Dear Arnold,
A storm in a teacup. I said nothing about the paradoxes of perception being unsurmountable. No doubt you will have surmounted them in your first semester in college. My grouse is that contemporary philosophers don't want even to play ball at that level. I am thinking of ER Clay's specious present in which we can hear a tune, despite the fact that once the fifth note has come the fourth should have disappeared, not to mention the others. Or the fact that we seem to see movement at a place at a time, when motion cannot be at one place at one time. As you yourself point out, the brain builds these representations within, using inferences from collation of inputs. Your own elegant perception experiments seem the best indicators that Rand's idea of perception being 'objective' and free of error at least needs very careful reading.
My grouse is with philosophers like one I met recently who claimed that 'redness' could now be defined as that property of things in the world that engenders a sense of red in us. You will be familiar with the territory. What about the 'red' light emitted by a tungsten filament that looks white, unless of course you put a prism in the way?
All simple stuff but all demonstrating that our only meaningful ontology can be of aspects of the world that can cause us to know about them. That has nothing to do with whether or not some of these aspects involved events prior to our existence. Knowledge has to be inferential. We can infer back to the big bang so we can know of the big bang, with some degree of confidence. The same applies to the pepperpot in front of me - my knowledge is subject to a degree of confidence in an inference. A photon hitting the retina indicates nothing unless the brain has been checking for photons before, or has receptors for other energy photons, or has ganglion cells to do edges and so on. Seeing a pepperpot is inferring from a few more of this sort of photon here, a few less there.
Idealism does not require that there was nothing there before man - as long as it is a panexperiential idealism like that of Leibniz, I guess. (And for Leibniz the 'perceptions' experienced by things like rocks need not even rise above what we might call a stupor or fog. They are too trivial even to ask questions about since it is only their third party operational aspects that would reasonably concern us.) As I tried to indicate, existence in no way requires knowledge or inference but it may be inseparable from the building block of inference, which is a causal, or dynamic, relation and I see no real problem in calling this 'experience'. To me Leibniz's metaphysic is not about making the world spooky it is about making spookiness just the usual old world.
You are entitled to entertain whatever ontology you like but you are not entitled to have it taken seriously by any one unless you can justify it, surely? The problem I am aiming at is perhaps most clearly indicated by David Chalmers suggestion that there might be a world in which there is no mass, only schmass. Mass and schmass endow their bearers with exactly the same disposition to resist acceleration under force and to attract other dollops of the same, but, as 'intrinsic' properties they may be different. To me this is a childish misinterpretation of Newton's idea of mass. Mass is just a name for a disposition to resist force and to attract (they turn out to be the same thing now) that Newton thought up. We have no justification for having theories about an 'intrinsic basis' for such dispositions. Humans are either genetically or culturally programmed to believe there are such 'intrinsic' properties but nobody has ever come across one and nobody has a justification for positing one! Kant fell into this trap and said they must be there, but why? Why should the world not be made of dispositions to entrain certain sorts of experience - which is what physics says it is. Schrodinger's equation is quite explicitly a formula for a disposition to entrain a certain sort of observation/experience under certain conditions.
So there is nothing peculiar about 'dynamic entities'. They are what Newton set up for us. All their properties are relational so they have dynamic relations. What could the constituents of dynamic relations be other than dynamic entities (things with dynamic properties like mass and charge) having relations?I agree with you that if you take the argument to the point James Ladyman may take it - to deny any ontology of relata for the relations then you get nowhere, but I am not following that track. For me the relata are absolutely real but their reality is only in terms of their relational properties. You need real relata to have experiences. With no specific relata, just patterns of relation, experiences are inexplicable - as both Barry Smith and I have challenged James with. Leibniz's monads are just what we need, relata that experience their relations.
What I think may confuse, although maybe more others than you, is that knowledge and experience have to be seen quite differently and if the knower is the experiencer is the whole person that difference is hard to understand. Like you I think experience relates to some very special component of the brain that is wired up to a huge input collation system that gets things ready for the representation point. Knowing involves all that collation. Experience is much more local, I believe. And I think you might agree that there is another paradox here in that the knowing system cannot generate knowledge unless it feeds the representing system but the representing system does not itself have any inferential apparatus so has to take things on trust so cannot 'know' in the sense of being able to check the reliability of the collation. I see no reason for that to be seen as problematic in a detailed analysis like yours but the philosophers don't appreciate the complexity of the process and think that there must be some sort of transparent non-inferntial knowledge - which God might have. To me that is pure confusion.
