Human Consciousness: more philosophy (Humans)

by David Turell , Friday, August 12, 2016, 21:07 (3023 days ago) @ David Turell

The article is a long discussion of the history of philosophic thought with some interesting observations:-https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=be530beed3-Saturday_newsletter_6_August_20168_5_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-be530beed3-68942561-"As one of the founders of empiricism, Locke believed that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, with real knowledge being felt by conscious beings. In the 17th century, René Descartes had also insisted on the irreducible centrality of subjective experience, arguing that, in principle, we could not build a machine to emulate human behaviour. For Descartes, a conscious machine was an impossibility, and something extra - a soul - was needed to account for the full spectrum of our mental landscape and actions. Like Chalmers and Bitbol today, Descartes and Locke considered conscious experience as something that couldn't be wholly explained by the laws of physical nature.-***-"With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing reality. At the subatomic level, reality appeared to be a subjective flow in which objects sometimes behave like particles and other times like waves. Which facet is manifest depends on how the human observer is looking at the situation.-"Such a view appalled many physicists, who fought desperately to find a way out, and for much of the 20th century it still seemed possible to imagine that, somehow, subjectivity could be squeezed out of the frame, leaving a purely objective description of the world. Albert Einstein was in this camp, but his position hasn't panned out. Forty years ago, the American theoretical physicist John Wheeler proposed a series of thought experiments to test if an observer could affect whether light behaved as a particle or a wave and, in 2007, the French physicist Alain Aspect proved that they could. Just this April, Nature Physics reported on a set of experiments showing a similar effect using helium atoms. Andrew Truscott, the Australian scientist who spearheaded the helium work, noted in Physics Today that ‘99.999 per cent of physicists would say that the measurement… brings the observable into reality'. In other words, human subjectivity is drawing forth the world.-***-" ...tools such as fMRI and optogenetics are now enabling us to see what neurons are doing when we think certain thoughts. Moreover, projects such as the BRAIN initiative in the US and the European Union's Human Brain Project are mapping what parts of the brain are active while people experience a vast range of emotions and mental experiences.-"This is all thrilling science, yet a question remains: will any of it explain subjective experience? Chalmers, the philosopher, claims that the problem of experience is not mechanistically reducible and he argues that it will ‘persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained'. In other words, he says, no amount of detail about neuronal potentials and interconnection is going to get us to the essence of subjectivity.-***-"Giulio Tononi's book Phi (2012) asks the question: ‘How could mere matter generate mind?' As a neuroscientist, Tononi says this is a mystery ‘stranger than immaculate conception… an impossibility that defie[s] belief'. Nonetheless, he offers us an explanation of consciousness grounded in information theory that has been admired by both Tegmark and Koch. He wants to do for psychic phenomena what Descartes, Galileo and their heirs did for physical phenomena: he wants to explain subjective experience by generalised empirical rules, and he tells us that such experiences have shapes in a multidimensional mathematical space.-***-"As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi's concept; at the same time, I don't accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity. -"Neurological and informatic models of subjectivity will no doubt have their uses and values, as did mechanistic models of the world before them. Yet, like their mechanistic forebears, these theories are grounded in an insistence that subjectivity is a secondary phenomenon whose explanation resides in something prior. Chalmers wants to insist, along with Descartes and Locke before him, on the primacy of subjective experience or, as the philosopher Bitbol puts it, ‘that consciousness is existentially primary'. Rather than being something that can be ‘described by us in the third person as if we were separated from it', Bitbol argues that consciousness ‘is what we dwell in and what we live through in the first person'. This feels reminiscent of what the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in 1936 called the ‘life-world' of conscious experience, and I suspect that it is where we must look to locate the source of our selves. But I also expect that philosophers and scientists will be arguing the point for centuries to come."-Comment: Insights but no help. I'm still with Descartes