Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter? (Humans)

by BBella @, Saturday, October 31, 2015, 17:38 (3062 days ago)

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181284-human-consciousness-is-simply-a-state-of-matt... short, though, it outlines Tononi's ITT — that consciousness results from a system that can store and retrieve vast amounts of information efficiently — and then moves onto his own creation, perceptronium, which he describes as “the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware.” This substance can not only store and retrieve data, but it's also indivisible and unified (this is where we start to wander into the “here be dragons” realm of souls and spirits and so forth)."-Comment: Although the article doesn't explain what he means by "unified" this is what I would like to know more about what Tononi meant by it. And of course Tononi's and the other neuroscientist and theoretical physicists do not go into what causes or creates consciousness.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by David Turell @, Saturday, October 31, 2015, 20:13 (3062 days ago) @ BBella

Bbella: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181284-human-consciousness-is-simply-a-state-of-matt... 
> "In short, though, it outlines Tononi's ITT — that consciousness results from a system that can store and retrieve vast amounts of information efficiently — and then moves onto his own creation, perceptronium, which he describes as “the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware.” This substance can not only store and retrieve data, but it's also indivisible and unified (this is where we start to wander into the “here be dragons” realm of souls and spirits and so forth)."
> 
> Comment: Although the article doesn't explain what he means by "unified" this is what I would like to know more about what Tononi meant by it. And of course Tononi's and the other neuroscientist and theoretical physicists do not go into what causes or creates consciousness.-Thank you for a very interesting and I think controversial theory. Consciousness is 'thought' and as such is not material, even though it arises from a material brain. Bluntly, the physical chemistry of biology does not explain life. These theories are just another form of an attempt at a naturalism explanation. To quote Nagel in Mind and Cosmos: "I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension....I find this view antecedently unbelievable---- a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense." In short I don't buy any of it, not being much a fan of Tegmark.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by BBella @, Saturday, October 31, 2015, 20:37 (3062 days ago) @ David Turell

Bbella: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/181284-human-consciousness-is-simply-a-state-of-matt... > 
> > "In short, though, it outlines Tononi's ITT — that consciousness results from a system that can store and retrieve vast amounts of information efficiently — and then moves onto his own creation, perceptronium, which he describes as “the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware.” This substance can not only store and retrieve data, but it's also indivisible and unified (this is where we start to wander into the “here be dragons” realm of souls and spirits and so forth)."
> > 
> > Comment: Although the article doesn't explain what he means by "unified" this is what I would like to know more about what Tononi meant by it. And of course Tononi's and the other neuroscientist and theoretical physicists do not go into what causes or creates consciousness.
> 
> Thank you for a very interesting and I think controversial theory. Consciousness is 'thought' and as such is not material, even though it arises from a material brain. Bluntly, the physical chemistry of biology does not explain life. These theories are just another form of an attempt at a naturalism explanation. To quote Nagel in Mind and Cosmos: "I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension....I find this view antecedently unbelievable---- a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense." In short I don't buy any of it, not being much a fan of Tegmark.-I don't think it's that far off the mark. Since thought carries/projects information and has proven to affect change in substance, it's not too difficult of a reach for me to imagine that consciousness as well as intelligence is itself a substance. Substance in the sense that it IS.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by David Turell @, Saturday, October 31, 2015, 23:11 (3061 days ago) @ BBella

David: In short I don't buy any of it, not being much a fan of Tegmark.
> 
> Bbella: I don't think it's that far off the mark. Since thought carries/projects information and has proven to affect change in substance, it's not too difficult of a reach for me to imagine that consciousness as well as intelligence is itself a substance. Substance in the sense that it IS.-"Thought has been proven to affect change in substance"? Are you mentioning spoon-bending or what else?

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by BBella @, Wednesday, December 02, 2015, 08:23 (3030 days ago) @ David Turell

David: In short I don't buy any of it, not being much a fan of Tegmark.
> > 
> > Bbella: I don't think it's that far off the mark. Since thought carries/projects information and has proven to affect change in substance, it's not too difficult of a reach for me to imagine that consciousness as well as intelligence is itself a substance. Substance in the sense that it IS.
> 
> "Thought has been proven to affect change in substance"? Are you mentioning spoon-bending or what else?-There has been much research on how thought affects health. But I do not have to go much further than my own life and those around me to see it proven.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by David Turell @, Wednesday, December 02, 2015, 20:54 (3030 days ago) @ BBella


> Bbella: There has been much research on how thought affects health. But I do not have to go much further than my own life and those around me to see it proven.-Placebo therapy alone proves your point.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of information?

by David Turell @, Wednesday, December 02, 2015, 22:03 (3029 days ago) @ David Turell

A very confusing approach to consciousness by appealing to information to help explain it:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20151202-"Panpsychism strikes me as self-evidently foolish, but non-foolish people—notably Chalmers and neuroscientist Christof Koch—are taking it seriously. How can that be? What's compelling their interest? Have I dismissed panpsychism too hastily?-"These questions lured me to a two-day workshop on integrated information theory at New York University last month. Conceived by neuroscientist Guilio Tononi (who trained under the late, great Gerald Edelman), IIT is an extremely ambitious theory of consciousness. It applies to all forms of matter, not just brains, and it implies that panpsychism might be true. Koch and others are taking panpsychism seriously because they take IIT seriously.-***-"[Koch] is not saying that information causes consciousness; he is saying that certain information just is consciousness, and because information is everywhere, consciousness is everywhere. I think that if you analyze this carefully, you will see that the view is incoherent. Consciousness is independent of an observer. I am conscious no matter what anybody thinks. But information is typically relative to observers. These sentences, for example, make sense only relative to our capacity to interpret them. So you can't explain consciousness by saying it consists of information, because information exists only relative to consciousness.
 (my bold)-***-
"In fact, Searle's point applies to other information-centric theories of consciousness, including one sketched out by Chalmers more than 20 years ago (which helps explain his affinity for IIT). Information-based theories of consciousness are circular; that is, they seek to explain consciousness with a concept—information—that presupposes consciousness." (my bold)-Comment: I view Horgan as a clear-thinking guy. The first bold above is the point I've tried to make all along. 'Information does not exist except as relative to consciousness'.

Human Consciousness: not explained by neuroscience

by David Turell @, Friday, December 04, 2015, 20:53 (3028 days ago) @ David Turell

A neuroscientist expresses his doubts:-http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/11/13/455731022/you-are-not-just-your-brain-"For some time now, I've been skeptical about the neuroscience of consciousness. Not so much because I doubt that consciousness is affected by neural states and processes, but because of the persistent tendency on the part of some neuroscientists to think of consciousness itself as a neural phenomenon.-"Nothing epitomizes this tendency better than Francis Crick's famous claim — he called it his "astonishing hypothesis" — that you are your brain. At an interdisciplinary conference at Brown not so long ago, I heard a prominent neuroscientist blandly assert, as if voicing well-established scientific fact, that thoughts, feelings and beliefs are specific constellations of matter that are located (as it happens) inside the head. My own view — I laid this out in a book I wrote a few years back called Out of Our Heads — is that the brain is only part of the story, and that we can only begin to understand how the brain makes us consciousness by realizing that brain functions only in the setting of our bodies and our broader environmental (including our social and cultural) situation. The skull is not a magical membrane, my late collaborator, friend and teacher Susan Hurley used to say. And there is no reason to think the processes supporting consciousness are confined to what happens only on one side (the inside) of that boundary.-***-"Seth is correct that "it's tricky to come up with a rigorous scientific definition of consciousness which enjoys a broad consensus." He goes on to say: "Put simply, for a conscious organism, there is 'something it is like' to be that organism." It's worth noting that this characterization of what it is for an organism to be conscious — that there is something that it is like to be that organism — was first advanced in the 70s by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.-"I don't intend this observation as a criticism. To the contrary, I applaud Seth for undertaking the project of leading this new research journal and for emphasizing, at the outset, that consciousness science isn't — and can't be — just neuroscience."-Comment: Lets throw out materialism as the lone explanation is what he is suggesting.

Human Consciousness: a subjective issue

by David Turell @, Saturday, December 12, 2015, 19:52 (3020 days ago) @ David Turell

A new essay explores the issue of the subjectiveness of consciousness and why that matters in any research or theory:-https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem-"First coined in 1995 by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, this ‘hard problem' of consciousness highlights the distinction between registering and actually feeling a phenomenon. Such feelings are what philosophers refer to as qualia: roughly speaking, the properties by which we classify experiences according to ‘what they are like'. In 2008, the French thinker Michel Bitbol nicely parsed the distinction between feeling and registering by pointing to the difference between the subjective statement ‘I feel hot', and the objective assertion that ‘The temperature of this room is higher than the boiling point of alcohol' - a statement that is amenable to test by thermometer. -***-"But perhaps most surprisingly, just when the ‘stream of consciousness' was entering our lexicon, physicists began to realise that consciousness might after all be critical to their own descriptions of the world. 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.-***-"There are parallel moves in neuroscience to determine the ‘neural correlates of consciousness' (NCC) - the neurological signatures of awareness. Originally developed in the 1990s by the American neuroscientist Christof Koch and the British Nobel laureate Francis Crick, the NCC project has been making massive strides; 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.-"Plenty of neuroscientists, physicists and philosophers disagree with him, but I'm on his side. What's at stake here is far more than the issue of whether your experience of blue is the same as mine, because subjectivity also has a moral dimension, as Descartes and the medievals understood. -***-"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'."-Comment: All consistent with Nagel's book, 'What is it like to be a cat'. Consciousness is subjective and immaterial. Please note the issue of consciousness and quantum research.

Human Consciousness: musing re hive consciousness

by David Turell @, Friday, January 01, 2016, 15:46 (3000 days ago) @ David Turell

A long rambling essay which raises some interesting points about possible origins of consciousness, self-awareness and brain plasticity as shown in animal experimentation:-https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1c607c0235-Daily_newsletter_Friday_1st_Jan16_12_22_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-1c607c0235-68942561-"It would be a lot easier to answer that question if anyone knew what consciousness is. There's no shortage of theories. The neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison claims that consciousness reflects the integration of distributed brain functions. A model developed by Ezequiel Morsella, of San Francisco State University, describes it as a mediator between conflicting motor commands. The panpsychics regard it as a basic property of matter - like charge, or mass - and believe that our brains don't generate the stuff so much as filter it from the ether like some kind of organic spirit-catchers. Neuroscience superstar V S Ramachandran (University of California in San Diego) blames everything on mirror neurons; Princeton's Michael Graziano - right here in Aeon - describes it as an experiential map.-***-"If physics is right - if everything ultimately comes down to matter, energy and numbers - then any sufficiently accurate copy of a thing will manifest the characteristics of that thing. Sapience should therefore emerge from any physical structure that replicates the relevant properties of the brain.-***
"Then again, if physics is right, we shouldn't exist. You can watch ions hop across synapses, follow nerve impulses from nose to toes; nothing in any of those processes would lead you to expect the emergence of subjective awareness. Physics describes a world of intelligent zombies who do everything we do, except understand that they're doing it. That's what we should be, that's all we should be: meat and computation. Somehow the meat woke up. How the hell does that even work?-***-"What we can get a handle on are the correlates of sapience, the neural signatures that accompany the conscious state. In humans at least, consciousness occurs when a bunch of subcortical structures - the brain stem, the thalamus and hypothalamus, the anterior cingulate cortex - talk to the frontal lobes. Integration is key. Neurons in all these far-flung regions have to be firing in sync, a co?ordinated call-and-response with a signal lag of no more than 400 milliseconds. -***-" A blind rat, wired into a geomagnetic sensor via a simple pair of electrodes, can use magnetic fields to navigate a maze just as well as her sighted siblings. If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality - something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history - is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?-Comment: Something for everyone on this website: physics to consciousness, Romansh uses illusion. dhw likes panpsychism; I like plasticity.

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by David Turell @, Sunday, January 17, 2016, 16:26 (2984 days ago) @ David Turell

This essay's author thinks consciousness can be understood and explained:-http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/consciousness-color-brain/423522/-"The hard problem of our own time is the mystery of consciousness. Let me be precise about what I mean by consciousness. These days it's not hard to understand how the brain can process information about the world, how it can store and recall memories, how it can construct self knowledge including even very complex self knowledge about one's personhood and mortality. That's the content of consciousness, and it's no longer a fundamental mystery. It's information, and we know how to build computers that process information. What's mysterious is how we get to be conscious of all that content. How do we get the inner feeling? And what is that inner feeling anyway?-***-" The brain constructs inaccurate models of the world. To understand consciousness scientifically, once again it's necessary for the cognitive parts of our brains to discover the inaccuracies in our deeper, built-in models of ourselves.-"The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I'm a kangaroo rat. I know it's true because, well, it's true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It's a quick sketch.-"What's it a sketch of? The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That's the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.-***-"The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion. It's a matter of hard science. It's a matter of understanding the brain and the mind—a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information. It's also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, then we can build the same functionality into our computers. Artificial consciousness may just be a hard problem within our grasp."-Comment: Hopeful, but is his approach realistic? Consciousness is based on information but it is immaterial itself. This article ties in closely with the Deutsch essay which precedes it. Thoughts?

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by dhw, Monday, January 18, 2016, 13:21 (2983 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID:(Under "David Deutsch"): An in-depth discussion on whether AGI is possible:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence?utm_source=...

QUOTE: Clearing this logjam will not, by itself, provide the answer. Yet the answer, conceived in those terms, cannot be all that difficult. For yet another consequence of understanding that the target ability is qualitatively different is that, since humans have it and apes do not, the information for how to achieve it must be encoded in the relatively tiny number of differences between the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees. So in one respect I can agree with the AGI-is-imminent camp: it is plausible that just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough. But it will have to be one of the best ideas ever." (David's bold)-David's comment: Deutsch's concluding remarks in a very long and thorough essay on epistemology and the meaning of true intelligence. I view his remark about human/chimp DNA difference to mirror my insistence we are different in kind.-I think we've exhausted the difference-in-kind argument, but there is a major problem here which ties in with this present post on the subject of AI and consciousness. If you favour dualism - a separation between mind and body - you cannot attribute human intelligence to a code in the DNA. Hence your comment on the essay below: “Hopeful, but is his approach realistic? Consciousness is based on information but it is immaterial itself.” That is the crunch question, and after a great start, the writer seems to me to go right off the tracks:- http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/consciousness-color-brain/423522/-QU... "The hard problem of our own time is the mystery of consciousness. Let me be precise about what I mean by consciousness. These days it's not hard to understand how the brain can process information about the world, how it can store and recall memories, how it can construct self knowledge including even very complex self knowledge about one's personhood and mortality. That's the content of consciousness, and it's no longer a fundamental mystery. It's information, and we know how to build computers that process information. What's mysterious is how we get to be conscious of all that content. How do we get the inner feeling? And what is that inner feeling anyway?-So far, so good. Yes, the content of consciousness is information, and yes, he is asking all the right questions. It's followed by an admirable summary of the different answers that have been offered, including scientific and mystic, but then he prepares us for the big moment:
 
"The brain processes information. (My bold - see lower down.) It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That's the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.”-First blip. When he says the brain describes the act of processing information, that description does not “depict a “me” or a state of subjective consciousness”. The act of processing is not “me”. It is the “me” that provides the description of the act of processing, and we do not know what this “me” consists of. That is the mystery! The confusion is typified - you won't like this, but I am actually on your side here - in his use of the word “information”, highlighted below:
 
QUOTE: “The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion. It's a matter of hard science. It's a matter of understanding the brain and the mind—a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information. (My bold) It's also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, then we can build the same functionality into our computers..."-Earlier he said the brain processes information (my bold). Yes. But now he says the brain and the mind...are made out of information (my bold). This means firstly that information processes information. It is what you have called “shorthand” and what I call a misleading and confusing use of the word. No, information does not process information. As I keep saying, we need to distinguish between the content of consciousness, which is information, and the mechanism that processes it. Some of the processing is unconscious, and that is the extent to which I'd say it is true that the brain processes information. I'd also say that nobody can pinpoint the exact stage at which unconscious processes become conscious. But we are now talking specifically about consciousness, and he takes it for granted that the brain and the CONSCIOUS mind are synonymous. You could hardly have a more direct opposition to your own belief that “consciousness is based on information but is immaterial in itself.” What this boils down to, therefore, is a very simple hypothesis: if the mind and the brain are synonymous, and consciousness is the PRODUCT of materials, it should be possible for us to create artificial consciousness. But the “if” is the big question, and until we know the SOURCE of consciousness (if we ever do), his musings are based on a purely subjective assumption.

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by David Turell @, Monday, January 18, 2016, 21:52 (2982 days ago) @ dhw


> I think we've exhausted the difference-in-kind argument, but there is a major problem here which ties in with this present post on the subject of AI and consciousness. If you favour dualism - a separation between mind and body - you cannot attribute human intelligence to a code in the DNA.-Yes I can. You forget that I view the brain as a receiver of consciousness, as the NDE researchers feel.-> 
> dhw: So far, so good. Yes, the content of consciousness is information, -But the mechanism of consciousness is not information as you point out below.
> 
> "The brain processes information. (My bold - see lower down.) It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That's the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.”-> dhw: The confusion is typified - you won't like this, but I am actually on your side here - in his use of the word “information”, highlighted below:
> 
> QUOTE: “The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion. It's a matter of hard science. It's a matter of understanding the brain and the mind—a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information. (My bold) It's also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, then we can build the same functionality into our computers..."-I don't believe his optimism at all.
> 
> dhw: Earlier he said the brain processes information (my bold). Yes. But now he says the brain and the mind...are made out of information (my bold). This means firstly that information processes information. -I've agreed with you above-> dhw: But we are now talking specifically about consciousness, and he takes it for granted that the brain and the CONSCIOUS mind are synonymous. ....What this boils down to, therefore, is a very simple hypothesis: if the mind and the brain are synonymous, and consciousness is the PRODUCT of materials, it should be possible for us to create artificial consciousness. But the “if” is the big question, and until we know the SOURCE of consciousness (if we ever do), his musings are based on a purely subjective assumption.-Agreed. My current solution, until something better comes along, is that the brain is a receiver of consciousness. It fits the NDE experiences that survive clinical death when the brain is not working.