Best wishes as ever
Jo
Hi Martha,
There are many explanations by different researchers, with no single consensus.
However, in my humble opinion, looking at the research done by professor Antonio Damasio would be a great place to start searching for answers. For example his book "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010", has been written with broader audience in mind and should be a good introduction to the subject .
Another interesting text about the subject could be the theory proposed by professor C.R. Cloninger in his article "Evolution of human brain functions: the functional structure of human consciousness." doi: 10.3109/00048670903270506, where he describes the major transitions of neocortical development from early reptiles to modern Homo sapiens.
Hope this helps you forward.
Best regards,
Olli Kärkkäinen
Indeed, philosophy and theology answer this question in some sense.
But if you are looking for scientific answer, one of the issues is: Is it possible to give an objective definition of consciousness? What is it?
Then if you want to find its origins you have to find a "substrate": Does consciousness need neural network to exist? How complex should it be?
What is the relationship between the "sphere" of perception and the consciousness?
Sorry, I gave more questions than answer. I hope it is useful.
Hi Martha,
Perhaps Daniel Dennett`s book "Consciousness explained" can be of interest to you?
Many thanks for your answers and references. I actually met professor Antonio Damasio in Paris. His explainations are still too difficult for me.( non-specialist )
Hi,
I do not recommend Daniel Dennet. His treatment of the subject is very one-sided and as been recently shot down by others, such as Thomas Nagel (2012), Bennett and Hacker (2003). I attached a section from a conceptual paper I am currently working on. Let me know if I can help any further.
2c. The Failure Of Eliminative Materialism To Resolve The Mind-Body Problem:
At the end of their chapter on Reductionism in their book, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003), Bennett and Hacker state that Eliminative materialism is not a serious option because it’s not a serious possibility for the study of human nature. They provide 4 reasons: (1) if eliminitivists are right, then there is no such thing as mental illness because there is no such thing as anxiety, depression etc. Moreover, there is no such thing as a learning theory because there is no such thing as “knowing”, “believing” or “opining”. (2) The eliminitivists conception of explanation, via neuroscience, is internally incoherent since explanation is conceptually related to “understanding” as well as to developing well-founded belief, and reasoned opinion. (3) If the concepts of what is so misguidedly deemed to be “folk psychology” are vacuous, the subject matter of genuine psychology doesn’t exist—just as there can be no scientific study of witchcraft if there are no witches. (4) The eliminitivists in effect saws off the branch on which he is seated: the presupposition that the non-vacuous use of the concepts which the eliminitivists contend are, in fact, vacuous (e.g., their clear use of language in making assertions presupposes the applicability of intentionality, knowledge and belief); so, does he or does he not believe in what he says? (p.377).
In summary, they state that this position eliminates all that is human. Our ideas about of how to explain the fall of the Roman Empire or the cause of World War II are all fictitious since they hinge on intentionality. Thus, the primary conceptual failure is elucidated by the fact that when one denies the existence of all the attributes that constitute mind, then one also undermines the very utterance that denies it . To conclude, this line of reasoning is not a viable option . It’s from here that a different potential solution is described by defending the idea that the mind-body problem is simply a categorical mistake, an illusion of assuming that there is a ghost in the machine. Because this solution is influenced by our usage of language, it is from here that the mind-body problem is beginning to be recognized within the post-modern framework.
Hi again Martha, This paper only taps in to your topic and is more philosophical, but may provide some background info or just inspiration. Brilliant author. If you cant find the paper let me know.
Binnie, James, “Philosophy of thought and the Relationship to CBT: An
Existential Analysis — What’s Wrong with Being a Robot?”, Philosophical
Practice, vol. 5, no. 1, March 2010, pp. 567–575.
