what counts as "necessary" is being true in all possible worlds, then all we've done is cloud our own understanding.
Something can be existentially dependent upon something else(in this world), and if we adhere to that archaic notion of "necessary" we're forced to to either deny the existential dependency in this world or say that it matters less than what we can imagine another world to be.
Flies and bottles.
To answer your latest question, panpsychism is not supposed to be a "conjecture about the world of facts", the likes of which should be testable; most philosophical claims are not the kinds of things meant to be testable, they're ways of thinking that are more or less useful as part of the framework within which we think about the kinds of things that are testable. But as for an argument for it, I'll just try rephrasing the same thing I've been saying over and over again, in more detail:
There are three exhaustive possibilities when it comes to what things have any first-person experience at all, where that having of a first-person experience at all is what is meant by "phenomenal consciousness", which is the topic of the "hard problem of consciousness". Either:
-Nothing at all has it, not even humans; or
-Some things don't have it, but other things do (and if there is ultimately only one kind of stuff, which doesn't have it in its simplest form, then somehow that stuff can be built into things that somehow do have it); or
-Everything has it.
The first of those three options ends up telling people that no, they really don't have any first-person experience at all, which is prima facie absurd. I think thought experiments like Mary's Room also show the significance of first-person experience apart from third-person experience, though I don't think that that disproves physicalism like it claims to.
The second option raises this big thorny problem of figuring out exactly where in the process first-person experience comes into being, and whether things like philosophical zombies could be possible, something that is exactly like a human being except that it lacks this having of a first-person experience, since on this (second option) account it's possible for some things to not have it while other things do.
The third option dissolves that big thorny problem of the second option, without falling into the absurdity of the first option. Since (as you've elsewhere agreed) philosophy is all about dissolving illusory problems, that makes this third option the best philosophical answer to the "hard problem of consciousness".
But that only means that there isn't anything wholly new popping into being from whole cloth at any stage of development between quantum fields and human beings. What's going on in human beings is built out things that are going on in the stuff human beings are made out of. New, more complex forms of the same general kind of stuff can still arise, weakly emergent, from simpler forms of that same general kind of stuff. I think that the mere having of a first-person experience at all, "phenomenal consciousness", is completely trivial, and trying to figure out where it starts and ends is a useless quagmire. What matters is the functionality of a thing, which can be seen both in the third person through its behavior, and in the first person (by the thing itself) in its experience. That functionality, and with it features of both the behavior and the experience of the thing, can emerge (weakly) from simpler functionality of things the thing is made of, but at no point does there start or stop being any first-person experience at all, the quality of that experience just changes, enhances or diminishes, just like the mechanical behavior of the thing does.
In another post recently I wrote this really nice little summary of my whole view on this topic that I'll copy and paste here:
I think there are only physical things, and that physical things consist only of their empirical properties, which are actually just functional dispositions to interact with observers (who are just other physical things) in particular ways. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, and the web of such events is what reality is made out of, with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions, how it observably behaves in response to what it experiences, in other words what it does in response to what is done to it.
In an extremely trivial and useless sense everything thus "has a mind" inasmuch as everything is subject to the behavior of other things and so has an experience of them ("phenomenal consciousness", the topic of the "hard problem"), but "minds" in a more useful and robust sense are particular types of complex self-interacting objects, and therefore as subjects have an experience that is heavily of themselves as much as it is of the rest of the world ("access consciousness", the topic of the "easy problem").
Not quite. The necessity isn't about what the names refer to. The necessity is the identity of "two" individuals, who are actually one individual under two different names. If the Morning Star is Venus, and the Evening Star is Venus, then the Morning Star necessarily is the Evening Star because Venus is necessarily Venus. But it's possible that "Morning Star" or "Evening Star" might be used to refer to something other than the same planet, Venus; the fact that those words mean those things is contingent, and a posteriori, though still analytic because it is about words.
Continually? You never explained anything even once. I explained in the opening post why the problem is hard, what exactly is not clear to you?
You keep making vague and empty assertions. How does that have to do with anything I said?
Quoting Janus
I can't see how what you say here differs in meaning from what I say. I mean the necessity is about what the names refer to, because if what two different names refer to is the same individual, then they necessarily have the same reference.
Behaviour? Are you saying robots able to mimic human behaviour are consciouss?
I think the confusion here might be about what this quoted bit means. I suspect you are trying to say:
[](two names refer to the same individual -> those names have the same references)
But what I've been hearing (and I'd argue is the more literal reading of your words) is:
(two names refer to the same individual) -> [](those names have the same references)
Kripke isn't saying it's necessary that "Batman" and "Bruce Wayne" refer to the same individual; it's possible for them to refer to different individuals. But [](Batman = Batman), and [](Bruce Wayne = Bruce Wayne], and if those should happen to be the same individual, then [](Batman = Bruce Wayne], because every individual is necessarily identical to themselves. The assignment of meaning to words is contingent; the identity of an individual to itself is necessary. The words don't necessarily mean the same thing, but when they do mean the same thing, the things meant by them are necessarily identical to each other because the things meant by them are just one thing.
What I was saying there is roughly that "to do is to be" and "to be is to do" (a thing's existence consists entirely in what it does, all of its properties are dispositions to act upon observers in certain ways) and "to be is to be perceive[able]" (a thing's existence consists entirely of its its observable properties) are different ways of phrasing the same statement, because for a thing to be "perceived" (more technically observed or sensed; perception is something more than that in contemporary terminology) is for it to act upon the observer. What's actually going on is an interaction between two things, and that same interaction constitutes both the behavior of the one thing upon the other, and the experience the other thing has of the first thing.
There's a deep definitional problem regarding the nature of physical things. This is of course the fundamental subject of physics, but physics has been unable to arrive at such a definition, despite having constructed the most complex, largest and expensive apparatus in history (namely, the large hadron collider).
There's a current article in Aeon magazine about whether what the Universe is 'made of' is atoms or fields. The conclusion is moot, but let's just note in passing that 'fields' are of a far more ethereal nature than the so-called 'indivisible particle' (which atoms were thought to have been, but which so far have never been observed.)
So we can't really even say what a physical thing is, other than in a common-sense way. But as we're dealing here with foundational definition of what constitutes the nature of being, then does declaring that there are 'only physical things' say anything beyond your adherence to physicalism?
However, surely you can't be saying that stones experience the hitting of a human subject. The fundamental point about beings, as distinct from inanimate objects, is that they are demonstrably subjects of experience, whereas there is no grounds for asserting that with respect to stones and other objects.
I gave my definition of what a physical thing is in the bit that you quoted. But yes, when it comes down to it, saying that something is or isn't physical really says very little at all, because on such a definition, being nonphysical is the same thing as being unreal: it's being somehow wholly disconnected from the web of interactions that constitutes reality (on my account). Being a philosophical zombie is likewise incoherent, for the exact same reason: to have no phenomenal experience would be to be completely disconnected from that web of interactions, just seen from the subjective side of those interactions rather than the objective side.
(As an aside, you know that "physical" is broader than "material", right? I'm actually against materialism, in a certain sense of the word, the sense that George Berkeley was against. But even as a subjective idealist, Berkeley still considered himself a physicalist).
Quoting Wayfarer
That wasn't what I was saying there, but I do say something like that. What I was saying was that the events that communicate the impact of the stone to the person it hits, the exchanges of photons between the electrons of the stone and the electrons of the person's body that transfer momentum and energy and so on between them, are the same events that constitute the raw phenomenal experience of the person of being hit by the stone.
Those interactions also have a flow of information and energy back the other direction too, so there is also a raw phenomenal experience the stone has of hitting the person. But beyond that most superficial level the experiences of course differ immensely. The person is a complicated system with lots of complex self-interaction happening all the time, so in addition to the brute impact of the stone, the person also experiences themselves reacting to the impact of the stone, and then other parts of themselves reacting to those reactions, in a complex cascade of biological and psychological events, all of which contribute to the overall experience the person has of being hit with a rock. The rock of course has no such complex self-interaction; it doesn't experience itself experiencing the impact, it just automatically, mechanically responds to the experience with a very simple behavior (it changes its velocity) and that's it. It's that difference in the complex internal self-interaction that makes human experience noteworthy; not just the brute having of any experience at all.
Quoting Wayfarer
I find this distinction you're making between "beings" and "inanimate objects" dubious. A being is just a thing, an object, an entity, a think that bes, or as we say in English, is.
But if two names refer to the same individual then they necessarily have the same reference. The original point I made is that this seems to be a trivial fact; a mere tautology.
Yeah, I misread your "basic feature of existence" to mean something like an inherently potential emergent property rather than a fundamental property like charge or mass. Mostly, I agree with you that the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is an illusion, but apparently for different reasons than yours.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But baseline, or ordinary, "first person experience" occurs only in the absence of
• neurological disorders (like anosognosias, blindsight, cotard delusion, derealization order, asomatognosia, etc)
• neuropathologies (like paranoid schizophrenia, etc)
• neuro-degenerative complexes (like Alzheimer's Syndrome, etc)
• psychoactive intoxication (like DMT, etc)
• neurotoxins used for anaesthesia ...
• etcetera.
which is evidence contrary to the claim that "first person experience" is a fundamental property like charge or mass (as I point out here re: 2.61). There is no "it" to have or not have, so the first possibilty "Nothing at all has it, not even humans" is less nonsensical - a more plausibly apt description - than the others.
[quote=Pfhorrest]The third option dissolves that big thorny problem of the second option, without falling into the absurdity of the first option.[/quote]
Yeah, I've already pointed out that "panpsychism" (3rd option) is a solution to a pseudo-problem e.g. "supervenience" or "epiphenomenalism" or "p-zombies" (2nd option). There's nothing "absurd" about humans being mistaken about what seems like "first person experience" that's, in fact, merely an illusionary artifact (i.e. a verb mistaken as a noun) of an ecology-situated, strange looping, reflexive information processing system. Further elaboration I've referred to here.
It (1st option) only seems "absurd" with respect to a substantive (noun) rather than dynamic-processional (verb) conception of "first person experience" (i.e. consciousness) insofar as the latter is like 'legs not walking' whereas the former is like 'walking without legs'. There's nothing "absurd" about either an irreflexive information processing system or an offline (i.e. sleep-mode) reflexive information processing system; what's absurd is to reify online reflexive information processing into a hammer and thereby interpreting all other systems as reflexive information nails.
it seems to me you are writing about minds, not consciousness. Yes, we can look at what minds do, especially if they can talk and write.
Experiencing is another story.
Things? There are people who lose the ability to see the whole visual categories like colors, motion, depth... Clearly visual qualia is composed from separate functional units or processes. This inner virtual world scene preparation surely requires some machinery or computation, which in turn requires the infrastructure to carry that function. But the very least those "things" should have some kind of sensors. No? Anyway, I don't see how your view helps with anything.
You wish to claim qualia is an illusion? Please sum it up first rather than elaborate.
A philosophical zombie would be, by definition, something that has all of that reflexive information-processing functionality, but is missing "phenomenal consciousness". I'm saying that things like philosophical zombies can't exist, because you can't be missing that, because everything necesssarily has it; and saying that everything has it isn't imputing anything of any substance to the likes of rocks, but rather saying that this "phenomenal consciousness" is something so completely trivial that even rocks have it, and it doesn't usefully distinguish anything from anything else. To say, instead, that nothing has phenomenal consciousness, would be to say that we are all philosophical zombies. Obviously (to each of us) we are not (ourselves) philosophical zombies, which leaves either the possibility that there is something substantial to this "phenomenal consciousness" thing that distinguishes philosophical zombies from real humans, something that rocks don't have but humans do, which comes into being somewhere in the evolution from one to the other, but is (definitionally) not just a functional property like the reflexive information-processing stuff you're talking about (that's access consciousness, not phenomenal consciousness); or else that whatever it is that's supposed to distinguish humans from philosophical zombies is an absolutely trivial thing that doesn't distinguish anything from anything, so since humans (definitionally) have it, so does everything else.
ADDENDUM: Maybe this will be a more amendable way to phrase it. You take consciousness (I'm intentionally not specifying which kind here because you don't seem to be) to be all about this reflexive information-processing ability. I agree that the reflexivity and the more complex processing parts of that are the important parts of access consciousness, and that that complex functionality can weakly emerge from things that don't have it yet. But the "information-processing" part in general doesn't suddenly spring into being; everything all the way down is capable of processing information, at some level. The whole universe can be seen as informational signals passing around between things, and those things can be defined by their function in that network of signals, the way they output signals in response to the signals input into them. Information processing in general doesn't emerge from stuff with no information-processing ability; just more and more complex patterns of information processing emerge out of simpler forms of it. I take "phenomenal consciousness" to be equivalent to that fundamental information-processing ability that everything has, which in most cases is completely unremarkable; most signals are just passed along or rerouted or minimally transformed by the functions of the simplest of things, and it's only in the aggregate of a whole bunch of those simple particles interacting in really complicated ways that more complex functions emerge. But the basic role of taking information in ("experience") is as fundamental to everything in the universe as the role of sending information out ("behavior") is; they're two sides of the same coin.
Quoting Zelebg
Check out the link above for the clearest summary of what I'm trying to say. I'm not a neuroscientist and Metzinger is one as well as a philosopher. If what I've posted doesn't pique your interest enough for you to check out the lecture then I apologize for blue ballin' ya with a tease. :smirk:
You claim something existed called "subjective experience of consciousness, or qualia".
I'm saying that "subjective experience of consciousness" points to nothing that exists in it's entirety prior to naming and descriptive practices, and yet consciousness does. So...
"P-zombie" is an incoherent construct because it violates Leibniz's Indentity of Indiscernibles without grounds to do so. To wit: an embodied cognition that's physically indiscernible from an ordinary human being cannot not have "phenomenal consciousness" since that is a property of human embodiment (or output of human embodied cognition). A "p-zombie", in other words, is just a five-sided triangle ...
What evidence - fundamental physical law - shows that every physical thing cogitates (i.e. reflexively processes information, or adaptively behaves/moves/transforms itself)?
What evidence is there that "phenomenal consciousness" is anything other than (the) output, or function, of a nonlinear dynamic process?
:meh:
And yet it is still true that no geometric figure is a five-sided triangle, and so that all geometric figures have the property (consistency of sides or however you want to formulate it) that five-sided triangles would lack. That's just a completely trivial property that, because everything has it, doesn't meaningfully distinguish between anything.
Quoting 180 Proof
I keep saying that I'm not claiming that, I'm not talking about that sense of "consciousness" at all (although I agree that that is the important sense of "consciousness", it's just not the topic of this thread). If you're going to keep thinking I'm saying something I'm not, despite repeatedly saying that that's not what I'm talking about, I'm going to stop trying to say it.
Did you read the last paragraph (the addendum) of my last post?
Quoting 180 Proof
It is defined that way, as independent of any particular functionality. I didn't make that definition. I don't think the thing that is defined that way is important. I think it's trivial. But philosophers talk about it, and this thread is explicitly about it, and my take on it is that it's a trivial thing that everything has and doesn't distinguish between anything, and so not worth saying anything more about it. Instead, we should talk about access consciousness for all the interesting philosophical discussion. You seem to want to say that only access-conscious things are phenomenally conscious, and I think that that gives too much importance to phenomenal consciousness, makes it something that does actually distinguish between things, except that it just so happens to correlate with access consciousness somehow, so that distinction becomes entirely redundant.
Instead of just saying "phenomenal consciousness is trivial, what matters is access consciousness" like I do, what you're saying would imply that, in addition to (something along the evolutionary chain between rocks and) humans gaining access consciousness that distinguishes us from rocks, also at that same moment something became metaphysically different about (that important step along the evolutionary chain between rocks and) humans. I'm saying nothing metaphysically changed along the way; all that changed was the functionality of the systems in question. Whatever is metaphysically necessary for that (ordinary physical) functionality to produce human consciousness, that was already present in the components that humans are made of. And it is consequentially a trivial thing that's not worth talking about, and I'm getting tired of talking about it.
You are making incoherent, vague assertions. My reply to you is : No, you are wrong, just saying.
You mean the link to one hour long YouTube video? I think you should summarize it here in words if you want people to respond to it.
Why would an entity that has the appearance of a regular human necessarily have phenomenal consciousness?
That's a strong claim. It would require strong evidence.
Two accounts:
(A)
So - phenomenal consciousness is defined as independent of access consciousness. These are conceptual distinctions.
But:
Observations:
Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness track each other.
Access consciousness comes in degrees.
Conclusions:
Therefore, phenomenal consciousness comes in degrees.
Therefore, panpsychism + no explanatory gap + no p-zombies.
The counter argument (@180 Proof) seems to be:
(B)
Observations:
Consciousness (Phenomenal consciousness and/or access consciousness) tracks reflexive information processing.
Reflexive information processing comes in degrees.
Conclusions:
Therefore, a conceptual distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness is useless. There's only one aspect of consciousness, which when present in a large degree, seems to yield phenomenal consciousness ("what is it like" states). Therefore no p-zombies, no explanatory gap, but also no panpsychism (maybe).
It looks to me like the difference between (A) and (B) arises solely through propagating the conceptual distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness through the same evidence; the argument is really over whether the distinction makes sense in light of what we know about consciousness. Is there one construct (functionality alone, account B) or two (functionality and phenomenality, account A)?
There wouldn't be a distinction between minds and consciousness. That is just continuing to use the false-dichotomy from the material-mind paradigm. The systems paradigm doesn't reduce to either, but allows for each simultaneously to be true. Everything that emerges establishes functional systems at its own level. Consciousness qua consciousness is perfectly explicable and can be studied to the extent that its activities exhibit systematicity. Which the activities of consciousness certainly do.
If you do choose to arbitrarily sever some of those activities at a lower level (say brainstem) and say that those are "physical" that's fine too. I just finished "Chaos and Complexity in Psychology" and there is one essay on experiments studying the patterns of neural firings during specific types of thought. And indeed, there are patterns that model in non-linear terms. In fact, there are people designing neural nets now that don't solve a problem directly (the problem is coded at the level of the hidden neurons) but solve it by having the neurons link in a way that mimics neurons in the brain. So the physically-faithful neural net can solve the same problems as the concept-driven neural net, but the physical model is much larger and less efficient.
I don't think that's right. Could you give an example?
Quoting fdrake
This doesn't seem right tome either, and a number of other philosophers also think that consciousness does not admit of degrees. It's important to distinguish consciousness from content, and consciousness from identity. One argument for panpsychism springs from the idea that consciousness does not admit of degree.
Actually it's not. I am not assuming that minds and consciousness are different things. I am simply pointing out that epistemologically we can track minds and what they do, but we cannot track consciousness. Perhaps these are indeed facets of the same thing. But we can measure one and not the other. Just as we can track behavior - which is how we track minds - or we can track glucose uptake, but we can't track consciousness because we do not know what is conscious and what is not. And perhaps that means we do not also know what has mind or not. Current research into plant intelligence - a phrase that is no longer fringe - is finding many of the behaviors of animal minds. But then we can't communicate and the chemisty is different. So we can neither rule out consciousness nor can we confirm it. Perhaps plants and some computers now can do many things that minds can do without being aware, without experiencing. Perhaps the functions always correlate with being aware. We don't know. I am not asserting dual substances. I am saying we don't know where consciousness begins and ends. Perhaps yes mind, where there is mind, is always the same as the consciousness that is there, but perhaps there is a rudimentary consciousness in all matter. I am blackboxing the monism vs. dualism debate and also being cautious.
And given the history of science's rather late getting it that animals had both minds and consciousness I am wary of leaping in an assuming we know what experiencing must be coupled to. Perhaps it need no be coupled to what we call minds. Which does not mean that our consciousness is a separate substrance from our minds (or brains).Quoting PantagruelYou are talking about activities. We do not know that all consciousnes is active.
You also use the term 'emergent', but we do not know at what point consciousness emerges or why it does there.
We used to think it emerged only in humans, and not that long ago, in fact in my lifetime.Quoting Pantagruel
But none of this lets us know if they have designed a non-conscious problem solver or something that is conscious. We don't know.
Perhaps it's only present in carbon based complicated systems...for some reason.
We don't have this yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_model
Thomas Metzinger is not saying that anything is illusion. He is also not explaining anything.
That means as much as if I said that subjective experience is the result of the phenomenal model of the wholy spirit (PMWS).
As far as I can tell, your assertions about consciousness relegate it permanently to the status of a nescio quid. You affirm that there is a consciousness but aver that it cannot be measured or known in any way. I don't know what this mystery thing is, but the consciousness that is under investigation, which does include any and all qualia typically associated with conscious experience, is what I myself am speaking of when I use the term consciousness.
Yes, plus it's worse. So instead of explanation at this time I'm looking for good analogies, and instead of trying to answer the question I'd rather talk about what kinds of answers are even worth pursuing and which ones ultimately lead to no answer that could ever satisfy our curiosity.
Hmm.
Depends on how we define 'conscious', which is why I am trying to be more specific and focus on the "self", on that something which is experiencing the experience. Not qualia per se, but subjective aspect of its perception.
Whatever explanation for that subjectiveness given in terms of purpose, function, process, computation, arrangement, state... or whatever other type of mechanical dynamics, is not the category of description that could explain the "why" question, nor “what is” question really.
Those types of answers will possibly explain everything else once the essence of the mystery gets discovered, if ever, but until then they are empty of any meaning simply because 'anything goes'. We must narrow it down and draw some bottom lines first.
Imagine you understand exactly how it works, you can decode the brain impulses and watch someone's dreams, read their thoughts, delete memories or imprint new ones... you can even make Total Recall type dream machine to experience virtual reality in real life resolution.
You have solved the mystery of consciousness. And then I ask you, but what about subjective experience, where this "self" comes from, what is it, why is it? And you still don't know if it is panpsychism, emergent property of computation, maybe a ghost, or virtual fart from the quantum foam. See what I mean?
The sense of 'self', 'identity' is a trick you brain is playing on you. It is a magical 'illusion'. Science of psychology has empirically shown this to be the case in multiple studies. Interesting read perhaps?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/store/books/the-science-of-consciousness/
Insofar as the whole of existence is a heap due to the paradox of the heap? Dunno this argument.
Yes, this is one specific interpretation of some of the results of systems theory. Although the meaning of consciousness between contexts may not map directly. Moving from one level of system to another instances become like 'metaphors'.
Stanford has caught up with this, no doubt due to my heroic efforts on these forums and the last:
Quoting Goff, Philip, Seager, William and Allen-Hermanson, Sean, 'Panpsychism', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
EDIT: ...and just to finish the thought, we then have to pick an alternative to emergentism. And as pfhorrest has already mentioned, the two obvious alternatives are eliminativism (nothing is conscious) or panpsychism (everything is). Eliminativism is false because I am conscious. That leaves panpsychism. It's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the others.
The statements you refer to are empty (meaningless) to you, because you don't understand the unconventional worldview that the assertions are derived from. That's why I provide links for those who are interested enough to investigate a novel way of looking at the world.
In the OP, you stated, as-if a matter of fact, that "At the bottom of it all is just plain mechanics, . . ." My replies have denied that assertion, and offered an alternative to the Mechanical worldview of Classical Materialism. I suppose you think the opposite of Materialism is Spiritualism. But my BothAnd philosophy accepts both the Materialism (Quanta) of Science, and the Spiritualism (Qualia) of Religion, while noting that they each exclude or ignore the other side of reality. When you can see the world as a whole, the Hard Problem of Consciousness vanishes as an illusion. :cool:
PS__Unfortunately, my worldview has some features in common with New Age philosophy. Which is why I spend of lot of verbiage to distance myself from the NA merging of science and magic. Whatever seems like supernatural magic is actually either obfuscation or natural phase changes.
Note : Richard Feynman quipped "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." I believe that's because Quantum Mechanics is not mechanical at all, it's emergent. Physicist Carlo Rovelli labeled his new book Reality Is Not What It Seems. . . . from the conventional classical scientific perspective.
BothAnd Principle : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
I think it's worth taking a quick step back at Emergence/Panpsychism, and rather than accept all of their respective tenants, take pieces that have merit or at least have a more aligned analogy.
To analogize each individual's stream of consciousness to merit's of emergence then I see two things:
1. In Nature: Swarming is a well-known behavior in many animal species from marching locusts to schooling fish to flocking birds. Emergent structures are a common strategy found in many animal groups: colonies of ants, mounds built by termites, swarms of bees, shoals/schools of fish, flocks of birds, and herds/packs of mammals.
An example to consider in detail is an ant colony. The queen does not give direct orders and does not tell the ants what to do. Instead, each ant reacts to stimuli in the form of chemical scent from larvae, other ants, intruders, food and buildup of waste, and leaves behind a chemical trail, which, in turn, provides a stimulus to other ants. Here each ant is an autonomous unit that reacts depending only on its local environment and the genetically encoded rules for its variety of ant.
So in that respect, my thinking is that the swarming as it were, has a strange parallel to a description of how conscious thoughts appear randomly (stream of consciousness). Meaning conscious and subconscience (EM fields of consciousness) seem to know how to interact as a whole system in our brain to produce thoughts. And, it may even have parallels to QM as we pick from these random fields/ thoughts that we apprehend through volitional existence, as we make choices everyday.
2. Schopenhauer's Metaphysical Will in Nature, generally, seems to suggest Panpsychism:
"Everything presses and strives towards existence…Let any one consider this universal desire for life, let him see the infinite willingness, facility, and exuberance with which the will to live presses impetuously into existence under a million forms everywhere and at every moment…In such phenomena, then, it becomes visible that I am right in declaring that the will to live is that which cannot be further explained, but [yet] lies at the foundation of all explanation…”
As Zelebg put in an earlier question about 'a force' , that is just one synopsis of a broader view about consciousness without detail.
Your account of the differences between 180 Proof and I sounds pretty accurate to me, except I'm not really arguing that there is anything substantial to phenomenality, I'm just addressing the topic as it is brought up in philosophy; all I think really matters is the functionality.