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by dhw, Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 15:28 (2982 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: I think we've exhausted the difference-in-kind argument, but there is a major problem here which ties in with this present post on the subject of AI and consciousness. If you favour dualism - a separation between mind and body - you cannot attribute human intelligence to a code in the DNA.-DAVID: Yes I can. You forget that I view the brain as a receiver of consciousness, as the NDE researchers feel.-It's no use having a receiver if there is nothing to receive! The whole point here is that the author believes the brain is the PRODUCER of consciousness, and that is why he thinks we'll be able to create artificial consciousness. I should make it clear that I remain neutral on the subject, but I object to the author's assumption of materialism. You have agreed with everything else I wrote, which includes what lies at the very heart of the author's argument - namely, the not unusual failure to distinguish between information and the mechanism that processes it. (“It's a matter of understanding the brain and the mind - a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information[/b].”) BBella has reinforced the point (under "David Deutsch"):-BBella The quote above reminds me of a quote by Mortimer Adler: "The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea."
The space between information and intelligence is eternally wide but both are needed to create reality.-I can only add that far too many writers, including the author whose essay we have just dissected, fail to distinguish between the two, which results in a misleading and confusing use of the word “information”. I may have complained about that before...

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by David Turell @, Wednesday, January 20, 2016, 01:49 (2981 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: I can only add that far too many writers, including the author whose essay we have just dissected, fail to distinguish between the two, which results in a misleading and confusing use of the word “information”. I may have complained about that before...-Yet the consideration of the place for information to make its contribution is important in the correct contexts.

Human Consciousness: not a hard problem

by dhw, Wednesday, January 20, 2016, 13:36 (2981 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I can only add that far too many writers, including the author whose essay we have just dissected, fail to distinguish between the two, which results in a misleading and confusing use of the word “information”. I may have complained about that before...-DAVID: Yet the consideration of the place for information to make its contribution is important in the correct contexts.-Yes indeed. If only some writers would confine their use of the term to the correct contexts, I wouldn't complain. I think we are in agreement.

Human Consciousness: requires whole brain

by David Turell @, Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 15:18 (2974 days ago) @ dhw

Twelve subjects were given propofol to compare conscious and unconscious brain activity:-http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-01-brain-consciousness-optimal-degree-connectedness.html-"Human beings, when awake, exist in a state of consciousness that is uniquely difficult to define. Scientists try by agreeing that it is the ability to have subjective experiences and to enjoy a first-person perspective on the "reality" of the world. But that does not explain the voice that is our own self, nor the varying degrees of consciousness, such as the differences between being asleep, versus partially awake, versus being completely unconscious. In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn more about the state that exists in the mind when consciousness occurs by enlisting the assistance of 12 volunteers who agreed to be made unconscious by the drug propofol, normally used to put people under during surgical procedures (and notably, also the drug that led to the death of singer Michael Jackson) while undergoing fMRI scans.-"Scientists (and surgeons) believe that propofol causes people to become completely unconscious, which by definition would mean to become incapable of processing thoughts. The brain should not be able to process pain signals, for example, thus making surgery a pain free experience. To gain a better perspective on the various states of consciousness, the team watched blood flow changes in the brains of the volunteers as they moved from a conscious state, to unconsciousness and then back to consciousness.-"In studying the scans, the researchers found that when the volunteers were conscious, there was what they describe as "a flurry of ever-changing activity," with a lot of activity between the various neural networks. In contrast, they found that while unconscious, the brains of the volunteers were engaged in far less interconnectivity and were less variable over time.-"These findings, the team suggests, show that consciousness in the brain is merely, in a physical sense, a state where there is an optimal level of neural network connectedness."-Comment: Consciousness requires the whole brain in action, not surprising.

Human Consciousness: Phantom limb issue

by David Turell @, Sunday, February 07, 2016, 15:43 (2963 days ago) @ David Turell

This article presents a very stretched theory that consciousness is an illusion much like phantom limb: the brain thinks the amputated part is still there, and I've had patients who continued to have pain from the removed part. From childhood the brain develops an encyclopedia of information about its body. For example when a baby's arm is hit, the whole arm hurts. Babies cannot differentiate between two close pin pricks. What is called two-point pain discrimination (two simultaneous pricks close together) takes some time to develop. The brain has to learn about each area of the skin from the beginning of life. We are not born with an encyclopedia of knowledge about our bodies. It is learned and phantom limb is a result.-http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/phantom-limbs-explain-consciousness/459780/-***-"During his disastrous naval assault on the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Lord Nelson lost hundreds of men, and was driven from the coast in defeat. He was also shot in the arm, and had to have part of it amputated.....For the rest of his life he could sense it, as though the appendage were extending invisibly from the stump. He supposedly claimed that he now knew there had to be an afterlife because if his arm could have a ghost, then so could he.-***-"The brain needs to control its attention, just as it controls the body. To understand how, we can gain some insight from control theory, a well-developed branch of engineering theory that deals in the optimal ways for complex systems to work—whether those systems dictate the airflow in a building, traffic patterns in a city, or a robot arm. In control theory, if a machine is to control something optimally, it needs a working model of whatever it's controlling. The brain certainly follows this principle in controlling the body. That's why it computes a body schema. Since the brain can control its attention exquisitely well, it almost certainly has an attention schema, a simulation of its own attention.-***-"Here's how a brain with an attention schema might behave. First, it would have a nuanced control of attention. Second, if it had an ability to translate internal information into words, it might make some strange, physically incoherent claims based on that attention schema. It wouldn't claim, “Well look at that, my cerebral cortex has an attentional enhancement of the visual signal of that sandwich in front of me.” Instead, going off the incomplete information in its attention schema, it might say, “I've got a non-physical, subjective experience of that sandwich. You know, the feely thing inside me. Consciousness.” That's the brain's caricature of attention. Of course the process is not limited to sandwiches. The same logic applies to consciousness of any object in front of you, consciousness of a memory that you've just recalled, or consciousness of yourself as a person.-***-"This is called the attention schema theory, a theory that my lab has been developing and testing experimentally for the past five years. It's a theory of why we insist with such certainty that we have subjective experience. Attention is fundamental. It's present in almost all animals. To help control it, the brain evolved an attention schema. Because of the quirky information contained in the attention schema, the brain-machine claims to have a conscious experience of things. Consciousness is phantom attention. Without resorting to magic, mysticism, hard problems, or spooky soul energy, the theory explains the behavior of us humans who claim—who swear up and down and get testy when challenged—that we have a ghost in the machine.-"Lord Nelson may have been right when he said that a phantom arm is made of the same stuff as the soul. It's all information in the brain."-Comment: the author tries to explain consciousness but he hasn't. The brain may cling to what it knew, but most of the time it is erased.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 15:34 (2961 days ago) @ David Turell

Freud's 'unconscious' Makes a comeback:-http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/sigmund-freud-unconscious-theories?CMP=fb_gu-" Yet it could be the case that far from being past its sell-by date, the time of the unconscious is yet to come.
 
"The reasons are twofold: science and necessity. First, neuroscience has demonstrated conclusively that there's far more going on in the mind than the owners of those minds are generally aware. Mark Solms, a professor of neuropsychology and psychoanalyst who has pioneered much of the effort to test Freud's findings against the neuroscientific, often points out that the conscious mind is capable of attending to six or seven things at once, while the rest of the nervous system is performing thousands. In that light, it seems perverse to deny that much of psychic life lies over the horizon of our awareness, doubly so when you consider experiences such as dreaming and slips of the tongue, or ordeals from infancy that can't be remembered and yet demonstrably shape adult life.-***-"So the real debate, today, is whether the mechanisms that Freud ascribed to the unconscious - the so-called dynamic unconscious - were right.-***-"The science, though, is building to challenge this view. One line of research examines certain amnesic conditions in which patients fabricate memories and deny they can't recall what actually happened. Such confabulations have been shown to follow the rules that Freud identified in a dynamic unconscious. They carry meaning. Alternatively, there are those who suffer from paraphasia, a syndrome in which forgotten words are substituted by others. The substitutions similarly show patterns that mirror those Freud detected in dreams and slips. The evidence is that repression is a key characteristic of the unconscious.-***-"The unconscious is one candidate, and conversion disorders provide a case in point. Also known as hysteria, these too are remarkably prevalent. -***-"But Freud's central idea on conversion disorders - namely that a trauma, or perceived trauma, lies at the origin - is now routinely shown to have clinical efficacy.....When you examine patient histories carefully - which of course takes time, training and money - the dissociations and meaning of the symptoms often emerge. ... As Kanaan put it, if Freud had referred to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) rather than hysteria, he would now be remembered as a pioneering hero.-***-"Further, psychoanalysis has itself radically revised Freud's original conclusions. But it now holds a century of wisdom on engaging this hidden and sometimes devastatingly powerful part of ourselves. Freud believed his work was only a beginning. Scientific research and sheer human need suggest we should energetically continue what he started."-Comment: From my own experience and training, repressed memories and ego defense mechanisms built up over the years can play very unwanted roles. But today talking and even studying dreams can play a role in helping the patient. Our brain is more complex than initially realized.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by BBella @, Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 19:16 (2961 days ago) @ David Turell

Freud's 'unconscious' Makes a comeback:
> 
> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/sigmund-freud-unconscious-theories... 
> " Yet it could be the case that far from being past its sell-by date, the time of the unconscious is yet to come.
> 
> "Further, psychoanalysis has itself radically revised Freud's original conclusions. But it now holds a century of wisdom on engaging this hidden and sometimes devastatingly powerful part of ourselves. Freud believed his work was only a beginning. Scientific research and sheer human need suggest we should energetically continue what he started."
> 
> Comment: From my own experience and training, repressed memories and ego defense mechanisms built up over the years can play very unwanted roles. But today talking and even studying dreams can play a role in helping the patient. Our brain is more complex than initially realized.-Freud and Jung's work and others called to me to study from a very young age. I look forward to any new information and understanding of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. It seems that aspect of the human mind is asleep until the conscious aspect falls asleep. Then the unconscious wakes and lives it's own life out in our minds until we awake. But even so, as the article points out, all of our lives are molded by both the conscious and the unconscious, that which we KNOW and remember and that which we don't. Imagine what kind of being we would be if both aspects of ourselves were fully aware and awake at all times. Mind blowing to think about.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Tuesday, February 09, 2016, 23:41 (2960 days ago) @ BBella


> dhw: Freud and Jung's work and others called to me to study from a very young age. I look forward to any new information and understanding of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. It seems that aspect of the human mind is asleep until the conscious aspect falls asleep. Then the unconscious wakes and lives it's own life out in our minds until we awake. But even so, as the article points out, all of our lives are molded by both the conscious and the unconscious, that which we KNOW and remember and that which we don't. Imagine what kind of being we would be if both aspects of ourselves were fully aware and awake at all times. Mind blowing to think about.-Firstly, I'm sure your deep interest in this subject greatly helped you as you created personalities in your plays and books. Secondly, as you recognize the depth of consciousness and unconsciousness in humans, how much unconsciousness do you expect is present in apes? Different in kind!

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 13:12 (2960 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Freud's 'unconscious' Makes a comeback:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/sigmund-freud-unconscious-theories...-QUOTE: " Yet it could be the case that far from being past its sell-by date, the time of the unconscious is yet to come.” -I'm surprised to hear that Freud's unconscious even needed to make a comeback. Perhaps that is simply because we now take it for granted that childhood experiences mark us for the rest of our lives, and that vast numbers of our actions take place without any conscious decision on our part. Freud was also extremely aware that art had its roots in the subconscious. See below. -BBELLA: Freud and Jung's work and others called to me to study from a very young age. I look forward to any new information and understanding of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. It seems that aspect of the human mind is asleep until the conscious aspect falls asleep. Then the unconscious wakes and lives it's own life out in our minds until we awake. But even so, as the article points out, all of our lives are molded by both the conscious and the unconscious, that which we KNOW and remember and that which we don't. Imagine what kind of being we would be if both aspects of ourselves were fully aware and awake at all times. Mind blowing to think about.-Interestingly, the creative processes do combine the conscious and the unconscious, which is why the arts can be so useful in psychotherapy. For a writer especially, the mixing of consciousness levels is quite astonishing. The characters emerge from the subconscious and they take on a life of their own, but you the writer are fully conscious of their presence, thoughts and actions (in dreams we are rarely conscious that we are dreaming) and you may even consciously interfere (which can be dangerous but is sometimes necessary). At one and the same time, the writer is consciously inside and outside his characters and his own consciousness and his subconsciousness. Actors, on the other hand, must lose their self-awareness and “be” someone else. The moment they become self-aware, the performance will lose its seeming “reality”.-DAVID: Firstly, I'm sure your deep interest in this subject greatly helped you as you created personalities in your plays and books. Secondly, as you recognize the depth of consciousness and unconsciousness in humans, how much unconsciousness do you expect is present in apes? Different in kind!-You mistakenly attributed BBella's comments to me, but you are quite right about the arts. As regards apes and other animals, far more of their activity is based on the unconscious than the conscious. It is our levels of awareness and self-awareness that mark us out as special! In terms of character formation, anyone who has lived with animals will know that they are different individually, and there can be no question that exactly like ourselves they are a mixture of nature and nurture. But because they lack our DEGREE of self-awareness, they are not able - as far as we know - to deliberately bring their subconscious minds to the surface as we can. It is this self-awareness that leads us to ask the questions which in turn lead us to expand our horizons so far beyond those of our fellow animals. Different in degree!

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 15:08 (2960 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: You mistakenly attributed BBella's comments to me, but you are quite right about the arts. As regards apes and other animals, far more of their activity is based on the unconscious than the conscious.-I knew BBella's comments as hers.-> dhw: It is our levels of awareness and self-awareness that mark us out as special! In terms of character formation, anyone who has lived with animals will know that they are different individually, and there can be no question that exactly like ourselves they are a mixture of nature and nurture. But because they lack our DEGREE of self-awareness, they are not able - as far as we know - to deliberately bring their subconscious minds to the surface as we can. It is this self-awareness that leads us to ask the questions which in turn lead us to expand our horizons so far beyond those of our fellow animals. Different in degree!-I've left your whole comment intact, because it reads exactly as I think and analyze, but with a different conclusion. You have perfectly described how different in kind are our mental processes and capacities, and try to imply it is just a little degree apart. It is a giant degree, that you would see by reading Adler, if you had the time. I'll send you a copy.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Thursday, February 11, 2016, 13:43 (2959 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It is our levels of awareness and self-awareness that mark us out as special! In terms of character formation, anyone who has lived with animals will know that they are different individually, and there can be no question that exactly like ourselves they are a mixture of nature and nurture. But because they lack our DEGREE of self-awareness, they are not able - as far as we know - to deliberately bring their subconscious minds to the surface as we can. It is this self-awareness that leads us to ask the questions which in turn lead us to expand our horizons so far beyond those of our fellow animals. Different in degree!-DAVID: I've left your whole comment intact, because it reads exactly as I think and analyze, but with a different conclusion. You have perfectly described how different in kind are our mental processes and capacities, and try to imply it is just a little degree apart. It is a giant degree, that you would see by reading Adler, if you had the time. I'll send you a copy.-During the last three days alone, on the “Different in degree” thread, I have emphasized the giant size of the degree: 
10 Feb: "The fact that we have developed these attributes on such a massive scale is indisputable..."
9 Feb.: "Yes, the magnitude is surprising, but magnitude is a matter of degree, not kind."
8 Feb.: "I am not going to minimize the gulf between our consciousness and that of our fellow animals..."
8 Feb.: "In brief, for all the gulf in scale, I don't see why anyone should believe that our quest for knowledge and our moral and aesthetic sense are not an evolutionary extension of the same characteristics to be found in our animal ancestors."-My point is that despite the colossal gulf in degree, there is a straightforward evolutionary explanation. You have explained in your second book that Adler regards our “different in kind” form of consciousness as being immaterial, and as such it supports theism. But you have also said that animals may have “souls”, in which case they too would have an immaterial form of consciousness. So in that context it really makes no difference whether our consciousness is different in degree or in kind. You have also said that Adler does not believe computers will ever be able to “think” like humans. I'm inclined to agree. I don't believe bacteria, ants or elephants will ever think like humans either. And I don't believe humans will ever think like bacteria, ants or elephants. So what exactly is the importance of the degree versus kind debate? If Adler has an answer which you agree with, I'd be grateful if you would sum it up - you are always very good at condensing arguments, and one great advantage of this forum is we discuss things person to person rather than being directed to an endless reading list.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Thursday, February 11, 2016, 18:44 (2959 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw; My point is that despite the colossal gulf in degree, there is a straightforward evolutionary explanation. You have explained in your second book that Adler regards our “different in kind” form of consciousness as being immaterial, and as such it supports theism. But you have also said that animals may have “souls”, in which case they too would have an immaterial form of consciousness.So in that context it really makes no difference whether our consciousness is different in degree or in kind. -That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.-> dhw: You have also said that Adler does not believe computers will ever be able to “think” like humans. I'm inclined to agree.-You are referring to Penrose.-> dhw: I don't believe bacteria, ants or elephants will ever think like humans either. And I don't believe humans will ever think like bacteria, ants or elephants. So what exactly is the importance of the degree versus kind debate? If Adler has an answer which you agree with, I'd be grateful if you would sum it up - you are always very good at condensing arguments, and one great advantage of this forum is we discuss things person to person rather than being directed to an endless reading list.-On page 396 of my Atheist Delusion book is a comment that Adler bases his conclusions on our ability to have immaterial thoughts. Animals don't have 'concepts'. We do. Here is the gap that Nagel refers to. Adler's thoughts are from 1967. A in evolutinll the research since then has not changed anything.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Friday, February 12, 2016, 13:38 (2958 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw; My point is that despite the colossal gulf in degree, there is a straightforward evolutionary explanation. You have explained in your second book that Adler regards our “different in kind” form of consciousness as being immaterial, and as such it supports theism. But you have also said that animals may have “souls”, in which case they too would have an immaterial form of consciousness.So in that context it really makes no difference whether our consciousness is different in degree or in kind. 
DAVID: That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.-You have never to my knowledge discounted the possibility. See below for further comment on animal thought.-dhw: You have also said that Adler does not believe computers will ever be able to “think” like humans. I'm inclined to agree.
DAVID: You are referring to Penrose.-Read your own p. 247: “His [Adler's] primary point is that matter cannot think, and he predicts that any form of computer will never reach that state.” -dhw: I don't believe bacteria, ants or elephants will ever think like humans either. And I don't believe humans will ever think like bacteria, ants or elephants. So what exactly is the importance of the degree versus kind debate? If Adler has an answer which you agree with, I'd be grateful if you would sum it up - you are always very good at condensing arguments, and one great advantage of this forum is we discuss things person to person rather than being directed to an endless reading list.
DAVID: On page 396 of my Atheist Delusion book is a comment that Adler bases his conclusions on our ability to have immaterial thoughts. Animals don't have 'concepts'. We do. Here is the gap that Nagel refers to. Adler's thoughts are from 1967. A in evolutinll the research since then has not changed anything.-Even you agree that some animals and birds think, have emotions, take decisions... Huge gulf in degree, yes, but working out solutions to problems can also count as “immaterial” thought, as can grief, as can making choices. And you agree that humans and apes share a common ancestor. So why is the distinction between kind and degree so important to you? What are you trying to prove?