Really entertaining is the book "Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work?" from Roy F. Baumeister, Alfred R. Mele, and Kathleen D. Vohs (2009). Chapter 2 and 3 are devoted to consciousness. It is very illustrative and very good for beginners (from psychology).
You might be interested in Evan Thompson's book, Mind in Life, or just about any of his articles, many of which can be downloaded from the Internet). His approach (enactivism) is an attempt to bridge the explanatory gap between mind and matter, or consciousness and nature, by integrating the methods and findings of cognitive science, phenomenology and eastern/Buddhist contemplative traditions.
As already pointed out, consciousness (C) should first be defined. One can make a distinction between C, mind, and awareness. Mind can be defined as an active mechanism or process that involves thoughts, intentions etc. C can be taken to mean the state of experiencing or the state in which one is able to experience something about external events conveyed by sensory input or about one's own thoughts or feelings. But there is a far deeper concept, something that enables qualia and C. The origin of this deeper level is not known.
Dear Martha,
I would not too much notice of recent literature. This question was much better understood 300 years ago by people like Leibniz and Descartes. People now think they know better but most have hardly started to understand.
It may be useful to consider consciousness in terms of two aspects. The first is just being 'aware' or 'sensing' or 'feeling'. The second is for that awareness or sensing to be in terms that can distinguish now from past and future and here from other positions in space and dispositional properties like reflection of light or 'colour' etc.
There is no need of an explanation of an origin of the first part because it seems likely to apply to everything, as Leibniz pointed out. Anything influenced by its environment, as any physical unit in the universe is, is to that extent aware of, or senses, the universe in operational terms and that is all we can ask about because it is clear that nothing ever got to know what the experience of another thing 'was like'. We have no reason to think that in this sense awareness or sensing is special to animals or humans.
The origin of the second part is the story of evolution of the human brain, which is something we only have a patchy knowledge of but enough to consider it no special mystery. Something inside a brain is aware of signals that the rest of the brain has collated in a complex way so that these signals correlate very well with not just here and now but other places and times, colours, shapes and sounds. I can see an indigo and ochre Turkish rug I remember buying just after I got married. Some neural component in my brain must be receiving signals from other neural components that have collated signals from my retinae and my memory. What I think is probably the crucial evolutionary step that makes our consciousness so different from even chimpanzees is a change in the way sensory data are collated by differentiation in time, maybe in the hippocampus, so that we have concepts of **episodes**. Chimps have a sense of past and future maybe but not specific episodes when this or that happened. The idea that the ability to form ideas of episodes gives us human consciousness has been championed by Tulving (1972). For complicated reasons unless you have a sense of episodes you probably cannot even have a sense of 'mentality' or 'being a subject in the world'.
Some people would say that I am being Cartesian saying that some neural unit in the brain is receiving signals about the world from the rest of the brain but since that is what neuroscience tells us goes on in the brain I cannot see how anybody can object. If nothing is 'getting' this information then it isn't even information because it isn't informing anything. The only problem with Descartes is that he assumed that there is only one of these units receiving sensations and having feelings in any one brain. This now seems implausible. There will be lots of them. This does not cause a problem because they are all getting the same collated information.
So in as much as there is an answer to your question I don't think you will find it in Dennett or Thompson or even Demasio. I think you will find the first bit in Leibniz and the second in neurophysiological data from people like Buzsaki and Moser working on hippocampus.
Best wishes
Jo E
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards
As an addendum, you might want to know why we email about the experiences of the neural units in our brains that get collated information about then and now and future rather than the neural units in the hypothalamus that just turn the temperature up and down. The simple answer is that the hypothalamic units are not wired up to monitoring circuits that can relay information about their inputs to speech centres. My hypothalamus may be sensing big time but it just has no way of telling yours, except by you shivering or taking a sweater off. There is no mystery about why certain neural events 'feel' and others do not. We have no reason to think there is any difference in whether they feel, just in whether the speech centre can monitor what they feel. Speech is all about episodic inputs too, which may be relevant, but may be a coincidence.
Jonathan, thanks for changing gears in this discussion towards more fundamental and interesting direction; the link to your web page turned out to be useful.