I think I've said this already in this thread (I've said it all over other threads before definitely), but to me the situation is analogous to natural vs supernatural. I think that everything is necessarily natural and that "supernatural" things don't make any sense, the concept of something being supernatural is incoherent; but nevertheless, I say that everything is natural, which turns out to not really mean anything because naturalness is a completely trivial attribute of everything. Likewise, I think that everything is "phenomenally conscious" as that term is defined, and philosophical zombies don't make any sense, the concept is incoherent; but nevertheless, I say there are no philosophical zombies, and everything has "phenomenal consciousness", which turns out to not really mean anything because "phenomenal consciousness" is a completely trivial attribute of everything.
And the two things -- supernatural things and philosophical zombies -- are unreal for the same reason, seen in two different ways: reality is made up of the network of interactions between its constituents, which interactions constitute the phenomenal experience things have of each other and the empirical properties things have, and for a thing to be supernatural is for it to have no empirical properties (and so to be completely disconnected from everything else in reality, and so unreal), while to be a philosophical zombie is to have no phenomenal experience (and so to be completely disconnected from everything else in reality, and so unreal).
Sigh...
Pots and kettles.
Aren't you the one forwarding a notion of consciousness that you yourself cannot explain?
Our perception is abstracted, simplified, focused, noise-reduced... it's a function in virtual reality not the result of direct sensation. To simulate this "user interface" called qualia requires quite a bit of processing, some kind of computer. Surely that much at least we can learn from neurology and other empirical studies of the brain.
But all of that is access consciousness, the subject of the easy problem of consciousness; which is really quite harder, because you have to do empirical science to explain it, but it's philosophically easy because we can say "the rest is just empirical science" in the way that mathematicians can say "the rest is just calculation" after all the abstract work is done.
The philosophically hard problem about phenomenal consciousness asks what exactly is it besides all of that functional stuff that gives us the subjective, first-person experience of all of that happening, and if you built a machine to do all of the same functionality, would it lack that subjective-first person experience, or would it have one just like us, and if so where does that come from and why?
The contemporary panpsychist answer is that there isn't anything special that gives us subjective first-person experience, there just is a subjective first-person experience to everything. But what that subjective first-person experience is like varies with the function of the thing, such that only complicated reflexive systems like us have an "internal life" (because we are experiencing our own self-interaction as well as just reacting to the world). So if you built a machine to do all the same functions that human brains do, it would automatically have the same kind of subjective first-person experience that humans do, and there's no need to explain where that came from, because it's not something that just popped into existence when you built that functionality into it: the experience is built out of simpler experiences that were always there, right alongside building the function out of simpler functions.
It's a pseudo-materialist solution, in my view. It says there must be some extra, magical ingredient in everything which is 'consciousness' in some latent or implicit form, which then manifests in living beings in particular.
The reason I say it's pseudo-materialist is because it purports to understand that element as a attribute of matter. But at the same time, it has no possible answer as to what this 'stuff' is or how it can be observed or brought into the ambit of empirical analysis. So it becomes another of the 'promissory notes of materialism', something which we are assured 'science will one day come to understand'. It's actually more a way of trying to preserve the monistic ontology of materialism - that only matter exists - by insisting that matter itself is conscious - which I think is a total fudge. (I actually had Philip Goff turn up on this very forum in response to my earlier criticism of one of his essays.)
With respect to the subjective unity of consciousness, this is a well-known and ancient philosophical problem. Kant certainly discussed it at great length in various works. But let's just step back and ask the question again - what is being discussed here? Chalmers, and others, have put it (awkwardly, in my opinion) as the 'what-it-is-like' to be something. But I think a much less roundabout way of putting it is, that what is being discussed is simply being. It is 'the nature of being' that is the hard problem.
Here is a pivotal conception in Kant concerning what he describes as 'transcendental apperception':
Source
(* I question number four, as I don't believe the self is an object of experience.)
This is related to the concept of the transcendental ego.
* cf Brihadaranyaka Upani?ad 'It is the unknown knower, the unseen seer'.
You might object 'where can this 'transcendental ego' be found? And I think there's a hint in the examination of the so-called 'neural binding problem', in particular the problem of the 'subjective unity of experience'. This refers to the capacity of the brain to synthesise all manner of perceptual stimuli into a coherent unity - the 'subjective unity of experience' - which is, at least, strongly suggestive of the 'transcendental ego'. But science is unable to determine the neural mechanism which is associated with this act of 'synthesis':
In his paper on this issue, Jerome S. Feldman says that:
In the introduction to this paper, Feldman states outright:
So, as I said in my first post, the reason the hard problem is hard, is really very simple: that being can never be made an object of scientific analysis, in the manner that this is currently understood. This is why, for example, 'eliminative materialism' exists, because it explicitly recognises this; but instead of saying 'oh well, then, scientific method has its limits', they then insist that being itself is an illusion. (Whereas, my view is: get over it, and move along.)
But what is the difference between that and saying subjective first-person experience emerges from computation? And in either case someone can come along and say: "panpsychism? higher thought? that's the spirit of god I've been telling you about for the last 2000 years".
None of it is testable and none of it makes any practical difference, not just to solve the problem, but not even to show us direction or a hint as to how should real mystery be resolved. Or do they?
Totally awkward, almost not helpful at all. I'd say the question is: what or who is the subject of experience?
Philosophy progresses by breaking down those intractable problems into either tractable problems for science to go solve, or non-problems that don’t need solving. The question of consciousness breaks down into two different questions, one of each kind. The tractable one, the easy problem of access consciousness, is just a question of functionality for psychologists, neuroscientists, and programmers to figure out.
The “hard” (non-)problem of phenomenal consciousness is whatever’s left after that: if we built perfect functional simulation of a human, would it have a first-person experience like we do? If no, why not, what’s different about it, besides the functionality that we’ve already stipulated is the same? If yes, then what is it besides the functionality, which we’ve already bracketed, that gives it that first person experience? My answer is “nothing”: there is no mystery to be explained, there is nothing besides the functionality of access consciousness that differs between a human and something that else that we wouldn’t normally call conscious, so whatever it is besides that functionality that might be required for humans to have a first-person experience, that is something trivial that’s just part of being, something everything has, and only the functionality, the access consciousness, is different.
I’m not saying that there are two kinds of substance, or two kinds of property, or anything like that: just that we can look at the same things, all things, which are all metaphysically alike and differ only in functionality, from two perspectives: third person / objective, and first person / subjective. That difference in perspective is all there is to phenomenal consciousness, and the functionality of access consciousness is all the rest of the explanation for consciousness, which is no longer a philosophical problem but a scientific one.
Consider all this preparation to encode qualia in a certain format for consumption by the "self". If we now suppose all the information actually must take this specific qualia format to be experienced, then that tells us something about this "self". We could then look into what is special about this format and maybe find out what does it take to be decoded or 'consumed', which then might tell us a little bit more, and so on. It's not much, but it's something "practical", in a way at least, something worth pursuing to see where it leads. Isn't it?
I heavily elaborated my last response while you were responding to it BTW.
When I say qualia gets "consumed" by the self, that "consumption" is the act of phenomenally experiencing the qualia. Access consciousness has to do with preparing the meal, or digesting it (from memory) after it has been consumed (experienced). One other thing we can say with no unsignificant confidence is that consumption of qualia leads to all the shit get stored in the memory.
For phenomenological traditions, there only exists the 'easy' problem of explaining the unity of intentionality. For there is no gap within their concepts for the hard problem.
How does ghost in the machine solve the problem? How do you explain subjective experience of the ghost? And whose ghost is it? Mine? Or is it some shape shifting lizard alien playing some game through my avatar?
You mean if we take all the bees that compose an emergent whole, so that their "collective consciousness" is parallel to brain consciousness? I find that parallel meaningful, but do not see what meaning of it could lead to something pragmatic we can do with it.
Are you saying "self" is some kind of organism that eats qualia and shits memories?
You're talking to yourself. But, yes, I guess I did say that.
Consciousness is a parasitic animal trom the 5th dimension of the Aether. They feed on experience in our dimension and make you think all the shit they leave behind are your memories. Our experience is just a bunch of mental feces. There, that explains everything.
So you would be inclined to agree with Daniel Dennett, then? David Bentley Hart's observation about his work is that 'it is all very obvious: Under certain chemical and environmental conditions, life will emerge in time and develop organisms with large brains, and these organisms will of necessity be social organisms. And social organisms require mental activity to survive and flourish. For Dennett, all evolutionary developments occur because they incorporate useful adaptations.'
That seems to mesh well with your account.
Quoting Zelebg
It's the kind of thing a demon would have you believe, were there such beings.
What I meant was the swarming effect reminds us of observing quantum mechanics/randomness, and EM moving particles associated with the conscious energy analogy. Or brain waves as it were.
Obviously something supernatural has to explain our stream of consciousness and connect the dots, but the point is to posit concepts that seem relevant:
1. Metaphysical Will- causation
2. Emergence- natural phenomena
3. Panpsychism- consciousness
Are those things still relevant as starting points in the discussion? Or did we say that they were not all that helpful...it seems there are bits and pieces of those concepts to everyone's theory... .
Panpsychism, which assumes that every particle in the cosmos is Conscious, does make it sound like there is some "magical ingredient" in addition to the material substance. That's why my thesis avoids using the misleading terms "psyche" and "consciousness". Not because they are inherently wrong, but they can be misinterpreted as implying that particles are conscious in the same way humans are. But atoms mechanically absorb & emit energy, and change physically, without forming any abstract images (imagination). Instead, I propose a view that could be called Pan-Informationism.
In the 21st century, we are familiar with computers that process mathematical (immaterial) information, but are not perceived as conscious, though some can fake it (Chinese Room thought experiment). So, "Information" per se, does not necessarily imply Qualia : the "what it's like" of conscious conception. Ironically, the original meaning of "Information" referred to the metaphysical quality of Knowledge (awareness). But, we now know that it can also refer to physical states and mechanical processes of matter/energy (electrical logic gates in computers).
So, I take that dual definition of "Information" literally, and infer that Qualia only emerged from Quanta after 14 billion years, not by magic, but by evolution. The potential for awareness was inherent in Energy (EnFormAction) from the beginning. And Emergence is not an act of magic, but of evolution (turning the page to reveal something that was there all along). Thus, your assessment is correct that " 'consciousness' in some latent or implicit form, which then manifests in living beings in particular." But the imputation of "magic" is unnecessary, because Emergence of new properties is a function of Whole Systems, that is completely natural, but immaterial. By that I mean, qualitative properties exist only in subjective Consciousness, not in objective Matter. Hence, all Magic is subjective. :cool:
Emergence : emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Emergence : Emergence is a continuous process that appears to be sudden only because the mind reaches a tipping-point of understanding between an old meaning and a new meaning, causing a phase-change from one logical category to another.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Qualia : the internal and subjective component of sense perceptions, arising from stimulation of the senses by phenomena.
Dualistic Information : The act of enforming (energy) and the product (material form). Both verb and noun.
On my account there isn’t any “stuff” that would need to be observed or empirically analyzed, and there isn’t anything more for science to understand about it. I’m not positing that there are any other kinds of substances or properties besides physical things and their ordinary empirical properties — I’m saying that noting the difference between a first person and third person perspective on that same physical/empirical stuff is sufficient account of “phenomenal consciousness” and there’s nothing more that needs saying about that.
It sounds like you’re talking about a function that I would call perception, which is the interpretation of sensations, which are one direction of fit of phenomenal experiences, which are what I’m talking about. Such perception is the second to last major class of function in the larger function that I picture access consciousness to be, the last one being reflexive judgement of those perceptions and the formation of belief through one’s self-awareness and self-control. I suspect you are instead picturing the whole of access consciousness as just that last reflexive step, and so everything before it as “phenomenal consciousness”, but I don’t think that’s consistent with the original definitions of the terms.
In the picture below, the first layer is what I consider phenomenal consciousness, and I think you think the third layer is access consciousness, and you group the second layer with the first while I group it with the third:
That bit you quoted sounds like something I agree with, but not anything to do with phenomenal consciousness.
Quoting Wayfarer
There isn’t a “subject of experience”, per se, but only the representation of an inherent, dedicated, human capacity, which each your propositions have contained in it.
If one thinks himself the subject of experience, he does so only because he thinks in relation to the object being experienced. In doing that, he still has thought nothing of the one who is thinking himself the subject, which he cannot do without the use of exactly the same phenomenon to account for the phenomenon he is using. A silly employment of the homunculus argument.
The only way to install a subject at all, is to create one within the tenets of a epistemological theory, such that something which appears to be the case (thinking) is justified. If it be granted the human cognitive system is representational, then the fundamental condition for thinking must be merely representational itself.
“....Consequently, only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations. (...) The thought, "These representations given in intuition belong all of them to me," is accordingly just the same as, "I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least so unite them"; and although this thought is not itself the consciousness of the synthesis of representations, it presupposes the possibility of it; that is to say, for the reason alone that I can comprehend the variety of my representations in one consciousness, do I call them my representations, for otherwise I must have as many-coloured and various a self as are the representations of which I am conscious. Synthetical unity of the manifold in intuitions, as given a priori, is therefore the foundation of the identity of apperception itself, which antecedes a priori all determinate thought. This principle is the highest in all human cognition....”
Identity of apperception is then represented by what is commonly called the thinking subject, the “I” in I think, that to which all experiences belong as objects, to a subject that cognizes them as such.
Theoretically.
It is. But it needs to be considered on a case by case basis. Most stories about emergence are perfectly plausible. But some bugger the mind. For example, its a headfuck to try and figure out how spatial stuff could emerge from non-spatial stuff. If you have a bunch of things that don't take up any space at all, what are they supposed to do to each other such that they end up with something that takes up space? Maybe it's possible, but you need a fuck of a good storyteller to make this convincing. Similarly with consciousness - I want the story of how non-conscious stuff interacting can end up with conscious stuff. Maybe it's possible. Some take a piecemeal approach, and divide up the concept of consciousness into several parts, and then set about attempting to move from one to the next. I haven't heard anything convincing at all so far. It's not enough to say 'hey, fluidity emerges from interactions of hydrogen and oxygen without a problem, therefore I can say anything emerges from anything without a problem.' No, you have to tell a convincing story.
And there are structural problems that work against the emergentist. One big one is that things are either conscious or not. Consciousness seems to be a non-vague concept. That is, if something is conscious at all, it is conscious. And if it isn't, it isn't conscious at all. There are no states that are indeterminate as to whether they are conscious or not. Are there? Maybe that's wrong. But if it's right, that presents a problem for emergence. Emergent properties typically emerge gradually in systems whose defining properties are vague. Fitting in a sudden switch from non-conscious to conscious in such systems is difficult and arbitrary. Such stories are unlikely to be convincing. But if you have such a story to present, please do so.
Why can't all these emergences happen in the dark? Why is consciousness a necessary consequence of all this?
I just read von Bertalanffy's book on Systems Theory. Near the beginning he talks about how metaphysical theories are validated by their "elegance".
Any attempt to conflate systems of different hierarchical levels inevitably results in category confusion. Mental concepts are valid within mental realms. Experiments in sociology (which is pure human behaviour) validate the use of NDS analysis. If you are looking for the touchpoint of mind and matter well, I don't think that's out of the question. What it concerns, though, is the relationship of nested hierarchical systems. And, specifically, the appearance of "trigger" subsystems whose function is to focus interaction from a subsystem to its parent. Kind of like the study of encephalization, the development of the central nervous system and brain.
That sounds interesting, but I don't understand it.
Particles are conscious in exactly the same way humans are. Particles have experiences. Humans have experiences. In so far as they both have experiences, or are capable of experience, they are both conscious. They have different experiences, but we are talking about consciousness, not content.
Quoting fdrake
@Pfhorrest Well, yeah, but not all "information processing" is the same. Below some-as-yet-determined physical threshhold (perhaps this), information processing is irreflexive, or insufficiently (e.g. too much lag-time) reflexive, for any degree of "phenomenal self-representation" to inhere. Just as e.g. below a certain atomic mass (96u or less) atoms are not radioactive.
[quote=fdrake]Two accounts:
(A)
So - phenomenal consciousness is defined as independent of access consciousness. These are conceptual distinctions.
But:
Observations:
Phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness track each other.
Access consciousness comes in degrees.
Conclusions:
Therefore, phenomenal consciousness comes in degrees.
Therefore, panpsychism + no explanatory gap + no p-zombies.
The counter argument (@180 Proof) seems to be:
(B)
Observations:
Consciousness (Phenomenal consciousness and/or access consciousness) tracks reflexive information processing.
Reflexive information processing comes in degrees.
Conclusions:
Therefore, a conceptual distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness is useless. There's only one aspect of consciousness, which when present in a large degree, seems to yield phenomenal consciousness ("what is it like" states).
Therefore no p-zombies, no explanatory gap, but also no panpsychism (maybe).
It looks to me like the difference between (A) and (B) arises solely through propagating the conceptual distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness through the same evidence; the argument is really over whether the distinction makes sense in light of what we know about consciousness.[/quote]
:clap: Yeah, in a nutshell ... Thanks for summarizing us.
[quote=fdrake]Is there one construct (functionality alone, account B) or two (functionality and phenomenality, account A)?[/quote]
Gone to Occam's barber (mindful though of what Uncle Albert says ...) :wink:
I'm not talking about consciousness, perception, or judgment. I’m talking about the simple fact that experience implies experiencer.
I am not talking about the subject in the contents of the experience, but the subject outside of the experience which is subjected to experience that experience. This subject is the subject per se, and it is the only mystery here, so I have no idea why after 5 pages we are still not talking about the same thing.
“I” and “Me”: The Self in the Context of Consciousness
Emergence is in the mind of the beholder. So no Mind, no illusion of sudden change. A magician could try to make his assistant disappear without using a cape, but then the trap door that's usually hidden in the dark would be apparent, and nobody would be fooled. Emergence only seems like magic, because the audience is figuratively "in the dark".
Far more interesting parallel is between ants or bee colony and the brain as a colony of brain cells. Perhaps it's due to our lack of understanding, but right now ontologically there is no difference to claim that a single unified consciousness arises from the bee colony as a whole due to bee-signals, and that it arises in the neuron colony as a whole due to neuron-signals.
There is a lot to be said about many interesting aspects of the mind that this parallel brings into focus, but I'll just mention one more for now. It can not be denied that at least part of the consciousness is an emergent system or entity simply due to the fact there is this unification of elements, seemingly independent and autonomous agents, working together as a whole to achieve a common goal, which they individually might not even be aware of.
How do you know this? I can only infer that other humans are conscious because they behave the same way as I do in similar situations. Do particles behave like humans? Do they show signs of fear as a strange energetic particle approaches? Do they love their entangled partners? Is your little toe conscious in "exactly the same way" as you are?
Consciousness is an evolutionary advantage for living creatures, but how would it be adaptive for atoms and billiard balls? My worldview makes a functional distinction between raw Information and highly evolved Consciousness.
Why do you say mental properties are non-spatial? Do you mean non-material? In any case emergence does imply that new emergent entities and their properties are functions ultimately based on spatial interaction of material elements, at least as much as you can say for a software algorithm at the time of execution to be a function of moving electrons in the hardware components of a computer.
I didn't mean to imply that at all. Sorry if I was not clear. I was simply making an analogy between space and consciousness. Being spatial is not the kind of thing that can emerge intuitively. Similarly with consciousness, I am suggesting.
Good. All we are allowed to talk about, with respect to experience, are the objects in the contents of it; experience is always of phenomena, because they are conditioned by the categories. The self, the entity that reasons, is not conditioned by the categories, hence is not phenomenon, hence not found in the contents of experience.
————————-
Quoting Zelebg
Yes, the theory-specific, metaphysical “I”, that under which the plurality of objects of experience are united in a single representational consciousness. What I meant when I said your proposition and wayfarer’s proposition both have contained in them as subject (as conjoined with predicate in a propositional construction): you both use the representational “I”........as we all do as a matter of course.
———————-
Quoting Zelebg
Yes, the subject of whichever theory of mind, or general cognitive theory, chosen to dignify its validity.
Absolutely. That speaks to the existential piece relative to Schopenhauer's Metaphysical Will in nature.
My takeaway there is that another concept of self-awareness deserves inclusion... meaning lower forms of consciousness would then be not self-aware. Seems obvious.
Yet a genetic code makes those natural things (lower life forms) work appropriately. However, the bridge that still has to be built is, how does higher life-forms emerge or evolve from the lower life-forms?
Metaphysical Will is one explanation. But unfortunately it's not a purely empirically based theory.
So back to your 'analogies' that help us come close to 'plausibility' here... which of course is still worth exploring...
Why the brain then, what's it for? And what do we do with this theory, does it explain any experiment, does it propose any experiment, or something, anything?
Yes I agree with you.If I am conscious and others exhibit similar behaviours to me then it would be churlish to deny that they have consciousness too. Particularly if they claim to be conscious as it would be nigh impossible for a non-conscious person to grasp the concept of consciousness.
Self awareness would seem to be closely linked to consciousness. Perhaps awareness of one's own existence generates consciousness or at least is a pre-requisite for consciousness.
But self awareness is different as it can be scientifically detected as when animals are presented with a mirror to see if they can identify the image in the mirror as being themselves or merely another of the same species.
It would certainly seem that most 'higher' mammals have some degree of self awareness and by inference consciousness.
It may be interesting to speculate on which animals have consciousness and which do not. Certainly chimpanzees do but what about lobsters? Perhaps not.
The issue I have is that there is no information 'per se'. The word itself has many meanings, depending on the context; it's not as is there is an identifiable fundamental type called information. It also seems to me the only naturally-occuring process it makes sense to speak in terms of 'information' is living organisms, as DNA encodes biological information. But there is no such information encoded in the vast majority of matter and energy found throughout the cosmos.
Quoting Mww
That there is a subject is evidenced by the fact of your post - the words didn't spontaneously organise themselves on a screen and then post themselves - a person did it, to convey a point, to persuade another to change their view.
Quoting Mww (quoting Kant)
'Highest' in what sense? Along what axis? Compared to what?
All information we know of is embedded in spatial arrangement of matter, so information is just 'geometrical relations of matter' in essence. Context is given when one arrangement interacts with another, say a program running on a computer prints stuff on the screen. It's hard or impossible to tell how meaningful any interaction is without knowing or understanding the "purpose", i.e. future consequences the product of that interaction may have on other arrangements of matter.
Therefore, there is information in every atom. Context for H and O is given by their specific interaction which produces water. How water is meaningful is hard to tell until you land on planet Earth, for example.
No, that just won't do it. Crystals don't convey or contain any information unless it is encoded in them intentionally. And information is not 'every atom'. Nor is water, nor anything else. intrinsically information-bearing, unless it is intepreted.
This idea that 'everything is information' is a furphy, I'm sure.
Plato's notion of 'the forms' is something completely different to that and can't be equivocated with it.
I don't regard that as information. It might be information if you paid money for 200kg of diamond and you get sent graphite. And you can be informed about the difference between the two. But I don't think you can say the difference between diamonds and graphite is 'information'. Nor do diamonds nor graphite meaningfully contain or impart 'information', unless, again, they have been arranged or manipulated to do so.
Your reply is not addressing what I said, you're misinterpreting.
You are confusing static information with its computation and the result. Information itself does not "convey a meaning", but first it needs the context, i.e. interaction. The meaning is a function of the result and its impact on the future interactions, thus mostly unpredictable in principle.
H and O atoms contain very specific information so they will always compute the same result that is H2O, and not H3O4 or H4O2. Furthermore, this H2O result contains specific information itself, which determines snowflake designs that are always beautiful patterns and never a random mess. Furthermore, snowflakes contain information themselves, by not being random, and that information when observed by some brains may result in emotion or appreciation of beauty. Furthermore, this emotion contains information itself, and so on...
This also means information contained in emotions are spatial arrangement of matter too, but that's not the problem for immaterial appearance of the mind, it's the other part of that interaction, something emotions interact with to be put into context and result in qualia.
Information is simply geometrical relation between chunks of matter. Meaning is not the same thing as information.
This seem nonsense to me. Interactions between inorganic matter doesn't constitute information.
Quoting Zelebg
Says who? What definition of 'information' says that? I get:
Sorry, but your 'definition' isn't in there.
You are again misinterpreting what I said and keep confusing information, computation, and the result. What are algorithms and computer programs made of?
I gave you an explanation, not definition. Once you understand you will see many of those definitions are wrong. I also notice you failed to show reference for your definitions. This is good enough, though:
(3): FACTS, DATA
b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something
What ‘arranges’ it? A pile of stones conveys no information. Algorithms and programs denote intelligible patterns of data which convey meaning.
INFORMATION:
1: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence
-- no, information is static concept, communication is transfer of information
2a(1): knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction
-- only if knowledge = spatial arrangement of stuff in the brain
(2): INTELLIGENCE, NEWS
-- no, they contain information, but they are more than just information
(3): FACTS, DATA
b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects
-- yes
c(1): a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data
-- yes
(2): something (such as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (such as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct
-- first part yes, but then unnecessarily it also describes computation and the result
d: a quantitative measure of the content of information
-- only if that 'quantitative measure' ends up written somewhere or otherwise embedded in the geometrical arrangement of matter.
Pile of stones conveys no information, it CONTAINS it. Size, weight, shape... how many more times can you misinterpret this? It's like you don't understand the meaning of words. Oh dear god, you are a robot!!
What you said was:
Quoting Zelebg
But I am saying that not all matter contains or encodes information. Crystals are geometrical but they don’t contain information. Of course we can find information about a crystal but that is not the same as saying that it ‘contains information’.
Quoting Zelebg
The misunderstanding is not mine.
You are contradicting definitions and yourself.
1. Computer programs contain information. Yes/No
2. Dead DNA still contains information. Yes/No
3. Words contain information even if you don't understand it. Yes/No
You are saying, but not explaining, not answering my questions, not responding to my points, and when you do respond it is to your own misinterpretation and not to what I said.
Find information? Correct phrase is "find meaning", robot. The way you are confusing word "meaning" with "information" is not even funny.
and then, well, there's all this, I also said earlier....
Yes to all the above. However, the discussion was about crystals, in response to the statement of yours, which I quoted. Unless you have anything further to add, then I think the question is resolved.
Good expression! And, yes.