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Friday, February 12, 2016, 15:15 (2958 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.
> 
> dhw: You have never to my knowledge discounted the possibility. See below for further comment on animal thought.-I never meant to 'discount' it. I accept it as a possibility.
> 
> dhw: You have also said that Adler does not believe computers will ever be able to “think” like humans. I'm inclined to agree.
> DAVID: You are referring to Penrose.
> 
> Read your own p. 247: “His [Adler's] primary point is that matter cannot think, and he predicts that any form of computer will never reach that state.” -Thanks for the correction. But Penrose has a book on it.
> 
> dhw: Even you agree that some animals and birds think, have emotions, take decisions... Huge gulf in degree, yes, but working out solutions to problems can also count as “immaterial” thought, as can grief, as can making choices. And you agree that humans and apes share a common ancestor. So why is the distinction between kind and degree so important to you? What are you trying to prove?-What Adler proves. We are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind, because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by BBella @, Friday, February 12, 2016, 17:17 (2958 days ago) @ dhw

And you agree that humans and apes share a common ancestor. So why is the distinction between kind and degree so important to you? What are you trying to prove?-According to evolution do not all beings share a common ancestor? And if so, wouldn't that mean all beings are truly only different in degree from each other? It would seem to me, only for categorizations purpose would something be different in kind.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Friday, February 12, 2016, 18:32 (2958 days ago) @ BBella


> BBella: According to evolution do not all beings share a common ancestor? And if so, wouldn't that mean all beings are truly only different in degree from each other? It would seem to me, only for categorizations purpose would something be different in kind.-Look at my comment today about Adler's thinking about the quality of the human intellect.:-" What Adler proves. We are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind, because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Saturday, February 13, 2016, 13:47 (2957 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.
dhw: You have never to my knowledge discounted the possibility. See below for further comment on animal thought.
DAVID: I never meant to 'discount' it. I accept it as a possibility.-Thank you. Therefore you think it possible that Adler's difference “in kind” (only humans have an “immaterial” mind) is wrong.
 
dhw: Even you agree that some animals and birds think, have emotions, take decisions... Huge gulf in degree, yes, but working out solutions to problems can also count as “immaterial” thought, as can grief, as can making choices. And you agree that humans and apes share a common ancestor. So why is the distinction between kind and degree so important to you? What are you trying to prove?-DAVID: What Adler proves. We are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind, because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.-You have constantly informed us that virtually nothing in evolution could have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, including the weaverbird's nest! So degree versus kind is irrelevant anyway. BBella has hit the nail on the head:
 
BBella: According to evolution do not all beings share a common ancestor? And if so, wouldn't that mean all beings are truly only different in degree from each other? It would seem to me, only for categorizations purpose would something be different in kind.-The perfect summary. Bacteria, ants, dogs, eagles, elephants, humans....all categorically different in kind, and all with varying degrees of intelligence, manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization etc., explicable in terms of the evolutionary drive (origin unknown) for survival and/or improvement.

Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Saturday, February 13, 2016, 15:10 (2957 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.
> dhw: You have never to my knowledge discounted the possibility. See below for further comment on animal thought.
> DAVID: I never meant to 'discount' it. I accept it as a possibility.
> 
> Thank you. Therefore you think it possible that Adler's difference “in kind” (only humans have an “immaterial” mind) is wrong.-No. If you knew Jewish theology you would know that animal souls are not the same as human souls, and the Hebrew words are different, nefesh and neshamah. And Adler's point is not what you state. Human aesthetics and immaterial conceptualizations are part of his argument. Can an ape write Beethoven's Fifth?-> 
> You have constantly informed us that virtually nothing in evolution could have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, including the weaverbird's nest! So degree versus kind is irrelevant anyway. BBella has hit the nail on the head:
> 
> BBella: According to evolution do not all beings share a common ancestor? And if so, wouldn't that mean all beings are truly only different in degree from each other? It would seem to me, only for categorizations purpose would something be different in kind.
> 
> dhw: The perfect summary. Bacteria, ants, dogs, eagles, elephants, humans....all categorically different in kind, and all with varying degrees of intelligence, manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization etc., explicable in terms of the evolutionary drive (origin unknown) for survival and/or improvement.-You both miss the point. Stick to the mental aspect. Adler only discusses the differences in consciousness and capacity of that consciousness, nothing about phenotypes, which are beside the point. The 'kind' difference is only in that aspect of life.

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Sunday, February 14, 2016, 12:52 (2956 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: That animals might have souls is a tenet of Judaism, nothing more.
dhw: You have never to my knowledge discounted the possibility. See below for further comment on animal thought.
DAVID: I never meant to 'discount' it. I accept it as a possibility.
Dhw: Thank you. Therefore you think it possible that Adler's difference “in kind” (only humans have an “immaterial” mind) is wrong.

DAVID: No. If you knew Jewish theology you would know that animal souls are not the same as human souls, and the Hebrew words are different, nefesh and neshamah. And Adler's point is not what you state. Human aesthetics and immaterial conceptualizations are part of his argument. Can an ape write Beethoven's Fifth?

Could Beethoven sing like a nightingale? First came birdsong, and millions of years later came humansong. Yes, a huge gulf, but a natural evolutionary progression once awareness had arrived at new levels. As for the soul, if it exists, it is that part of the organism that lives on when the material body is dead. I would not expect an elephant/dog/ant soul to be the same as a human soul. The point is its immateriality. Immaterial conceptualizations connected with the quest for knowledge, morality and aesthetics are the whole point of O'Hear's anti-evolutionary argument, which you say echoes Adler, and I have suggested that they are explicable in evolutionary terms of human self-awareness building on our animal ancestors' own explorations, social structures and “appreciation of beauty”. You accept that these are “an evolutionary extension, just the magnitude is extremely surprising.” Magnitude = degree. You then claim that “we are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.” According to you, even the weaverbird's nest could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, so if that is the point you are trying to make, why not use the same argument for both: human intelligence, like the weaverbird's nest, is too complex to have been created by undirected evolutionary processes. We may not agree, but at least we can then dispense entirely with the non-argument of degree versus kind. (I have suggested, ad nauseam, that the direction in all cases is provided by an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism - origin unknown - within the organisms themselves.) 

BBella: According to evolution do not all beings share a common ancestor? And if so, wouldn't that mean all beings are truly only different in degree from each other? It would seem to me, only for categorizations purpose would something be different in kind.
dhw: The perfect summary. Bacteria, ants, dogs, eagles, elephants, humans....all categorically different in kind, and all with varying degrees of intelligence, manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization etc., explicable in terms of the evolutionary drive (origin unknown) for survival and/or improvement.

DAVID: You both miss the point. Stick to the mental aspect. Adler only discusses the differences in consciousness and capacity of that consciousness, nothing about phenotypes, which are beside the point. The 'kind' difference is only in that aspect of life.

Dealt with above. BBella and I are simply trying to sort out the linguistic mess, which has led to your claiming that difference in degree (capacity, like magnitude, is another difference in degree) = difference in kind. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and all species have different degrees - sometimes massively so - of intelligence etc., as above. Simple.

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Sunday, February 14, 2016, 15:22 (2956 days ago) @ dhw

> dhw: According to you, even the weaverbird's nest could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, so if that is the point you are trying to make, why not use the same argument for both: human intelligence, like the weaverbird's nest, is too complex to have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.-That is exactly what I have stating. -> 
> dhw: Dealt with above. BBella and I are simply trying to sort out the linguistic mess, which has led to your claiming that difference in degree (capacity, like magnitude, is another difference in degree) = difference in kind. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and all species have different degrees - sometimes massively so - of intelligence etc., as above. Simple.-And I'm simply pointing out that Adler and Nagel agree: evolution does not explain the human mind. And I'm with them.

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Monday, February 15, 2016, 16:47 (2955 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Immaterial conceptualizations connected with the quest for knowledge, morality and aesthetics are the whole point of O'Hear's anti-evolutionary argument, which you say echoes Adler, and I have suggested that they are explicable in evolutionary terms of human self-awareness building on our animal ancestors' own explorations, social structures and “appreciation of beauty”. You accept that these are “an evolutionary extension, just the magnitude is extremely surprising.” Magnitude = degree. You then claim that “we are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.” According to you, even the weaverbird's nest could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, so if that is the point you are trying to make, why not use the same argument for both: human intelligence, like the weaverbird's nest, is too complex to have been created by undirected evolutionary processes. We may not agree, but at least we can then dispense entirely with the non-argument of degree versus kind. (My new bold)-DAVID: That is exactly what I have [been] stating.
DAVID: I'm simply pointing out that Adler and Nagel agree: evolution does not explain the human mind. And I'm with them.-May I ask you please to reread the whole of the paragraph above, which covers both the anti-evolution argument and the non-argument concerning kind versus degree, which you have been “stating” ever since you read Adler. According to you, God had to preprogramme or personally supervise the production of the human mind and of the weaverbird's nest (plus the rest of evolution's innovations, lifestyles and wonders), and so kind versus degree is as irrelevant as it is confusing. All species (broad sense) think and act in their own way. Would you therefore accept the summary I offered earlier:
 
dhw: BBella and I are simply trying to sort out the linguistic mess, which has led to your claiming that difference in degree (capacity, like magnitude, is another difference in degree) = difference in kind. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and all species have different degrees - sometimes massively so - of intelligence [and of manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization] etc. Simple.

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Monday, February 15, 2016, 18:50 (2955 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: BBella and I are simply trying to sort out the linguistic mess, which has led to your claiming that difference in degree (capacity, like magnitude, is another difference in degree) = difference in kind. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and all species have different degrees - sometimes massively so - of intelligence [and of manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization] etc. Simple.-I continue to disagree, having read Adler's whole book on the subject. For example we have inherited instinctual behavior in evolution just as animals have, but we have the distinct advantage of being able to reason and control them when they are not appropriate. You are looking at patterns like the Pentadactyl limb type. Our bodies may look the same but our immaterial thought patterns are totally different than lower organisms. Different in kind.

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by dhw, Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 16:14 (2954 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: BBella and I are simply trying to sort out the linguistic mess, which has led to your claiming that difference in degree (capacity, like magnitude, is another difference in degree) = difference in kind. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and all species have different degrees - sometimes massively so - of intelligence [and of manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization] etc. Simple.-DAVID: I continue to disagree, having read Adler's whole book on the subject. For example we have inherited instinctual behavior in evolution just as animals have, but we have the distinct advantage of being able to reason and control them when they are not appropriate. You are looking at patterns like the Pentadactyl limb type. Our bodies may look the same but our immaterial thought patterns are totally different than lower organisms. Different in kind.-I do not think that degrees of intelligence, manoeuvrability, adaptability, perception, social organization can be equated with the pentadactyl limb type. However, I am happy to agree with you that our immaterial thought patterns are totally different from (and vastly more complex than) the immaterial thought patterns of ants, dogs and elephants, just as the immaterial thought patterns of ants, dogs and elephants (judging by their behaviour and lifestyle) are totally different from one another. All species (broad sense) are different in kind, and so it is only natural that their thought patterns will also be different in kind. You have, however, accepted that there are basic common patterns which humans have inherited and developed on a vast scale (e.g. exploration, social organization, appreciation of beauty) and which are “an evolutionary extension, just the magnitude is extremely surprising.” Magnitude = degree. You then claim that “we are so different in degree it is obvious we are different in kind because that degree in difference could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes.” Since according to you the weaverbird's nest and the rest of evolution's innovations and natural wonders could not have been created by undirected evolutionary processes, I am simply pointing out that with your interpretation of evolution, there is no need for any of this discussion. In brief, ALL species' (broad sense) thought patterns are different in kind, the degree of our intelligence is indeed surprising and remarkable, as are the complexity of the weaverbird's nest, the strength of the spider's silk, and the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. For you they are ALL special, and - according to you - their special attributes ALL provide evidence that your God directed evolution. So why single out humans?

`Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious

by David Turell @, Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 18:51 (2954 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: In brief, ALL species' (broad sense) thought patterns are different in kind, the degree of our intelligence is indeed surprising and remarkable, as are the complexity of the weaverbird's nest, the strength of the spider's silk, and the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. For you they are ALL special, and - according to you - their special attributes ALL provide evidence that your God directed evolution. So why single out humans? - First, per Adler, because it is extremely clear animals cannot have conceptual thought. See my entry today about animal thought as supported by Nagel.

`Human Consciousness: Role of sleep/dreams

by David Turell @, Wednesday, March 23, 2016, 14:23 (2918 days ago) @ David Turell

David Gelernter cautions sleep and dreams must be include in the mix of studies: - http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45357/title/In-Your-Dreams/&u... - "...as I argue in my new book The Tides of Mind, we will never reach a deep understanding of mind unless we start with an integrated view, stretching from rational, methodical thought to nightmares. - "Integrating dreaming with the rest of mind is something like being asked to assemble a car from a large pile of metal, plastic, rubber, glass, and an ocelot. Dreaming is hallucination, centering on a radically different self from our waking selves, within unreal settings and stories. Dreams can please or scare us far more vividly than our ordinary thoughts. And they are so slippery, so hard to grasp, that we start losing them the moment we wake up. - "But dreaming fits easily into the big picture of mind; and we will make no basic progress on understanding the mind until we see how. Dreaming is the endpoint of the spectrum of consciousness, the smooth progression from one type of consciousness to the next, that we each experience daily. - *** - "We can also describe the spectrum as a steady shift from a mind dominated by action to one dominated by passive mental experience; from mental doing to mental being. In the upper spectrum, we tend to ignore emotion as we pursue some mental object by means of reasoning or analysis. But the daydreams and fantasies that occupy us as we move down-spectrum are often emotional. And in dreaming we encounter the most saturated emotions, good and bad, that the mind can generate. - *** - "The spectrum clarifies important aspects of the mind. “Intentionality,” the quality of aboutness (“I believe that bird is a sparrow” is about “that bird”), is sometimes called “the mark of the mental”—the distinguishing attribute of mental states. But intentionality belongs strictly to the upper spectrum, and disappears gradually as we descend. At the bottom, our minds are dominated by experience, pure being. Happiness or pain or “the experience of seeing purple” are states that have causes but are about nothing. - *** - "Software simulations of the upper spectrum, of thinking-about, have grown steadily stronger over the years. That trend will continue. Being, however, is not computable. Software can no more reproduce “being happy” than it can reproduce “being rusty.” Such states depend on physical properties of particular objects. A digital computer resembles only the upper-spectrum mind. Software will never come close to reproducing the mind as a whole.
 Leaving sleep outside our investigation is a good way not to see any of this. Arbitrarily hacking off one end of any natural spectrum is an invitation to conceptual chaos. There has been plenty of that in the science of mind. We must start by understanding sleep and dreaming, and go from there. - Comment: Perhaps Freud was right after all. Sleep/dreams must be a major aspect of consciousness

`Human Consciousness: Role of sleep/dreams

by BBella @, Wednesday, March 23, 2016, 19:22 (2918 days ago) @ David Turell

David Gelernter cautions sleep and dreams must be include in the mix of studies:
> 
> http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45357/title/In-Your-Dreams/&u... 
> "...as I argue in my new book The Tides of Mind, we will never reach a deep understanding of mind unless we start with an integrated view, stretching from rational, methodical thought to nightmares.-> Leaving sleep outside our investigation is a good way not to see any of this. Arbitrarily hacking off one end of any natural spectrum is an invitation to conceptual chaos. There has been plenty of that in the science of mind. We must start by understanding sleep and dreaming, and go from there.
> -I fully believe this ----> David's Comment: Perhaps Freud was right after all. Sleep/dreams must be a major aspect of consciousness

`Human Consciousness: Like movie film?