I have great respect for the deep thinkers of the past such as Leibniz or Descartes. However, I prefer to base my thinking on facts (the two kinds Leibniz talks about) known to be relevant today instead on what L &D have said (although their writings have a great historical interest). As a natural scientist, I would like to base my thinking and world view on reasoning that is based on observations of nature (such as the brain) as well as on logic.
I agree with Jo that the first, deeper part (awareness) may not be explainable but that the second part can be analysed. However, philosophical/scientific discussions about the first part can be conducted and certain false statements (opposites of Leibmiz's facts) can be ruled out.
I appreciate so much all your valuable comments and discussions. I will continue to study philosophy and logic in order to find out more about consciousness and unconsciousness.
This discussion is very interesting and thanks for all the thoughtful comments. This subject has been raised before in 2012 on Researchgate.
The following text is derived and modified from my contribution to an online discussion forum of Researchgate June 22 2012. http://www.researchgate.net/topic/Neuroscience/post/what_is_consciousness_What_is_its_nature_and_origin?
Consciousness is not a thing, entity, object or energy field of some sort. It is an attribute of certain living organisms, a state of awareness of the world external to the organism. From an evolutionary perspective awareness of the external world starts with sensations, the most primitive of which is probably the photosensitivity of plants. The most primitive forms of animal life are characterized by an independence from photosynthesis as a source of energy, in that animals are able to acquire their nutritional needs from consuming plants and other animals. In order to do this they must have some ability to sample the chemical nature of their immediate environment which is the primitive form and origin of taste and smell. The ability to move about to acquire food and avoid predators is the obvious stimulus for the evolutionary development of touch (awareness of shape and texture), vision (a development of photosensitivity) and hearing (awareness of vibration in the environmental medium - water or air). Where the organism relies on a single form of sensory awareness, or treats two or more sensory faculties separately, the complexity of neural functioning does not need to develop beyond a certain stage. However, once organisms evolved to the extent that sense data from two or more different sources (say vision and touch for example) could be integrated, neural complexity increased significantly. Whether the neural complexity comes first or the integration arises first is debateable, but the physical adaption of increased neural complexity is the likely mutation that makes the integration possible, and the survival advantage a reality. Connecting the visual appearance with its shape and texture requires both greater complexity and some ability to retain data from sensory input. Pure sense perception is both immediate and temporary. Immediate inasmuch as the sense data flows as soon as the stimulus is received from the external world. Temporary inasmuch that as soon as the stimulus ceases (e.g. sound stops or it becomes dark), sensory data flow ceases. In order to connect the different sensations generated by events and entities outside of the organism, some primitive form of memory is required. The data of one form of sensation needs to be retained in some manner so that it may be connected to or associated with the data from another form of sensory input. The next step up on the evolutionary ladder is recognition of entities – that is entities external to the organism. A pebble has a certain shape, colour, texture and mass. These attributes may be sensed separately by an organism, and so long this is all the organism does, the pebble has no reality to the organism, as a pebble. What the more primitive organism would experience is; just colour, texture and mass, as separate sensory inputs. In order to know the pebble, as a pebble, the attributes of colour, texture and mass have to be integrated and retained in the nervous system. This ability to perceive objects rather than discrete sensations is a huge upward step from an evolutionary perspective. The memory storage capacity of the nervous system must be orders of magnitudes greater than what is required for simple sensation-level organisms. This memory capacity permits the organism to learn from experience and so select out objects and entities from the surrounding environment. The survival value of this is obvious. Food objects like other organisms can be identified at a distance and moved towards, or chased, rather than simple reliance on just the immediate and temporary contact experience of the purely sensory level. Avoidance of predators is similarly significantly improved. This level of awareness of the world external to the organism, which we may call the perceptual level (as distinct from the sensory level), is what could be considered consciousness. What level of complexity, what degree of sensory integration is required before one can say perception and consciousness exists? That is a question for biologists, but perhaps enough is known of the lower multicellular organisms to answer that question. The answer is not necessary in order to grasp the continuum of complexity somewhere along which the phenomenon of perception and consciousness can be said to begin. Is consciousness and perception one and the same thing? Do the concepts have the same referents? At this stage I am not sure, but suspect we are designating perception as the process of sensory integration and retention, whereas consciousness designates the organism’s state of awareness of perceptions as such. Conceptually, perception seems prior to consciousness, even though the two appear contemporaneously somewhere on the evolutionary continuum of complexity.