I, for instance, as the creator of half a communication, become immediately irrelevant with respect to you, for instance, as the receiver of that half-communication. Your job is to decipher the in-coming half-communication in order to extract some meaning from it. It becomes full-fledged communication when your extracted meaning is congruent with my prescribed meaning. This is the norm, the common state of affairs, and is as boring as watching paint dry. It adds nothing whatsoever to our investigations into cognitive metaphysics, which happens to be what we’re talking about in this discussion.
In any theory, we hypothesize the conditions under which authority for the conclusions the theory predicts is justified. The normative procedure for intercommunication does none of that, for the hypotheses for a cognitive theory aren’t even given by such communication, insofar as I, as the creator and you as the receiver, are already established as extant, thus very far from hypothetical. The hypotheses can only arise with respect to the relative meanings, and therefore the derivations of them, contained in the language of the communication, which is, in itself, nothing but an objective representation of them.
Now we arrive at the fact that I as subject in the form of creator and you as subject in the form of receiver, are mutually exclusive, for we have reduced the hypotheses of a possible cognitive theory to the necessity of meaning and intention contained in the objective representation itself, each subject operating completely independently of each other. I had to assemble concepts with respect to each other to create an object of thought with a specific meaning, you had to disassemble the object of perception into its related concepts for it to become a possible meaningful thought. We communicate if the two meanings, arising in reverse order respectively, are sufficiently congruent.
So stop and think about all that. Say, create your half a communication that will eventually be perceived by me. You will speak or write something like, “I remember my first bicycle.....” from which beforehand you’ve assembled a bunch of concepts to form an article of your experience. But when you were assembling cognitively, never once did you include the “I” you used in the objective reality, the prose or speech that I will perceive, to create the object of your thought. Not once did you precede the inclusion of a concept with “I will use this concept, and this one, and this one....”. Yet all those concepts did not instantiate themselves. And because they must have intend some meaning, only certain concepts can be called into play. But “I”, the conscious thinking subject, didn’t do it. Whatever did do it, THAT serves as the identity of apperception, apperception being a predicate of human nature which grants that concepts can even be assembled, understanding being the capacity to assemble the correct concepts to fit the object. It is hidden from conscious thought, but conscious thought is impossible without it. And THAT is the foundation for the highest principle in human cognition.
Theoretically self-consistent and non-contradictory, which makes it logically possible, yet unfalsifiable, which relegates it to a mere metaphysical theory. Because consciousness stands in no chance of being empirically demonstrated, it must remain......until technology catches up......maybe.....nothing but a metaphysical project with rational constituency.
In other words, something fun to play with. Beats the crap outta dinkin’ around with mere language, I must say. Gots ta figure out thinking before figuring out talking about it, right?
According to the Wiki definition below, mathematics is not a physical thing, but simply "knowledge", "number", "structure", "geometry". All of these are forms of generic Information. So wherever you find mathematical "structures" you have Information.
My first insight into the essential role of information in the living and non-living world came from a surprising assertion by a quantum physicist years ago : "a quantum particle is nothing but Information". By that he meant, all we can observe is mathematical "position and velocity", but not at the same time (uncertainty). All other properties are inferred from that basic Information. My own definition of multi-function Information is also linked below.
Mathematics : (from Greek ?????? máth?ma, "knowledge, study, learning") includes the study of such topics as quantity (number theory), structure (algebra), space (geometry), and change (mathematical analysis). ...
Information : Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. . . .
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
If physics describe the natural world, that would suggest that there is a metaphysical language ( mathematical abstracts) encoded into all of nature.
I’ve been interested in mathematical Platonism since I started posting on forums. I believe that that number is 'real but incorporeal', hence showing that materialism is false. But the philosophical implications are very tricky.
You have to recall that in Platonism, mathematical knowledge (dianoia) was only one aspect of an entire and very subtle epistemological scheme, which also included noesis, knowledge of the forms, and the knowledge of the good, the beautiful and the true.
It also has to be remembered that the expression ‘mathematical objects’ is kind of analogy, because numbers and so on are not actually objects at all, they’re intelligible ideas. They’re an aspect of reason. So I don't accept the idea that information constitutes the world or physical objects. As I was saying before, I don't think it's true to say that minerals and inanimate objects encode or contain any information as such; that we can obtain information about their constitution and so on, but they're not inherently information-bearing apart from that. So
Quoting Gnomon
I'm highly dubious about this. You can't make up definitions of fundamental words, like 'information'.
Quoting Gnomon
I’ve read a lot about the philosophical implications of quantum physics and have argued that it also undermines materialism (‘materialism’ being the view that matter is fundamentally real). I am inclined towards Heisenberg’s philosophical attitude, generally discussed under the heading of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’. And this view was very reticent about statements about what the subjects of observation actually are, whilst also fully acknowledging the role of the observer in determining the experimental outcome. Later in life, he wrote Physics and Philosophy, which is generally supportive of Platonism. (See Plato vs Democritus.)
Quoting 3017amen
Galileo beat you to it, saying 'the book of nature is written in mathematics'. Galileo too was basically Platonist is some ways, mainly by virtue of the neo-platonist revival that was a product of the Italian renaissance. But there is also the matter of 'Galileo's mistake'.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think that is mistaken. That just allows you to think you know something which is far from evident. The nature of the reality of number, is completely different than the nature of the reality of material objects, because the former can only be grasped by reason. It's the exact problem with a lot of modern philosophy, which fails to differentiate the sensory and the intelligible.
Tegmark's recent books are regarded by many critics as completely unmoored from reality, and besides, he still maintains a physicalist view of brain/mind.
Agree. This is reminiscent of a basic principle of Vedanta ‘tat tvam asi’ ‘that thou art’:
https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_III-01.html#part4
Mathematicism like Tegmark's does differentiate the sensory from the (merely) intelligible ("merely" because we can also reason about the things we also have sensory experience of). The sensory, i.e. the concrete, the physical, is the stuff that's part of the same structure that we are, with which we are in communication if you will. There is other stuff that is not part of that same structure, that is not concretely real, but is of the same ontological nature as the stuff we are a part of; we're simply not a part of that stuff.
We don't have complete immediate access to the entirety of the structure of which we are a part, we only have access to the parts here, now, in the actual world -- including our memories of other times and places and so on, our imagination of possible futures and other possible worlds, etc -- and so to have any kind of a useful picture of even the concrete world, we have to reason upon and abstract away from the most concrete bit of reality we that have direct access to, because those most concrete bits, e.g. individual "pixels" of vision and so on, are uselessly specific.
Particular rocks and trees are slightly abstract objects, abstracted away from patterns of sensory experiences. The categories of "rock" and "tree" are abstracted from patterns of those particulars. Universals like "green" and "round" are abstracted away from them further still. Mathematical objects like numbers and sets even further still. And then from those distant abstractions we construct bigger more complex abstract objects that we take to be the universe as a whole. Whichever such abstract construction is a perfectly accurate map 1:1 of the entirety of the concrete universe, that just is the true concrete universe: whatever the correct theory of everything says the universe is, that's what the universe is, because that's what it means for that to be the correct theory of everything.
But that's still an abstract object, just like all the other abstract objects that aren't perfect 1:1 maps of the concrete universe. So if that's "real", if anything besides things like "pixels of vision" are real at all, then all abstract objects are real in the same sense as that one; but that one is special to us, because it's the one we're a part of, and so more concretely real, able to be observed, not just imagined.
Quoting Wayfarer
As he should. Mental stuff in one sense (access consciousness / easy problem) is reducible to physical stuff. But physical stuff is reducible to mental stuff in several other senses (phenomenal consciousness / hard problem, mathematicism inasmuch as information is considered "mental"). There isn't a clear divide between "mind" and "matter".
You contradict yourself, insofar as you also claim that objects are intelligible, and it is their numerability and geometry that makes them intelligible. This intelligibility is form, and form insofar as it is intelligible is information. So, where's the separation between objects and their intelligibility in terms of number and geometry? And where is there any number and geometry completely separate from objects and instantiations?
In short, because panpsychism is the least problematic theory of consciousness. I can rehearse the arguments if you want me to.
The point of my comment was less to argue for panpsychism, and more to make a point about the definition of 'consciousness'. The differences in experience between one thing and another are differences in what is experienced, not differences in degree of consciousness, because consciousness does not admit of degree.
Yes, they move if poked, for example. If you want to say some behaviour is evidence of consciousness and other behaviour is not, I'd be interested in what criterion you use for determining what is admissible evidence and what is not.
[quote=Gnomon]Do they show signs of fear as a strange energetic particle approahes?[/quote]
i doubt it. I understand fear in very human terms, and a particle is very different from me. But they may feel something as their fields gradually overlap, I don't know.
[quote=Gnomon]Do they love their entangled partners?[/quote]
I don't know.
[quote=Gnomon]Is your little toe conscious in "exactly the same way" as you are?[/quote]
Yes, becausue 'consciousness' only means that the bearer is capable of experience, not that their experiences are similar to other conscious things.
[quote=Gnomon]Consciousness is an evolutionary advantage for living creatures, but how would it be adaptive for atoms and billiard balls?[/quote]
I'm a panpsychist, I don't think consciousness did evolve. I don't think consciousness confers any evolutionary advantage, because there are no non-conscious things.
I agree, and I think that this is analogous to the situation with incompatibilist free will. Incompatibilists insist that free will means being undetermined. Okay, electrons are undetermined, according to contemporary physics. So electrons have free will? Sounds like kind of a useless definition of free will then. But hey look over there, those compatibilists have a much more useful definition of free will according to which humans sometimes have it but electrons don't... it just has nothing to do with (in)determinism.
Likewise, phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.
Do you think the atman is supposed to represent what we would call consciousness, even if it is called the Self? We use ego to represent consciousness in Western philosophy, I’m guessing that might be the same thing. One way to think of the residue of reality is intuitions, which are the contents of consciousness in some epistemological methodologies.
——————-
Quoting Wayfarer
I’m down with real but incorporeal, but I’m not sure one could justify denying materialism entirely from the immaterial quality of pure a priori conceptions. Each and every number is nothing but a pure concept that categorizes a quantity, and we often need to quantize, or quantify, real objects, which are pretty much always material things. Still, we use numbers to quantize time and space, which definitely aren’t material things. All kinds of implications, no doubt.
You are probably most familiar with Claude Shannon's definition of Information. But, my general definition of Information above is a distillation of many technical definitions. For example, Shannon defined Information in absolute digital terms suitable for computers : either 1 or 0; either True or False. Hence, no uncertainty. But humans are analog computers, and parse information in terms of relative certainty : a ratio between 1 or 0; a probability range from True to False. Shannon's Entropy is defined in terms of a degree of order relative to disorder. The complete concept of Information is so broad that you will find almost diametrically opposite definitions depending on the application. For example, Shannon equated computer Information with physical Entropy, expressed as a Ratio between Randomness and Order : "Information entropy is the average rate at which information is produced by a stochastic source of data." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
My thesis goes step-by-step through the evolution of the modern meaning of Information, and has several pages of references. But in the final analysis, it's all mathematical and metaphysical : a Rate or Ratio is not a specific thing, but a general range of probabilities from certain information (100%) to uncertain Information (0%). The human analog brain uses fuzzy logic (intuition) to extract meaning from incoming information. That may be why precise mathematics does not come easy for most of us; it requires hard conscious thinking. :nerd:
Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
Not only then is the ratio a : b the fundamental notion for all activities of perception, but it signals one of the most basic processes of intelligence in that it symbolizes a comparison between two things, and is thus the elementary basis for conceptual judgement . . . A proportion, however, is more complex, for it is a relationship of equivalency between two ratios . . . An analogy.
—-Robert Lawler, Geometry
Knowledge is not information, knowledge is 'understood information'. Ability to know is not information, ability to know is ability to understand information.
10 print "hello world!"
20 goto 10
In degrees of uncertainty, how much information is in this program above, or any other deterministic program?
Vaguely. But as I already mentioned, Claude Shannon was an electrical engineer, and his theory concerned transmission of binary information through a medium. 0 and 1 are of course the constituents of binary code, and his calculations of probability were used to reduce redundancies, and hence increase efficiencies, in binary information transmission, which is why his discoveries are basic to data compression (like Stuffit, which all of use every day.)
As for 'enformationism', your site is certainly attractive and it seems interesting, and you plainly care a lot about what you're doing there. (I kept a blog for about ten years, myself, although ultimately my interests proved a little too esoteric for...well, everyone.) But I'm sorry to say that I think the extraction of a 'metaphysics' from information theory is pure science fiction, I don't think that definition of 'information' would pass muster in any serious journal or department. (Sorry to be so blunt.)
There are noted convergences between Vedanta and German idealism particularly Kant, Schopenhauer and Fichte (It was said Schopenhauer used to read from the Upanisads every evening in the later part of his life.) The reason I mentioned that passage is because there is an arguable similarity between the Kantian transcendental ego and the Vedantic 'atman'. Not the ego, which is 'man's conception of himself', but something deeper than that.
Quoting Mww
'In his seminal 1973 paper, “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf presented a problem facing all accounts of mathematical truth and knowledge. Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.'
Why is this? Because, it turns out, 'our best epistemic theories' are materialiist - well, naturalistic, and based on the assumption of physicalism. We read: 'Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.'
https://www.iep.utm.edu/indimath/
(I love 'some philosophers, called "rationalists"..' - I can almost here a TV host intoning those words as he introduces the audience to those rare and elusive creatures....)
From the SEP entry on mathematical Platonism:
Knowledge is just one form of Generic Information. In my thesis, Consciousness is a highly evolved form of Generic Information. Generic Information is essentially abstract mathematics, and is physically manifested as Energy. Mathematically, Energy is a proportion --- a ratio between Cold & Hot, for example. And metaphysical mathematical Energy, according to Einstein, is equivalent to Mass (ratio of inertia to acceleration) , which is the measurable property of physical Matter. But, Meaningful Information is in the relationship, not the things.
So, Information (knowledge) in it's traditional sense is a property of Mind, of Consciousness. In my view, it's both the ability to know (verb; action; to enform), and the thing known (noun; object; a physical form). The multiple functions of Information can get confusing when you switch from Physics to Metaphysics, but it's both Quanta and Qualia. That's why my thesis proposes Enformationism as a modern update of ancient Materialism. The thesis goes into much more detail to explain that apparent paradox, and the underlying unity of Mind & Matter, Brain & Consciousness. Enformationism seems to be related to Mathematical Platonism, but I'm not very familiar with that contentious concept .
Mathematical Platonism : Mathematical platonism has been among the most hotly debated topics in the philosophy of mathematics over the past few decades
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/
What is EnFormAction? : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
That's OK. My thesis is also quite esoteric, and is not amenable to mainstream reductionist materialist Physics. But there are plenty of Physicists and Mathematicians out there on the fringes, that hold a more holistic worldview. Some of them (e.g. physicists Paul Davies and Max Tegmark) are published in serious journals, and hold their own in both scientific and philosophical debates. Unfortunately, for me, such holistic ideas are readily accepted by those of the New Age persuasion (e.g Deepak Chopra), but they tend to lean a bit too much toward Spiritualism for my comfort. :confused:
I've read a bit of Paul Davies and actually shelled out for his latest, Demon in the Machine, which is about information and biology - which reminds me, have to get around to reading it.
To LearN the MeaninG of the WordS look into DictionarY. YoU may use yoUr own PersonaL LanguaE to talk with yoUr ImaginarY FriendS, but in the ReaL WorlD it only makes you InsanE and IncompetenT to have ConversatioN.
Perhaps if any of what you say had any practical relevance you would have a chance to realize purposelessness of your hallucinations. For example, think about why you didn't answer my question. You had a chance to finally apply some of your theory to something concrete, but you could not because it's nonsense. God HelP yoU, kiDDo!
Ghost-in-the-machine metaphysical problems are what happens when a plurality of different phenomenological senses are (mis)interpreted as a plurality of substances.
For example, I can directly imagine an object that I assert is 'red'. But here my private expressive use of 'red' does not assume nor appeal to external definitional criteria. Hence this use of 'red' has no necessary connection to the public use of the term 'optical red' which relates to physical experiments concerning the electromagnetic spectrum. This latter is use is representational and communicative rather than imaginative. This is all that needs to be said, phenomenologically speaking. There isn't a 'hard problem' to explain here, unless one conflates private expressives with public representations.
Yeah, not to drop book titles again, but Paul's 'The Mind of God' is a pretty awesome read! I refer to it often. You guys are inspiring me to pick-up another one of his books....
Absolutely. The argument sustaining those is also the paradigm shift in epistemological philosophy.
I don’t think anyone with a half-metaphysical brain doubts the reality of abstract mathematical objects. I mean, mathematics itself doesn’t even exist in Nature; it is a science constructed by humans in response to a need to facilitate talking about quantities. That’s all it was ever meant to do, just as logic was created by humans solely in response to a need to talk about relations. It follows that anything invented by humans is necessarily predicated on whatever idea serves as ground for the very form of its respective science. Things exist in Nature, but how many things, or how things relate to each other, is not a concern of Nature.
If information constitutes the physical world, we are at a loss as to how to explain cases in which separate observers do not arrive at the exact same experience of a singular given thing. Even if the exception to the rule is very much less the case, it still serves to falsify the principle of induction, which is the necessary ground for the idea that pervasive information should result in non-contradictory, hence invariably consistent, observations.
The argument claims that it is absolutely impossible to tell the difference between whether an object consists of its properties in order for us to know them as they are, or we install the properties in objects such that we know how we are affected by them. This dichotomy is exactly the same as whether information constitutes physical objects, or we are merely informed about physical objects in accordance with how our intrinsic cognitive system treats them.
The real irony is, the one thing on which humans in general will always agree, despite differences in language or culture, is the principles governing the very sciences they all themselves construct.....math and logic. They can argue the a posteriori truth of “the sun is in the sky”, but none of them can argue the a priori truth “no figure is possible with two straight lines”.
Agreed.
Humans: in particulars the more they differ, universally the more they remain the same.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Nothing against iep, but that is one LOADED assertion, right there.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Taken straight outta British Enlightenment empiricism: a priori knowledge is useless, if not altogether impossible. The claim we know things solely from the habitual experience of cause and effect, whereas the truth of the matter is that claim is catastrophically wrong, which cleared the way for the reality of a priori knowledge, and thereby, abstract mathematical objects.
Disclaimer: I couldn’t find that 1973 paper, so it may be he wasn’t talking about that at all. In that case....my bad. I just wrote the first thing that popped into my head that seemed to relate to that snippet I quoted in this section.
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On mathematical Platonism:
Man, I dunno. I reject the opening statement in the SEP article, out of hand. Mathematical objects only really exist if we objectify them, so I don’t see how they can be independent of our language, thoughts or practices. That which the mathematical objects express certainly exist independently of us, re: spatialtemporal distinctions, quantities, distance and the like, but we cannot know anything about those things, other than the fact of them, without the abstract objects we create as the means for it. It’s pretty obvious the Earth and the moon aren’t in the same place, so.......take it from there.
Yes. Ortodox science does seem stuck in a way some "unexpected" discovery of wide consequences is needed for further progress. Still, those kinds of propositions are useless unless they can answer some of those questions we are stuck at, and I don't see that particular one even tries.
You're spamming the thread by self-advertising your personal English dictionary, lunacy of which is not funny anymore.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Since I'm breaking new ground in the Enformationism Thesis, rather than just recycling old ideas, I am forced, like many philosophers and scientists, to coin new words to express novel ideas. Have you ever heard of a "wavicle"?
With "imaginary friends" like you in mind, I have provided an extensive Glossary of Terminology, and a Blog to expand on difficult concepts. In order to learn the meaning of my words, you'll have to look into my dictionary. :nerd:
Neologisms : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neologism
Lexicon of Neologisms : http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/lex_philosophy.html
Enformationism Glossary : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/
In degrees of uncertainty, how much information is in this program?
No, you were childishly redefining existing word "information" and confused it with existing word "knowledge". See above, and note the question while you're at it.
Exactly. And to think you did something usefulf there or that anyone should care is insane.
“...There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement...”, spoken by Al Michelson, 1894, who went on to disprove luminiferous ether, which, ironically enough, refuted the first by doing the second.
Tidbit of useless trivia.
That's not the reason it doesn't make sense to me.
Quoting Mww
I have some passages from Frege where he says that mathematical primitives - integers I presume - 'exist independently from anyone's understanding of them', in the same sense that planets do - 'grasped by the mind in the way a pencil is grasped by the hand'. I presume the same applies to e.g. Pythagoras' theorem, the law the excluded middle, f=ma and many other such principles.
Reason is able to discern these principles, but then, as reason is independent, it can also invent similar kinds of ideas - for example algorithms or artificial mathematical systems or synthetic chemicals.
But when natural principles are discerned or discovered, then we're seeing something about nature, not simply projecting human ideas onto nature.
Besides humans are not really outside of, or apart from, nature. (This insight originates with non-dualism). This notion we nowadays have that nature is dumb stuff governed by physical laws, and the mind is internal to the hominid brain, is grounded in the sense of 'otherness' that is one of the distinctive characteristics of modernity. Our experience of reality is a single whole, with inner and outer aspects, but both 'inner' and 'outer' are still representations or constructs (vorstellung). Reason doesn't inhere in either pole but pertains to the structure of the understanding itself. (I am very impressed by this passage on Augustine on Intelligible Objects.)
In pre-modernity there was an instinctive sense of relatedness to the cosmos - that the mind was an expression of an order which both created it and allowed it to understand the world. Whereas now 'understanding' is seen merely as adaptation and is devoid of any purpose save that of survival and instrumental utility.
To relate all this back to the hard problem of consciousness - for the materialists, such as Dennett (and those here), there is no 'hard problem' because they have so thoroughly internalized the modern outlook that they've lost all sense of what is problematical about it.
Other than my arcane vocabulary, is the "reason" you're dubious because Enformationism combines Physics and Metaphysics? Most scientists are careful to not cross that line. But I'm not a scientist, nor a professional philosopher. So I don't have to worry about being ridiculed by my peers. Or, is there another reason? I'd like to address it if possible.
PS__Christof Koch, in his recent book, Consciousness, subtitled it : Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. His basic question is one that crosses those same taboo lines : "What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience." [my emphasis.]
In The Feeling of Life Itself, Koch admits that, "Speculations about ultimate "why" questions are enjoyable at the intellectual level. But they also contain more than a whiff of the absurd, trying to peek behind the curtains that hide the origin of creation only to find an endless set of further curtains." [my emphasis]
Note : Koch's theory of Consciousness is based on Integrated Information Theory, which is compatible with my own thesis.
You're trying to come up with an explanation of foundational principles. I don't think you realise quite how big an undertaking that is. The 'first principle' or 'ground of being' or 'source of what is' can't be so easily depicted in a new catch-phrase like 'enformationism'.
I agree there is a move towards understanding 'information' as fundamental, but I think you're viewing it naively.
There's a well-known quote by Norbert Weiner, inventor of cybernetics:
I certainly agree with this quote, but I don't take it to mean that 'information' can be assigned the role that was hitherto assigned to matter (or matter-energy) which is what I think you're doing with this idea of 'generic information'. Besides, the question of what 'information' means, in any general sense, seems highly obscure to me. Atoms made sense, because they were indivisible and eternal, and so could plausibly be depicted as a mode of unconditioned reality. But 'information' is a polysemic word, that is, it has multiple meanings, so the phrase 'generic information' means precisely nothing.
Human brains are made out of those functional objects, big complex highly reflexive functional compound objects, and human experiences are the input from the rest of the world feeding into the function of those brains (and, significantly, from the brain feeding back into itself). So you can equally well think of all of this "software" as phenomenal experiences, or think of the universe as being made of "thought" in a rough sense.
This is entirely compatible with the mathematicism I was earlier propounding. The concrete universe is an abstract object, a Platonic form if you like to think of it that way, a mathematical thing, just like a computer program is (software is made of math and logic). The only thing that differentiates that abstract object that we can sense from other ones that we can only think about is that we are a part of the abstract object that is the concrete universe.
This is also entirely compatible with physicalism as I mean it. The signals output by each object, the things those objects do to those observing them, their behavior in a broad sense, constitutes the empirical properties of those objects, which constitute the entire being of those objects. "Physical" just means "empirical", so this universe, or multiverse, made entirely of "mental", abstract, "Formal" information is still entirely physical. Minds are "programs" running on brains made of matter that is itself made of "programs" that are as mental as the stuff going on in the minds.
You seem to think that any view that doesn't maintain a separation of mental, intelligible, otherwise non-physical stuff from physical stuff is trying to do away with the non-physical and reduce everything to non-mental, unintelligible, dumb little billiard balls clicking around. And yeah there have been and still are some people who push that view, but that's not the only alternative to this impenetrable wall between the mental/intelligible/etc and the physical: some of us just think that everything is kinda both at the same time, that there isn't a clear separation between them.
An analogy I thought of a while back, that's not perfect but I think helps: there is no clear distinction between software and data. Every hunk of data is in principle executable, just most of it will immediately crash and not do anything interested if executed. And every bit of software is stored as a bit of data. It's useful to differentiate executable files, that do useful things when executed, from the data upon which they act, but when it really comes down to it they are fundamentally the same stuff. Likewise with mind and matter: two different ways of looking at the same stuff, where minds are executable-like and matter is data-like, but when you get down to it it's all just bits.
I hope it's clear by now why words like communication, knowledge, news, or intelligence are not synonyms for the word information, which is far more basic.
So, what else is there, go ahead and name some more of those supposed multiple meanings, and if it does not encapsulate "spatial arrangement of matter", or if it assumes anything more, I will explain why it is in fact not appropriate substitute for the word ‘information’.
That's a generalization, kind of opposite of explanation. So why would anyone think that? What's the point, what do you with it, what questions does it answer we could not answer before?
The concrete universe is a byproduct of parasitic animals from the 5th dimension. Can you name a reason or evidence why your theory of Platonic realm is better than my theory of Parasitic realm?
The software thing is just an analogy or illustration of the underlying philosophy I'm talking about. I come to that philosophy, to massively simplify things (I literally wrote an 80,000 word book about the whole system), from trying to think about the world and the mind in as unencumbered a way as possible.