by David Turell @, Wednesday, April 13, 2016, 01:09 (2897 days ago) @ BBella

A new theory proposes that it exists in time frames: - http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-04-brain-consciousness-slices.html - "EPFL scientists propose a new way of understanding of how the brain processes unconscious information into our consciousness. According to the model, consciousness arises only in time intervals of up to 400 milliseconds, with gaps of unconsciousness in between. - *** - "Consciousness seems to work as continuous stream: one image or sound or smell or touch smoothly follows the other, providing us with a continuous image of the world around us. As far as we are concerned, it seems that sensory information is continuously translated into conscious perception: we see objects move smoothly, we hear sounds continuously, and we smell and feel without interruption. However, another school of thought argues that our brain collects sensory information only at discrete time-points, like a camera taking snapshots. Even though there is a growing body of evidence against "continuous" consciousness, it also looks like that the "discrete" theory of snapshots is too simple to be true. - ***
"The new model proposes a two-stage processing of information. First comes the unconscious stage: The brain processes specific features of objects, e.g. color or shape, and analyzes them quasi-continuously and unconsciously with a very high time-resolution. However, the model suggests that there is no perception of time during this unconscious processing. Even time features, such as duration or color change, are not perceived during this period. Instead, the brain represents its duration as a kind of "number", just as it does for color and shape. - "Then comes the conscious stage: Unconscious processing is completed, and the brain simultaneously renders all the features conscious. This produces the final "picture", which the brain finally presents to our consciousness, making us aware of the stimulus. - *** - "The whole process, from stimulus to conscious perception, can last up to 400 milliseconds, which is a considerable delay from a physiological point of view. "The reason is that the brain wants to give you the best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time," explains Michael Herzog. "There is no advantage in making you aware of its unconscious processing, because that would be immensely confusing." This model focuses on visual perception, but the time delay might be different for other sensory information, e.g. auditory or olfactory. - "This is the first two-stage model of how consciousness arises, and it provides a more complete picture of how the brain manages consciousness than the "continuous versus discrete" debate envisages. But it especially provides useful insights about the way the brain processes time and relates it to our perception of the world." - Comment: This concept would explain the Libet gaps in resonsiveness

`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics

by David Turell @, Saturday, April 23, 2016, 15:23 (2887 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Saturday, April 23, 2016, 15:36

Is much of what we experience of reality an illusion? That is the subject of this interview. How does quantum mechanics relate? Is our brain a machine? - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ - "As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain's best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. - *** - "Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What's more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction. - *** - "On one side you'll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.” - *** - "On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don't seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them. ....The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there' independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” - *** - "That's the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there's a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there's a map A from the space of actions to the world. That's the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at. - *** - " We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it's not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it's also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they're split. I didn't expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. - *** - "The idea that what we're doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it's very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. - *** - "And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don't make progress. They don't avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We'll stick with Newton, thank you. We'll stay 300 years behind in our physics.” - *** - "As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I'm claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life — my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate — that really is the ultimate nature of reality. - Comment; We are what quantum mechanics makes us, as the basis of reality. Not enough space. Much of his reasoning should be read directly. This relates to entry: Thursday, April 21, 2016, 01:52

`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics

by BBella @, Saturday, April 23, 2016, 20:18 (2887 days ago) @ David Turell

Is much of what we experience of reality an illusion? That is the subject of this interview. How does quantum mechanics relate? Is our brain a machine?
> 
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/&... - Back in my illness days I came to this very realization of the illusion of life while under the influence of marijuana (taken solely for pain). But even after seeing behind the mirror of what IS (so to speak) I also came to the conclusion that illusion or not, it is all I have so jump fully into it hook, line and sinker. Why not? Even if all is an illusion, I am - here - not behind the mirror. Only cognizant in the now. - 
> ***
> " We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it's not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it's also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they're split. I didn't expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. - One side of the consciousness (the left) processes our logic conscious and the other side processes our emotional conscious. They do overlap to some degree, but together as a whole conscious they process the whole. I thought they knew that already?

`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics

by David Turell @, Saturday, April 23, 2016, 22:21 (2886 days ago) @ BBella


> Bbella: One side of the consciousness (the left) processes our logic conscious and the other side processes our emotional conscious. They do overlap to some degree, but together as a whole conscious they process the whole. I thought they knew that already? - Yet in split-brain hemispheric surgery when one side is removed for problems like severe epilepsy, the children have fully functional brains and consciousness.

`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics

by dhw, Sunday, April 24, 2016, 13:29 (2886 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Is much of what we experience of reality an illusion? That is the subject of this interview. How does quantum mechanics relate? Is our brain a machine? - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ - QUOTES: "As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain's best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one.
"Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.” - I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this “dramatic” conclusion. The world as an illusion is as old as philosophy. We ourselves covered the whole subject yonks ago in the thread on epistemology, when we agreed that human experience is subjective, and the nearest we can get to objectivity is intersubjectivity - in the form of a general consensus that something is “real”. I don't know how it is possible to say that the world we perceive is “nothing like reality” when none of us is in a position say what IS reality. Coincidentally, this ties in with BBella's challenge to find a theory that could explain the (hypothetical) “reality” of psychic experiences. This, she and I have agreed, boils down to the statement: “Reality is whatever the individual thinks it is.”

`Human Consciousness: Requires quantum physics

by David Turell @, Sunday, April 24, 2016, 15:34 (2886 days ago) @ dhw


> I'm surprised that anyone is surprised by this “dramatic” conclusion. The world as an illusion is as old as philosophy. ... Coincidentally, this ties in with BBella's challenge to find a theory that could explain the (hypothetical) “reality” of psychic experiences. This, she and I have agreed, boils down to the statement: “Reality is whatever the individual thinks it is.”-I don't worry about it. I'm simply happy to work with what I have been given.

Consciousness: can it be created artificially?

by David Turell @, Saturday, May 14, 2016, 17:55 (2866 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Saturday, May 14, 2016, 18:34

The author of this article who works in the field of AI thinks it is possible in the future following his theory: - https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-make-consciousness-into-an-engineering-problem?utm_source... - "The brain is a machine: a device that processes information. That's according to the last 100 years of neuroscience. And yet, somehow, it also has a subjective experience of at least some of that information. Whether we're talking about the thoughts and memories swirling around on the inside, or awareness of the stuff entering through the senses, somehow the brain experiences its own data. It has consciousness. - *** - "I've made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. The theory suggests that consciousness is no bizarre byproduct - it's a tool for regulating information in the brain. And it's not as mysterious as most people think. As ambitious as it sounds, I believe we're close to understanding consciousness well enough to build it. - *** - "We could give our robot an internal model of a ball and an attentional focus on the ball. But is the robot conscious of the ball in the same subjective sense that you might be? Would it claim to have an inner feeling? Some scholars of consciousness would say yes. Visual awareness arises from visual processing. - I would say no. We've taken a first step, but we have more work to do. - ***
 Let's add another component, a second internal model. What we need now is a model of the self. - "A self-model, like any other internal model, is information put together in the brain. The information might include the physical shape and structure of the body, information about personhood, autobiographical memories. And one particularly important part of the human self-model is called the body schema. - *** - "But we've neglected the third obvious component of the scene: the complex relationship between the self and the ball. The robot is focusing its attention on the ball. That's a resource that needs to be controlled intelligently. Clearly it's an important part of the ongoing reality that the robot's brain needs to monitor. Let's add a model of that relationship and see what it gives us. - "Alas, we can no longer dip into standard neuroscience. Whereas we have decades of research on internal models of concrete things such as tennis balls, there's virtually nothing on internal models of attention. It hadn't occurred to scientists that such a thing might exist. - *** - "Consciousness research has been stuck because it assumes the existence of magic. I would say most scientific scholars of consciousness - ask the question: ‘How does the brain generate that seemingly impossible essence, an internal experience?' - *** - "To monitor and control its own attention, the brain builds an attention schema. This is like a map of attention. It contains simplified, slightly distorted information about what attention is and what it is doing at any particular moment. - *** - "As long as scholars think of consciousness as a magic essence floating inside the brain, it won't be very interesting to engineers. But if it's a crucial set of information, a kind of map that allows the brain to function correctly, then engineers may want to know about it. And that brings us back to artificial intelligence. Gone are the days of waiting for computers to get so complicated that they spontaneously become conscious. - *** - "Building a functioning attention schema is within the range of current technology. It would require a group effort but it is possible. We could build an artificial brain that knows what consciousness is, believes that it has it, attributes it to others, and can engage in complex social interaction with people. This has never been done because nobody knew what path to follow. Now maybe we have a glimpse of the way forward." - Comment: it might look and act conscious, but solipsism says do we really know? Very long fascinating essay.

Consciousness: a new theory

by David Turell @, Tuesday, June 07, 2016, 15:41 (2842 days ago) @ David Turell

This sounds to me as a theory of how to be conscious, not consciousness with its abstract thinking: - http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-consciousness-evolved/485558/ - "Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has been the grand unifying theory of biology. Yet one of our most important biological traits, consciousness, is rarely studied in the context of evolution. Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that's why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? - "The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions. The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence. If the theory is right—and that has yet to be determined—then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species. - "Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition. Neurons act like candidates in an election, each one shouting and trying to suppress its fellows. At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal's behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing. - *** (A long description of evolution of nervous systems is skipped) - "Covert attention isn't intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence. And this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description. Alas crocodiles can't really talk. But in this theory, they're likely to have at least a simple form of an attention schema. - *** - "In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one's own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others. - *** - "If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us. Data from my own lab suggests that the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness. - *** - "Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes. - *** - "And so the evolutionary story brings us up to date, to human consciousness—something we ascribe to ourselves, to others, and to a rich spirit world of ghosts and gods in the empty spaces around us. The AST covers a lot of ground, from simple nervous systems to simulations of self and others. It provides a general framework for understanding consciousness, its many adaptive uses, and its gradual and continuing evolution. - Comment: this research scientist misses the point. He is discussing being conscious, not human consciousness which has abstract thought and concepts. He is right that language certainly enhances consciousness; we think in language. But being conscious is only on the way to consciousness. He is not ignoring solipsism, but uses it to tout his theory.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by David Turell @, Monday, May 16, 2016, 15:05 (2864 days ago) @ BBella

I found a philosopher who seems to agree. What she describes is conscious experience and decries the fact that we don't understand quantum reality:-http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?emc=edit_th_20160516&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=60788861&_r=0-"I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It's the most familiar thing there is, whether it's experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.-"The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman's remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay “Mind and Matter”: “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” he wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.-"I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain.-***-"This point was a commonplace one 100 years ago, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes it dramatically in his book “A Brief History of Time.” Physics, he says, is “just a set of rules and equations.” The question is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don't know — except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.-***-"Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can't be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the idea that everything is physical, make the most extraordinary move that has ever been made in the history of human thought. They deny the existence of consciousness: They become “eliminativists.”-***-"It's not the physics picture of matter that's the problem; it's the ordinary everyday picture of matter. It's ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can't possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness."-Comment: Yes, the universe is conscious in that quantum research requires consciousness, but, consciousness is not just experience, it also can conceptualize what is not material, feelings such as love, plan items that don't yet exist. Strange essay.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by dhw, Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 12:53 (2863 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I found a philosopher who seems to agree. What she describes is conscious experience and decries the fact that we don't understand quantum reality:-http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?...-As far as I can make out, she is telling us we know what consciousness is (so it's not a mystery), but we don't know how it works. That, however, is not a mystery either because dualists are idiots, people who say we don't have it are also idiots, and the reason why we don't know how it works is that we don't know all about matter. So matter, not consciousness, is the mystery. In other words, eventually we shall learn how matter creates consciousness. So now you know. Or rather you don't know, but sometime we shall know, because she knows that “consciousness is matter”.

Human Consciousness: Simply a state of matter?

by David Turell @, Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 22:18 (2862 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: In other words, eventually we shall learn how matter creates consciousness. So now you know. Or rather you don't know, but sometime we shall know, because she knows that “consciousness is matter”. - She is discussing being conscious. As a university philosophy professor that is all she can contribute?

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Friday, August 12, 2016, 19:29 (2776 days ago) @ David Turell

This is the best explanation of how we take in stimuli from an unconscious process in the grain to its emergence in our consciousness:-https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4f324f5408-Daily_Newsletter_11_August_20168_11_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-4f324f5408-68942561-"An answer came out of my mouth that I had never quite thought before, but as I heard the words, they seemed true: ‘It's not as simple a question as we usually think. We usually think that whatever we perceive is what is there. Perception equals reality. But research shows that every perception we have is actually constructed by the unconscious mind, which then instantly hands it to consciousness. What the unconscious mind uses to do this constructing is largely sensory stimulations. We grasp this information with our senses, we process it with our brains unconsciously, and the product enters our consciousness. Because we all share this sensory world, we do very similar unconscious constructing. We can both look at a lamp like this one and see the same lamp, as far as we can ever know. It's easy to say, this lamp is real.'"-Comment: This paragraph comes from a long article on treating psychosis, and is interesting to read. My point is that this still sounds like dualism to me. The brain's unconscious activity is occurring in the material part of the brain and then transfers to whatever creates the immateriality of consciousness. There are two levels. That is dualistic! The author's point is we have to accept what the brain gives us whether psychotic or natural, and fits Romansh's uncomfortableness with the process, but the main point is, to me, this is what we are stuck with, and with the plasticity, our brain is molded by us to fit our needs and therefore is controlled by us to be trustworthy unless psychotic. Obviously we all trust it, or there would have been no human modernization progress. Note I have not explained consciousness, nor does Darwin's evolutionary theory.

Human Consciousness: more philosophy

by David Turell @, Friday, August 12, 2016, 21:07 (2776 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

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Sunday, August 14, 2016, 11:21 (2774 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is the best explanation of how we take in stimuli from an unconscious process in the grain to its emergence in our consciousness:-https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish?utm_...-QUOTE: "… research shows that every perception we have is actually constructed by the unconscious mind, which then instantly hands it to consciousness. What the unconscious mind uses to do this constructing is largely sensory stimulations. We grasp this information with our senses, we process it with our brains unconsciously, and the product enters our consciousness.'"-David's comment: This paragraph comes from a long article on treating psychosis, and is interesting to read. My point is that this still sounds like dualism to me. The brain's unconscious activity is occurring in the material part of the brain and then transfers to whatever creates the immateriality of consciousness. There are two levels. That is dualistic! -Your comment seems to me a bit oversimplified. I would argue that processing information, communicating it, making decisions based upon it, and acting upon those decisions are all characteristics of consciousness (not to be confused with self-awareness), of which there are many different levels. These characteristics are common to all organisms, ranging from bacteria through to ants, humming birds, dolphins, chimps and ourselves. Where, then, does the material end and the immaterial begin? If dualism is true, then ALL organisms are dualistic. In the “more philosophy” post, you say are still with Descartes. You probably know that Descartes considered our fellow animals to be automatons (just as you think bacteria are), without a “soul”. Are you with him in confining immaterial consciousness to humans? If not, please explain what attributes, in addition to the above, you yourself regard as essential to a definition of immaterial consciousness.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Sunday, August 14, 2016, 19:45 (2774 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Your comment seems to me a bit oversimplified. ... These characteristics are common to all organisms, ranging from bacteria through to ants, humming birds, dolphins, chimps and ourselves. Where, then, does the material end and the immaterial begin? If dualism is true, then ALL organisms are dualistic. In the “more philosophy” post, you say are still with Descartes. You probably know that Descartes considered our fellow animals to be automatons (just as you think bacteria are), without a “soul”. Are you with him in confining immaterial consciousness to humans? If not, please explain what attributes, in addition to the above, you yourself regard as essential to a definition of immaterial consciousness.-No, I'm with Descartes up to the point that he excludes our fellow multicellular animals. In the Jewish religion they have their own special kind of soul, and that special kind of soul was used by Caesar, our last dog, to bring us Jack, our current dog. We have discussed it with the native Tlingets in Alaska who agreed with us. Too long a story to cover here. Soul and immaterial consciousness are part of one and the same construction and with death returns to join the universal consciousness, which some religions, not Jewish, refer to as heaven.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Monday, August 15, 2016, 12:17 (2773 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your comment seems to me a bit oversimplified. I would argue that processing information, communicating it, making decisions based upon it, and acting upon those decisions are all characteristics of consciousness (not to be confused with self-awareness), of which there are many different levels. These characteristics are common to all organisms, ranging from bacteria through to ants, humming birds, dolphins, chimps and ourselves. Where, then, does the material end and the immaterial begin? If dualism is true, then ALL organisms are dualistic. In the “more philosophy” post, you say are still with Descartes. You probably know that Descartes considered our fellow animals to be automatons (just as you think bacteria are), without a “soul”. Are you with him in confining immaterial consciousness to humans? If not, please explain what attributes, in addition to the above, you yourself regard as essential to a definition of immaterial consciousness.-DAVID: No, I'm with Descartes up to the point that he excludes our fellow multicellular animals. In the Jewish religion they have their own special kind of soul, and that special kind of soul was used by Caesar, our last dog, to bring us Jack, our current dog. We have discussed it with the native Tlingets in Alaska who agreed with us. Too long a story to cover here. Soul and immaterial consciousness are part of one and the same construction and with death returns to join the universal consciousness, which some religions, not Jewish, refer to as heaven.-You left out the list of characteristics (now in bold), and I would still be interested to know what other attributes you regard as essential to a definition of immaterial consciousness. The reason for my persisting is of course that if you believe Caesar has his own “special kind of soul”, why can't you believe that Billy Bacterium also has his own “special kind of soul”? (Alternatively, why can't you believe that both Billy and Caesar have no "soul"?) Please remember that your Caesar's "special soul" does not have a brain.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Monday, August 15, 2016, 18:19 (2773 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Your comment seems to me a bit oversimplified. I would argue that processing information, communicating it, making decisions based upon it, and acting upon those decisions are all characteristics of consciousness (not to be confused with self-awareness), of which there are many different levels. These characteristics are common to all organisms, ranging from bacteria through to ants, humming birds, dolphins, chimps and ourselves. Where, then, does the material end and the immaterial begin? If dualism is true, then ALL organisms are dualistic.-> 
> DAVID: No, I'm with Descartes up to the point that he excludes our fellow multicellular animals. .... Soul and immaterial consciousness are part of one and the same construction and with death returns to join the universal consciousness, which some religions, not Jewish, refer to as heaven.
> 
> dhw: You left out the list of characteristics (now in bold), and I would still be interested to know what other attributes you regard as essential to a definition of immaterial consciousness. The reason for my persisting is of course that if you believe Caesar has his own “special kind of soul”, why can't you believe that Billy Bacterium also has his own “special kind of soul”? (Alternatively, why can't you believe that both Billy and Caesar have no "soul"?) Please remember that your Caesar's "special soul" does not have a brain.-As before, I view all animals without a brain as automatons. Caesar had a brain and an animal soul in my view. I also believe consciousness requires a brain to be received, as shown by NDE studies. This fits dualism.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 12:34 (2772 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As before, I view all animals without a brain as automatons. Caesar had a brain and an animal soul in my view. I also believe consciousness requires a brain to be received, as shown by NDE studies. This fits dualism. - NDE studies suggest the exact opposite: the clinically dead patients still have their identity, their memories and the ability to think, perceive and communicate. Their consciousness therefore survives without a brain, and so no receiver is required. This fits dualism, and so according to your beliefs, consciousness does not require a brain.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 18:32 (2772 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: As before, I view all animals without a brain as automatons. Caesar had a brain and an animal soul in my view. I also believe consciousness requires a brain to be received, as shown by NDE studies. This fits dualism.
> 
> dhw: NDE studies suggest the exact opposite: the clinically dead patients still have their identity, their memories and the ability to think, perceive and communicate. Their consciousness therefore survives without a brain, and so no receiver is required. This fits dualism, and so according to your beliefs, consciousness does not require a brain.-You say NDE studies mean the opposite. No. van Lommel's book, Consciousness Beyond Life, 2010, basically proposes dualism in that the brain is a receiver (like a radio). While the brain is unconscious because it is not functioning, the NDE person's consciousness still receives the info of the episode and passes it back to the person when their brain revives. I hope that clears up this point.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Wednesday, August 17, 2016, 12:16 (2771 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As before, I view all animals without a brain as automatons. Caesar had a brain and an animal soul in my view. I also believe consciousness requires a brain to be received, as shown by NDE studies. This fits dualism.-dhw: NDE studies suggest the exact opposite: the clinically dead patients still have their identity, their memories and the ability to think, perceive and communicate. Their consciousness therefore survives without a brain, and so no receiver is required. This fits dualism, and so according to your beliefs, consciousness does not require a brain.-DAVID: You say NDE studies mean the opposite. No. van Lommel's book, Consciousness Beyond Life, 2010, basically proposes dualism in that the brain is a receiver (like a radio). While the brain is unconscious because it is not functioning, the NDE person's consciousness still receives the info of the episode and passes it back to the person when their brain revives. I hope that clears up this point.-I'm afraid it doesn't. The “dead” patients retain their identity, and perceive and communicate with other “dead” people, i.e. they receive information without having a functioning brain. When disembodied consciousness returns to the body, of course it remembers its experiences. If I put on my dualist hat (as usual, I am agnostic on this issue), I would suggest that the receiving brain is only required to relay information to the body. If one does not have a body, one does not need a brain. To sum it up, NDEs seem to suggest that consciousness does NOT require a brain to be received, and that is precisely the reason why they are cited as evidence for dualism (and also for life after death).