What are we trying to talk about when we talk about the world? Most basically, we're talking about the stuff that we can see and hear and otherwise sense. Everything about anything in the world comes down to some impact on my senses, so I'm lead to something like a "bundle theory": objects are bundles of attributes, which are all empirical properties. Phenomenal consciousness on the other hand seems to be talking about the other side of that exact same thing: my "phenomenal consciousness" is the bundle of sense-experiences that I have, something like a bundle theory of self. Combine that with old philosophical adages like "to do is to be" or "to be is to do", thinking in more detail about what it means to have a sensory experience of something, and you start thinking of sense-experiences of things as interactions between yourself and them: the sight of an object just is the photons it sends my way, and its visual appearance more generally is what kind of photons it sends my way under what conditions of what photons are sent its way, what it does in response to what it done to it; specifically what it does to me, and how I interact with those photons, what my eyes are sensitive to, etc. (I'm skipping on elaborating on this for all senses because this is already getting too long). That lends to thinking about objects as being defined in terms of function, of mapping of input to output: a thing is a bundle of empirical properties, and an empirical property is a propensity to do something in response to something else. That dissolves all the philosophical problems about the ontology of physical stuff: materialism, idealism, it's all irrelevant, there doesn't have to be any substrate at all, all that matters is the network of sense-data interactions.
On a separate topic, about access consciousness, we've already got functionalism pretty well-established there: access consciousness is a kind of function, a mapping of inputs to outputs, including internal states as a kind of output, all regardless of the underlying substrate. (The exact specifics of that function are up for empirical investigation). So now that we're already thinking of all objects as functional "bundles" or nodes in a web of interactions of sense-experiences, and of phenomenal consciousness as just being on the receiving end of such sense-experiences, and of the important aspects of human consciousness being the details of our complex functional access consciousness, then it seems like phenomenal consciousness in that sense is naturally attributable to everything, and what differentiates human consciousness is the specific, complex functionality of our brains, access consciousness. All of this is completely independent of whatever any "underlying substrate" might be; we don't need to concern ourselves at all with what that is or whether there is such a thing, it makes no difference in explaining the world in as it appears to us. That dissolves all the philosophical problems about mind-body interaction and what phenomenal consciousness is, because minds and bodies are made of the same stuff and "phenomenal consciousness" (that doesn't even really deserve to be called consciousness) is a trivial aspect of that stuff, what really matters is what kind of functions are going on in human minds.
So we're basically just talking about everything in terms of exchanges of sense-data now, basically already thinking of the universe in terms of the information that describes it. When it comes to descriptions of things, there is the old adage that "the map is not the territory", but a perfect 1:1 map of something just is a perfect copy of that territory (e.g. if you build a map of a city down to the atom, what you've done is replicate the city). So whatever complete theory of everything it is that perfectly describes the physical world in every last detail, that would just be a perfect copy of the physical world. Such a theoretical model would also be an abstract object. Perfect copies of abstract objects are identical to each other, even expressed in different terms: for example the series of sets and set operations that behave identically to the natural numbers and arithmetic are considered by professional mathematicians to be the same objects and functions as the natural numbers and arithmetic, just expressed differently. So the physical world, as a bunch of (sense-)data, being indistinguishable from whatever mathematical model perfectly describes it, just is identical to that mathematical model: if you ran that model on an actual computer somehow, and it gave rise to sub-structures just like us humans in that virtual universe, those structures would find themselves having sense-experiences of an apparent physical universe just like we do. So at least one abstract, mathematical object is definitely real: the concrete, physical world. If that's the case, then like with modal realism, which addresses why the actual world exists instead of some other possible world by assuming all possible worlds exist and "the actual" world is just the one we're in, likewise we can dissolve a lot of philosophical questions about why the concrete world follows the mathematical laws that it does by assuming that all mathematical structures exists, and "the concrete" world is just the mathematical structure of which we're a part. That also then dissolves the problem of whether and how abstract objects exist, neither having to deny their reality nor having to posit some kind of weird other realm for them to exist in: they're just like the world we're familiar with, ontologically, except we're not a part of them. (Again, just like modal realism dissolves the question of the ontology of possible worlds by assuming there's nothing special about them at all, they're just like the actual world, except we're not in them).
TL;DR: the reason to think of things in this way is that it makes a bunch of apparently-intractable problems about ontology and consciousness go away like the illusory problems they are (by responding to questions about "how do you explain this special weird thing?" with "that's not weird or special, that's normal and unremarkable, everything's like that and couldn't not be"), and lets us focus instead on the contingent particulars about exactly what functions human minds and other physical objects in our actual concrete universe execute.
Italics added - so, this is a metaphor. And, no computers are spontaneously occurring, they are built by human agents to perform a function. So the notion of the universe being a program irresistibly suggests a programmer - which I'm sure you don't want to do.
There's instinctive sympathy for analogies of the universe being a simulation, or a computer program, or like a computer, which is understandable, given the technological nature of the culture. But it is still an analogy.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Like this, you mean?
[quote=Steve Talbott]Daniel Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:
Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.[/quote]
Quoting Pfhorrest
Not really. 'Ontology' is about 'types or modes of being'. And this doesn't say anything about ontology, or how 'those signals' come to be, other than today's universal assumption that it relies on an ability that 'must have evolved'. But that is back to neo-darwinian materialism, which is very much what is at issue in all of this. You're not 'dissolving' the problem at all, you're simply singing from the neo-darwinist songbook.
Quoting Zelebg
Think of a simple item of information: 'The cat sits on the mat'. I can write that in any one of a number of languages, all of which consist of arrangements of different symbols in a different order. I can write it in pencil on a piece of paper, or I could send it by morse code, or even flags or smoke signals. In all cases, the information remains the same, but the physical form is completely different.
Therefore, the information is different to the physical form.
Now, what arranged that matter to convey that meaning? Clearly, humans did that. And when we speak of 'information', I'm pretty sure we're generally talking of something that humans have generated or understood. It makes no sense to speak of 'information' in respect of inanimate matter; matter contains no information, as such. Scientists have spent decades scanning interstellar space for signs of life. Any sign of 'information transmission' would be the biggest headline in history. No luck, so far.
There's only one naturally-occuring range of phenomena with respect to which I think it's meaningful to speak of 'information' being encoded and transmitted - and that is DNA.
Are you kidding me?!?!!
1. you are a robot
2. YOU ARE A ROBOT
The same information can be embedded or transmitted in different spatial arrangements of matter. And the point is, again, that in all the cases information itself is defined by the spatial arrangements of matter.
Dear god, you are still unable to differentiate between "information" and "meaning"! I'm out of here.
Sample reasoning:
1. think of rocks, small and large, different shapes, multicolored and dull-colored
2. individual specimens of basalt, marble, limestone, etc
3. they're all rocks, but their physicals are different, and they're not the same rock
4. therefore rock is different to any physical rock (independent thereof)
What arranged the rock exercise?
• going through the exercise above requires thinking
• there are numerous naturally occurring rocks that are all rock
What to make of this stuff, @Wayfarer ...?
Populating Platonia? Hypostatization? ...?
I think the dichotomy rears its head when we try to reconcile a priori truth's with a posteriori truth's.
Meaning the fact that a priori/mathematical truth's describe the physical universe (a posteriori/cause and effect) so effectively, remains an unsolved mystery of sorts.
Quoting Mww
Interesting comment. Seems one could make a case for the opposite occurring in nature. Meaning, if the language of mathematics (metaphysical abstracts) is encoded into all of the physical/natural world, what does that infer? To me, it infers that a metaphysical reality exists.
The next question would be here, did that metaphysical truth/reality always exist independently, or did humans invent it(?). Objectively, not sure anyone knows...
Meaning, if the language of mathematics (metaphysical abstracts) is encoded into all of the physical/natural world, what does that infer? To me, it infers that a metaphysical reality exists.[/quote]
So we notice there is some space where two lines meet and we call it an "angle". Then some thousands of years later we somehow forget that thing we call angle is our own construct and start thinking it is actually the angle that makes the lines and not the other way around.
While I agree Nature has its dynamic procedures independent of our understanding, it is we that legislate the principles for them, as you say....
Quoting Wayfarer
.......given some relevant observation, the sole purpose of which is to make those dynamics understandable to us, hence accessible to our knowledge. Pythagoras’ Theorem being a perfect example: it is impossible to derive the relationship between the boundaries of a triangle merely from the fact a space is enclosed by three straight lines. And Galileo had absolutely no means to derive 32ft/sec/sec, a perfectly natural mathematical primitive existing independently of our understanding, from watching an object fall out of a tower window. That’s why it’s so much fun to listen as post-Kantian analytical philosophers try to annihilate the synthetic a priori adaptation of the human cognitive system. It just can’t be done without the guy attempting it immediately contradicting himself. Substituted for, maybe; refuted......not a chance.
Not sure why integers would be considered mathematical primitives. That a symbolic representation of a completed series presupposes “quantity”, sure, but that implies quantity is itself a mathematical primitive. Maybe that’s what Frege was getting at. There’s no contradiction in the occurrence of a natural series of continuous spacetime events independent of our understanding, for its negation is quite absurd, so maybe that’s qualification for “primitive”.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Dunno if that originates with non-dualism, but the idea holds within some dualisms as well. Awful hard to justify being outside the very nature, re: Nature, we’re using to justify our own physical existence. Kinda funny, really. Nature gifts the ability to think, but doesn’t gift the ability to restrict thinking. In all her wonder, she left it to reason itself, to think without thinking too much, to think more than its qualifications admit. Sorta like giving a 5yo a chess set for his birthday: he stands as good a chance of learning the basics of the game as he does using the pieces to suit his imagination.
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On Augustine:
Interesting. I can see it for the most part. From where I sit though, being a pseudo, or pre-modern, the possibility of the immutability of intelligible objects is irrelevant, if I have no means to know anything about them. Wisdom, e.g., may indeed be higher than reason and be the judge of reason, but for me, it doesn’t matter if that is the case. I am restricted by my very nature to employ reason to both discover and understand anything about wisdom, including whether or not I even have any. THAT it is may be given, but I want to know WHAT it is, how it manifests, what it does for me. This goes back to my “kinda funny” above: we had to think of wisdom as being immutable, otherwise we couldn’t claim that it is, because obviously no outside source told us it is, then made the attempt to show how it must be above the means we used to think it in the first place. Rational dog chasing its metaphysical tail.
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Quoting Wayfarer
Agreed. Understanding has become the red-headed step-child of the adoptive cognitive neuroscience. Which is fine, if you got a machine strapped to your head. But I don’t, and never will, so I need my understanding to do its damn job.....you know.....as the intelligible object it is.......in order to function in the world alongside my kind. As far as the hard problem goes, I’d say it is indeed hard, given from the excruciatingly simply reason we don’t know enough empirically about it sufficient to justify the speculative ground on which it is based.
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Quoting Wayfarer
What do you think entails the problematical? How would you characterize it?
(Addendum: did you mean Steve Talbot’s “love it or hate it”?)
Stepping away from mathematics for a moment, I’ll address the possible metaphysical reality of first principles.
Consider the law of identity (A = A). Is the law of identity something that exists apart from our understanding of it? Or is it something we’ve created axiomatically and then put to use which we then reify into a metaphysically real given?
Since its impossible to create it sans the a priori existence of the law itself, and since young enough preadolescents have no understanding of it while yet making use of it (ostensibly, as do lesser animals), I heavily lean toward it being a non-created, a priori, metaphysical reality.
The same can then be stated of a priori mathematical givens: they can become intelligible to us, but exist apart from our understanding of them, all the while constraining what can be.
And as with laws of thought, we're free to concoct any mathematics that we please axiomatically, but those which are metaphysically real shall always remain irrespective of what we assume.
Sure. Likewise, one decides to design a roof truss, and using simple arithmetic, in order to determine rise over run (roof pitch), it is thus created. Could it have been created otherwise, sure it could. Man could use spatial-perceptive abilities to build it. (Just like we don't-or need to- calculate the laws of gravity in order to avoid falling objects in the jungle.)
Metaphysical abstracts are alive and well! Next question could be, why do we have two ways to know the world when one is not needed(?).
Just like unicorns. I'm afraid to ask what is it you actually mean to say there, but whatever it is, can it explain anything about qualia, sentience, or 1st person nature of experience?
Great questions. One thought is if metaphysical abstracts (mathematics) exist independently, and their existence is both physical and non-physical (consciousness) it's entirely possible that the idea of unicorn's could exist in another realm or reality.
By the sheer fact that consciousness cannot be explained, and metaphysical abstracts exist, that logically leaves the door open for (absurd) possibilities...
Similarly; qualia, sentience, and 1st person experience goes beyond Subjectivity (subjective truth's) in trying to understand their nature. Other than relegating them to metaphysical phenomena, we have nothing to describe them.
And so I am thinking that leaves the door open for all sorts of odd or absurd notions existing in another reality.
Maybe another take away viz mathematcal abstracts or metaphysical phenomena is the question of what does it mean to exist (?).
Ha! I am acutely aware of how big an undertaking it is to flip my own understanding of reality upside down. Enformationism began as a flash of insight --- that immaterial Information is the foundation of reality --- and I have been trying to test that hypothesis, skeptically, for the last ten years. I have almost convinced myself, but I find it's difficult to convince others, if they don't have the same intuition that "reality is not what it seems".
I have mentioned the recent book by quantum scientist Carlo Rovelli, primarily because of its title : Reality Is Not What It Seems. But his explanation is mostly about the paradox of Quantum Gravity. I'm currently reading a book by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality, which is closer to the concerns of this thread : Consciousness and Perception. His explanation argues that our perception evolved to be Pragmatic (what works) instead of Veridical (truth).
All mammals, including humans, are Pragmatic Materialists by nature, because it is adaptive to assume that what you see is what's really out there. But humans are also capable of looking beneath the superfical surfaces to the underlying "foundational principles". Yet, what we have found there is the weird world of Quantum Physics, where the foundation of reality can be described, not in terms of macro-level space-time properties, but only in terms of arcane quantum mathematics, and of Unicorn metaphors for individual Particles that behave like holistic Waves. Counter-intuitively, "Wavicles" seem to be both particles and waves. Hence, Reality has been de-materialized by our extended technological senses. But most of us still act as-if what we perceive via unaided sense is what's really out there, despite the current consensus of Science that it ain't so.
Although Quantum theory has turned Classical Materialistic Physics inside-out, it is now grudgingly accepted by most scientists. So, I have tried to develop a worldview that can reconcile the reports of our Physical senses with the revelations of our technology, and our logical/mathematical inferences about the Quantum Metaphysical foundations of Reality. I call that compromise conciliation the BothAnd Principle. :cool:
BothAnd Principle : "Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? what’s true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose."
Yes, but it doesn’t have to. A priori truths are proved by pure logic (transcendental logic from one methodology), but a posteriori truths are proved from observations. It is an a posteriori truth that an object impresses my hand by its matter; it’s an a priori truth that to be an object it must have matter. If the a priori truth doesn’t hold, we are inclined to say the a posteriori truth cannot hold either. But this is not necessarily the case, for there may be some other reason of which I have no knowledge, that causes objects to impress my hand. But it is altogether impossible for logical truths to be false, because if they are, I can’t even justify any of my thoughts at all, including the very truths I thought logical. If A does not equal A, I am well and truly screwed!!!! Not to mention, now that Voyager has traversed to actual deep space and is still working, the principle of universality, itself an a priori truth we predicated to applied mathematical logic, yet always requires empirical proofs, gains credence.
So to eliminate the dichotomy, we limit a posteriori to the material and use empirical proofs, which turn out to be contingent, we limit a priori to the rational and use logical proofs, which turn out to be necessary. And we are certainly justified in doing this, because we can think things that don’t exist in the world, and there are things in the world we have not thought.
But I agree it is a mystery why our thinking is sustained by the world, how the world is so well explained by us. On the other hand, we are explaining the world to ourselves, using our own human apparatus, so....what else should we expect? Funny thing though, used to be if we didn’t know which path a particle takes, we are authorized to say it took all possible paths simultaneously (Feynman, 1948), and if we don’t know where a particle is until it is measured, then we are authorized to say it is no where, from which follows the logical assumption the measure is the causality (Heisenberg, 1927) YIKES!!!! Reason run amok, or, the way things really are? Mystery, indeed.
(Keyword....used to be)
Before you go :
"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill --- the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill --- you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
Morpheus, The Matrix :wink:
Lot of stuff in there, all predicated on the possibility of a 1:1 representation/existence correspondence. Disregarding the logical impossibility of perfect replication still leaves us with a hyper-reality, where the mathematical structure and the concrete structure are the same thing, so how would we know we’ve even cognized ourselves as belonging to one or the other?
If we can’t tell the difference, we’re losing nothing by leaving ourselves with the duality we already acknowledge, rather than assume a fringe duality only a few can wrap their heads around.
Just a thought.........
It is a metaphor yes, but you'll note right after where you ended that quote of me, I said "but there is no hardware running the program, the software is the primary level of reality.".
Quoting Wayfarer
Not so, if you read through the rest of the worldview I described. A program is a bit of math. All bits of math exist, abstractly; every program that could ever be written already exists "in Plato's heaven", just like every number that could ever be thought up. One such program is indistinguishable from and so identical to our physical universe, and that just is the concrete world: concrete only because it's the one we're a part of. If there are intelligent substructures within other abstract objects, then to them those are concrete too.
Quoting Wayfarer
You get that I'm talking about fundamental physics and not living things here, right? I'm talking about things like two electrons repelling each other by exchanging a photon, like in a Feynman diagram. That photon passed between them is the kind of signal I'm talking about. Evolution is inapplicable at that level; I'm definitely not saying that electrons evolved interaction with the electromagnetic field because it was advantageous to their survival or anything like that.
I'm not talking about it being possible for us here in this universe to actually come up with a perfect mathematical replica of the entire universe, just pointing out that the way we ordinarily talk about mathematical objects, two structures that are indistinguishable other than that we call them by different names are the same structure, so whatever the perfect mathematical description of our concrete world would be (even if we can never pin down what it is), that is identical to the concrete world. Not only in that sense, but in the sense that such a perfect model of this world would contain within it models of you and me having this conversation, so there's no way of telling whether we're in "this real world" or "that model of it", again leaving us with indistinguishable things that we may as well consider identical for all practical purposes.
Quoting Mww
I'm not positing a duality, but rather doing away with them entirely. I'm saying there is at the bottom one kind of thing, abstract mathematical objects, every possible one of them. We are a part of one of them, and that one we call the "concrete world". There is no question of whether we're in the mathematical structure or the concrete structure; the concrete structure is just whichever mathematical structure we're in. "Concrete" only means that we're in it.
Yeah, I get it. I read Tegmark, 2007, when it first came out, where he argues, “....that, with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematical structure, the former (ERH, external reality hypothesis, your concrete structure) implies the latter (MUH, mathematical reality hypothesis, your mathematical structure)...”
Sound right?
I’m not equipped to counter-argue the thesis, but it doesn’t float all that big a boat, seems to me. Little too far outside the box for my comfort zone.
I'd say we cannot prove anything at all, except in relative contexts. So, that leaves the question as to which duality is the more plausible or whether we even possess the means to assess the relative plausibility of the two dualities at all.
You’re correct, of course. (I fixed it)
We can’t actually prove anything, given the singular nature of our objective reality. I mean.....what do we compare it to? We can, as you say, compare and thus prove conditions within it, relative to each other, but nothing more than that.
I think it’s even more unrealistic to posit no duality at all. A human being has to operate from a duality in order to theorize he isn’t, using a logic that shows he’d be contradicting himself by trying.
Nothing against folks thinking far downstream, though.
Since I'm basically a skeptic I'm not sure, but I think I would favour monism or pluralism over dualism, because the latter is too tidy a fit to human reason, and I think it behooves us to acknowledge that the map or model is not the territory, and allow for the mystic tides of unreason. But hell, the whole question about whether monism, dualism or pluralism is a better fit to "reality in itself" might just simply be an altogether incoherent one. :yikes:
And yet here we are regardless. :rofl:
Apparently, for many scientists, that cause/effect inference from Program to Programmer is quite resistible --- if it is taken to imply a supernatural Creator. For example Max Tegmark and Seth Lloyd don't have much to say about the Programmer of their hypothetical universal computer. But I can't resist speculating about how the operating system for our universe came to be organized like an evolutionary program (Global Optimization algorithm) converting raw data (information) into more and more intellectually-powerful creatures (forms).
Of course, I must remain Agnostic about any specific characteristics of the implicit Coder, beyond what's logically necessary to produce such a marvelous "virtual machine" from scratch. Anything we might say about that intriguing possibility can only be in the form of familiar worldly metaphors. That's why I refer to the unknown programmer cryptically as "G*D" or "G?D". But you can insert whatever name you prefer into the blank.
Evolutionary Programming : http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/evolution/evolutionary_programming.html
That's why I resolve the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of Dualism vs Monism with the BothAnd Principle. The "correct" term depends on your perspective*1 : Physical Monism, Metaphysical Monism, or Physical/Metaphysical Dualism, or Information Monism : Spinoza's "Single Substance" is protean polymorphic Information.
Spinoza's Substance : "God is the only substance in the universe, and everything is a part of God. “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Baruch_Spinoza
*1 perspective
Quoting Janus
Agreed. That is why the ontological argument for God's existence doesn't provide for adequate meaning. The God of experience is simply that, an experience. But of course we're talking about Cosmology here... .
Quoting Mww
Do you have an example of that? I actually tend to believe the opposite; we experience things first and then we try to figure them out. Barring some exceptions, examples include; running calculations subsequent to avoiding falling objects (as I've alluded), as well as running calculations to design a roof truss, and playing music first then figuring it out later through music theory and written notation.
Quoting Mww
I believe we are indeed screwed! Driving a vehicle daydreaming and thus having an accident suggest s I'm driving and not driving at the same time. Consciousness and subconsciousness breaks the rules of logic.
Quoting Mww
I agree that there are metaphysical truths that are necessary. In consciousness examples would be our sense of wonder, intuition, love, sentience and other various forms of qualia.
In summary, a priori necessary truths are existential in that they just are without meaningful explanation. The dichotomy is unresolved. And that is because, in part, mathematical truths, while they describe the aforesaid physical conditions in the natural world, they cannot explain nature and account for existence ex-nihilo.
The closest we get to a posteriori truth 's in this context, is once again, the synthetic a priori; all events must have a cause.
What is the true nature of consciousness, could mathematcal (or metaphysical) abstracts help us (?).
But, as we agreed, if 'computing' is a metaphor, then what is the real-world analog for 'software', if not ideas? In which case, if you're saying that ideas constitute the primary level of reality, then we're in agreement.
I agree with this, physicality, just as is mentality, is inextricably context relative: the first to the context of perception and the second to the context of ideation, So, to talk about absolute physical or mental substances is to speak incoherently.
Yes indeed. Just as Kantian noumena requires a sense of intuition not belonging to us, so too does map/territory infinite accuracy require a comprehensibility that does not belong to us. Neither can be claimed as manifestly impossible; just impossible for us, because of intrinsic contradictions we can’t find our way around.
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Quoting Janus
Yeah, well, if you do that, you immediately acquiesce to a dualism. If you grant reason is un-mystic, yet allow for its complement, which is the natural condition of the human agency, then you are a dualist. But a dualist is a small kind of pluralist, so maybe you’re ok. But you still can’t be a monist and be human at the same time.
Beware the transcendental illusion!! Don’t let it come up and bite you in the hindquarters!! (Grin)
Ahhh....really? So you intend a falsification of A = A, insofar as some occasions permit A = not-A? I submit that if you’re daydreaming you’re not driving. While you may be behind the wheel, which is merely a relative location, you’re not conditioning the act of driving with the attributes that qualify the act as such. To condition the relative position of behind the wheel with the attribute of daydreaming, you cannot be conditioning the relative position of behind the wheel with the attributes of driving.
What’s that sound??? Oh. That? That’s just Aristotle breathing a heavy sigh of......see? Tolja so. (Grin)
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Quoting 3017amen
I’m not sure this isn’t a hidden rendition of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc, or questionable cause, irrationality. It would have to be the case that metaphysical truths of various demeanor are found in consciousness, when in (theoretical) fact, all that’s to be found in consciousness is the totality of intuitions, which are always given from phenomena alone. Our sense of wonder is conditioned by experience, but wonder itself is a feeling, thus not an empirical predicate, hence not found in consciousness. Rather, it is that which is loved, or is wondered about, or to which is directed our sentience, that occupies our conscious state. We never cognize feelings; we cognize that which causes feelings, and is therefore always antecedent to them.
Same with metaphysical truths, per se: the principles of them may be found in reason a priori, and the possible objects given from those principles may be exemplified by experience, but that is not sufficient in itself to allow truths of any kind to reside in consciousness. Truth is where cognition conforms to its object, and no cognition is possible that is not first a judgement. Therefore, it is the case that truth resides in judgement, and if there is such judgement we are then conscious of that which is cognized as true.
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Quoting 3017amen
All judgements of experience, from which are derived a posteriori truths, are synthetic, yes, but not necessarily a priori. Synthetic a priori judgements, which we understand as principles in propositional form, such as “all events have a cause”, and that ubiquitous 2 + 2 = 4, always involve necessity, which cannot be a ground for empirical conditions, which are governed by the principle of induction.
(If it was necessary that a foundation be the cause of a building to be upright, we cannot explain why earthquakes topple buildings even when the foundation is unaffected. Upon reductive examination, it shall be found that the uprightness of the building is contingent on the forces acting on it, and if the forces are sufficient, and the building falls, necessary causality of the foundation is negated, and anything susceptible to negation cannot be necessary)
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Quoting 3017amen
Why would it have one?
Don’t mind me......I ramble a lot. Sorry.
Meaning.
It takes two informed parties to communicate in code. Both sender and receiver must understand the intended meaning of the symbols (signals) in order to encode and decode (interpret) them. Morse code is a conventional language of symbols that are meaningless in themselves. The audible or visual symbols (signals) are not the Information, but merely physical carriers of metaphysical Information in abstract bits and bytes. Meaning is in the Mind, not in the neurons (correlates of consciousness). Information causes meaning.
Neuroscientists have been able to decode brain signals (quanta) in a manner similar to the British breaking the Enigma code in WWII : by comparing overt behavior with meaningless symbols. Yet they are not tapping into subjective metaphysical consciousness, but only objective physical actions. The British were not reading the minds of the German high command; they were merely comparing code symbols with spying observations, in order to determine which symbols correspond with which ship maneuvers. That's a slow & crude method of communication compared to direct mind-reading. The use of a common language of conventional symbols is a much more effective way to "read" a mind. But it only reveals what the sender wants you to know, and your interpretation of the intent (qualia) could still be wrong.
"The process of encoding converts information from a source into symbols for communication or storage. Decoding is the reverse process, converting code symbols back into a form that the recipient understands,"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code
Correlation does not imply Causation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
In degrees of uncertainty, how much information is in this program?
A dualism between rational thought and feeling? For me rational thought is not mystical in its deliberations and outcomes; they are paragons of determinacy. (Although rational thought may indeed be mystical in its origins; which is merely to say its origins are a mystery).
Also, I see the mystical as consisting in feeling, for the simple reason that the mystical cannot be determined by rational thought.
As to the transcendental (and the Cosmos itself), we can rationally determine our inability to rationally determine its nature, so for us it consists determinately merely in an unknowable "X", and beyond that indeterminately in a mere feeling of numinosity. Of course it is also true that this "mere feeling", along with a whole-hearted acknowledgement of our ignorance, may be profoundly transformative.
So, yes, we should indeed beware the transcendental illusion, that our propensity for reification so easily allows to become manifest in many forms of faux-determinate transcendence.
That depends on how many alternative interpretations are possible. As a computer algorithm, the Gaussian uncertainty is small. Which is appropriate for an artificial system with only two possible values :1s and 0s. But for often ambiguous human language, the Bayesian uncertainty is moderate, depending on the prior knowledge of the person trying to interpret the code. For an Amazonian tribesman, the coded information may be completely meaningless : it could mean anything or nothing. Why do you ask? :smile:
To see if you have a brain of a robot or a child.
No. There are no alternative interpretations. The meaning is defined by the precise, specific, and deterministic semantics of the language those sentences are constructed for. Unlike the meaning in your sentences that is defined only in your hallucinations.
The phrase "gaussian uncertainty" does not and can not exist in computer science. In the context of an algorithm it makes sense as much as "pornographic radiosity" or "gravitational luminosity".
You do not understand words. You're pulling random stuff from the internet to construct vague and ambiguous statements hoping there could be some meaning between the lines in the resulting word salad. What in the world did your brain tell you "gaussian uncertainty" means, can you define?
Mww, precisely! As far as our consciousness is concerned, we are not driving, which is why we have the potential to crash and kill ourselves.
Cognitive science says that our subconscious is driving. Hence, I'm driving and not driving at the same time. Therefore, consciousness is beyond our logical understanding.
Quoting Mww
I'm saying two things: 1. forms of qualia are essentially Kantian innate noumena, that are fixed properties in consciousness a priori. (Or metaphysical phenomena/existential phenomena that just is, and cannot be explained.) They can be described, beyond ineffable phenomena, but their nature can't be explained, particularly in the context of xnihilo.
2: I believe you are essentially saying intellect precedes the (Metaphysical) Will. And I'm saying saying that the Will precedes intellect. In either case both are, insoluble. Yet another hard problem with consciousness.
Quoting Mww
Consciousness would have a nature to its existence. I use the word nature because it's mutually exclusive in our abilities to logicize its existence. The nature of our existence is unknown.
We also do not know what gravity, or magnetic and electric fields really are, why they exist, and how can they do what they do. But we can measure them in the context of spatial geometry and dynamics, and that makes it meaningful to talk about them, those relations actually matter.
But what are you leaving the door open for, something that by definition is not measurable or testable in any way? Why, why even talk about it - is "not-measurable" not the same thing as "not-existent"?
Excellent points on both fronts!
Here's the irony! It goes back to the metaphysical sense of wonderment in our consciousness. It goes back to why you contemplated the mysteries of consciousness in this thread.it goes back to wondering why we do what we do. And perhaps the greatest wonderment of all (aside from love) it goes back to understanding our existence (trying to).
So it's also perfectly fine to wonder why we wonder. And as you suggested, it's more than fine to attempt any measurement of same. How we measure it's important no doubt.
To that end, I also go back to what you said in an earlier thread that there is much value to analogizing existing phenomena and to make appropriate inferences accordingly...
That’s one aspect of duality, yes. Feelings are not cognitions, but cognitions arise from rational thought. Ergo, rational thought and feelings suggest an intrinsic duality, either in form or substance, origin, purpose, or, something else theoretically untenable. But my point was that the human system is complementary, so it stands to reason that sooner or later we’re bound to arrive at the duality of immanent/transcendent, under which we can subsume all complementary pairs in relation to each other. Then we have the total rational dualism as the SOP for humans. There may be some over-arching monism, but it won’t matter to us; we still would have to use our innate dualistic nature to understand it.
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Quoting Janus
Yeah, we do seem to want to objectify our notions, don’t we?
I relate qualia and EM fields in more than one way, three in fact. First is to ask why are we not disturbed by not knowing what EM fields really are, nor why or how they are. Those are exactly the same unknowns we face with qualia, and yet it not only doesn’t bother us, we actually feel we understand a great deal about them, perhaps all that really matters.
Second builds on the first one, so I claim if we discover how to decode all of the brain signals, so we can extract qualia from it to read thoughts and watch dreams, read memories and feelings or inprint new ones, then we would have solved all and every mystery there is about consciousness, still without really knowing what is it, why is it, or how is it even possible, but nevertheless we should feel satisfied by that type of explanatory and predictive knowledge just as we are in the case of magnetic and electric fields.
Because, what else is there to know? If I told you that EM fields are consequences of vortex dynamics of the Aether, what value does that information have when we can describe all the interactions with emergent formulas that work in our size level of complexity just fine. Similarly, what more could you possibly want to know about qualia if we can answer all the practical questions about how to read it, make it, or fake it.
I am saying there might not exist a better answer than the one ultimately describing some causal mechanics of the “mind system”, not because of our inabilities, but due to some objective and absolute epistemological limit where wanting to know more is meaningless like wanting to go more north of the north pole.
OK, fine. If you’re not driving and your subconscious is, then it follows necessarily the dichotomy (I am both driving and not driving) is false, because “I am driving” is contradicted by the “subconscious is driving”, while the “I am not driving” remains true. Otherwise, you and your subconscious must be identical, in the exact same way you and your consciousness are identical, which is quite absurd.
While I grant consciousness is beyond our empirical knowledge, it does not follow from being beyond knowledge that it is also beyond logical understanding. As a matter of fact, if consciousness is considered as merely some metaphysical abstraction, the only possible way to understand it at all, is from logical conditions. And as we all know, all logic needs for certainty, is identity and non-contradiction, consistent with itself. So if a theory speculates an identity and adds in a purpose for good measure, consciousness is no longer beyond our logical understanding, as long as the theory for it holds no contradictions in its construction.
If you want to attribute the impossibility of logical understanding to something, might I suggest you attribute it to the subconscious you used to justify your falsification of the Identity Law? I mean, you can always use the subconscious as a logical premise, insofar as the possible availability of something in juxtaposition to consciousness. But consciousness lends itself to theoretical speculation, whereas the subconscious cannot be the subject of a meaningful theoretical speculation because of the very quality our own rationality demands of it, without opening the door to the bane of all speculation, infinite regress.
Now....science. Do you really give a crap what science says, with respect to driving your car? Tell me the truth....do you flash on a peer reviewed paper when the phone rings and you go through the mental motions of whether or not to pick up? If not, and I certainly hope not, then how can you possibly justify negating a purely rational law (A = A) with a purely empirical doctrine (cognitive neuroscience)?
I get the belated impression that your original post was talking about Computer Consciousness, while most of the discussion here has been about Human Consciousness. That may explain the failure to communicate.
"Gaussian Uncertainty" applies only to non-semantic numerical Information. "Bayesian Uncertainty" is necessary for analyzing semantic verbal Information. If you only communicate with computers in machine language (1s & 0s), uncertainty is at a minimum, but meaning is also minimal : syntax without semantics. But, if you want to communicate with humans in one of the thousands of historically-evolved culture-bound languages, uncertainty is high, yet the potential for transmitting meaning is also high.
Computers talk to other computers in binary (digital) language. And they can interface with programmers in one of the many artificial programming languages. But when they must communicate with ordinary humans, they have to translate from the sterile purity of syntax to the contaminated complexities of semantics. Apparently, you are trained to think in simplistic binary terms, so the ambiguities of confusing multi-value language makes human-speak sound like "greek" to you. :smile:
Human vs Digital Language : https://medium.com/@anaharris/human-languages-vs-programming-languages-c89410f13252
Semantics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics
I can understand why you would think "ultimate or absolute reality" is "ideal" for us as opposed to phenomenal reality which is concrete or physical for us. But the very notion of 'ultimate' or 'absolute' connotes 'in itself'; an existence which is neither concrete nor physical, but which gives rise to the emergent properties of physicality and ideality.
Spinoza already nailed this with his understanding of substance and its attributes and modes. Do we need to reinvent the wheel?
You are confusing computation with communication, neither of which is 'information', but integration and transfer of information. Transfer of information, i.e. communication, is subject to loss of information and only as a consequence of that there is uncertainty on the receiving end, which then has to do with 'interpretation', 'semantics', 'meaning' and 'understanding' of information. Computation in turing machines, on the other hand, is not subject to loss of information, or any kind of uncertainty regarding validity, integrity, or interpretation of the computed information.
Therefore, again, your statement 'information is measured in degrees of uncertainty' is not simply wrong, it is terribly confused and misplaced. It would be slightly less wrong if you said ‘information is measured in degrees of entropy’ since that could be applied not just to communication, but also compression (computation) of information. However, in either case ‘uncertainty’ is only a side effect of interpretation or decompression of information by _another system_, so in the case of algorithmic computation in turing machines entropy and uncertainty have no meaning or application, and yet algorithms contain information. Ok?
Any information may be misunderstood or not understood by something or someone, and cars can go slow and fast. It is pointless observation, except it contradicts your earlier nonsense when you said: “information causes meaning”. Information causes nothing by itself, just like shape of a ball does not cause it to roll down the hill without the hill and the force of gravity.
But one does not know the difference. All the person knows is he or she is in another reality and that's why they crash and kill themselves.
Hence their driving but not driving. Otherwise why would the person want to accidentally kill themselves?
Think of it as a person exercising and getting an endorphin high. They're not aware of the biological and physiological brain states; all they know is they are running feeling good.
And so the person daydreaming is not aware that they're daydreaming otherwise they would avert the accident. ( Some say sleepwalking is the equivalent... during which, are you sleeping or walking or both? )
Is 'just' that, eh? The problem with this is that sticks and stones are demonstrably different to fours and fives. Simply saying that the physical IS forms or ideas or mathematical structures, doesn't say anything meaningful.
The point where this radically diverges is that in Platonism, 'the physical' is distinguishable from the intelligible. The material domain is inherently changeable and separated from the changeless. The hoi polloi are bamboozled by appearances into believing that it has inherent worth, which generally manifests as avarice, attachment to pleasure and status, and all of the other illusory goods which worldly people pursue. Whereas 'the philosopher' ascends by dint of hard intellectual and noetic discipline to understand the source and origin of things not simply their manifestations in the world of form.
So the point which your account is lacking, is any sense of the requirement for the ascent to a higher understanding. That is preserved in science in some sense, but the consequences, in modern science, are instrumental or utilitarian, not qualitative and ethical. In other words, if we only retained the principles of Greek philosophy that were relevant to science and engineering, but jettisoned the spiritual principles that were felt to be even higher in the grand scheme - then you would have the kind of scientific philosophy that we see the effects of today.
Quoting Gnomon
But, the only reason to regard the sub-atomic domain as foundational, is a hangover from philosophical materialism and the quest to resolve everything to 'fundamental particles'. '
Quoting Gnomon
Whoa. Quantum theory as a means of prediction and control is intrinsic to all modern physics and a huge proportion of modern technology. But the interpretation of what it means is intensely contested and controversial. There is no way to claim that there is one accepted, authoritative and mainstream consensus on the meaning of physics.
I've read quite a few popular accounts of this, notably Manjit Kumar's Quantum (excellent), David Lindley's Uncertainty (3 stars) and most recently Adam Becker's What is Real? Hey, note the title! This is the question at issue!
Sean Carroll, a physicist and pop-philosopher (and a poor one, in my opinion) has just published a book assuring us that the multiverse is the ultimate reality. Yet he's also embroiled in a massive stoush with other scientists who think the whole idea is unscientific. I don't expect any of this to be resolved in my lifetime - or ever!
We have to always remember that the basic meaning of philosophy is 'love~wisdom'. We have to find some source of those qualities in our own being and the being of those around us.
Time is an aspect of that structure, so only things that are a part of that structure, or similar structures that also include time, experience change. Only things that are part of the same structure as us are empirically sensible to us. That is the important difference between what is part of this world and separate from it. But that’s just like acknowledging that there’s an important difference between now and other times, or here and other places, or the actual world and other possible worlds: it’s importantly different to us because it’s where we are, but in a more absolute less relative sense they’re all ontologically the same.
All the stuff about ethics and spirituality is besides any of this. This is just descriptive; any prescriptions could be paired with this. Accepting this description of the world doesn’t say anything about what is or isn’t valuable or good or etc.
My point, exactly. There’s the hard problem in a nutshell.
I see the points that you're making in several succinct ways. The how's and why's of existence, as well as explaining and/or describing conscious existence.
1. How do you build a human being with consciousness.
2. Why do human beings have a consciousness that provides for self-awareness.
3. Explain consciousness; is consciousness logically possible.
4. Describe conscious existence.
Arguably I think the best we can do is posit number 4.
This interesting, and I think I understand your point. In the analogy, phenomenal consciousness is like incompatibilism - a coherent and meaningful idea, but not useful or particularly interesting. And compatibilism is like access consciousness - it's actually interesting and useful to be able to talk about the particular capabilities, powers and limitations of the mind in question.
I half agree with you. I'd be interested in your views on overdetermination. I eat because physical events in my brain cause, in law-like ways, my muscles to pick up food, put it in my mouth and chew it and swallow it. And presumably these causal pathways are in principle traceable. But I also eat because I feel hungry. And I wouldn't eat if I didn't have that feeling - the physical story is not the whole story of why I eat. So we have two causes (don't we?), and the question is, what is the relationship between them? There is a problem, because when we speak about machines which we presume are not conscious, an account of the physical processes is taken as sufficient to explain the behaviour of the machine. But in humans it's not enough, and we then have to try and explain why the situation is different in humans. My panpsychist answer is to say that it is not ultimately different. The problem is resolved if we can reduce one explanation to the other. Attempts to reduce will or consciousness to physical explanations have so far failed, but I think the reverse reduction can perhaps be made. Physical explanations refer to laws, causes, forces, all of which are presumed to be insentient. But these are just made up ways to refer to what things just do. To illustrate this, consider a crude analogy. Imagine an alien race of giants who discover humans. However they see only our behaviour and have no idea we are conscious. They design a light switch (admittedly a rather crap design, but bear with me). They put a giant 100m rocker switch like a see-saw on the ground. 20 humans are placed on one end and the whole lever is enclosed in a cage so that the humans can't escape. Now they wait a bit. To operate the switch they put some bags of food at the other end. The hungry humans move to the other end to get to the food, and the switch tips over and is operated. Now we know that the switch depends on phenomenal states to work, because we know what it is like to be a human experiencing hunger. But the giant aliens, who are not like us at all, presume that we do not possess consciousness, because we are very different from them. So Prek the alien giant observes this behaviour very carefully and invents Prek's law, namely that human particles follow a four-hour cycle of attraction to carbohydrate particles which are then absorbed by the humans particles. This is just taken as a fundamental law which 'just is', and it works. It successfully predicts the behaviour of the switch. (Yes, I know it is a really crap switch). We know Prek's law is a made-up law, because it is just a stand-in for the real cause, which is the phenomenal state of hunger. And the panpsychist thought is to simply extrapolate this to everything, so when we look at the behaviour of a system, we are looking at conscious things following their will. And mechanism can emerge from this, and predictable results can be exploited which are not intended or understood by the constituent entities. Any time we appeal to a force in a physical explanation, I suggest we are referring to the phenomenal states of the entities involved. And if we remember that entities are really persistent doings themselves, even the very existence of anything depends on will. This is of course problematic and raises a lot of questions. But it seems to me that reducing physical explanation to will is a much more hopeful project than reducing will to physical explanation. So I am an emergentist after all, but not about consciousness, but about mechanism. If we think 'reduction' is a dirty word then we are the stuck with the problem of the relationship of the mental to the physical. Do you find this at all plausible?
Ok. Driving but not driving is very much an argumentative improvement over driving and not driving.
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Quoting 3017amen
True enough, but one doesn't have to know the difference to know there is one. And it does seem like a different reality, when it is actually quite impossible to show it isn’t just a different perspective on the same reality. If you crash while daydreaming, the car is every bit as damaged as if you’d crashed under purely accidental conditions, through no fault of inattention.
I’ll end this by stating for the record I do not deny daydreaming and the like, done it myself more than a few times, both naturally and .........shall we say, chemically stimulated (gasp)......but I maintain such mental distractions are merely reason without due restraint. Maybe like Janus’ “mystic unreason”. Transcendental philosophy seeks to bound reason so as not to cause confusion within itself, but subconsciously, the rational gloves come off and reason is allowed to think whatever it wants. And I prefer my reason to be under control, thank you very much, so while granting the subconscious its existence, I consciously allot to it no power.
Hey Mww!
Sure but I would just caution against splitting semantic hairs. Driving and not driving, or driving but not driving in our context means the same.
1. Sleepwalking: the person sleep walking has an empaired self- awareness.
2. Daydreamer: the person daydreaming has an empaired self-awareness.
1A. A person speaking with the sleepwalker, concludes that they're both sleeping and walking at the same time.
2B. A person speaking with the daydreamer who survived an accident, concludes that they were simultaneously driving while dreaming they were surfing.
If A and -A holds ( law of non-contradiction/LEM ), one could reasonably conclude that consciousness is logically impossible.
It seems absurd to the layperson. (As a Christian Existentialist, that does not seem so absurd.)
Yeah, that is a common problem. But what about this, and pardon me, everybody, for stealing from another thread:
“When someone shuffles a deck of cards and deals you the first twenty cards, the probability of getting those specific cards is extremely unlikely.”
Is it extremely unlikely?
And intriguing question. And speaking of context, I haven't checked to see where that other thread was located. So without that information I would have to first define the premises.
Assuming a transaction has occurred, or in the law of contracts-promise for a promise, what then was the promise made?
In other words was there a promise to receive a specific amount or type of cards, or was it a promise of chance or randomness (?).
Sorry I couldn't be specific on that one for now...
To answer the question, you don’t the thread. All the context you need is given.
Mmm, let's see in the context of this thread, I would say the natural swarming effect found in Emergence, might suggest that eventually, you will receive "the hand " that is dealt to you.
I very roughly agree with all that.
Hmmmm......So instead of splitting semantic hairs, we have successfully compounded propositional hairs.
Be that as it may, you’ve deduced the correct answer, although you should have been able to deduce the correct answer without invoking swarming or emergence, or anything else, except what was contained in the question itself. Which is where the semantic hair-splitting quibble is to be found, and a perfect example of why sometimes such quibbling is proper dialectical procedure.
Ha! Well your point is very well taken!
And accordingly, I would say it was more based upon inductive reasoning, not really deductive reasoning (inference based on empirical observation of cause and effect, randomness, et al.).
But back to the main point of consciousness. I believe the key distinction here is the fact that the individual experiencing that so-called illogical phenomenon believes that they are in a different reality. They are not aware that they are not aware. How can that be?
Your serve
You may have misunderstood my usage of abstract "ideality" in contrast to concrete "reality". Plato's realm of perfect Ideas or Forms was never meant as a perfect abode for flesh & blood humans. Instead, it would be more suitable for the generalization "humanity", which is merely an abstract idea, a concept, which has no concrete instance. We can go to that ethereal "place" in MInd, but not in Body. :smile:
Ideal :
1. satisfying one's conception of what is perfect; most suitable.
2. existing only in the imagination; desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality.
Ideality :
[i]In Plato’s theory of Forms, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
1. Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of “virtual” particles in a mathematical “field”, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind]
2. Some modern idealists find that scenario to be intriguingly similar to Plato’s notion that ideal Forms can be "realized", i.e. meaning extracted, by knowing minds. For the purposes of this blog, “Ideality” refers to an infinite pool of potential (equivalent to a quantum field), of which physical Reality is a small part. A formal name for that fertile field is G*D.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
Realize : 1.become fully aware of (something) as a fact; understand clearly.
[to form a mental image, not to make a physical thing]
No. I'm using a broader definition of "Information" as both noun and verb. That's the whole point of the Enformationism Thesis. Information is not just 1s and 0s, it's also everything in between. Information is data, Enformation is energy, EnFormAction is both. Probably the best explanation of the development of Information theory, post-Shannon, can be found in the series of books by prominent Physicist & Cosmologist Paul Davies.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=paul+davies+books
The Mind of God is a 1992 non-fiction book by Paul Davies. Subtitled The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, it is a whirlwind tour and explanation of theories, both physical and metaphysical, regarding ultimate causes. Its title comes from a quotation from Stephen Hawking: "If we do discover a theory of everything...it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would truly know the mind of God."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_of_God
I agree. But I was including the current theoretical (immaterial) "foundation" of perceived reality, Quantum Fields, in the sub-atomic domain. I also agree with cognitive researcher Donald Hoffman, that what our senses perceive as real (matter, particles) is not fundamental reality, but symbols representing the underlying "ideality". He illustrates the perception/reality interface as a computer screen displaying symbolic icons instead of the invisible patterns of coded electrons in the CPU and memory. I think you would appreciate his mind-bending (idealistic) take on consciousness.
Vicktor Toth on Quora : But no, quantum fields do not interact with matter. Quantum fields are matter. In a quantum field theory, what we perceive as particles are excitations of the quantum field itself. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/12/20/what-is-a-quantum-field-and-how-does-it-interact-with-matter/#4082644728c4
I disagree. A sub-material field (empty space) has no real stuff to stimulate. The excitations are actually in the visual system of the observer.
Donald Hoffman to Francis Crick : I agree wholeheartedly with you that "seeing is an active, constructive process", that what we see "is a symbolic interpretation of the world", and that "in fact we have no direct knowledge of objects in the world.
Hoffman, The Case Against Reality
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
Normal people would be ashamed to admit they were talking nonsense the whole time, that's what you just said. There is no such definition in English dictionary. Your imaginary language only makes you insane, and it does not answer my point: there is no uncertainty in computer algorithms, do you understand this?
As well it should be, dammit!!!! A guy is dealt twenty cards, the probability of him getting those specific twenty cards is exactly 1!!!! It is absolutely impossible for him to be dealt any other than those specific cards, because those were exactly what he was dealt. Semantic hair-splitting quibble.....those. Attending to that quibble immediately falsifies the original proposition as stated.
Easy-Peasy.
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Quoting 3017amen
Did you miss the part where I reasonably concluded consciousness is not logically impossible?
Within the context of “I am both driving and not driving”, the A and -A both driving does not hold. Either A is driving or -A is driving. There does exist both A and -A, but not in the same place at the same time. Or, not doing the same thing at the same time.
Easier-peasier.
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Quoting 3017amen
Damned if I know. It does seem to be the case, though. I’m never aware of daydreaming as such, until I’m no longer daydreaming. Then I can certainly tell I was, but am not now. What’s even cooler, is you can never tell exactly when the turnover occurred. I can tell I just fell asleep if I come awake soon after, but try as I may, I can never distinguish the point of departure from one state to the other.
Humans...every bit as amazing as they are ignorant.
Ha! I appreciate your sense of humor, dammit!!
Well in your last paragraph I'm glad you mentioned that....I was going to bring that up later; that so-called morphing effect between two realities. It's like radio waves fading in and out from one station to the next as one travels closer to the frequency... . I'll come back to that
The A and -A issue, is occurring in one's mind. And yes I must have missed your argument, I'll go back and look...you may have talked about conscious and sub-conscious distinctions though... . In the meantime, the reason why I am arguing that it's logically impossible ( driving and not driving at the same time) is because also, of the individual's perception of what they are actually doing.
Using the surfing example, all the person knows is they are surfing and not driving. Their awareness is on the Beach surfing. Their awareness, of course, is not driving.
And that leads us back to the fact that they are not aware that they are not aware. So how else should we put that phenomenon in words? How do we describe the fact that the person was driving but yet not really driving at all because they crashed and killed themselves? They thought they were on the beach.
Similarly, how about the sleepwalker who was sleeping and walking at the same time?
Seems to me one would have to drop the law of excluded middle since in order to describe the conciousness phenom correctly, you would say that he's in the middle somewhere doing two things at once. Kind of like the radio frequencies playing two songs at once.
Or kind of like propositions of self-reference. For example: This statement is false. It's both true and false at the same time; an unresolved paradox. Because if the statement is true, then it is false And if it is false, then it is true.
The other component we did not talk about yet is volition. The sleepwalker seemingly has no control over anything whereas the driver, what control did they have? For example initially, the driver chose to drive, but at some point during the act of daydreaming likewise they have no control over anything. Is that not logically impossible?
My question remains; how can consciousness be logically possible (?).
Consciousness is the primary and perhaps the only fact. So the question really goes the other way around: how or why is logic possible at all? And what you are actually asking is: why is there something rather than nothing?
Is your question different than: how can magnetic and electric fields be logically possible? Or, how can Periodic table of elements be logically possible? Or, how can water and liquidity be logically possible? Self-replicating molecules, living cells, organisms, life… how can anything be logically possible?
We accept all of it as a brute fact. Even for things like atoms where we can fully describe the mechanics of their properties, we still do not know how any of it is possible, why does it do what we see it does, or what “it” really is.
So, why not see the consciousness in the same light, as a brute fact, just as something that came along with all the rest, and just as mysterious, but not any more mysterious than the rest when the rest is already mysterious to infinity and beyond.
Whoa, hold on there, mon ami. I’m arguing the logical impossibility angle. You started this free-for-all by claiming....and I quote...”I am both driving and not driving”. I wouldn’t even be here if not for that Aristotelian faux pas, which I am duty-bound to quibble over.