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Wednesday, August 17, 2016, 19:23 (2771 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: If one does not have a body, one does not need a brain. To sum it up, NDEs seem to suggest that consciousness does NOT require a brain to be received, and that is precisely the reason why they are cited as evidence for dualism (and also for life after death).- Your conclusions are not van Lommel's. I don't follow your reasoning at all; in these cases a brain is still part of an unconscious body; see Sam Parnia (the current leading researcher) below and my comment:-http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/670781/There-IS-life-after-DEATH-Scientists-reveal-shock-findings-from-groundbreaking-study-"LIFE after death has been "confirmed" by scientists who have discovered consciousness continues even once a person has died.-"In a large scale study of more than 2,000 people, British boffins confirmed that thoughts DO carry on after the heart stops.-"The shock research has also uncovered the most convincing evidence of an out of body experience for a patient declared dead.-"It had been believed the brain stopped all activity 30 seconds after the heart had stopped pumping blood around the body, and that with that, awareness ceases too.-"However, the study from the University of Southampton shows people still experience awareness for up to three minutes after they had been pronounced dead.-***-"Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead.-"Dr Parnia continued: "This suggests more people may have mental activity initially but then lose their memories after recovery, either due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory recall.”-"Of those who said they had experienced some awareness, just two per cent said their experience was consistent with the feeling of an outer body experience - where one feels completely aware and can hear and see what's going on around them after death.-"Almost half of the respondents said the experience was not of awareness, but rather of fear.-"However, the most significant finding of the study is that of a 57-year old man who is perhaps the first confirmed outer body experience in a patient. (my bold)-***-"The man was able to recall with eerie accuracy what was going on around him after he had ‘died' temporarily. -"Dr Parnia continued: "This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions occurring either before the heart stops or after the heart has been successfully restarted, but not an experience corresponding with 'real' events when the heart isn't beating.-"In this case, consciousness and awareness appeared to occur during a three-minute period when there was no heartbeat. -“'This is paradoxical, since the brain typically ceases functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping and doesn't resume again until the heart has been restarted. -“'Furthermore, the detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events.'"-Comment: Note my bold. In van Lommel's study there was a man who came into the ER and while totally unconscious, had his false teeth removed for intubation and later knew where the teeth were by identifying the nurse who took them. van Lommel considers the possibility that there are lower brain centers that stay active. Parnia's study is prospective; all patients have EEG's running as soon as the patient arrives, and all who survive are immediately interviewed. Another point is that in an adult (20 years old or more) the brain dies in four minutes. That is why resuscitation is carried out so quickly. Parnia's 3-minute-finding fits the facts.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Thursday, August 18, 2016, 20:59 (2770 days ago) @ David Turell

Once again I am editing sections of our exchanges to keep the arguments clear:-DAVID: I also believe consciousness requires a brain to be received, as shown by NDE studies. This fits dualism.-dhw: NDE studies suggest the exact opposite…-DAVID: No. van Lommel's book, Consciousness Beyond Life, 2010, basically proposes dualism in that the brain is a receiver (like a radio). While the brain is unconscious because it is not functioning, the NDE person's consciousness still receives the info of the episode and passes it back to the person when their brain revives. -Dhw: …The “dead” patients retain their identity, and perceive and communicate with other “dead” people, i.e. they receive information without having a functioning brain. When disembodied consciousness returns to the body, of course it remembers its experiences. If I put on my dualist hat (as usual, I am agnostic on this issue), I would suggest that the receiving brain is only required to relay information to the body. If one does not have a body, one does not need a brain. To sum it up, NDEs seem to suggest that consciousness does NOT require a brain to be received, and that is precisely the reason why they are cited as evidence for dualism and for life after death.-DAVID: Your conclusions are not van Lommel's. I don't follow your reasoning at all; in these cases a brain is still part of an unconscious body; see Sam Parnia (the current leading researcher) below and my comment:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/670781/There-IS-life-after-DEATH-Scientists-revea...-QUOTE: "However, the study from the University of Southampton shows people still experience awareness for up to three minutes after they had been pronounced dead.”-Note the headline: “There IS life after death.” What a cop-out! There is life after death, and it lasts for three minutes! This study and your own comment only deal with out of body experiences in which the “dead” patient witnesses actions that have taken place in his presence. But you know as well as I do that this is far from being the only type of NDE, and there are some in which patients claim to have entered another world where they commune with other “souls” and, above all, acquire information they could not otherwise have known (e.g. the very recent death of a relative). It is this ability to think and communicate with others (not just passively observe) that supports the theory that mind and body are separate, which is the essence of what is known as substance dualism (property dualism makes mind and body interdependent, and so offers no possibility of life after death). You say you believe that animals have souls, and indeed “that special kind of soul was used by Caesar, our last dog, to bring us Jack, our current dog”. If you believe human souls also survive our physical death, and if you believe they are conscious (not much point in having an unconscious soul, is there? You might as well be dead), how can you also believe that consciousness requires a brain to be “received”, unless you accept my suggestion that the brain is only required so long as we have a body? I'd better stress again, though, that I am only disputing your logic and not trying to promote any sort of belief.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Thursday, August 18, 2016, 23:26 (2769 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: Note the headline: “There IS life after death.” What a cop-out! There is life after death, and it lasts for three minutes! This study and your own comment only deal with out of body experiences in which the “dead” patient witnesses actions that have taken place in his presence. But you know as well as I do that this is far from being the only type of NDE, and there are some in which patients claim to have entered another world where they commune with other “souls” and, above all, acquire information they could not otherwise have known (e.g. the very recent death of a relative).-Agreed, the headline is wildly hopeful and not called for, but the point of my presenting the article was not the headline, but Parnia's work results seen during resuscitations. You are correct, this study does not cover the other kinds of NDE's whose evidence in veridical instances is very supportive of 'souls'.-> dhw: It is this ability to think and communicate with others (not just passively observe) that supports the theory that mind and body are separate, which is the essence of what is known as substance dualism (property dualism makes mind and body interdependent, and so offers no possibility of life after death).-You know more about the philosophy of dualism than the extent to which I am educated in it. I accept your observation, and now see your point. For me our consciousness is what contains our soul and can separate from the body to enter afterlife.-> dhw:If you believe human souls also survive our physical death, and if you believe they are conscious (not much point in having an unconscious soul, is there? You might as well be dead), how can you also believe that consciousness requires a brain to be “received”, unless you accept my suggestion that the brain is only required so long as we have a body?-I think we can agree there are the two types of near to death episodes, out of body and down the tunnel to light. When separated into those parts we are in full agreement. Both shed light on how our consciousness/soul might work. We also know of other instances that are not near to death but veridical: Pam Reynold's surgical experience mentioned in my books and online:-http://neardth.com/pam-reynolds-near-death-experience.php

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Friday, August 19, 2016, 12:32 (2769 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It is this ability to think and communicate with others (not just passively observe) that supports the theory that mind and body are separate, which is the essence of what is known as substance dualism (property dualism makes mind and body interdependent, and so offers no possibility of life after death). - DAVID: You know more about the philosophy of dualism than the extent to which I am educated in it. I accept your observation, and now see your point. For me our consciousness is what contains our soul and can separate from the body to enter afterlife. - dhw:If you believe human souls also survive our physical death, and if you believe they are conscious (not much point in having an unconscious soul, is there? You might as well be dead), how can you also believe that consciousness requires a brain to be “received”, unless you accept my suggestion that the brain is only required so long as we have a body? - DAVID: I think we can agree there are the two types of near to death episodes, out of body and down the tunnel to light. When separated into those parts we are in full agreement. Both shed light on how our consciousness/soul might work. - Thank you for both of these gracious responses. In our discussions, it's quite unusual for me to be adopting the immaterialist stance in opposition to your initially materialist stance (consciousness needs the brain), but hey ho, that's agnosticism for you! Our agreement actually leads to another interesting issue, but I need to think it through first….

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by David Turell @, Friday, August 19, 2016, 20:39 (2769 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Thank you for both of these gracious responses. In our discussions, it's quite unusual for me to be adopting the immaterialist stance in opposition to your initially materialist stance (consciousness needs the brain), but hey ho, that's agnosticism for you! Our agreement actually leads to another interesting issue, but I need to think it through first….-Thank you. We got off track. If you look at my books, I've always differentiated between OOB an NDE.

Human Consciousness: how we observe

by dhw, Saturday, August 20, 2016, 12:23 (2768 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Thank you for both of these gracious responses. In our discussions, it's quite unusual for me to be adopting the immaterialist stance in opposition to your initially materialist stance (consciousness needs the brain), but hey ho, that's agnosticism for you! Our agreement actually leads to another interesting issue, but I need to think it through first….-DAVID: Thank you. We got off track. If you look at my books, I've always differentiated between OOB an NDE.-I know you have. Indeed, I wrote: “you know as well as I do that this (OBE) is far from being the only type of NDE”. Now that you are back on track, I shall try to elaborate on some of the important implications when I have a bit more time.

Human Consciousness: with very little matter

by David Turell @, Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 14:56 (2757 days ago) @ dhw

This article raises the issue of how does one have a fully functional consciousness with only 10% of a brain:-http://wmbriggs.com/post/19647/-"So this 44-year-old Frenchman—let's call him Jacques—presented for a “mild left leg weakness“. The leg bone being connected to the hip bone, etc., it was eventually discovered that Jacques's “skull was filled largely by fluid, leaving just a thin perimeter of actual brain tissue.” -"And yet the man was a married father of two and a civil servant with an IQ of 75, below-average in his intelligence but not mentally disabled…-"While this may seem medically miraculous, it also poses a major challenge for cognitive psychologists, says Axel Cleeremans of the Université Libre de Bruxelles.-“'Any theory of consciousness has to be able to explain why a person like that, who's missing 90% of his neurons, still exhibits normal behavior,” says Cleeremans. A theory of consciousness that depends on “specific neuroanatomical features” (the physical make-up of the brain) would have trouble explaining such cases. -"To say that explaining this man via current theories of the brain is a “major challenge” is like saying Bill Clinton has a “small problem” with the ladies. According to these theories, the man should be a “vegetable”. It's always vegetable, isn't it? I guess neurologists didn't see the original The Thing. Skip it.-"The missing matter of Jacques's brain was noticed by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The MRI picture above is from the Lancet (under the bland title “Brain of a white-collar worker”). "-Comment: We know that existing an consciousness can be altered by brain damage or brain surgery, but this person had his consciousness develop from birth with this huge material deficit. Brain plasticity? No, consciousness not explained by materially functional brain activity.-The rest of the article discusses the statistical mess behind fMRI and suggests that many of the conclusions are borderline accurate. We still don't know much that is reliable about the most complex organ on Earth.

Human Consciousness: more guesswork

by David Turell @, Saturday, September 10, 2016, 21:36 (2747 days ago) @ David Turell

An interesting discussion of recent research:-https://aeon.co/essays/do-we-really-want-to-fuse-our-brains-together?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6be67e34d5-Saturday_newsletter_20_August_20168_15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-6be67e34d5-68942561-"It would be a lot easier to answer that question if anyone knew what consciousness is. There's no shortage of theories. -***-"I think they're all running a game on us. Their models - right or wrong - describe computation, not awareness. There's no great mystery to intelligence; it's easy to see how natural selection would promote flexible problem-solving, the triage of sensory input, the high-grading of relevant data (aka attention).-***-"if physics is right, we shouldn't exist. You can watch ions hop across synapses, follow nerve impulses from nose to toes; nothing in any of those processes would lead you to expect the emergence of subjective awareness. Physics describes a world of intelligent zombies who do everything we do, except understand that they're doing it. That's what we should be, that's all we should be: meat and computation. Somehow the meat woke up. How the hell does that even work?-***-"till, we are talking about a cadre of renowned neuroscientists, the least of whom is far more qualified than I to make assertions on the subject. One of the things they assert is that self-awareness does not depend on specific brain structures. The declaration grants ‘near-human levels of consciousness' to parrots (who lack a neocortex) and to octopuses (whose brains - basically a bagel of neurons encircling the esophagus - don't have any anatomical resemblance to ours at all). It's neurological complexity that's essential to the conscious state, they tell us. The motherboard can take any shape so long as it's got enough synapses on board.-***-"Even when the corpus callosum is severed, the hemispheres can communicate via the brainstem. It's a longer route, though, and a much thinner pipe: think dial-up versus broadband. The essential variables, once again, are latency and bandwidth. When the pipe is intact, signals pass back and forth across the whole brain fast enough for the system to act as an integrated whole, to think of itself as I. But when you force those signals to take the scenic route - worse, squeeze them through a straw - the halves fall out of sync, lose their coherence. I shatters into we.-"You might expect that an established personality, built over a lifetime and then split down the middle, might take some time to develop into distinct entities. Yet hemispheric isolation can also be induced chemically, by anaesthetising half the brain - and the undrugged hemisphere, unshackled from its counterpart, sometimes manifests a whole new suite of personality traits right on the spot. A shy, whole-brained introvert morphs into a wise-cracking flirtatious jokester. A pleasant, well-adjusted woman turns sarcastic and hostile. When the other half wakes up the new entity vanishes as quickly as it appeared.-"So while the thing that calls itself I typically runs on a dual-core engine, it's perfectly capable of running on a single core. ....the local personae are obliterated, absorbed into a greater whole; as the Finnish computer scientists Kaj Sotala (at the University of Helsinki) and Harri Valpola (Aalto University) recently declared, ‘the biological brain cannot support multiple separate conscious attentional processes in the same brain medium'.-***-"Consciousness remains mysterious. But there's no reason to regard it as magical, no evidence of spectral bonds that hold a soul in one head and keep it from leaking into another. And one of the things we do know is that consciousness spreads to fill the space available. Smaller selves disappear into larger; two hemispheres integrate into one. ...You don't need a neocortex or a hypothalamus. All you need is complexity."-Comment: These quotes are from an essay that discusses direct brain to brain communication as a future possibility. I've left that part out. I believe that consciousness requires more than brain complexity. But the discussion of split brain points out two personalities can develop. For me just interesting facts. Parrots and octopuses are not self-aware in the way we are.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Sunday, September 11, 2016, 15:44 (2746 days ago) @ David Turell