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Quoting 3017amen
Yep. It is logic in pure form only. The A means the form is without content, or, means that any content in general replacing A, that accords with the pure form, is going to be logically correct. It is an analytic proposition a priori, tautologically, therefore necessarily, true.
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Quoting 3017amen
I done already told ya. At least, from how I think about it. I guess, according to you, it isn’t logically possible at all. In the immortal words of Stephen Stills....nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
I guess I'm not normal, and have no shame, or perhaps I'm just unconventional. But, I have good company. Most of the leading philosophers have been noted, not for using dictionary meanings for old words, but for creating new meanings and new words. This innovation often makes their writings difficult to understand until someone produces a glossary of their technical vocabulary to supplement the common words in Webster's.
For example, have you ever tried to read A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality? A century later, you will find "actual occasions of experience', "concresence", and "prehension" in philosophical dictionaries, along with his personal definition of, Creativity : "The fact that endlessly the past is blended with the possible in order to make new units of reality". Does his creative language make him "insane", or merely "imaginative"?
In my previous post, I noted that the whole point of Shannon's Information Theory and its application to computers is precisely because it minimizes uncertainty. But what does that have to do with human consciousness? Do you understand the difference? Materialists assume that computers can eventually emulate human consciousness. But some very smart people say "not so". Yet for both sides, it's an opinion, because computer consciousness (not intelligence) has never been demonstrated. So, you can have your opinion, and I can have mine, without resorting to insulting each other's intelligence. :smile:
Whiteheadian Terminology : http://ppquimby.com/alan/termin.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
Computer Consciousness : http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanComputerConsciousness.pdf
You are a baby robot, if you're lucky, otherwise you're logic unit is beyond repair. You're using English words, but not speaking English language. It's called gibberish.
Almost every word is wrong in that sentence. There is no such thing as "Shannon's Information Theory”. There is information entropy in Shannon's theory of communication. It's not applicable to computation, but communication. It does not minimize uncertainty, it defines information as a set of possible messages sent over a noisy channel and defines uncertainty in the context of communication channel capacity.
This is how huge your confusion is, like the difference between these two diagrams. One is transfer and communication, the other is algorithm and computation. But to keep insisting on your errors despite all the explanations given and with the internet and English dictionary one click away, that's not just stupid, it's so idiotic it deserves prison punishmet. Go away child robot, shoo, shooo!
But I think there's a connection between the 'fact-value' distinction, and the 'hard problem', as follows.
The fact-value dichotomy grew out of Hume's observation of 'is and ought'. I won't repeat the famous passage, I assume you're familiar with it. But it is at least an analogy for the larger issue of quantification and measurement, on the one hand, and the importance and role of 'qualia', on the other. 'Qualia' means precisely 'a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person.' And the hard problem is that 'what it is to be experienced' cannot be objectively or quantifiably described. So the hard problem is actually central to the fact-value distinction.
So, I brought up the fact that in Platonist philosophy, mathematics was important but not of the highest importance. That was accorded to the knowledge of the good, and so on. Whereas, as you say, *anything* can be described in terms of geometric algebra and equations. But the whole point of the hard problem is that, even though such a description appears to be comprehensive, there's something fundamental it doesn't include or describe. And I don't know if you're seeing that.
I understand the connection you see between the two now though so thanks for explaining that.
Obviously, we are not talking "in the same way" about our conscious perception of Reality. Philosophers often distinguish between Phenomenal Reality (perception, appearances, maya) and Ultimate Reality (the source of the Information that we interpret as the real world).
I defined "ultimate or absolute reality" in Platonic terms as "Ideality", which consists of metaphysical Ideas (Forms) instead of physical objects (things). Now, what were you talking about, in your reference to "phenomenal reality' versus "ultimate reality", and "concrete or physical" versus "ideal for us"?
Reality versus Ideality : https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
Ouch!! The entropy between sender and receiver is astronomically high. There must be a short somewhere producing stupid static. :groan:
Yes, and I am saying that defining ultimate reality as either ideality or physicality is to reify notions that derive from our understandings of phenomenality. We cannot think the absolute except apophatically as "neti, neti", or "not this, not this". It is really thought only as a (real) limit to thought and nothing more. So in saying that it is ideal in itself (as opposed to for us) you are succumbing to Kant's "transcendental illusion".
On the other hand, where I diverge from Kant is in saying that the in itself should be thought as being real, insofar as it it is not thought to depend on our thinking at all. Of course the in itself is ideal for us, but we should, in acknowledging that the "map is not the territory", that our models are not reality (but merely a small part of it), think that the in itself in itself is real, whatever it may be. The alternative is to say that whatever we say about it is simply incoherent.
In short, any form of Platonism is a positive reification.
I agree, but there is also a little bit of humor in there.
That may well be, but a lot of smart people, including pragmatic scientists, not noted for fanciful thinking, argue that Materialism might also be a form of reification. Cognitive researcher Don Hoffman has concluded, after many years of trying to explain Consciousness, that : "our senses are simply a window on this objective reality. Our senses do not, we assume, show us the whole truth of objective reality".
For me, his experiments, arguments and illustrations are compelling. And his alternative to Objective Realism is essentially a 21st century form of Idealism. But of course, it is outside the materialist mainstream, epitomized by Daniel Dennett. Here's a brief synopsis of his recent book.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality : https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
YouTube Video of Hoffman TED Talk : https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY
Yeah! It's just philosophical locker room talk. :nerd:
Quoting Pfhorrest
That description is suggestive of Descartes' notion of 'the new science' which was created on the basis of his discovery of algebraic geometry. It's basic to modern scientific method - that any subject matter can be understood through this kind of universal mathematical analysis. But it omits something of fundamental importance - and that's what the 'hard problem' is seeking to articulate.
This was also anticipated in Thomas Nagel's essay What is it like to be a Bat and this theme is central to many of his later writings.
Chalmer's main antagonist, Daniel Dennett, cannot acknowledge that there is a 'hard problem'. And why not? Well, to me it seems obvious, but Dennett has been writing and publishing for 50 years and is a tenured academic, so it's plainly not obvious to everyone.
There's a stock quote, however, which is relevant to just this issue:
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.
This too is a facet of the hard problem of consciousness, in my opinion.
I'm sure that was his intention. And he doesn't have much to say about Platonism. In his chapter "Illusory" though, he says, "In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners in the cave see flickering shadows cast by objects, but not the objects themselves." But in Hoffman's 21st century update, the cave is replaced by a computer screen, and the shadows by pixelated icons. In both cases, the actual objects (shadow-casters; computer processes) are hidden behind the Wizard's curtain. Presumably, modern cell-phone addicts are the "prisoners".
His latest book was published in 2019, so maybe his argument has been refined in the last two years.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/dp/0393254690
Just to clarify, I think consciousness is form of integrated unified experience. I think experience is universal. Mind (a less unified and integrated form of experience) is widespread in nature and “consciousness” is a fairly rare form of mind and experience. I thus fall into the category of panexperientialism or a form of Whiteheadian process philosophy which some classify as a variety of panpsychism.
I think the “problem of consciousness” is a philosophical problem not a scientific problem. The problem arises precisely because we think we should be able to detect and explain “consciousness” using the scientific method. This stems from the dominant materialistic, mechanistic view of nature. In the materialist mechanistic view most of nature is inert, unfeeling, non experiential and psychically inert. From this point of view experience, mind, consciousness, qualia are rare in nature and confined to humans and at most a few higher animals. In the materialist view our scientific, empirical descriptions are complete and accurate descriptions of all aspects of the phenomena which they seek to describe and explain. This strikes me as false for even the most basic of scientific phenomena such as quantum events, entanglement, non locality, and superposition. There are aspects to even these most basic natural phenomena which elude us.
Thus I do not think any purely empirical, mathematical or scientific explanation which is entirely complete and absolute for experience, mind, consciousness or qualia is possible.
This is not a position against the continuing advances of neuroscience, This is not a position against the utility of science in gaining useful and meaningful knowledge of reality. It is a position against the position that science will completely and satisfactorily explain all of nature including our experience.
Now from my philosophical position (process philosophy and panexperientialism), mind and consciousness is not something unexpected for it has not “popped into existence” from inert mindless non experiential matter, for that would truly be a miracle. Instead “occasions of experience” are the fundamental units of nature and we should not talk of “particles” but of “events”
As for Descartes, it was the splitting of nature into two distinct but separate substances (dualism) that began the whole mind body problem (which gives rise to the hard problem of consciousness) in the first place. We are part of nature, our experience is part of nature. We cannot, we should not attempt to explain it away as a purely physical materialist empirical phenomena. Whitehead argues strongly against this “artificial bifurcation of nature” into “nature of awareness and nature as the cause of awareness” the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of chairs and the feel of velvet” these are all part of nature, of reality “ you cannot pick and choose and call quarks real and consciousness an illusion.
). For James, experience is the sole criterion of reality; we live in “a world of pure experience.
:up: :clap: :100:
I don’t think there’s necessarily anything nonphysical about that though. See for example Galen Strawson’s “realistic physicalist” panpsychism, and my own essay On Ontology, Being, and the Object of Reality wherein I equate these Whiteheadian occasions of experience to the fundamental particles of quantum physics themselves.
Whitehead used the term "occasions of experience" as the fundamental units of nature and thus occasions were temporal and had prehensions of the past and of future possibilities. None of these aspects of "occasions of experience" were purely physical or could be explained in purely physical, empirical, mathematical and measurable terms. There are efforts to minimize these aspects of his philosophy by some but reading Whiteheads Concepts of Nature and other works should dispel any notion that he adhered to an entirely materialist, deterministic, physicalist view of nature. On the other hand he thought science was fundamental to philosophy and felt his process philosophy entirely compatible with the "science" of the day assuming one does not equate science with mechanistic determinism.
I neither claimed nor implied anything about "appearances" in relation to "phenomenal consciousness"; I used the concept of embodied cognition to point out that a 'p-zombie' with the same embodied cognition as a human being necessarily has the same phenomenal consciousness as a human being that's the (reflexive) output of human embodied cognitive processes I'm unaware of any explanation to the contrary (re: p-zombie sans phenomenal consciousness), and in all likelihood there isn't one; thus, I don't think the 'p-zombie' construct is conceptually coherent enough to do the thought-experimental work as advertised, namely to reify the illusion of mind-body duality (pace Spinoza et al) viz. qualia, etc aka "the hard problem of ..."
I'm reading a book now that attempts to pinpoint when in the evolutionary story phenomenal consciousness appeared in animals. In the introduction, the author talks about Chalmers in order to clarify what the topic of the book is: that it's about experience as opposed to functionality. The fact that this has to be explained is a testament to our legacy of mind-body dualism.
If you get that distinction: function vs accompanying experience, then you don't need the P-zombie as a philosophical tool. You're seeing the difference. As for whether its possible, it's at least metaphysically possible, which just amounts to being able to imagine the p-zombie.
Or are you saying you can't imagine the p-zombie at all?
So whilst I agree that 'other minds' exist, I don't agree that they exist independently of my aesthetic judgements of them. For sure, I cannot predict what a person might say and do next, and my predictions concerning that person's behaviour constitutes part of my definition of their mind (or lackof). But their actual behaviour and functionality are not my sole definitional criteria regarding my concept of their mind, for my own feelings and intuitions are very much also a part of my concept of 'other minds'. Hence I cannot be skeptical about the existence of other minds in the sense of truth-by-correspondence, for other minds are partly made true by my construction.
Similarly, suppose that society is divided as to whether tomorrows robots possess consciousness. In my opinion, there is no mind-independent 'matter of fact' as to whether or not robots possess consciousness. Personally, if I feel that a robot is conscious then it is conscious. Any so-called 'objective' definition of robot consciousness will be defined, ultimately, in terms of the social consensus, which one might agree with or might not. I wouldn't regard any such dispute over the existence of robot consciousness to be a dispute over facts 'in themselves' - except for the parts of the dispute that have behavioural implications.
Sure, I'm totally on-board with the mystery associated with conscious existence. Some of the
takeaway's that I'm seeing, as you just suggested is, logical necessity. And then combine that with consciousness being able to break the rules of non-contradiction, then you get logical impossibility.
Conscious existence: Both logically necessary and logically impossible. It is logically necessary for any thought to occur at all; it's logically impossible when we experience it (sensory experience/bivalence-vagueness/physical paradox/phenomenology).
If that's true, what are the implications I wonder...
Ha! Throw-in a little 'ineffable' cognitive science from Maslow: "What you are not, you cannot perceive to understand; it cannot communicate itself to you."
Existential Phenomenology.
There are limits to what language can describe.
We should explore what those limits might be but philosophy, reason and even logic tell us there are limits. Godels incompleteness and Kants noumena. Consciousness may lie in the boundries.
Granted, but still raises the question.....why would we care about what we are not?
Existential Phenomenology: what academics do now, because Kant didn’t bother then. Not that there’s anything wrong with that......
Hey Mww, that's an important question. We are hard-wired to care-by default-when doing philosophy. We know that the many philosophical inquiries involving declarative statements (or Kantian propositions and judgements) about our existence involve experience. And in phenomenology, if I experience something that you don't, how then do I know it exists (or vise versa)?
Said another way, how does one know if that experience exists if one doesn't experience it himself? One obvious answer is the objective/subjective truth dichotomy. But all that tells us is that there are different ways of knowing something. It doesn't explain the experience. I think it is another problem of consciousness.
For example, a musician doesn't know what it's like to be a Doctor. And even if he becomes a Doctor, he still cannot experience everything any other Doctor experiences. And the opposite is true in this sense: if a musician claims they had an ineffable experience, who would believe them?
Or, even say, if the layperson hears voices in a pre-dream state (pre-lucid state) that tells him/her to do something extra-ordinary, what should they do; who should they consult to verify its truth value? Anyway, the lists (phenomena) are endless...
I'm thinking you kinda' already know that stuff :)
As if there is something else besides science that can explain anything? Science itself doesn't really explain anything either, it only describes the dynamics of the stuff it can measure. But if your conclusions are not based on repeatable measurements, then you can not only not describe anything, you have no reason to believe the thing you're trying to explain even exist in any actual or meaningful way so its existence actually matters.
This sounds similar to my own worldview, except for some of the outdated terminology. "Experience" and "Consciousness" and "Panpsychism" are terms that are normally defined from the human perspective. So I have substituted the less anthro-morphic term "Information" as a reference to the fundamental element of the universe --- by contrast to "occasions of experience". Hence, "Information" is universal in Nature, but "Consciousness" is a limited and late-emerging phenomenon of evolution.
Panpsychism is often criticized for implying that atoms are aware of their environment in the same manner that humans are. But human Consciousness necessarily includes Self-consciousness. Ironically, some physicists are guilty of suggesting that sub-atomic particles are self-aware, when they say metaphorically that a particle "feels" the weak or strong forces. That's OK, as long as the term is not taken literally. But such literalism is why some New Agers assume that non-biological crystals have a sort of spooky Mind power, or that they can communicate with the universe as a whole.
So, just to be clear, I call my version of Panpsychism "Enformationism", which asserts that both rocks and rabbits are composed of bits of Information, but only the rodents are somewhat self-aware.
Integrated Information Theory : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
Criticism of IIT : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/
So you’re asking:
.......how I would know the thing of your experience exists......
(By experiencing that thing myself, which makes no promise on agreement as to what the thing is, except that there is a thing)
........or are you asking how do you know the thing of your experience exits.....
(From the experience itself. It is impossible to experience that which does not exist.)
.....or are you asking how do you know experience exists?
(The existence of experience is a nonsensical notion. Experience is the termination of a particular rational process, and not an existence qua existence. Existence is a category of modality by which all sense objects are conditioned, which make experience possible.)
......or are you asking how does one know someone else’s experience exists without the one having the same experience as the someone else?
(Wouldn’t matter; false dichotomy. I can’t ever know anyone’s experiences. The very best I can do is judge it impossible he had no experience whatsoever, given the same set of empirical circumstances for the both of us.
There’s no profit in thinking experience is something that exists. Existence is a condition only of sensible objects, and experience is very far from a sensible object.
Surely experience exist in a sense you are either conscious or not. And so do unicorns exist as much as thoughts exist, not actually as material objects, but virtually as mental objects. But, does Pacman exist, where and how?
Anyway, I don't see what does that have to do with anything. Can you summarize what argument you are having and what is the point you're making?
The definition of ontology -
'The compound word ontology ("study of being") combines onto- (Gr. ??, on, gen. ?????, ontos, "being; that which is") and -logia (Gr. -?????, "logical discourse"), where 'on' is the present tense participle of the verb ????, eimí, i.e. "to be, I am".
So 'ontology' is the 'study of the nature of being' - which has a different meaning to 'the study of what exists', although it's a hard distinction to draw.
I’m assuming the comment I was responding to implied that experience has some kind of existence. In the proposition, the logical judgement, “experience is something that exits”, experience is the subject, exists is the predicate. The argument countering that implication is grounded on the premise that....no matter how I cognize a thing, even to the completion of it so that my cognition represents the thing exactly as it is, in this case experience, I add nothing whatsoever to it, by stipulating “existence” to be the concept contained in the predicate.
Just by cognizing experience as subject in the first place presupposes its possibility, to which my conceptions describing it, belong. Otherwise....how could I be cognizing that thing? That in itself is sufficient reason to claim there is no profit in granting “existence” as a predicate in a logical judgement. It’s the same argument for the conceptions “necessity”, “possibility”, and any other pure a priori conception; none of them add anything to the subject.
“Experience is something that is possible”. “Experience is something that is necessary”. Big whoop, right? Tautological truths, but affording no information whatsoever for supplementing my understanding of experience in and of itself, which, when it comes right down to it, has no business being thought of as a thing anyway.
Quoting Zelebg
And the point is: Nope, no way...not on even a good day in hell...can a category be used to underwrite a cognition not originated in sensibility. We can think whatever we want about “experience”; we just don’t gain anything by saying it exists. Furthermore, given that ontology is the doctrine by which existence is studied, and existence is not a necessary condition for experience....what does that say about ontology itself, with respect to the human rational system, which is the sole determinant factor for what experience is?
Look at what it says under 'etymology', footnote 2. I'm not picking nits, this is important to the term. It's the contemplation of 'the nature of being' with first-person connotations that are generally bracketed out of scientific analysis of what exists.
Unfortunately, defining "experience" and "existence" has been a subject of debate in philosophy for millennia. Scientists typically try to limit experience to Empirical or A Posteriori Knowledge gained from sensory impressions. But Philosophers and Theologians often include Theoretical or A Priori (tautological) knowledge in their discussions of Consciousness. So, whether there is profit in talking about the ontological "existence" of Experience may depend on your worldview : Materialism or Idealism. Is unproven, but reasonable, Theoretical knowledge a form of non-sensory Experience? Some call Reason the sixth sense.
The confounding problem here is that human beings are capable of acting as-if concepts that exist only in the mind (e.g. fictional characters) are real. Apparently, posters in chat rooms for Game of Thrones or Lord of the Ring seem to gain some profit from imaginary beings. That's not to mention all the various gods of world religions that are treated as-if real in some sense. So, apparently there is Material "profit" and Ideal "profit". If we were discussing a material object here, your assertion would be accurate. But Consciousness is not that kind of thing. :wink:
Where it says “on” means “to be”, or “I am”? Yeah, the Greek first-person form of “to be” is the same as its infinitive, unlike English. That doesn’t mean that ontology is about being in the first person, which is somehow different from existing (which can also be in the first person: “I exist”). I’m going to need to see something more substantial than that to suggest that being and existence are somehow profoundly different philosophical concepts. So far this just sound like those people who make a big deal about the difference between unalienable rights and inalienable rights.
For some strange reason instead of consciousness we are discussing the meaning of the words in English dictionary. It’s like everyone has their own dictionary and then the argument goes: “my English dictionary is better than yours”.
More importantly you need to explain what do you assume the word “existence” means by specifying your definition and applying it to some examples like these:
Do words exist?
Do algorithms exist?
Does Mickey Mouse exist?
Do thoughts and ideas exist?
You seem to be making pointless and self contradicting distinction I already addressed. Surely experience exist in a sense a person is either conscious or not. And so do unicorns exist as much as ideas exist, not actually as material objects, but virtually as mental objects.
Like what, what do you gain by saying clouds or crocodiles exist?
Existence of experience is what defines the difference between conscious and unconscious human being, the difference between a robot and sentient machine, and between just a plant, or just an animal and sentient beings.
Clearly we gain the definition of sentience as "subjective experience" and the ability to not contradict ourselves when talking about abstract objects by acknowledging both modes of existence: mental and material, i.e. virtual and actual.
Perhaps you wish to claim experience does not exist and we are all just robots simply programmed to go around claiming to be experiencing sensations, emotions and cognition, while in fact it's not even an illusion, but a lie. That is the position your statement amounts to.
We need the basics, like “self-replicating molecule” did for our understanding of the word “living”. But first of all it must be explored what kinds of answers are we ready to accept, what kind of answers do we even expect and whether those expectations are, well, not just realistic, but whether they are even meaningful to begin with.
It seems to me that some people want to go more north of the north pole, they want to know things about consciousness without really knowing what it is they want to know, and that kind of curiosity is impossible to satisfy.
You: Existence of experience is what defines the difference between conscious and unconscious human
Me: Experience is what defines the difference between conscious and unconscious human
(Sigh)
More importantly you need to explain what do you assume the word “existence” means by specifying your definition and applying it to some examples like these:
Do words exist?
Do algorithms exist?
Does Mickey Mouse exist?
Do thoughts and ideas exist?
What are you trying to say, what is the point of all this? Your statement is incomplete and thus meaningles unless interpreted in a generous way.
It's not simply 'experience' that defines the difference between conscious and unconscious human, the experience can be present or not, in other words experience can exist or not in a living human being at some point in time. Why am I stating the obvious and why is this not obvious to you?!?
Good point, although I would add that a priori knowledge is not necessarily tautological. That is, synthetic judgements afford knowledge a priori, but are not tautologies, re: mathematics.
——————-
Quoting Gnomon
Hmmmm.....I’d suggest the confounding problem is humans treat acts of the mind that are real as actually existing. Thoughts, ideas, intuitions, concepts are real, but only to the mind, and not to sensibility. And real to the mind only as hypotheticals in a speculative theoretical epistemology. Sensibility is impossible without objects that impress it, and thought is impossible without objects that impress it, but the impressions are different, so the reality of the objects absolutely must be different.
One man’s semantic quibble is another man’s logical consistency, n’est ce pas?
Oh fercrissakes, no I do not. I don’t give a crap how existence should be defined, in order to show the concept “existence” as it is already defined, or at least understood, adds nothing to the conception “experience”, in a synthetic a priori logical judgement.
This represents a long-standing principle of basic epistemological metaphysics, at least since Aristotle.
And as my ol’ buddy Forest said......and that’s all I have to say about that.
….thanks Mww, those were all good answers to my questions!
Since I see you're a movie buff, I suppose one central issue is:
Do you believe we were relegated to an incidental and seemingly pointless role in an indifferent cosmic drama, like unscripted extras that have accidentally stumbled onto a vast movie set? Or do you see science suggesting that the existence of conscious organisms is a fundamental feature of the universe?
Another robot, what the... ?!
I’ll go with the former, indifferent cosmic drama. Nice wordsmithing, by the way. I guess I should say I don’t consider myself anything all that special, especially on a cosmic scale. Doesn’t matter that there’s only one of me when there are 7B pretty much just like me right now, and several billion in total.
Besides.....we’re not doing anything Nature hasn’t allowed us to do.
Science is correct enough, in saying, given the right conditions, objects like us would be inevitable. But the infinitesimal minutia of those necessary conditions is unfathomable, so given all that, how could we NOT be here. So saying we’re inevitable doesn’t say much.
Be really cool, though, to get to a similar eco-system, evolved from a similar set of conditions.....and see no evidence of life at all. In which case, I guess we would indeed be special. Slightly less cool would be a similar eco-system evolved under similar conditions and find an entirely different kind of life. Then we go back to being not so special.
I’m simply asking you to explain what you mean before I can say you’re speaking gibberish and have no idea what you are talking about.
Your ability to understand words and speak English is under suspicion when you keep avoiding to address any of the points directly or answer a simple question like this: Do algorithms exist? Does Mickey Mouse exist?
Looks more like it represents some misunderstanding of yours. But let us suppose what you are trying to say is not gibberish and actually makes some sense, in some context at least. What is the point, how is it important, why did you say it, what does it have to do with anything?
So, if you are thinking consciousness evolved from mindless, purposeless forces; how did self-awareness evolve from the universe?
Oh, maaannn.....this isn’t the ol’ “we’re all stardust” argument, is it? Say it isn’t so, Mr. Bill!!!
Nahhhh....I wouldn’t go so far as to say consciousness evolved from mindless, purposeless forces. Consciousness evolved because we are capable of thinking it. If one wishes to say that because we are comprised of physical constituents, then everything about us has to do with those constituents, including our capacity for thought, then he wouldn’t be wrong as much as his explanations for it would be insufficient. And it is only insufficient because our knowledge is limited.
We think we possess consciousness and we deem ourselves self-aware because we haven’t figured out any other way to explain how it appears that way. We are only allowed to theorize our own internal condition because science can’t yet prove otherwise. And if it should be the case science is incapable of proving the complete physicality of our rational system, then our proper theories with respect to them are at least legitimate, without claiming to be true.
The same way the periodic table of elements evolved from the universe. It's one of the many possibilities that can be built with LEGO bricks of the universe. Except these LEGOs also assemble themselves, so the best is to ask the bricks.
If matter makes the clay that makes the bricks, what consiousness made the matter?
(Or maybe the easier question is how did matter make consciousness?)
Complex-adaptive systems routinely self-organize into stable states that are nevertheless far from equilibrium and exhibit interesting new features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
Thanks ...but I must have missed something, it doesn't explain how consciousness came from matter ?
Because it is a fundamental property of systems across every domain to self-organize and exhibit new properties.
That's why I make a pragmatic distinction between Reality (sensory) and Ideality (mental).