A philosopher's thoughts with an emphasis on the cellular level:-http://nautil.us/blog/consciousness-is-made-of-atoms-too-"science has not been able to show how mind or human consciousness can be incorporated into [ our scientific understanding]. ...neurobiology has made some progress as to how perception and thought actually take form. Consciousness may well be made of atoms, and it all begins with sensations. -"It is clear that neural systems evolved to enable animals to move in their environments—to find food and mates, and to avoid or otherwise deal with predators. Stimuli are received from the environment, assembled by central neural circuits, and transmitted to muscles or other tissues in the animals' bodies whose coordinated activity enable it to respond. This process occurs in every complex multi-celled animal.-"The first step is the conversion of stimuli from the environment into sensations. Since animals are composed entirely of cells, this process must occur at the cellular level—that is, stimuli from the environment activate receptor cells on the surface or within their bodies. These stimuli are of three types: electromagnetic radiation in the range of wavelengths we identify as light, pressures from objects or the air striking the body, and streams of molecules in the air or in direct contact with the animals' bodies. A variety of receptor cells exist to receive and record these stimuli.-"In every case, these environmental stimuli exist in analog form and are converted into digital form by the receptor cells and the neural circuits connected to them. For example, the “eye” of the horseshoe crab Limulus can create a boundary line within a gradient of light from light to dark. That boundary gives the animal something to respond to within the analog stream of radiation. In the human eye, color pigments (carotinoids) in the retina are able to absorb small portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to create the colors we identify and respond to. (my bold) -"The same is true of the other sensory modalities. Specialized receptor cells in the skin, the ear, on the tongue and in the nasal passages respond to selected portions of the swarms of molecules and pressure changes in the environment. All are conversions of analog stimuli into digital form. -***-" Sensations are the building blocks of consciousness. They must first be combined into perceptions and converted into objects in the environment. Then neural systems must evolve mechanisms by which they can be remembered or recalled; and finally plasticity must develop—the capacity to shape, edit, and organize this neural content, present or remembered, into a picture, experience, or awareness of the “world.” This is the way consciousness emerges in neural systems.-"In 1934, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll published a monograph titled, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men (intriguingly subtitled A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds) in which he attempted to show that every animal creates a “world” (he called it its umwelt) from stimuli in the environment to which it responds. Even an animal such as the common wood tick, with which he begins his essay, creates such a world. The wood tick responds to only three stimuli: butyric acid (which is secreted by the skin glands of mammals), which causes the tick to drop onto it from its perch; the shock of landing on its victim, which causes it to scramble among its hairs; and the warmth of the animal's skin, which causes it to bore into it for its meal of blood. -"These three stimuli alone create an umwelt for the tick, “impoverished” as it may be. We can add to his account only that the three stimuli—butyric acid, the shock of landing, and the warmth of the animal's skin—are analog stimuli, that is, they are undifferentiated gradients in the environment from which the neural system of the tick selects just portions for its response. Those portions, converted into digital form, are the sensations that constitute its tiny world.-"There is nothing “mental” or “physical” in this account of sensations. That distinction makes sense only much further down the line in the evolution of neural systems and requires the development of memory and neural plasticity along with a far richer sensory world than the wood tick's. Sensations are the creation within neural systems of environmental events cast in different form, but still part of the same single material fabric of the universe. They reside in the animal's central neural system—its brain (as MRI studies reveal)—and can be given a general location for where they occur."-Comment: Stimuli are one aspect of developing consciousness. He certainly doesn't give us a full explanation of consciousness. My bolded section is to point out the automaticity of cell response to stimuli he is suggesting. His essay also shows how the physics of biology is important.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Monday, September 12, 2016, 12:25 (2745 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: Stimuli are one aspect of developing consciousness. He certainly doesn't give us a full explanation of consciousness. My bolded section is to point out the automaticity of cell response to stimuli he is suggesting. His essay also shows how the physics of biology is important.-He gives us no explanation at all. To me it is self-evident that you cannot have consciousness without something to be conscious of. Stimuli give an organism something to be conscious of. As usual, you focus on the automatic responses of cells to stimuli, whereas my hypothesis of cellular intelligence focuses on how cell communities process the information provided by the stimuli before they take a decision on how to behave. To assess whether the wood tick is conscious or not, one would have to conduct experiments, i.e. devise problems for it to solve before it can get to the blood it needs for survival. As discussed under (so-called) "realism vs empiricism", that would be the empirical approach, which can hardly be applied to the theory that God showed the weaverbird how to build its nest.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Monday, September 12, 2016, 18:15 (2745 days ago) @ dhw

David's comment: Stimuli are one aspect of developing consciousness. He certainly doesn't give us a full explanation of consciousness. My bolded section is to point out the automaticity of cell response to stimuli he is suggesting. His essay also shows how the physics of biology is important.
> 
> dhw: He gives us no explanation at all. To me it is self-evident that you cannot have consciousness without something to be conscious of. Stimuli give an organism something to be conscious of.-He is a leading philosopher read widely by others. It was just of general interest to present him as an example of how far we are from explaining consciousness.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 11:56 (2744 days ago) @ David Turell

David's comment: Stimuli are one aspect of developing consciousness. He certainly doesn't give us a full explanation of consciousness. My bolded section is to point out the automaticity of cell response to stimuli he is suggesting. His essay also shows how the physics of biology is important.-Dhw: He gives us no explanation at all. To me it is self-evident that you cannot have consciousness without something to be conscious of. Stimuli give an organism something to be conscious of. As usual, you focus on the automatic responses of cells to stimuli, whereas my hypothesis of cellular intelligence focuses on how cell communities process the information provided by the stimuli before they take a decision on how to behave. To assess whether the wood tick is conscious or not, one would have to conduct experiments, i.e. devise problems for it to solve before it can get to the blood it needs for survival. As discussed under (so-called) "realism vs empiricism", that would be the empirical approach, which can hardly be applied to the theory that God showed the weaverbird how to build its nest.-DAVID: He is a leading philosopher read widely by others. It was just of general interest to present him as an example of how far we are from explaining consciousness.-Sorry if my response seemed a little ungracious. You are providing us with an amazing array of views and developments in many different fields, and in adding my comments to yours, I am only trying to clarify some of the ideas we discuss. In this case, there were two: I agreed with you that the references to stimuli did not explain consciousness, but I thought your focus on the automaticity of cell response required a very conscious response from me! It also tied in rather neatly with our dispute over your claim to be an empiricist!

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 02:04 (2743 days ago) @ dhw


> Sorry if my response seemed a little ungracious. You are providing us with an amazing array of views and developments in many different fields, and in adding my comments to yours, I am only trying to clarify some of the ideas we discuss.....I thought your focus on the automaticity of cell response required a very conscious response from me! It also tied in rather neatly with our dispute over your claim to be an empiricist!-By his definitions I'm much more an empiricist than a realist, since he offered only two classes of thought.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 12:31 (2743 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: I thought your focus on the automaticity of cell response required a very conscious response from me! It also tied in rather neatly with our dispute over your claim to be an empiricist!-DAVID: By his definitions I'm much more an empiricist than a realist, since he offered only two classes of thought.-Ah well, here are the definitions:-"In philosophical terms, “anti-realists” or “empiricists” understand science as investigating the properties of observable objects via experiments. Empirical theories are constrained by the experimental results. “Realists,” on the other hand, speculate more freely about the possible shape of the unobservable world, often designing mathematical explanations that cannot (yet) be tested.”-I would have thought that belief in a God who created the universe in order to produce humans, who designed the weaverbird's nest, and who hides behind a quantum wall, constituted untested and indeed untestable speculation rather than investigation of observable objects by experimentation, but whaddoIknow?

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 15:58 (2743 days ago) @ dhw


> "In philosophical terms, “anti-realists” or “empiricists” understand science as investigating the properties of observable objects via experiments. Empirical theories are constrained by the experimental results. “Realists,” on the other hand, speculate more freely about the possible shape of the unobservable world, often designing mathematical explanations that cannot (yet) be tested.”
> 
> dhw: I would have thought that belief in a God who created the universe in order to produce humans, who designed the weaverbird's nest, and who hides behind a quantum wall, constituted untested and indeed untestable speculation rather than investigation of observable objects by experimentation, but whaddoIknow? - My conclusions follow Adler. IMHO all the experimental evidence points to God.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Thursday, September 15, 2016, 12:41 (2742 days ago) @ David Turell

"In philosophical terms, “anti-realists” or “empiricists” understand science as investigating the properties of observable objects via experiments. Empirical theories are constrained by the experimental results. “Realists,” on the other hand, speculate more freely about the possible shape of the unobservable world, often designing mathematical explanations that cannot (yet) be tested.” - dhw: I would have thought that belief in a God who created the universe in order to produce humans, who designed the weaverbird's nest, and who hides behind a quantum wall, constituted untested and indeed untestable speculation rather than investigation of observable objects by experimentation, but whaddoIknow? - DAVID: My conclusions follow Adler. IMHO all the experimental evidence points to God. - You can follow whoever you like, but I still don't see how the above conclusions can possibly be tested by experiments.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Thursday, September 15, 2016, 19:12 (2742 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: My conclusions follow Adler. IMHO all the experimental evidence points to God.
> 
> dhw: You can follow whoever you like, but I still don't see how the above conclusions can possibly be tested by experiments.-They can't. At some point it is faith from the evidence we have.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Friday, September 16, 2016, 13:54 (2741 days ago) @ David Turell

According to your famous philosopher, empiricists “understand science as investigating the properties of observable objects via experiments. Empirical theories are constrained by experimental results.” You say you regard yourself as an empiricist.-DAVID: My conclusions follow Adler. IMHO all the experimental evidence points to God.-dhw: You can follow whoever you like, but I still don't see how the above conclusions can possibly be tested by experiments.-DAVID: They can't. At some point it is faith from the evidence we have.-If your conclusions cannot be based on experiments, how can you claim that they are based on experimental evidence? Your faith is the result of your speculations about the possible shape of the unobservable world, and you have designed an explanation that cannot be tested. According to the famous philosopher, you are a “realist”, not an empiricist. It really doesn't matter two hoots, except that you follow exactly the same path as atheist scientists who also claim that their beliefs are based on the scientific evidence. The basic line of thought seems to be: “I believe/do not believe in God. I am a scientist. Therefore science supports my belief/non-belief.” You all see the same material and you draw your different conclusions, and these conclusions are speculative theories.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Friday, September 16, 2016, 15:00 (2741 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: They can't. At some point it is faith from the evidence we have.
> 
> dhw: If your conclusions cannot be based on experiments, how can you claim that they are based on experimental evidence? Your faith is the result of your speculations about the possible shape of the unobservable world, and you have designed an explanation that cannot be tested.-I follow Adler. I have enough evidence to feel beyond a reasonable doubt God exists. I reached a point where I took Pascal's leap. That point is the complexity of biochemical functions to create life. I understand you can't take the leap, but I wonder if it is due to your insufficient understanding of that complexity, which is why I keep presenting it. But it may be that you seem to demand proof of everything, which is not possible.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Saturday, September 17, 2016, 13:10 (2740 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: IMHO all the experimental evidence points to God.-Dhw: ..I still don't see how the above conclusions can possibly be tested by experiments.-DAVID: They can't. At some point it is faith from the evidence we have.-dhw: If your conclusions cannot be based on experiments, how can you claim that they are based on experimental evidence? Your faith is the result of your speculations about the possible shape of the unobservable world, and you have designed an explanation that cannot be tested.-DAVID: I follow Adler. I have enough evidence to feel beyond a reasonable doubt God exists. I reached a point where I took Pascal's leap. That point is the complexity of biochemical functions to create life. I understand you can't take the leap, but I wonder if it is due to your insufficient understanding of that complexity, which is why I keep presenting it. But it may be that you seem to demand proof of everything, which is not possible.-You know that I accept the complexity argument, and I have the greatest respect for your faith. I have merely pointed out that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence, as you claimed above. Experimental evidence suggests that the truth of your belief can be scientifically tested, and it can't. -I am well aware that proof of everything is not possible, but while I am unable to share the atheist's faith in chance, I find it equally impossible to share the theist's faith in a sourceless mind that can create and encompass countless solar systems which, just like the many species of living organisms, simply appear to randomly come and go. -In our discussions on evolution, I have based a design theory on the findings of some eminent biologists, who claim that microorganisms are sentient, intelligent, cognitive beings. You insist that an organism without a brain cannot be conscious (not to be confused with human self-awareness), even though you contradict yourself through your belief that consciousness does not depend on the brain. “But it may be that you seem to demand proof of everything [with the one exception of your God], which is not possible.”

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Monday, September 19, 2016, 00:02 (2738 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: You know that I accept the complexity argument, and I have the greatest respect for your faith. I have merely pointed out that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence, as you claimed above. Experimental evidence suggests that the truth of your belief can be scientifically tested, and it can't. -I reach a point from scientific evidence to conclude that beyond a doubt God exists. Then my belief appears. I know my belief isn't proof.
> 
> dhw: In our discussions on evolution, I have based a design theory on the findings of some eminent biologists, who claim that microorganisms are sentient, intelligent, cognitive beings. You insist that an organism without a brain cannot be conscious (not to be confused with human self-awareness), even though you contradict yourself through your belief that consciousness does not depend on the brain.-You have forgotten that I believe consciousness is received by the brain, but is its own separate entity that that survives without a functional brain episode as in NDE's. Apparently you only accept that only a brain can make a consciousness. I don't.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Monday, September 19, 2016, 13:24 (2738 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You know that I accept the complexity argument, and I have the greatest respect for your faith. I have merely pointed out that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence, as you claimed above. Experimental evidence suggests that the truth of your belief can be scientifically tested, and it can't. -DAVID: I reach a point from scientific evidence to conclude that beyond a doubt God exists. Then my belief appears. I know my belief isn't proof.-All agreed. But my complaint is against your claim that your belief is based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence.-dhw: In our discussions on evolution, I have based a design theory on the findings of some eminent biologists, who claim that microorganisms are sentient, intelligent, cognitive beings. You insist that an organism without a brain cannot be conscious (not to be confused with human self-awareness), even though you contradict yourself through your belief that consciousness does not depend on the brain.-DAVID: You have forgotten that I believe consciousness is received by the brain, but is its own separate entity that that survives without a functional brain episode as in NDE's. Apparently you only accept that only a brain can make a consciousness. I don't.-NDEs are one of the reasons why I do NOT accept the materialist explanation, and so I remain open-minded on the source of consciousness. What you do not seem to grasp is that by insisting that bacteria cannot be conscious because they do not have a brain, you are contradicting your OWN belief that consciousness does not depend on having a brain.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Monday, September 19, 2016, 15:47 (2738 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You know that I accept the complexity argument, and I have the greatest respect for your faith. I have merely pointed out that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence, as you claimed above. Experimental evidence suggests that the truth of your belief can be scientifically tested, and it can't. 
> 
> DAVID: I reach a point from scientific evidence to conclude that beyond a doubt God exists. Then my belief appears. I know my belief isn't proof.
> 
> dhw: All agreed. But my complaint is against your claim that your belief is based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence.-Try this website essay which shares my point of view and I follow his research:-https://stream.org/new-study-shows-awe-bad-science-science-mean-atheism/-"Everyone is awed by life, and experiences that accentuate this awe seem to affect us, whether or not we believe in God. The new study suggests that these experiences affirm a sense of faith in theists and a sense of purpose-like natural order in atheists and agnostics, both of which cause problems for instructors wanting to churn out good Darwinists.-***-"Maybe “good” isn't the right word there. I mean, if something as obviously good for science as awe works against a “scientific” idea, wouldn't that suggest this idea isn't really so good or scientific in first place? How good can a way of viewing life be if excitement about life undermines it?
Common sense provides the clearest take-home message here. Since awe and wonder have always drawn people to scientific exploration, any form of teaching that calls for policing those emotions can't possibly be in the best interest of science.-***-"The authors of this study think “awe drives theists away from scientific explanations,” but they only say that because they're using a distorted definition of science. To them, anyone who doesn't see science “as a superior, even exclusive guide to reality” is unscientific. They assessed this by asking participants in their study whether they agree that “we can only rationally believe in what is scientifically provable.” According to these professors, then, the very definition of science marks people of faith as scientific outsiders.-"Perhaps this only shows how ignorant that definition is. Do these psychology professors honestly think that reason is a product of science? Do they think someone in a white lab coat somewhere has proof in a test tube that science is the only reliable source of truth? Do they not detect a hint of absurdity to that logic?
As a person of faith, I can assure them that their does-not-compute interpretation of awe is entirely foreign to people of faith, many of whom are scientists. When we behold the wonders of God's handiwork, we're not at all driven away from studying these wonders and making them known. Quite the opposite. Like so many scientists before us, we're driven toward those activities, seeing them as part of our very purpose in life.-"That, I think, is science in its purest and most compelling form, which may be why the inscriptions at the entrance to one of the world's greatest centers of physics — the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge — have since 1874 quoted Psalm 111: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.”-Douglas Axe is director of Biologic Institute. His research uses both experiments and computer simulations to examine the functional and structural constraints on the evolution of proteins and protein systems. After a Caltech PhD he held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at the University of Cambridge, the Cambridge Medical Research Council Centre and the Babraham Institute in Cambridge.
> 
> dhw: What you do not seem to grasp is that by insisting that bacteria cannot be conscious because they do not have a brain, you are contradicting your OWN belief that consciousness does not depend on having a brain.-And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 16:16 (2737 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I reach a point from scientific evidence to conclude that beyond a doubt God exists. Then my belief appears. I know my belief isn't proof.
dhw: All agreed. But my complaint is against your claim that your belief is based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence. (My bold)-DAVID: Try this website essay which shares my point of view and I follow his research:
https://stream.org/new-study-shows-awe-bad-science-science-mean-atheism/-You are resolutely refusing to acknowledge that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence.-QUOTE: “The authors of this study think “awe drives theists away from scientific explanations,” but they only say that because they're using a distorted definition of science. To them, anyone who doesn't see science “as a superior, even exclusive guide to reality” is unscientific. They assessed this by asking participants in their study whether they agree that “we can only rationally believe in what is scientifically provable.” According to these professors, then, the very definition of science marks people of faith as scientific outsiders.”-No disagreement. May I draw your attention to the following paragraph in my “brief guide”, which was written ten years ago and which you seem to be unaware of:-“Science can only concern itself with the material world as we know it. Science cannot speculate on matters beyond the scope of what can be tried and tested, and so by definition any belief in a non-physical world must be unscientific. But unscientific does not mean unreal or non-existent. There are many things in our lives that transcend the material world as we know it - love, art, music, beauty, premonitions and so on - but more importantly, the tools with which we examine the material world are inadequate. Birds and insects are able to perceive things that we cannot. We are clever enough to devise instruments that hugely enhance our capabilities of perception, but even then, they will only be able to show us that which the human brain is able to perceive. How, then, can we know that there are no other forms of life and being that exist on a totally different plane? A deaf man might argue that because he can hear nothing, sound doesn't exist. This is not to denigrate science. It is simply a denial of the right of science to exclude the possibility of phenomena outside its range. By extension, it is a denial of the right of an atheist to claim that religious faith is unscientific and therefore wrong.”-dhw: What you do not seem to grasp is that by insisting that bacteria cannot be conscious because they do not have a brain, you are contradicting your OWN belief that consciousness does not depend on having a brain.
DAVID: And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research.-NDE research (I'm not referring to OBEs here) suggests exactly the opposite - namely, that when the brain is clinically dead, the patient can enter a different world in which he/she DOES experience consciousness. You yourself have said you believe in an afterlife in which the brainless David WILL remain conscious. Therefore according to you it must be possible to experience consciousness without a brain.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 19:07 (2737 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw:You are resolutely refusing to acknowledge that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence. - Nuance of difference: my beliefs occurred because of the persuasive evidence from science. I know my beliefs are not testable.
> 
> dhw: “ It is simply a denial of the right of science to exclude the possibility of phenomena outside its range. By extension, it is a denial of the right of an atheist to claim that religious faith is unscientific and therefore wrong.” - Apologize for not remembering your introduction. Point is correct.
> 
> > DAVID: And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research.
> 
> dhw: NDE research (I'm not referring to OBEs here) suggests exactly the opposite - namely, that when the brain is clinically dead, the patient can enter a different world in which he/she DOES experience consciousness. You yourself have said you believe in an afterlife in which the brainless David WILL remain conscious. Therefore according to you it must be possible to experience consciousness without a brain. - As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 12:52 (2736 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You are resolutely refusing to acknowledge that your beliefs are not based on EXPERIMENTAL evidence.
DAVID: Nuance of difference: my beliefs occurred because of the persuasive evidence from science. I know my beliefs are not testable.-Nuances make a difference. Both theists and atheists use nuances to kid people that their beliefs are based on science. By identifying yourself with a particular philosopher's category of “empiricist”, you implied that your beliefs were testable by experiments (which was a key element of his definition). Such use of language is on a par with Dawkins' claim that natural selection “explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance.” You would no doubt - and in my view quite rightly - leap on such misleading statements: science is no more capable of explaining how dinosaurs, humans or duckbilled platypuses can emerge from single celled forms of life than you can test your religious beliefs by experiment.
 