Unfortunately for the Realists, what we take for real objects is actually ideas in the mind that serve as symbols referring to a hidden "ultimate reality". That's the conclusion of Donald Hoffman, which he explains in an analogy between the Mind and a computer screen. What we interact with on our computer display is Icons, that are merely intermediate symbols of the "hidden" physical and mathematical functions inside.
We accept the simple abstract pixelated icon as-if it is the complex concrete mechanism inside the black box computer. And that acceptance is a useful belief for our non-technical purposes. What we see is 2D pixels, constructed by 4D computer processes, to represent some aspect of reality outside the box. Hence, Hoffman asserts : "we see the theories we believe". You and I act as-if our senses are reporting reality, when actually all they see is the symbols. In other words, we see reality in the form of as-if ideas, not as-is matter & energy.
Donald Hoffman TED talk : https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY
The Case Against Reality : https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/
Is that like Schopenhauer's Metaphysical Will in all of nature?
I see some logic in that, insofar as we do not mentally operate in the same terms we prescribe to our composite elements as the means for them to physically operate. I suppose science will eventually describe our mental machinations in terms of C, N/m/s, or other physical designator, but I refuse to relinquish my humanity for it. But....I’m too old already, so....good luck to the rest of ya!!! (Grin)
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Quoting Gnomon
As well we all should. Neither is complete in itself.
I suspect that the confusion comes from using the word "consciousness" as-if it's an object or substance. Instead, Consciousness is a process of transformation (awareness) from objects to meanings.
As suggested by Zelebg, consciousness is in the "bricks", the basic components of material reality. But only in the metaphorical sense of using a single step in place of a whole process. As I like to describe that process, everything in the world begins as a form of Information : the clay that composes the bricks, from which our reality is constructed. Eventually, the human mind interprets (consciousness) the coded information (matter) that our senses detect into the kind of decoded information that is meaningful for us (knowledge). For example, dots & dashes of Morse code are physical carriers of information that are meaningless, until interpreted. Information is in the code; the bricks are bits & bytes; Consciousness is the interpretation.
The process of converting being to knowing : 1. Information (potential) is the cause of change (difference). 2. Information (energy) is enformed into matter (bricks), 3. which are constructed into objects (house), 4. which can then be deconstructed into meaning (consciousness). Meaning is not the house itself, but the significance (what difference it makes) of the object to the observer. So what began as impersonal Information, eventually becomes transformed into personal value.
Now, that should be clear as Mississippi mud. :cool:
Synecdoche : a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa
Well, I suppose one could interpret that as a form of Metaphysical Will in nature. Perhaps much like the swarming effect from emergent properties. The ant colonies, the birds, and other biological creatures (lower life forms) know a priori viz a genetic code where to go and what to do to sustain their existence, as well as plant life, etc. etc...
Unfortunately, it still leaves us with the all of the existential questions about the nature of such existence; the why's of higher consciousness, the metaphysical features of consciousness itself, so on and so forth.....
Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean panpsychism. It's also compatible with emergentism and even dualism in some way. I'm not sure if it even excludes any theory at all, so it doesn't mean much as an explanation.
[i]In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God . . .
The Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us.[/i]
There is no reason to call mental reality "ideality". English dictionary already suggests pretty meaningful distinction: actual/material/real vs virtual/mental/abstract.
Sure from an ethical standpoint ( how to live a purposeful happy life ) volitional existence would provide for some answers. Meaning the partially blank canvas we inherit from childbirth can be filled with much knowledge and experience as we navigate through life.
And as pointed out, the how's of conscious existence can be inferred from the various emergent property metaphors (including the esoteric's of a Metaphysical Will as a driving force). But the why's of self-awareness I think, presents an even more nebulous type of challenge in that there is less information to extrapolate from.
We do have limited resolution due to biological size scale structure of the sensory input. We also do not perceive directly even these low resolution signals due to subsequent signal processing, but only some form of composition bundled together with predictions or expectations based on earlier input, memory and the current state of mind.
However, none of it means outside reality is not what we perceive it is, only means our perception is blurred, both spatially and temporally. But if you could sense every tiny vibration, or quality of each atom in every molecule, and see all of the electro-magnetic spectrum, then perhaps you would be staring into the pure chaos and things would only make less, not more sense. So limits are not necessarily a bad thing, they can help put things into a context or bring them under a certain perspective.
We have microscopes and telescopes to artificially increase our resolution, and what we see on macro and micro scale is structurally/geometrically consistent with what we perceive through our biological resolution, more or less. This gives us confidence that reality is objectively real and indeed like what we think it is, as much as it matters to us at least. Therefore, any other proposition about reality can hardly be any less speculative than that.
Yes. In my thesis, I refer to the "force" or "intention" behind progressive evolution as EnFormAction, which is similar in effect to the various notions of World Will, proposed by philosophers, and of God's Will as proposed by theologians.
Quoting 3017amen
We may be getting closer to answering some of those existential puzzlers. But the answers will typically be in the form of metaphors based on our incomplete perceptions of reality. I'm currently reading Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman's book, The Case Against Reality. It proposes an evolutionary explanation for the emergence of Consciousness, and concludes that we perceive just enough of ultimate reality (symbolic objects) to negotiate the exigencies of the world (survival). That's because ultimate reality is more like Quantum than Classical physics, and would make survival decisions too complex & ambiguous for creatures with limited intelligence. [that's my brief summary of Hoffman's much deeper and broader analysis]
What is EnFormAction? : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
I agree. That's why my thesis proposes a Programmer / Enformer / Creator outside of space-time. Panpsychism explains the intelligible order in the universe as an intrinsic (uncaused) property of space-time. But the actual First Cause of organization in the world must exist beyond the perceptual boundaries of space-time.
Einstein upset our intuitive understanding of space-time by saying that it is not absolute, but relative to the observer. Donald Hoffman refers to space-time as our "interface" (computer screen) between observer and ultimate reality : "we will find that the distinction we make . . . is an artifact of limitations of our space-time interface, not an insight into the nature of reality".
Donald Hoffman : The Case Against Reality, Why Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes
I had my own reasons for coining the neologism "Ideality". Partly to serve as a contrast to the noun "Reality". And partly to make a distinction between belief in Realism versus Idealism. It also entails a distinction between Physics (actual/material/real) and Metaphysics (virtual/mental/abstract).
Ideality :
[i]In Plato’s theory of Forms, he argues that non-physical forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate or perfect reality. Those Forms are not physical things, but merely definitions or recipes of possible things. What we call Reality consists of a few actualized potentials drawn from a realm of infinite possibilities.
1. Materialists deny the existence of such immaterial ideals, but recent developments in Quantum theory have forced them to accept the concept of “virtual” particles in a mathematical “field”, that are not real, but only potential, until their unreal state is collapsed into reality by a measurement or observation. To measure is to extract meaning into a mind. [Measure, from L. Mensura, to know; from mens-, mind]
2. Some modern idealists find that scenario to be intriguingly similar to Plato’s notion that ideal Forms can be realized, i.e. meaning extracted, by knowing minds. For the purposes of this blog, “Ideality” refers to an infinite pool of potential (equivalent to a quantum field), of which physical Reality is a small part.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html
That's exactly why Evolution, according to Hoffman, has hid the "chaos" of ultimate reality from the eyes of humans with limited intelligence. That partial perception is sufficient for survival in an imperfect world, where fitness requires only enough "truth" to stay one step ahead of competitors.
Absolute "Truth" is concealed behind the curtain of intuitive classical Physics. Yet, highly-evolved humans have recently learned how to peek behind the curtain into the counter-intuitive realm of Quantum Physics. There, they are baffled by Virtual Particles and impossible Entanglements. But they continue doing science with the partial understanding of incomplete Standard Models..
Quoting Zelebg
Yes. In our human-scale macro world, we may be confident that reality is "like what we think it is". But Quantum Theory has revealed that the solid desk I perceive is "really" mostly open space, that our physical fingers would pass right through, if not repelled by strange forces in the space between protons and electrons. So, our pragmatic confidence is due to theoretical ignorance.
Richard Feynman : “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics"
Physicist Sean Carroll : "What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have".
Physical or actual includes both basic phenomena like magnetism or gravity, and also emergent phenomena like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, liquidity, acidity...
Abstract or virtual phenomena includes concepts like words, language, Batman, unicorn, algorithm, number, angle… It is important to note that being abstract or virtual does not mean immaterial per se, it only means it is not directly physical, but instead it exists in the relations between chunks of matter, like angle exist wherever two lines meet.
If it’s not clear what I mean by "abstract/virtual" imagine Pacman arcade machine. You can see Pacman exists on the screen, and that’s sort of directly physical since it maps Pacman form (information about Pacman) into the matter as Pacman form. Now turn off the monitor, you can still hear the sounds and Pacman still exists somewhere in there, but not as Pacman in its physical or actual form, but as spatio-temporal dynamics and interaction between electrons and electronic components of the machine.
Now, if we can agree with all the above, then the question is what do you think ‘subjective experience’ or qualia is, physical or virtual phenomena? Why do you think so, and why do you think it’s not the other way around?
Firstly, physicality is itself an abstraction. Secondly, immediate experience (be it of pain/pleasure or of empirical givens) is itself not an abstraction but, instead, that from which abstractions result.
If abstractions are virtual and immediate experiences are actual, then the following doesn't contextualize the issue properly:
Quoting Zelebg
Qualia, (as Dennett described it) is basically non-physical/Metaphysical abstract phenomenon.
There is really nothing else it could be... . The common examples include any type of human sentience, love, will, intuition, and so on.
Consider mathematical abstracts which are non-physical/metaphysical languages. Yet at the same time they are imbedded into the physical world. Similarly, love for example, is an abstract feature/language of consciousness, and it is also embedded in the physical world through manifestation of human aesthetics'.
So, if I look at a roof truss, I know that one way to describe it is multiplying rise over run to get the roof pitch. When I look at a woman, I know there is [potentially] an abstract feeling of love somewhere in my consciousness.
Underlying the physical, there exists abstract metaphysical properties and phenomena, yes?.
If by "real" you mean something that matters, that can be a cause for some consequence. Then yes, liquidity and acidity are real, and so are words, languages, Batman, numbers and algorithms. Not in the same way though, virtual objects do not exist in the same way as physical.
But that’s not the question, the question is whether qualia is physical phenomena like magnetism or liquidity, or is virtual phenomena like algorithm or Pacman?
Universals are not a result. What ‘emerges’ if anything is the capacity to comprehend universals. But they don’t come into existence purely by dint of being comprehended.
I am not comparing anything. I sad the question is whether qualia is physical phenomena like magnetism or liquidity, or is virtual phenomena like algorithm or Pacman.
I also explained what is physical and what is virtual phenomena. What exactly do you have a problem with? What statement of mine are you even responding to?
This is true. Universals qua consciously comprehended entities is the more accurate description. I stand corrected.
That is irrelevant if you understand the distinction between the things I labeled “physical/actual” vs things I labeled “abstract/virtual”.
Those are two distinct categories of existence as I described, and you may label them as you wish or think about them whatever you want, but as long as we agree the distinction exists, then the question still stands whether qualia belongs in one or the other category.
Where do ‘natural laws’ fit into that scheme?
Physical or actual includes both basic phenomena like magnetism or gravity, and also emergent phenomena like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, liquidity, acidity...
I explained everything the first time around, see several posts above.
I defined precisely what I meant by the words I used, just in case, and it should be pretty clear exactly what distinction I wanted to make and which two categories I wish to define. You understood my words in some other context, for some reason, so your reply is not relevant to the questions and points I made. I don’t even see any disagreement, you’re simply talking about something else.
Look, theories which assert consciousness arises from computation make the claim qualia is abstract or virtual phenomena like angle or Pacman. On the other hand, theories like panpsychism make the claim qualia is physical or actual phenomena like magnetism or acidity. The defining difference is that for an artificial sentience in the first case qualia could be simulated, while in the second case it would have to be physically emulated. Ok?
In what sense can Qualia be physical? Is "redness" a force or a material object? That question is the crux of the mind-body debate. Physicalists try to define Qualia as-if they are real things apart from conscious minds. But that presumption is what makes the problem "hard".
Just as Minds are correlated with Brains, and Qualia with Objects, correlation does not prove causation. As Hume noted, even though not physically connected, proximity in space-time merely implies a connection for an intuitive cause-imputing mind. As you noted in the quote below, Qualia are relations between things, not things in themselves. As an abstract concept, the correlation "1 : 2" is meaningful even in the absence of physical objects. That's why Algebra works.
Qualia : The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem.
Correlation : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder : "Beauty is no quality in things themselves : it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them ; and each mind perceives a different beauty."
___David Hume
Quoting Zelebg
If abstract concepts in mind are material, what kind of matter are they made of : atoms of consciousness? In my thesis they are made of Information (i.e. mental relationships). I suppose you could call bits & bytes "atoms of information". :wink:
What does "not directly physical" mean? Is that a reference to Virtual Reality? If its existence is uncertain, in what sense is it real? In The Matrix, did Neo begin in the Real world, or in the Virtual simulated world? The bald kid answered that question, "there is no spoon". That's why Neo was able to dodge bullets : they were not real. [the movie is a metaphor of the Mind/Body problem ]
Virtual Particle : In physics, a virtual particle is a transient quantum fluctuation that exhibits some of the characteristics of an ordinary particle, while having its existence limited by the uncertainty principle. [actually VP exhibit no characteristics (properties, qualities) until observed (measured).]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particle
Virtual = simulation = imitation = illusion = deception
If it’s not clear what I mean by "abstract/virtual" imagine Pacman arcade machine. You can see Pacman exists on the screen, and that’s sort of directly physical since it maps Pacman form (information about Pacman) into the matter as Pacman form. Now turn off the monitor, you can still hear the sounds and Pacman still exists somewhere in there, but not as Pacman in its physical or actual form, but as spatio-temporal dynamics and interaction between electrons and electronic components of the machine.
Like magnetic field, liquidity, or acidity is physical. I explained all this the first time around.
You seem to be confusing subjective concepts with physical objects. In the typical bar magnet illustration of a magnetic fleld, you never sense the field itself, only its effect on iron filings. Your cause-seeking brain fills-in the gaps between lines with an imputed force. This is also how optical illusions work : fill-in the blanks. The field is not an actual thing, but a metaphorical creation to represent something invisible, similar to gravity imagined as the "fabric" of empty space.
Einstein didn't intend for people to take his analogies literally, but that makes metaphysical existence easier to understand than abstract mathematics. Likewise, space-time is a metaphor-in-the-mind for us to make sense of certain invisible, intangible aspects of the natural world. Physical properties (qualia) like "magnetic field, liquidity, or acidity" exist only in minds, but are attributed to our mental models of the outside world. As Kant noted long ago, we never know the ding an sich. only our ideas about them. "Reality" is the name we give to our beliefs about ding an sich based on our mental images of them. Reality is mathematical relationships, not physical objects. :nerd:
Yes, its effect, its PHYSICAL effect. I already explained to you once before that just because magnetic field is transparent does not mean it is immaterial. Why can you not understand this?
You do not understand English, you’re not speaking English, you’re talking nonsense.This is ridiculous, the whole discussion revolves around semantics, people talking past each other by inventing their own personal dictionaries or not understanding the basic words like information vs meaning, computation vs communication, physical vs. virtual, transparent vs immaterial... What the hell is going on here, what is wrong with you?!
Well said Gnomon. We are barred from such knowledge about the true nature of our existence; things-in-themselves. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't speculate... !
Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the fact that we can't help but wonder about it. Here, the irony is that we know that we will never know, yet we keep seeking answers.
The metaphysical property of our sense of wonderment is wonderful. Or, it is a love-hate relationship LOL.
On the one hand, fields are real and modeled mathematically:
"The fact that the electromagnetic field can possess momentum and energy makes it very real ... a particle makes a field, and a field acts on another particle, and the field has such familiar properties as energy content and momentum, just as particles can have....”
.....A “field” is any physical quantity which takes on different values at different points in space....
.....There have been various inventions to help the mind visualize the behavior of fields. The most correct is also the most abstract: we simply consider the fields as mathematical functions of position and time....”
(Feynman lectures, (CalTech, 1956), in Vol. II, Ch 1.5, 1963)
And on the other, fields are completely abstract and quantitatively incommensurable directly:
“....We now take it for granted that electric and magnetic fields are abstractions not reducible to mechanical models. To see that this is true, we need only look at the units in which the electric and magnetic fields are supposed to be measured. The conventional unit of electric field-strength is the square-root of a joule per cubic meter. A joule is a unit of energy and a meter is a unit of length, but a square-root of a joule is not a unit of anything tangible. There is no way we can imagine measuring directly the square-root of a joule. The unit of electric field-strength is a mathematical abstraction, chosen so that the square of a field-strength is equal to an energy-density that can be measured with real instruments. The unit of energy-density is a joule per cubic meter, and therefore we say that the unit of field-strength is the square-root of a joule per cubic meter. This does not mean that an electric field-strength can be measured with the square-root of a calorimeter. It means that an electric field-strength is an abstract quantity, incommensurable with any quantities that we can measure directly....”
(Dyson, EuCAP, 2007)
All that to say this: While it is true we never sense the field itself, I’m not sure that qualifies fields to be purely subjective concepts. I think perhaps we abstract the reality of fields from demonstrated characteristics of real physical objects. It follows necessarily that abstractions are immaterial, for the simply reason they are themselves irreducible to mechanical models, but nevertheless, that which is immaterial is not thereby merely a subjective concept.
Still, I suppose all concepts originate in a subject, but calling them subjective concepts implies they have no use outside the subject that originates them, which is far from the case. The only purely subjective concepts are space and time, insofar as nothing causes time or space in the same way as physical objects cause fields. QFT refutes this, of course, but......one thing at a time, right?
—————-
As an aside.....Kant didn’t know about fields, his natural science having to do with forces alone, without the conception of field associated to them.** So I wonder if he would have considered a field as a thing-in-itself, given what he actually did consider that way of things in general. I suspect not, for things-in-themselves are real objects of sensation to which our representations relate, but fields in and of themselves have no such reality of that phenomenal nature, in as much as their representations are actually representations of something else that is phenomenal, such that the conception of them becomes empirical. And, as we understand, representations of representations, are more commonly known as abstractions.
** See M. P. N. S., 1783, Pt II, Prop. 5, 6
Excellent point Mww. Could one argue that abstract things have their own independent existence?
All life is conscious (to various degrees). The better question would be: How did matter make life?
Answer that and you will be closer to understanding consciousness.
Hahaha ! Good one Ov! But I've got one even better:
Learn to build a human with a human consciousness and you will become... ?
NICE!!!
Okay, our work is done here, next issue... !!!!
Depends on how far one wants to obfuscate the relationship between word and meaning. If one considers basketballs as an exemplar of existence, then of course abstracts do not. If one considers that which reason constructs of its own accord as existing, then abstracts exist. But it absolutely cannot be both, equally and without contradiction.
Pretty dumb, actually, to require reason to not contradict itself in its constructions, then turn right around and contradict ourselves in the use of them. It is not contradictory to say abstracts are real and empirical objects in spacetime are real, as long as it is understood spacetime objects to us are phenomena given by intuition and abstracts are not phenomena, being given to us by conception alone. Then we are allowed to claim the former are conditioned by existence while the latter are not, but are none the less real.
The ultimate rendition of......stay in your own lane.
Quoting 3017amen
adjective/?abstrakt/ existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
"abstract concepts such as love or beauty"
In relation to 'love or beauty' the abstract thought has to relate to the observed but can apply to many observations. You can say they are loosely affiliated but not independent.
...well, of course the old debate over whether mathematics' has an independent existence or a human invention, rears it head again here:
We know mathematics is an abstract feature from consciousness
We know mathematics describes concrete things-in-themselves (does not explain the nature thereof)
We know mathematics describes things that are unseen (laws of gravity)
We know mathematics confers no survival/biological advantages
Just like other abstract phenomena in consciousness (metaphysical/sentience), can one infer an independent will of sorts, that is causing this unique sense of (self)awareness(?).
Pardon me If I’m being nosey, but.....what do you use for reference material?
Quoting Mww
Yes. The intrinsic Either/Or aspect of our apparently dual "Reality" is what Einstein was talking about in his Theory of Relativity. What's real depends on who's looking. That's also why my personal worldview is based on a complementary Both/And perspective. For all practical purposes (science), what we perceive as concrete objects and physical effects is what is Real. But for theoretical purposes (philosophy), our perceptions of those objects are mental constructs. So discussions about Consciousness must make that distinction clear, or else, by reifying Consciousness, we run into the paradoxical "hard problem".
Like all mammals, the human species has evolved to trust their perceptions as reliable guides to survival in the "real" world. But, unlike other mammals, humans have also evolved a rational extension of perception (conception), which allows us to see aspects of the world that do not exist in space-time. For example, we can make survival decisions for now, based on past or future. We can build instruments to extend our natural perception into aspects of space-time that are otherwise invisible and intangible, hence unreal. We can create abstract concepts, such as Unicorns and Hobbits, and act as-if they are real.
Unfortunately, our cleverness leads us into seeing counter-intuitive and paradoxical "realities", such as quantum "wavicles". Thence, the question arises, "are they tangibly real, or merely useful ideas like mathematics?" For example, can we see or touch a magnetic field, or do we reify the field in order to explain otherwise inexplicable effects? Ancient people saw the effects of invisible Energy, and imagined invisible Spirits or Gods as the cause. Modern people see the effects of Magnetism on matter, and imagine a Force Field as the cause. Yet that field can be described, not in terms of material properties (redness, solidity, liquidity), but only of mathematical relationships (positive or negative).
The world that rational humans live in is both concrete (real) and abstract (ideal). Moreover, abstract ideas can have real effects, as in Memetics. So we have difficulty drawing a hard line between real & ideal. Which is why my worldview is BothAnd, until it's necessary to draw a distinction, as in theories of Consciousness.
Memetics : Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=memetics
BothAnd Principle : Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ? what’s true for you ? depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose. http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html
See my reply to Mww. :smile:
I didn't consider mathematics as abstract thought. I just googled the definition and used their interpretation as the basis for my argument.
I do consider mathematics as a kind of fundamental law of nature independent from human experience.
Going by this created dichotomy, all instantiations of immediate experience would be "physical/actual". Abstract concepts that emerge from these instantiations of experience would then be "abstract/virtual".
More specifically, qualia as an abstract conceptualization is abstract/virtual, but any instantiation of qualia as immediate experience (say, a sensed aesthetic) would be physical/actual.
But so dichotomizing doesn't so far make sense to me. This because I do not deem actual, concrete experience to be the same as physicality. It almost seems that you believe in experience's equivalence to physicality. Can you better explain this, or how this is a mistaken interpretation of your view? My bad if I've missed this explanation somewhere in the thread.
Everything is subjective. That stupidly purposeless observation has already been stated several times on every page of this discussion, and no one disagrees.
But nevertheless, we can still differentiate two distinct categories of existence as I have nicely described in accordance with English dictionary and textbook physics.
So what I see is a baby robot with malfunctioning logic and semantic unit, unable to understand the difference between physical existence of actual electron in the outside world, virtual existence of simulated electron in a computer, and mental existence of imagined electron in the brain.
P.S.
My question then, again, is whether mental existence of imagined electron is like physical existence of real electron or like virtual existence of simulated electron.
It’s funny how people are espousing or even inventing theories of consciousness without knowing, and even less understanding, the essential kind of statement their theory is suggesting about the most basic nature of qualia.
Yep. Paradoxical indeed: we think consciousness as that which that belongs to us because of our nature, then attribute to it qualities we can’t figure out how it has.
——————-
Quoting Gnomon
Exactly right. In Einstein (1905), the simultaneity of relativity depends for its direct explanation on a third observer for the two participants in the events relative to each other. The relativity can only be immediately witnessed by an observer outside both, even if each participant can afterwards compare information.
Good stuff. Fun to think about. ‘Preciate the references; mine would be different, but close enough to see each other.
I have no opinion yet on the matter, I'm asking to hear what other people think.
Theories which assert consciousness arises from computation, for example, they in fact make the claim qualia is abstract or virtual phenomena like angle or Pacman. On the other hand, theories like panpsychism make the claim qualia is physical or actual phenomena like magnetism or acidity.
The point of the question is also the defining difference, which is that for an artificial sentience in the first case qualia could be simulated, while in the second case it would have to be physically emulated.
As for me, consciousness - as in "that which is aware of" - is itself other than information - as in "that which informs". The former is informed by the latter. But this seems to be neither here nor there in this debate.
At any rate, thanks again for the forthright reply.
Lots of folks would follow suit.
I rather think that Nature has its intrinsic relations, which we observe and explain to ourselves by means of mathematics, specifically developed for that purpose alone. We also create the laws, but the laws represent the principles under which Nature seems to operate, at least as far as humans are concerned, and also at least as far as we can tell.
Events in Nature occur in succession, which is independent of human experience, but only humans call that succession “time” and only humans recognize “cause and effect” from it, which are hardly independent of human experience.
If you think math is independent of human experience, how would you explain how we came to be in possession of it?
Seems pretty simple to me. If “redness” is the state of being red, “fitness” is the state of being fit, why shouldn’t consciousness be the state of being conscious? And if the state of being conscious is the condition of our attention (that which is aware of) with respect to the information presented to it, why wouldn’t that be “consciousness”?
So....all we need is a meaning, or an understanding, of what that “information” actually is.
Oh. And of course, what is meant by “attention”. And what does that “attention” belong to.....
AAARRRGGGGG!!!! Too many notions, too few facts.
I didn't mean we don't experience math we do. Experiments with monkeys has demonstrated even they understand math. If you give 4 peanuts to one monkey and only 1 to another, that one will get pretty pissed off.
I think what I am saying is, that it is not only us that uses math. Everything in nature seems to use it.
Very simple. A photo-receptor cell is 'conscious' of light. A cochlear hair cells is 'conscious' of sound...etc
Hmmmm....yeah. If it can’t be proven the one was pissed because he understood “3 more than me” as opposed to just recognizing “that sorry sack of elephant droppings has got my damn peanuts”.....then it cannot be said he was doing math. Even if we grant monkeys the capacity to recognize relative quantities, which isn’t that far-fetched, we haven’t explained that his anger is because of it. Maybe he’s just selfish. Or worried what his ol’ lady will say if he don’t bring home the......er.....peanuts.