DAVID: And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research.-dhw: NDE research (I'm not referring to OBEs here) suggests exactly the opposite - namely, that when the brain is clinically dead, the patient can enter a different world in which he/she DOES experience consciousness. You yourself have said you believe in an afterlife in which the brainless David WILL remain conscious. Therefore according to you it must be possible to experience consciousness without a brain.-DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.-Exactly. If consciousness can be experienced without a brain, it is a complete contradiction for you to state that bacteria cannot experience consciousness because they do not have a brain.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 19:27 (2736 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: science is no more capable of explaining how dinosaurs, humans or duckbilled platypuses can emerge from single celled forms of life than you can test your religious beliefs by experiment.-Again, I use the results of experimentation to reach my beliefs. I can't test my beliefs.
> 
>to experience consciousness without a brain.[/i]
> 
> DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.
> 
> dhw: Exactly. If consciousness can be experienced without a brain, it is a complete contradiction for you to state that bacteria cannot experience consciousness because they do not have a brain.-Your statement doesn't fit mine:-"DAVID: And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research."-Perfectly clear.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Thursday, September 22, 2016, 12:54 (2735 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.-dhw: Exactly. If consciousness can be experienced without a brain, it is a complete contradiction for you to state that bacteria cannot experience consciousness because they do not have a brain.-DAVID: Your statement doesn't fit mine:
"DAVID: And I view a brain as a required receiver to experience consciousness. Bacteria do not have any degree of a conscious experience or consciousness because they have no receiver. From NDE research."
Perfectly clear.-So humans can experience consciousness even when they do not have a brain/receiver, because consciousness is a “separate entity from the brain”. But bacteria cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not a separate entity from the brain - it requires a brain/receiver. But you can't see any contradiction.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Thursday, September 22, 2016, 20:02 (2735 days ago) @ dhw


 dhw: So humans can experience consciousness even when they do not have a brain/receiver, because consciousness is a “separate entity from the brain”. But bacteria cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not a separate entity from the brain - it requires a brain/receiver. But you can't see any contradiction.-My interpretation of NDE research is that the unconscious patient has the episode, but only appreciates it as his brain becomes conscious and receives the episode information
back from the separate consciousness which returns to contact with the receiver brain. How else would the patient's consciousness survive the brain's absent function?

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Friday, September 23, 2016, 12:46 (2734 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So humans can experience consciousness even when they do not have a brain/receiver, because consciousness is a “separate entity from the brain”. But bacteria cannot experience consciousness because consciousness is not a separate entity from the brain - it requires a brain/receiver. But you can't see any contradiction.-DAVID: My interpretation of NDE research is that the unconscious patient has the episode, but only appreciates it as his brain becomes conscious and receives the episode information back from the separate consciousness which returns to contact with the receiver brain. How else would the patient's consciousness survive the brain's absent function?-What do you mean by “appreciates it”? The patients report the emotions they felt and the conversations they had when they entered the “other world”. If your consciousness is a separate disembodied entity, then it uses your brain to control your body, but it does not need your brain to be you, with the memories, emotions and other immaterial attributes that constitute you. (Please note, I am not taking sides on the issue of dualism; I am merely pointing out the contradiction in your own beliefs.) Here is your concept of the “other world”:
DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.-If you believe your consciousness is a separate entity from your brain, it is a clear contradiction for you to claim that consciousness cannot exist without a brain. You may believe that your God has preprogrammed every move made by every brainless organism, but that does not remove the contradiction in your thinking.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Friday, September 23, 2016, 15:44 (2734 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: What do you mean by “appreciates it”? - Wiki definition: - understand (a situation) fully; recognize the full implications of.
"they failed to appreciate the pressure he was under"
synonyms:
recognize, acknowledge, realize, know, be aware of, be conscious of, be sensitive to, understand, comprehend, grasp, fathom; informalbe wise to 
"we appreciate your difficulty" - > DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.
> 
> dhw: If you believe your consciousness is a separate entity from your brain, it is a clear contradiction for you to claim that consciousness cannot exist without a brain. You may believe that your God has preprogrammed every move made by every brainless organism, but that does not remove the contradiction in your thinking. - How many times do I have to repeat the brain acts as a receiver of consciousness, which I believe has the ability as a separate entity to enter afterlife.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Saturday, September 24, 2016, 12:23 (2733 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My interpretation of NDE research is that the unconscious patient has the episode, but only appreciates it as his brain becomes conscious and receives the episode information back from the separate consciousness which returns to contact with the receiver brain. How else would the patient's consciousness survive the brain's absent function?-Dhw: What do you mean by “appreciates it”? The patients report the emotions they felt and the conversations they had when they entered the “other world”.-You have replied by defining the word “appreciate”. My point was that the brainless patients ALREADY felt the emotions and held the conversations when they were in the “other world”, i.e. they did not need to wait until they had a functioning brain in order to experience consciousness or to realize, grasp, understand that they were feeling emotions and holding conversations. I then explained further: ”If your consciousness is a separate disembodied entity, then it uses your brain to control your body, but it does not need your brain to be you, with the memories, emotions and other immaterial attributes that constitute you.”-DAVID: As a dualist, I believe when I die my consciousness/soul goes to Heaven intact, no brain required, the consciousness a separate entity from the brain.
Dhw: If you believe your consciousness is a separate entity from your brain, it is a clear contradiction for you to claim that consciousness cannot exist without a brain. You may believe that your God has preprogrammed every move made by every brainless organism, but that does not remove the contradiction in your thinking.-DAVID: How many times do I have to repeat the brain acts as a receiver of consciousness, which I believe has the ability as a separate entity to enter afterlife.-No need for you to repeat it. If you think your consciousness, together with all the immaterial elements of your identity such as your memories, intelligence, ideas etc., can exist separately from a receiving brain, just explain why you think consciousness CANNOT exist separately from a receiving brain.

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Saturday, September 24, 2016, 15:48 (2733 days ago) @ dhw


> DAVID: How many times do I have to repeat the brain acts as a receiver of consciousness, which I believe has the ability as a separate entity to enter afterlife.
> 
> dhw: No need for you to repeat it. If you think your consciousness, together with all the immaterial elements of your identity such as your memories, intelligence, ideas etc., can exist separately from a receiving brain, just explain why you think consciousness CANNOT exist separately from a receiving brain.-But it does in NDE's per research. I don't follow your objections

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by dhw, Sunday, September 25, 2016, 12:44 (2732 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: How many times do I have to repeat the brain acts as a receiver of consciousness, which I believe has the ability as a separate entity to enter afterlife.-dhw: No need for you to repeat it. If you think your consciousness, together with all the immaterial elements of your identity such as your memories, intelligence, ideas etc., can exist separately from a receiving brain, just explain why you think consciousness CANNOT exist separately from a receiving brain.-DAVID: But it does in NDE's per research. I don't follow your objections.-
You refuse to accept the possibility of autonomous (i.e. without divine guidance) cellular intelligence as the driving force of evolution because, according to you, cells cannot be conscious as they do not have a brain. You believe consciousness IS possible without a brain, as shown by NDE research, but you believe it is NOT possible without a brain, as in autonomous cellular intelligence. I see that as a contradiction. -(NB, just to avoid repetition of earlier discussions, consciousness does not mean human levels of self-awareness. It means sentience, plus the autonomous ability to absorb and process information, communicate, cooperate, take decisions etc.)

Human Consciousness: stimuli, analog to digital

by David Turell @, Sunday, September 25, 2016, 15:06 (2732 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: You refuse to accept the possibility of autonomous (i.e. without divine guidance) cellular intelligence as the driving force of evolution because, according to you, cells cannot be conscious as they do not have a brain. You believe consciousness IS possible without a brain, as shown by NDE research, but you believe it is NOT possible without a brain, as in autonomous cellular intelligence. I see that as a contradiction. 
> 
> (NB, just to avoid repetition of earlier discussions, consciousness does not mean human levels of self-awareness. It means sentience, plus the autonomous ability to absorb and process information, communicate, cooperate, take decisions etc.) - In regard to cells, the only sentience I see is the reception of stimuli, and the responses are a series of algorithmic automatic mechanisms, based on information in their genome. All cells I have every studied act that way.

Human Consciousness: self and soul

by David Turell @, Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 02:08 (2709 days ago) @ David Turell

A very interesting philosophical/theoretical discussion of self and soul:

http://www.livescience.com/56505-do-you-have-a-soul.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&u...

I present only this paragraph from Physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne:

"In fact, it's quite difficult to understand what's the carrier of continuity for a person in this life. Here am I, an aging, balding academic — what makes me the same person as the little boy with the shock of black hair in the school photograph of years ago? It's not atomic material continuity — the atoms in my body are totally different from the atoms in that schoolboy. It's not the atoms themselves, but the pattern in which those atoms are organized in some extraordinary, elaborate and complex sense. And I think that's what the human 'soul' is. It is the information-bearing pattern that is the real me.'"

Comment: What is continuous is our consciousness in which our 'self' develops. Each self is individual and different from all others. What might be a soul is discussed in the article but the key point is every cell in a body is not the same as it was at birth. As pointed out the atoms are all different, but we have a continuous self which maintains itself from birth to death. This is what consciousness does for us, a mighty tool managed by the brain.

Human Consciousness: self and inner speech

by David Turell @, Sunday, October 23, 2016, 15:01 (2704 days ago) @ David Turell

When aphasia occurs from a stoke inner speech can be lost and one may not even be able to speak to oneself. Inner speech helps to form one's concept of self.:

http://nautil.us//issue/30/identity/what-happens-when-you-cant-talk-to-yourself

"What would you do if you lost your inner monologue? You know, the one where you tell yourself “I don’t want to get up yet,” or “This is one delicious burger.” That’s what happened to Tinna Geula Phillips.

"In 1997, Phillips suffered a massive stroke, which left her without the ability to communicate in any meaningful way. She went from being fluent in six different languages to virtually mute. “I cried inside, because I cannot communicate. My mom, others, Chinese! I don’t know. Is not communicate, nothing. I, six languages, gone!”

***

"Between 25 and 40 percent of people who suffer a stroke will have aphasia. Damage tends to be in two brain areas: Broca’s area, in the posterior left prefrontal cortex, and Wernicke’s area, which is in the posterior left temporal cortex. In Brocha’s aphasia, people have problems with fluency, muddling the order of the words in a sentence, and disregarding grammar. Wernicke’s aphasia affects how much sense the speaker makes. Their language becomes confused, or even nonsense. It can also limit a person’s rhythm, impeding fluency and word formation.

"Phillips was diagnosed with global aphasia, which is the term used to describe a severe loss of the ability to communicate and comprehend language. For two years, she says, she was unsure whether she would ever recover the means to communicate, even in a limited sense. “One year, two year, nothing. Before, going to parties. Thirties, I learning English, English, English, going to parties gone. Now, 40s, I ask ‘Why 30s [gone by]?’ Very emotion. Is very hard.”

"But one of the most profound effects was losing the ability to speak with herself. Her inner monologue disappeared for several months, leaving her unable to process her own thoughts in what is considered a psychologically “normal” way. The ability to converse with one’s self, known as “self-talk,” or “inner speech,” is essential for conceptualizing our emotions, processing our memories, and for predicting the future. It is inherently associated with our sense of self.

"The relationship between language and the self is made clear in child development. As infants gain the ability to understand and use language, they also become more aware of themselves and their place in their environment. When infants don’t develop their language as expected, it is often a sign of a larger issue, such as autism spectrum disorder, which is also associated with a lack of self-awareness and sociability.

"Phillips is just one of three people with aphasia that documentary filmmaker Guillermo F. Flórez has profiled in a new film about the condition, Speechless. In it, Phillips describes her internal silence as a total loss of identity. Some research has even suggested that internal speech is necessary for higher consciousness. But American philosopher Jerry Fodor proposes an alternative idea, called the “Language of Thought” hypothesis. He argues that in addition to our consciously perceived internal monologues, we have a second internal language that is codified into the brain—a kind of “mentalese,” that we don’t consciously perceive. (my bold)

"Fodor uses the analogy of a computer: There is the set of operations that occur when a particular binary sequence is executed, and there are coding languages that can be used to make those binary sequences. The brain, he argues, works in the same way: There is a base language that is tied to cognition and thought, and then there are other, developed languages that are used to express these thoughts. In this view, higher consciousness can survive even without an internal monologue.

"Phillips’ husband, Jeff, points out that no one else will ever appreciate how Phillips felt during that time. Other aphasia sufferers may describe their experience very differently, and have had very different outcomes. What is clear is that some degree of recovery is possible. Volin says that people such as Phillips really prove the fact that the adult brain has a far higher degree of neural plasticity than previously thought."

Comment: Our consciousness is clearly closely related to our inner dialog and our sense of self. Only humans have this. We are different in kind from all other animals.

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by David Turell @, Sunday, November 06, 2016, 18:14 (2690 days ago) @ David Turell

Penrose believes in microtubules in the brain carrying a quantum representation of the soul:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/728897/LIFE-AFTER-DEATH-consciousness-continue-SOUL

"While scientists are still unsure about what exactly consciousness is, the University of Arizona’s Stuart Hameroff believes that it is merely information stored at a quantum level.

"British physicist Sir Roger Penrose agrees and believes he and his team have found evidence that protein-based microtubules – a structural component of human cells – carry quantum information – information stored at a sub-atomic level.

"Sir Roger states if a person temporarily dies, this quantum information is released from the microtubules and into the universe. 

"However, if they are resuscitated the quantum information is channeled back into the microtubules and that is what sparks a near death experience.

"Sir Roger added: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

"Researchers from the renowned Max Planck Institute for physics in Munich agree and state that the physical universe that we live in is only our perception and once our physical bodies die, there is an infinite beyond.

"Dr Hans-Peter Dürr, former head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, has said: "What we consider the here and now, this world, it is actually just the material level that is comprehensible. 

“'The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger. 

“"Which this world is rooted in. In this way, our lives in this plane of existence are encompassed, surrounded, by the afterworld already... The body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way, I am immortal.” 

"Dr Christian Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, added: "Our thoughts, our will, our consciousness and our feelings show properties that could be referred to as spiritual properties. No direct interaction with the known fundamental forces of natural science, such as gravitation, electromagnetic forces, etc. can be detected in the spiritual."