And if everything in Nature uses math, and if the math everything in Nature uses isn’t the same as the math we use, where does that leave us? Maths are different depending on who is using it? And if we can’t prove it is the same math, how do we know it is math at all?
Something to think about.....
This is the mereological fallacy- ascribing to parts activities that can only be undertaken by the whole. So, isolated parts of an organism are not conscious, as the signals that they process are not being interpreted by a conscious agent.
Quoting 3017amen
Also known as 'being'. 'Being' is what Dennett denies the existence of - he says that what we understand as 'being' is in reality the net sum of unconscious cellular processes which create the illusion of being. (Which is why it's laughable that philosophies like Dennett's are categorised as 'humanism'.)
What wayfarer said, plus.....(shudder) ......anthropomorphism: attributing congruency between being conscious of and being merely reactive to.
Yep, with all due respect his book is a waste of money. Another irony of sorts as you point out, includes denial of Being. If he could explain consciousness, then why couldn't he reconcile self-awareness and Being (?)
Some philosophers feel like the more words they write, the more it somehow justifies their position as being a convincing one. Sure, one needs to support and make the case. But when I see a lot of extraneous explanations in order to basically deflect and circumvent the real answers to the questions, it's a red flag!
As Einstein alluded, Dennett being an atheist, I think he has an axe to grind.
Yeah, Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe you should just read up on studies into animal psychology.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/04/monkeys-can-do-math
Maybe, maybe, maybe. So far a lot of nature seems to be running pretty nicely according 'our' math.
Science relies on the assumption that we live in an ordered Universe that is subject to precise mathematical laws. Thus the laws of physics, the most fundamental of the sciences, are all expressed as mathematical equations.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318134-400-is-nature-mathematical/#ixzz67HS2nzv4
If you believe only the (human) brain can be conscious, you are applying anthropomorphism.
Because it might be a process instead of state. It could also be a property, or force, or illusion. Times two. It could be physical state or virtual state. It could be physical process or virtual process. It could be physical property or virtual property. It could be physical force or virtual force. It could be physical illusion or virtual illusion. And maybe it could also be a physical ghost or virtual ghost.
Am I forgetting something?
So you put a camera and a tv to face each other. Tv produces light, camera receives it. Why would you say camera is “conscious” of that light rather than tv?
And what happens if we connect camera output to tv input? Is that system self-aware then? So perhaps neither camera nor tv are conscious by themselves and it actually takes both of them to form s ‘strange loop’ for the system to awake.
The TV is conscious of the signal it receives from the camera.
The camera is conscious of the light it receives from the TV.
Yeah, I will. Just as soon as it is apparent to me, that the mental explanatory gap in an animal with 2B neural connections per mm3*, 16B in the most paradigmatically distinguishing section**, can be bridged by animals with 7B in his entire brain.
*Penrose, 1998
**Herculano-Houzel, 2009
Hey....it’s a free country. Think what you like.
Correct. But I don’t. So I’m not.
Yes, slicing open a chimps brain and looking at it through a microscope is so much more informative than animal studies. That is the best way to figure out how a chimp 'thinks'.
Yep.
The human rational agent has but one thought at a time.
You are talking about passively received signal/light in both cases. In that sense a stone is also conscious of light, is that what you wish to claim?
Anyway, you are not addressing the phenomena that is happening on the TV screen, which is integration of the signal into something we can perhaps call qualia. So, again, why would you say camera is conscious of that light rather than TV which is in fact producing it?
Therefore...?
Even if we disregard the fact that thinking requires certain physiological attributes, and merely observe creatures in their own undisturbed environment, we have absolutely no way to understand what we’re seeing about them, except by means of our own rational system. When they do things we don’t understand, how the hell are we supposed to understand why or how they do it? The very idea of thinking itself, is ours alone, so what are we going to compare what we see in other animals, except in relation to us?
The whole point of Nagel, 1974.
You can call it anything you like. I call as I see it. The camera is conscious of light, the TV is conscious of the signal it receives from the camera. As simple as that.
Quoting Zelebg
A stone might be conscious of light. I think it is most certainly conscious of heat, as it will expand in the heat. And it is most certainly conscious of gravity. Yes I like to view consciousness in it's broadest sense. Keeps things simple. I like simple. I am a simple person.
Therefore it is non-contradictory to say consciousness is a state of being conscious. Constantly changing states, because we’re always thinking as long as we’re conscious, which is where the process makes its Grand Appearance, whatever it might be, but that just means the state of being conscious changes as much as the thoughts.
Before cognitive neuroscience, this was the established metaphysical methodology for remembering stuff. You know....back in the good ol’ days.
You believe we are so different to chimps that we have absolutely no way to understand them? Well lets stop all animal research then. What a waste of time and money. Completely incomprehensible creatures.
except by means of our own rational system.
— Mww
Isn't that how we understand everything? Or do you know of another 'means of understanding'?
You again failed to acknowledge the phenomena that is happening on the TV screen. To put some meaning into your assertion explanation is necessary.
How do you define "conscious"? Why is TV not conscious of the light on its screen?
The TV does not register light. The TV does not react to light.
You: we have no means to understand them?
Me: we have no means to understand them, except.....
Please tell me you do actually see a difference there. If you do, perhaps you’ll accept the rest of your comment as superfluous.
TV reacts to abstract information in the form of electric signals and realizes them into actual physical quality in the form of real light. Which is better parallel then for the biological system producing actual qualia out of the electro-chemical sensory signals?
So, what's the problem?. As far as I can tell, no one here is denying that humans have two ways of thinking about existence : sensory reality and mental ideality. Which category would you place Consciousness in : mental or physical --- or metaphysical?
Quoting Zelebg
You equate "physical" and "actual", and I agree. But if a simulated electron is not physical & actual, what is it? Why do we call it "simulated"? If a "virtual" particle is not real, what is it? If an imaginary electron in a mind is not real, what is it? I call it "Ideal" : the idea of an electron. These are all conventional dictionary terms to describe those "distinct categories of existence".
Besides coinages for unconventional concepts (see Glossary), I do use some ordinary dictionary terms in personal ways to make a point about my personal worldview. For example, I use capitalized "Ideality" in the philosophical sense of "existence only in idea and not in reality", as the opposite of "Reality", as an allusion to the "Forms" of Platonic Idealism. Is that an example of "malfunctioning logic"? I also adopted a common philosophical term related to Aristotle's book on ideas that were not discussed under the heading of "physics" for my personal worldview. Would you place Consciousness in the category of Physics or Metaphysics?
Metaphysics --- Latin: Metaphysica, lit: "the beyond the physical". Is that hard for you to understand?
Perhaps if you will answer your own question [ "My question then, again, is whether mental existence of imagined electron is like physical existence of real electron or like virtual existence of simulated electron" ] in your own highlighted terms, we can compare terminologies to discover the cause of our failure to communicate. I'm hoping it's not due to immature robotics or a "malfunctioning logic and semantic unit". :joke:
Meta-physics :
[i]The branch of philosophy that examines the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, substance and attribute, fact and value.
1. Often dismissed by materialists as idle speculation on topics not amenable to empirical proof.
2. Aristotle divided his treatise on science into two parts. The world as-known-via-the-senses was labeled “physics” - what we call "Science" today. And the world as-known-by-the-mind, by reason, was labeled “metaphysics” - what we now call "Philosophy" .
3. Plato called the unseen world that hides behind the physical façade: “Ideal” as opposed to Real. For him, Ideal “forms” (concepts) were prior-to the Real “substance” (matter).
4. Physics refers to the things we perceive with the eye of the body. Meta-physics refers to the things we conceive with the eye of the mind. Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is. Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made. Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the “formal” cause of the thing designed.[/i]
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html
That is casual speech. There are differences between what is the result of a process and what results from a single state, and what results only from a collection of successive states. In any case, it's not contradictory, just not that simple conclusion to make as was suggested.
Someone correct me, but mathematician's played around with numbers as an abstract exercise long before they applied it to the real world (?)
In any case there's all sorts of abstract phenomenon some of which we're doing right now in this forum through abstract thinking. It's primarily a result of self-awareness in consciousness. Many examples we covered range from music theory, various forms of human sentience/innate properties of our consciousness (wonder, intuition, will, beauty, love...), and to a lesser degree, using metaphor, analogies, thinking out loud, or anything that takes us from the concrete to the abstract.
So to that end, back to mathematics, we don't need arithmetic to build a roof truss or to evade falling objects in the jungle. Yet we can use a formula for the laws of gravity, as well as calculate rise and run to determine roof pitch. And so from the physical world we can describe the concrete in an abstract way through mathematics only. (And as an ancillary note, we don't need abstract music theory abilities to enjoy listening to music.)
Some have argued that mathematics is an abstract metaphysical language...
As far as reference material, you can shoot me a PM anytime...
It's virtual. It means it is represented as information by some other physical form rather than its actual form. Like Pacman is actual on the display screen, but virtual in the electronic components of the arcade machine.
A computer can also emulate another computer, so there exist such thing as double-virtual, or virtual-virtual object, entity, property, state, process, (quality?)...
I'm saying the concept is incoherent, and therefore as a counterfactual premise it renders the "hard problem" argument invalid.
Do you always contradict yourself in the same sentence?
Why argue so convoluted. Our sensory organs transmit the signal by means of a biochemical electrical charge and our brains are able to interpret that signal in such a fashion that it provides us with knowledge about our environment. Don't have to make it more complicated than that.
It is a fallacy to believe only the (human) brain is conscious.
For something to be able to react to a signal it must by definition be 'conscious' of it. The general public has a extreme exclusive concept of consciousness.
An eye that can see is conscious of light.
Maybe not so much numbers, for even the proverbial caveman had the idea of quantity and the ability to represent it to himself. I mean....who goes hunting with only one measly arrow? And if you’ve got two hands, why not carry two spears?
Geometry, on the other hand, well.........
“....A new light must have flashed on the mind of the first man (Thales, or whatever may have been his name) who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle. For he found that it was not sufficient to meditate on the figure, as it lay before his eyes, or the conception of it, as it existed in his mind, and thus endeavour to get at the knowledge of its properties, but that it was necessary to produce these properties, as it were, by a positive a priori construction; and that, in order to arrive with certainty at a priori cognition, he must not attribute to the object any other properties than those which necessarily followed from that which he had himself, in accordance with his conception, placed in the object....”
This is not to say all those produced properties arrived out of the blue. But however much trial-and-error the old geezer did, all of it without exception, was pure thought, and all could have been derived from a single example of a single triangle. What’s really amazing....sorta.....is, Thales lived around 600BC, but square roots had been known for 1000 years before that. So arriving at 1,1, sq rt 2 for one of the properties of the isosceles triangle, while seeming quite unlikely, actually wasn’t.
So, yeah, no doubt. The abstract mathematical playground was in use long before its application to the natural empirical one.
Quoting ovdtogt
Beings are conscious, that’s why they’re called ‘beings’. ‘Eyes’ are conscious, they’re organs.
Quoting ovdtogt
That attitude is a direct historical consequence of the Christianity.
Eyes are [a] be(ing) conscious of light.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which attitude?
I'm beginning to see a part of our communication glitch. You seem to think that a "virtual electron" --- as represented by illuminated pixels on a computer screen --- is still an electron in a different physical form. Yet, those screen pixels have none of the physical properties of an actual electron. Instead, they only have the potential to cause the metaphysical idea of an electron to be generated in the mind of the observer. The graphic symbol is merely an illusion or appearance, due to its conventional association with a real object. I'm sure you know this, but your terminology is misleading.
The physical pixels are not the thing represented, but a coded message (information) that triggers the idea of an electron in a conscious mind. So, the physical representation on the screen (symbol) is converted into an abstract idea (eidos) in a conscious mind. Hence, a virtual electron is not, as you suggested, an electron in an alternative "physical form" in space-time, but merely a pointer to a meta-physical form in consciousness. A simulated electron is not a virtual electron, but an abstract sign directing your mind to recall the idea of an actual object that you are already familiar with. :nerd:
Virtual : not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so.
___Google
Symbol : a thing that represents or stands for something else, especially a material object representing something abstract.
___Google
PS___ Your definition of "virtual" above is like saying a statue of an invisible god, is still the god, but in a different form. Early Christians ridiculed pagans for equating the powerless symbol with a powerful deity. Our God, they said, is a spirit and will never be found in a physical form. Ironically, the Christians could see the error in pagan idolatry, but not in their own equation of human Jesus with divine Jehovah : spirit in the flesh. :smile:
Nonsense. You can take frog’s eyes out and place them in solution, and the photo-receptors will still respond to simulation, but ‘responding to stimuli’ doesn’t constitute ‘consciousness’. Consciousness is holistic, it manifests as the interaction of all manner of cells and organs as an orchestrated whole which is what 'being' refers to. There are 'conscious beings' but not 'conscious organs'. That is the mereological fallacy in a nutshell.
None of what you say in this thread conveys any insight into subject, so unless you have anything useful to contribute, we’re done.
A 1 cell organism has also a 'being'. It is called being alive. Being alive mean being conscious.
To assume consciousness is unique to humans is the height of arrogance and Quoting ovdtogt
We do not own consciousness as we are not the center of the universe.
What you're doing would be called intellectual dishonesty, if you knew what you’re doing. Do you understand the difference between "not physically existing" and "not physically existing as such"?
Do you understand the information or ‘data & instructions’ that make up “software” at the time of execution is defined or contained by the dynamics and interaction of electrons and electronic components in a computer?
Oh dear god smite him with some fiery serpents or something! You’ve used up my patience and I will be ignoring you if you fail to understand it this time.
Pointer points FROM something to something. Do you understand the difference when that pointer of yours points from, say an actual chair in a room, and virtual chair on a computer screen?
I was just about to say, but you already said it yourself:
That is crazy in so many ways, beautiful!
So if a scientist takes up the challenge of addressing the "hard problem", you'd see that as misguided?
No. "The hard problem ... ", like e.g. æther, is an empty concept (i.e. pseudo-problem, based on the dissolved 'MBP'); any competent scientist will reformulate such a speculative chimera into an explanatory conjecture that can be modeled computationally and, at least in principle, tested (e.g. IIT) or discard it and move on to a more productive line of inquiry and research.
But it's only true for eyes that are the organs of conscious beings.
Quoting 180 Proof
You might have missed the scientific paper I mentioned above, which mentions the 'hard problem' in particular connection to what is called the 'neural binding problem'. The paper is here, from which I quote:
Bolds added. So here we have "scientist acknowledges 'scientific mystery'". Maybe you could explain to him that he ought to be doing his job better. :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
The problem with great minds such as yours and others I have come across on this forum is that their cleverness prevents them from seeing the whole picture. You are like great scientists examining every stone and leaf but still haven't figured out that the world is round.
With my simple mind I stick to the basics but have over the years been able to figure out the large picture even though the details remain obscure to me. With child-like awe I observe the world.
Quoting ovdtogt
No time like the present for being able to study such things. Why not start with Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Quoting 180 Proof
Here is Jerome S. Feldman's homepage. If you could pick a scientist to refer to regarding the subject of this thread, then he would be a leading contender.
You said:
Quoting 180 Proof
BUT, here we have, not only a competent, but exemplary scientist, who specialises in the very kind of science that addresses 'the hard problem of consciousness', from a scientific perspective. And this very scientist says that, and again I quote,
and also that
whilst commenting on 'the subjective unity of experience'.
Which is dismissed by you as follows:
Quoting 180 Proof
There genuinely, really is 'a hard problem of consciousness', but it's almost beyond doubt that you don't actually comprehend what it is.
Argumentum ab auctoritate ... :roll:
[quote=Wayfarer]... but it's almost beyond doubt that you don't actually comprehend what it is.[/quote]
Well, I have no doubt whatsoever, Wayf, that you don't comprehend the demarcation problem at all (re: your penchant for 'so much wooooo, so little defeasible corroboration'). Or elementary informal logic for that matter (since you can't help making fallacious utterances). Anyway. You get the last word - link & quote away with your badd self ...
?Wayfarer I want to understand how the way the eye works and how that corresponds to the sound of a breeze through the leaves of a tree.
You might have missed the scientific paper I mentioned above, which mentions the 'hard problem' in particular connection to what is called the 'neural binding problem'. The paper is here, from which I quote:
— Wayfarer
The problem with great minds such as yours and others I have come across on this forum is that their cleverness prevents them from seeing the whole picture. You are like great scientists examining every stone and leaf but still haven't figured out that the world is round.
With my simple mind I stick to the basics but have over the years been able to figure out the large picture even though the details remain obscure to me. With child-like awe I observe the world.
Yes. A symbol points to something else. But it is not the actual something else. And the something else is not necessarily concrete or real. It may be an idea or concept. In that latter case, the physical symbol points to a meta-physical concept. The pointer points FROM something symbolic or virtual, TO something semantic, which is an abstraction pointing BACK TO something real or physical. The "difference" is between Mind & Matter, Substance & Attribute, Potentiality & Actuality. "Vive la difference!"
If you point a camera at an actual physical chair in a room, and display the collected optical information on a TV screen, the image on the screen may be defined as a "virtual" chair, but you can't sit on it. The image is a simulation, or a symbol, or an illusion of a chair. The symbol has a physical reality, but not that of a chair. The symbol only serves to remind you of the idea of a chair. The meaning of "chair" is already in your memory as a pattern of abstract information, but not as a little chair inside the head.
In computer theory, a symbolic reference is sometimes called a "semantic pointer". It redirects to the metaphysical meaning of a thing, but not to the thing itself. Meaning is in the mind, not the brain. A symbol is not the thing symbolized. A virtual thing is not the thing symbolized. A virtual electron is not an actual electron; it's the idea of an electron. You might say it's the Platonic form of an electron. :nerd:
Note : a Virtual Electron is a potential particle, not an actual particle.
Semantic pointers : neural representations that carry partial semantic content and are composable into the representational structures necessary to support complex cognition.
http://compneuro.uwaterloo.ca/research/spa/semantic-pointer-architecture.html
Metaphysics : the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. ___Wikipedia
Of course. And a symbol points to something else, but it is not the actual something else. What symbol now, you may ask. Who cares! I'm just talking gibberish.
It's the problem of explaining subjectivity.
"Virtual electron" (as a potential particle) is a phrase in quantum field theory. We were talking about a single word, and you even gave correct definition:
To suddenly confuse the two like that is not simply senseless, it requires total cognitive blindness. You are a robot, pulling word salad strings from the internet, but you are failing to make any sense as you are unable to google properly because you do not understand words.
If you don't like the Google definition of "Virtual", which alternative definition would better suit your personal preference, and preconceptions?
Quoting Zelebg
That was my own personal definition.
So, you believe that "virtual" and "potential" existence are equivalent to "real" and "actual or physical" existence? Hence, nothing in the world is "unreal" or "ideal" or "metaphysical", yes?
Is it true that Platonic Idealism and Aristotelian Metaphysics are literally non-sensical, hence meaningless? If so, then anything you can't detect with your senses does not exist, and does not matter; correct?
PS__I'm enjoying our philosophical ping-pong, because it challenges me to refine my own ideas and beliefs about reality and consciousness. :nerd:
I'm not so sure of this, but prefer not to argue the point. When I taught college algebra courses some of the word problems went back very far in time. For instance, the problem of determining how long it would take for two workers to plow a certain field working together if it is known how long it would take for each individually. Cuneiform tablets 5K years ago.
I like Chalmer's definitions of strong and weak emergence, particularly the weak variety which he explains in terms of computer programs. Speculation, of course, is that consciousness or mind may be the only example of strong emergence. We discussed much of this on SuperTopo, a climbers forum, in the thread "What is Mind" - over 25K posts I recall.
No conclusions.
Gnomon program is not competent to have conversation.
Gnomon program does not understand words.
Gnomon program has operational imagination function, but malfunctioning logic unit.
Obviously not. Nor was I talking about anything “potential”.
Instead, I pointed out your failure to distinguish between “virtual” as made by software and “virtual” as a potential particle in quantum field theory is clear evidence you are cognitively blind, that is unconscious, possibly a child zombie, but likely a computer program. Go way, Digimon. Shoo, shooo!
I’m arguing from the premise that the notion of quantity is not to be supposed as the abstract playground, but should be considered merely the use of empirical deduction, re: your example of tallying relative quantities on a stick, for instance. From the abstract mathematical playground is derived the principles of universality and necessity for mathematical constructs, geometric or algebraic, the proofs of which follow a posteriori. I used Thales just to show nothing’s changed since.
——————-
I read up on strong/weak emergence here: http://www.consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf, and concur.......no conclusion. No apodeictically justifiable conclusion, anyway. I hesitate, nonetheless, on scenarios where, say, we create a game, discover trends intrinsic to playing it, then somehow adapt those trends as a possible bridge in the explanatory gap in human mentality. Reason grasping at shadows, throw stuff at a wall.....see what sticks.
As my ol’ buddy Andy Rooney might say, if we can’t do any better than that, maybe we shouldn’t do anything.
Teach me. Show me how I misinterpreted your "words". :smile:
You point to my discernment failures, but you fail to support your personal definitions with applicable examples that might help me to see where you are coming from. We seem to be consulting different dictionaries. That's why I provide links to my sources. Please point to something relevant to Consciousness that supports your discrimination between "software virtual" and "particle virtual". :confused:
Virtual = Not Actual = Potential (statistically possible) or Non-existent (not physically existing)
If quantum particles are "real" objects, why are they labeled with the unreal term "virtual"?
I suspect that your understanding of quantum "virtual" is based on something like this :
Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics? :
Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested. ___Gordon Kane
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-virtual-particles-rea/
Note : For the purposes of calculation, virtual particles are treated as-if they are real.
But here are some other expert opinions that treat "virtual" particles as Metaphysical Concepts, not Physical Things :
Are virtual particles a cop out? Are physicists just attributing things to virtual particles when a real particle doesn’t fit, or are they real after all?
https://www.quora.com/Are-virtual-particles-a-cop-out-Are-physicists-just-attributing-things-to-virtual-particles-when-a-real-particle-doesn-t-fit-or-are-they-real-after-all
"Virtual particles are simply a convenient intuitive label attached to terms in a power series expansion of integrals in quantum field theory." ___Viktor Toth,
"They are used as a conceptual tool for solving equations." ___David Rosen,
"Yes, citing virtual anything, negative mass, massless bosons as a reason for is a scientific lazy way to say the math does not work out." ___Kenneth Oglesby
Note : my perseverance in this dialog is not due to obstinacy, but because Quantum Virtuality is an essential element of my Enformationism worldview. In effect, the squishy quantum foundation of the physical world is on the borderline between Reality & Ideality, Space-Time & Infinity-Eternity, Matter & Mind, Physics & Metaphysics. That's how I discriminate between Ultimate Reality (Reason) and Perceptual Reality (Sensation).
And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. ___Kant, Prolegomena,
Note : Kant's ding an sich is a bookkeeping device for an object known only by reason.
Bookkeeping device. Sad though, to be the device. After all, the appearance gets the name, while the device just is.
Now that we have a better understanding of the relationship between genetics and epigenetics, Carl Jung's ideas correlate with the relationship between archetypes and semiotics. If Jung had the insight of Charles S. Peirce, and the two had realized the connection, we would be so much further by now! But they had no knowledge of genetics and epigenetics. Consciousness is not only inside an individual brain, and this relationship explains the transition of life when the body dies. I go into a lot of detail about this in episode 4 of my podcast (A Musical Moment). Jung was ahead of his time in his understanding of archetypes and the collective unconscious. If only he had realized the semiotic connection. Biology is just now beginning to understand this amazing aspect of consciousness. It is a shame that materialists and dualist are so far behind in their understanding. Catherine Tyrrell (synechism scholar)
Can you sum up a few points to see if I already heard about it, and link to that podcast.
or you can read the transcripts at culturalmetapatterns.com ... Again, reading them in order to follow it.
There are four episodes now. More coming. Next up will be 'A Bird's Eye View'. Then, 'The Inside Out of Color'.
Here's the excerpt that may be the points you are seeking....
If we were to try and apply a commonly understood, modern analogy to the relationship between semiotics and archetypes, semiotics might be thought of as the cognitive mapping ‘software’ that engages in an exchange of activity that is external to ‘self’, while ‘archetypes’ might be thought of as the cognitive mapping ‘internal’ hardware, that is fundamental to knowledge as a ‘collective’, and provides the platform for what arises as semiotic cause and effect. Let me explain more of how I come to this analogy, but in order to do that I will need to backtrack a little to a field of study I mentioned in episode #1; Epigenetics’. ….
Epigenetics is the study of changes in organisms cause by ‘modification’ to gene expression, rather than alterations to the genetic code itself. The Greek prefix ‘epi’ in epigenetics refers to features that are ‘on top of’ or ‘in addition to’ the genetic basis for inheritance. What’s fascinating about this field of research is how these scientific discoveries are confirming that there is ‘continuity’ in all things, and every ‘thing’ is just an aspect or ‘mode’ of the greater Whole. For example, in a December 1st, 2013 Nature Neuroscience article, located online at http://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3603, researchers found that when mice are taught to fear a particular odor, both their offspring and the next generation are subsequently born fearing that same odor. The findings indicate that environmental information may be inherited transgenerationally. And in a more recent study published in the scientific journal ‘Cell’, found at www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(19)30448-9.pdf, researchers confirmed that the nervous system ‘can’ transmit messages to future generations.
If we look at this with a parallel frame of mind regarding semiotics and archetypes, we can consider how semiotics is ‘epi’, or ‘on top of’ or ‘in addition to’ primitive archetypes. In other words, what makes our species ‘human’ in a genetic sense is our common genetic code, and what makes our species human in a cognitive sense is our primitive and collectively common archetypes. Our genes are influenced by our environment, or Medium, per epigenetics, and expressed as creative diversity manifested over and above genetic copies. Our collective, cognitive foundation (archetypes) is also influenced by our environment, or Medium, per semiotics, and expressed as creatively diverse ideas, and manifested in our verbal, non-verbal, and written dialogue.
You pointed to a thing that needs explanation, but what is the explanation supposed to be, morphic resonance, biocentrism? What new concept or mechanics is that theory proposing?