“'On the other hand, however, these spiritual properties correspond exactly to the characteristics that distinguish the extremely puzzling and wondrous phenomena in the quantum world.”

Comment: this theory has been around several years. It fits my feeling about how 'soul' works after death, and certainly fits the NDE discoveries in resuscitated patients. More background:

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/content/hameroff-penrose-review-orch-or-theory

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by dhw, Monday, November 07, 2016, 13:53 (2689 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Penrose believes in microtubules in the brain carrying a quantum representation of the soul:

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/728897/LIFE-AFTER-DEATH-consciousness-continue-SOUL

The heading of this thread echoes the sensational distortion of the subheading of the article:

LIFE AFTER DEATH
Shock claims of evidence showing consciousness may continue as a SOUL
Subheading: the human conscious lives on after death, scientists have sensationally claimed.

“May continue” is suddenly transformed into “lives on” in the article, and “soul survives” in David’s heading (complete with exclamation mark).

Contrast this with Penrose’s own words: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

It’s possible…can exist…perhaps indefinitely. A sensibly cautious hypothesis, as opposed to a sensational claim.

However, many thanks for an illuminating article which fits in with some of the ideas I am trying to formulate with a view to reconciling dualism and materialism. I will get there eventually!

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by dhw, Tuesday, November 08, 2016, 12:16 (2688 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Penrose believes in microtubules in the brain carrying a quantum representation of the soul:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/728897/LIFE-AFTER-DEATH-consciousness-continue-SOUL

I’ve had another look at this, and I think Penrose has a major problem which I’ll come onto later, because first I want to try and formulate my own “reconciliation” between materialism and dualism. This entails synthesizing some of the theories we’ve been discussing, but my starting point is very different from all of them. I pointed out in the “brief guide” that someone on a planet billions of miles away with a powerful enough telescope would be able to view the crucifixion. Light is energy, and theoretically the visual image generated by a material event goes on for ever. The source is material (the actual crucifixion), but the image in the form of energy is not. It survives the death of the material source.

If we take this as an analogy, we can argue that although the material brain may be the source of the consciousness which contains all our non-material attributes – our thoughts, emotions, memories etc. – these are also a form of energy, or in other words the “image” produced by the materials is not material.

This ties in with two of the ideas we have already discussed: emergence, as the process whereby the property of the whole cannot be explained by the properties of its parts, and Sheldrake’s morphic field, which I take to mean all the attributes and information that comprise the identity of the individual. Once we think of consciousness in terms of energy produced by materials, and we link it to the analogy of the image produced by light, it seems to me that we have a reconciliation between materialism (materials are the source of consciousness) and dualism (the energy exists independently of the source).

We now come onto the subject of the “immortal soul”. My crucifixion analogy is limited because it is fixed, whereas consciousness is not. It continues to absorb and produce information so long as it exists, and this is where my hypothesis, Penrose’s and Sheldrake’s run into the same difficulty. My “energy”, Penrose’s “quantum information”, and Sheldrake’s “morphic field” are all immaterial products of the material being, and they may survive the death of the individual body in the sense that their already formed information can be accessed by others (like the image of the crucifixion). But that does not necessarily mean that the immaterial information/ energy/ morphic field is capable of undergoing any change once its source is extinguished. Penrose agrees with Hameroff that consciousness is “merely information stored at a quantum level”. But consciousness is not information; consciousness is awareness of information. It contains information – all the information that makes us what we are – but even if we can argue that the information itself may last for ever, the extra dimension of the conscious “I” which is aware of and uses the information cannot be explained as itself BEING information. To go back to my crucifixion image: the being with the telescope could theoretically observe every incident of my whole life, and if he was telepathic he could theoretically read every thought I ever had: all that information lives on. But it can’t go beyond what has already taken place.

I am making two points here. One, that materialism and dualism are not incompatible. But two, we are no nearer to solving the question of whether there is such a thing as a consciousness which can live on as a functioning, communicating, observing “I” after the death of its material source. That would require the purest possible form of dualism, with consciousness preceding materials – a concept that lies at the very heart of most religions and inevitably leads to God. I am not arguing against it, or against the possibility of an immortal, observing and thinking soul, as seems to be suggested by NDEs. I am simply saying that none of the hypotheses (quantum information, morphic field, everlasting energy) are of any help in settling the issue, and I would suggest that science is incapable of doing so, since it is restricted to a materialist approach to the whole subject. That’s why I like Penrose’s caution: “It’s possible,..can exist…perhaps indefinitely, as a soul” We shall just have to wait and see – or not see!

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by David Turell @, Tuesday, November 08, 2016, 14:47 (2688 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:I am making two points here. One, that materialism and dualism are not incompatible. But two, we are no nearer to solving the question of whether there is such a thing as a consciousness which can live on as a functioning, communicating, observing “I” after the death of its material source. That would require the purest possible form of dualism, with consciousness preceding materials – a concept that lies at the very heart of most religions and inevitably leads to God. I am not arguing against it, or against the possibility of an immortal, observing and thinking soul, as seems to be suggested by NDEs. I am simply saying that none of the hypotheses (quantum information, morphic field, everlasting energy) are of any help in settling the issue, and I would suggest that science is incapable of doing so, since it is restricted to a materialist approach to the whole subject. That’s why I like Penrose’s caution: “It’s possible,..can exist…perhaps indefinitely, as a soul” We shall just have to wait and see – or not see!

Bravo. Brilliant analysis! However, true materialism does not explain consciousness while dualism appears to by including materialism on one side of its duality.

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by dhw, Wednesday, November 09, 2016, 13:13 (2687 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:I am making two points here. One, that materialism and dualism are not incompatible. But two, we are no nearer to solving the question of whether there is such a thing as a consciousness which can live on as a functioning, communicating, observing “I” after the death of its material source. That would require the purest possible form of dualism, with consciousness preceding materials – a concept that lies at the very heart of most religions and inevitably leads to God. I am not arguing against it, or against the possibility of an immortal, observing and thinking soul, as seems to be suggested by NDEs. I am simply saying that none of the hypotheses (quantum information, morphic field, everlasting energy) are of any help in settling the issue, and I would suggest that science is incapable of doing so, since it is restricted to a materialist approach to the whole subject. That’s why I like Penrose’s caution: “It’s possible,..can exist…perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.” We shall just have to wait and see – or not see!

DAVID: Bravo. Brilliant analysis! However, true materialism does not explain consciousness while dualism appears to by including materialism on one side of its duality.

Thank you. We are all wrestling with very complex matters here. However, I don’t think either dualism or materialism explains consciousness. Materialism claims that materials must be the source of consciousness, and dualism claims that consciousness is independent of materials. “True” dualism, in my view, can only lead back to some sort of God, but even that is not an explanation – it’s merely a statement: that consciousness has always existed as the first cause.

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by David Turell @, Wednesday, November 09, 2016, 14:51 (2687 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:I am making two points here. One, that materialism and dualism are not incompatible. But two, we are no nearer to solving the question of whether there is such a thing as a consciousness which can live on as a functioning, communicating, observing “I” after the death of its material source. That would require the purest possible form of dualism, with consciousness preceding materials – a concept that lies at the very heart of most religions and inevitably leads to God. I am not arguing against it, or against the possibility of an immortal, observing and thinking soul, as seems to be suggested by NDEs. I am simply saying that none of the hypotheses (quantum information, morphic field, everlasting energy) are of any help in settling the issue, and I would suggest that science is incapable of doing so, since it is restricted to a materialist approach to the whole subject. That’s why I like Penrose’s caution: “It’s possible,..can exist…perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.” We shall just have to wait and see – or not see!

DAVID: Bravo. Brilliant analysis! However, true materialism does not explain consciousness while dualism appears to by including materialism on one side of its duality.

dhw: Thank you. We are all wrestling with very complex matters here. However, I don’t think either dualism or materialism explains consciousness. Materialism claims that materials must be the source of consciousness, and dualism claims that consciousness is independent of materials. “True” dualism, in my view, can only lead back to some sort of God, but even that is not an explanation – it’s merely a statement: that consciousness has always existed as the first cause.

That is the only answer. Consciousness is the appearance of an inorganic universe inventing a way to study itself! First life ( against all odds) then introspective
consciousness appears. All by chance. Consciousness first is the only reasonable conclusion.

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by dhw, Thursday, November 10, 2016, 13:09 (2686 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: ...true materialism does not explain consciousness while dualism appears to by including materialism on one side of its duality.

dhw: We are all wrestling with very complex matters here. However, I don’t think either dualism or materialism explains consciousness. Materialism claims that materials must be the source of consciousness, and dualism claims that consciousness is independent of materials. “True” dualism, in my view, can only lead back to some sort of God, but even that is not an explanation – it’s merely a statement: that consciousness has always existed as the first cause.

DAVID: That is the only answer. Consciousness is the appearance of an inorganic universe inventing a way to study itself! First life ( against all odds) then introspective consciousness appears. All by chance. Consciousness first is the only reasonable conclusion.

That was not the point I was answering. You said that dualism appeared to explain consciousness. Nothing explains consciousness. Your belief in a universal, eternal consciousness does not EXPLAIN consciousness: it merely tells us that consciousness was always there. My comment was only meant as a minor, slightly pedantic correction to detail!

Human Consciousness: Penrose: soul survives!

by David Turell @, Thursday, November 10, 2016, 21:18 (2685 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: ...true materialism does not explain consciousness while dualism appears to by including materialism on one side of its duality.

dhw: We are all wrestling with very complex matters here. However, I don’t think either dualism or materialism explains consciousness. Materialism claims that materials must be the source of consciousness, and dualism claims that consciousness is independent of materials. “True” dualism, in my view, can only lead back to some sort of God, but even that is not an explanation – it’s merely a statement: that consciousness has always existed as the first cause.

DAVID: That is the only answer. Consciousness is the appearance of an inorganic universe inventing a way to study itself! First life ( against all odds) then introspective consciousness appears. All by chance. Consciousness first is the only reasonable conclusion.

dhw: That was not the point I was answering. You said that dualism appeared to explain consciousness. Nothing explains consciousness. Your belief in a universal, eternal consciousness does not EXPLAIN consciousness: it merely tells us that consciousness was always there.

which to me explains why consciousness in humans exists.

Human Consciousness: emotions are learned

by David Turell @, Wednesday, February 15, 2017, 20:19 (2589 days ago) @ dhw

This is a new theory about the development of emotions. Consciousness does not come with them onboard:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-emotions-cognitive-innate.html

"Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor at the City University of New York, conclude.

***

"'We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain," explains LeDoux, a professor in New York University's Center for Neural Science. "Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences."
As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, "the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious experiences."

"Their paper—"A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness"—addresses a notable gap in neuroscience theory. While emotions, or feelings, are the most significant events in our lives, there has been relatively little integration of theories of emotion and emerging theories of consciousness in cognitive science.

"Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the brain's subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren't a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.

"However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different architecture for emotions—one more centered on process than on composition. They conclude that emotions are "higher-order states" embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness."

Comment: Their work is a more reasonable theory than what existed previously, in my opinion. Newborn children bond to their mothers through hormonal connections (oxytocin) automatically, but as they develop they learn to think about that love. I think envy, jealousy and others must be developed as life is experienced.

Human Consciousness: emotions are learned

by dhw, Friday, February 17, 2017, 14:27 (2587 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: This is a new theory about the development of emotions. Consciousness does not come with them onboard:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02-emotions-cognitive-innate.html

I find it hard to believe that this is a new theory, but I’m not sure whether that is my fault or the fault of the arguments offered.

QUOTE: Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor at the City University of New York, conclude.

You won’t have an emotion unless you have something to be emotional about (information), just as you won’t have a memory (information) unless you have something to remember. Has anyone ever argued the contrary?

QUOTE: "'We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain," explains LeDoux, a professor in New York University's Center for Neural Science. "Specifically, the differences between emotional and non-emotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences."

If consciousness arises from a general cortical network (the “one system in the brain”), then it’s not exactly a revelation that all states (emotional and non-emotional) relating to consciousness are processed by a general cortical network in the brain which is essential to consciousness. This seems to me to be talking in circles.

QUOTE: “As a result, LeDoux and Brown observe, "the brain mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not fundamentally different from those that give rise to perceptual conscious experiences."

Emotions are reactions to perceptions, whether sensory or psychological, so of course there is no “fundamental” difference – they are both perceptions which can also be called experiences.

QUOTES relating first to existing theories: “In other words, emotions aren’t a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.” But the new theory sees “emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.”

The existing theory as reproduced here simply conflates reaction with the nature of the reaction. The emotions we feel, just like our decisions, our social behaviour and all our other “states of consciousness” ARE a response to perception/experience. But the WAY we respond is intrinsic to our makeup. All our states of consciousness follow the same obvious pattern: experience precedes reaction. Is it really possible that nobody thought of this before?

Human Consciousness: emotions are learned

by David Turell @, Friday, February 17, 2017, 19:32 (2587 days ago) @ dhw


dhw: Emotions are reactions to perceptions, whether sensory or psychological, so of course there is no “fundamental” difference – they are both perceptions which can also be called experiences.

QUOTES relating first to existing theories: “In other words, emotions aren’t a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.” But the new theory sees “emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.”

The existing theory as reproduced here simply conflates reaction with the nature of the reaction. The emotions we feel, just like our decisions, our social behaviour and all our other “states of consciousness” ARE a response to perception/experience. But the WAY we respond is intrinsic to our makeup. All our states of consciousness follow the same obvious pattern: experience precedes reaction. Is it really possible that nobody thought of this before?

I feel your objections to this theory are highly relevant. Our consciousness develops its relationships to reality by experiencing reality.

Human Consciousness: does teleportation preserve self

by David Turell @, Saturday, July 14, 2018, 18:25 (2075 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Saturday, July 14, 2018, 18:31

Teleportation involves digitalizing a person's body and reproducing it elsewhere. Is one's self the same is the question raised by this philosopher. I cannot edit this as all the thoughts must be presented from the author who believes self is an illusion:

https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed?utm_so...

Comment: What is true is that the body I had at the beginning of my life and that which grew into full adulthood is not the body I inhabit now. Much of the bone structure is the same and much of the original neurons in my brain are the same or direct descendants. What is the same is my memory of my life and my current personality structure. I have an immaterial image of myself which is a lifelong image. I am not the same as the author's image of a long lasting poker club which is the same but with all new members.

I think my teleported twin would look like me but like the author I do not think I would think of me as me. I doubt if we can digitalize an immaterial soul. So I agree with him even if I start from a different premise, that a soul exists.

Human Consciousness: does teleportation preserve self

by dhw, Sunday, July 15, 2018, 13:22 (2074 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Teleportation involves digitalizing a person's body and reproducing it elsewhere. Is one's self the same is the question raised by this philosopher. I cannot edit this as all the thoughts must be presented from the author who believes self is an illusion:
https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed?utm_so...

DAVID’s comment: What is true is that the body I had at the beginning of my life and that which grew into full adulthood is not the body I inhabit now. Much of the bone structure is the same and much of the original neurons in my brain are the same or direct descendants. What is the same is my memory of my life and my current personality structure. I have an immaterial image of myself which is a lifelong image. I am not the same as the author's image of a long lasting poker club which is the same but with all new members.
I think my teleported twin would look like me but like the author I do not think I would think of me as me. I doubt if we can digitalize an immaterial soul. So I agree with him even if I start from a different premise, that a soul exists.

The author begins:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a soul, or some ghost that inhabits my machine. I’m just the result of the activity among my 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion distinctive connections. And, what’s more, that activity is what it is, no matter what collection of neurons is doing it. If you went about replacing those neurons one by one, but kept all the connections and activity the same, I would still be me.

I don’t think he believes in a soul, but who cares? This is philosophical game playing. Ah well, for what it's worth, my view is that regardless of whether there is a soul or not, yes I am me, but no I am not exactly the same me as I was twenty, thirty, forty years ago, either physically or mentally. Experiences change us. So if I left one me on Mars, the me that returned to Earth would have different experiences from the me that was left on Mars (including the experience of being left on Mars and of returning to Earth). They’d both still be me, but neither me would always be the same me.

Human Consciousness: does teleportation preserve self

by David Turell @, Sunday, July 15, 2018, 15:29 (2074 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Teleportation involves digitalizing a person's body and reproducing it elsewhere. Is one's self the same is the question raised by this philosopher. I cannot edit this as all the thoughts must be presented from the author who believes self is an illusion:
https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed?utm_so...

DAVID’s comment: What is true is that the body I had at the beginning of my life and that which grew into full adulthood is not the body I inhabit now. Much of the bone structure is the same and much of the original neurons in my brain are the same or direct descendants. What is the same is my memory of my life and my current personality structure. I have an immaterial image of myself which is a lifelong image. I am not the same as the author's image of a long lasting poker club which is the same but with all new members.
I think my teleported twin would look like me but like the author I do not think I would think of me as me. I doubt if we can digitalize an immaterial soul. So I agree with him even if I start from a different premise, that a soul exists.

dhw: The author begins:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a soul, or some ghost that inhabits my machine. I’m just the result of the activity among my 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion distinctive connections. And, what’s more, that activity is what it is, no matter what collection of neurons is doing it. If you went about replacing those neurons one by one, but kept all the connections and activity the same, I would still be me.

I don’t think he believes in a soul, but who cares? This is philosophical game playing. Ah well, for what it's worth, my view is that regardless of whether there is a soul or not, yes I am me, but no I am not exactly the same me as I was twenty, thirty, forty years ago, either physically or mentally. Experiences change us. So if I left one me on Mars, the me that returned to Earth would have different experiences from the me that was left on Mars (including the experience of being left on Mars and of returning to Earth). They’d both still be me, but neither me would always be the same me.

The key is I am me, a immaterial concept based on memory and construct called personality.

RSS Feed of thread
powered by my little forum