Where does the human form of consciousness fit in? What is its distinctive nature? Is it fundamentally different from sensation and perception, or is it a further development along the continuum of neural and perceptual complexity? I would argue that the human form of consciousness is a quantum leap forward from the perceptual level, yet still based on it. The human mind can rise to the conceptual level and form concepts, and as far as is known, no other organism can do this. Apparently a smart chimpanzee can be taught simple concepts after years of training. A human child does this effortlessly in a few months just by being alive, awake and functioning. What are concepts and what is this higher level of awareness and consciousness which we may call the conceptual level? That is another discussion and a very long and complex one. Opinions vary considerably, but my view is that Ayn Rand successfully described and explained concepts and their formation in her monograph “Introduction to objectivist epistemology” in a two part article in 1966[2]. This thesis and document has subsequently been published and is in its second expanded edition, edited by Dr Harry Binswanger and Professor Leonard Peikoff[3].
In summary I would argue that consciousness is not a mysterious or mystical phenomenon, but an awareness attribute possessed by certain living entities evolved beyond a minimum level of complexity, and where integration and retention of sensory data is possible. One does not need to grasp quantum mechanics to understand consciousness. The means by which our nervous system and brain processes external sensory data is still an emerging science, but a grasp of the fundamental principles involved is possible. Likewise modern criticism or even denial of knowledge i.e. modern scepticism, based on the fact that knowledge is acquired by some means and that the brain processes sensory data, is fundamentally flawed also. Knowledge is knowledge of the external world and to deny the possibility of knowledge and identification of truth is self-contradictory. The sceptic cannot claim that the statement “knowledge and certainty is not possible” – is true. To remain consistent the sceptic must accept that this is also uncertain. Errors are possible and truth is hard to establish but possible. Knowledge begins with sensory data, confusing as it may often be, and it is the task of our minds to interpret what our senses provide. We are not God and our fallibility does not lend credence to modern scepticism, but informs us that we need logic and the scientific method to understand the world we live in.
Consciousness and the body are inextricably integrated, for consciousness depends on the sensory and perceptual levels of awareness for its existence. There is no mind-body dichotomy and no metaphysical conflict between consciousness and existence. Mind and body are two aspects of an indivisible, integrated entity. Existence exists, only existence exists, and consciousness is awareness of that which exists. Self-awareness is simply the act of consciousness being aware of the body of which it is an attribute. Awareness of the content of and functioning of its own consciousness is what we may call introspection, as distinct from the extrospection of awareness of existents external to the content of our own minds.
The following an extension of that line of discussion helped to some extent by my recent reading of Cloninger’s paper, recommended by Olli Kärkkäinen in his post 5 days ago to this forum:
If one thinks across all the living species, from the simplest viruses and bacteria, to the most complex of the higher species – the vertebrates, it is clear that above a certain level of complexity, living things are able to sense the existence of other aspects of the environment in which they live. This ability to sense the world outside the individual organism gets progressively more sophisticated as the complexity of species increases. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that evolution and the progressive increase in awareness of an external world are intimately related. A good description of that progress from simple organisms to the complexity of the human brain and mind is the one given by Cloninger[1]. In this article Cloninger describes the known development of the brain over evolutionary time frames and integrates biological knowledge with the fossil record as well as what he calls the five ‘planes’ of human self-awareness: sexuality, materiality, emotionality, intellectuality, and spirituality in a 5X5 matrix. He then proceeds to inter-relate these 25 aspects with five basic motives or drives that can be measured as temperaments or basic emotions: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and happiness/sadness. The complexity of his reasoning and criticism of his position is beyond the scope of this material and my own academic training, but I believe it is reasonable to state that at a certain point in sensory sophistication it would be reasonable to say that specific species have consciousness, a brain with a faculty of awareness of the world external to the organism that goes beyond simple sensory capacity. Consciousness would seem to be a state of awareness that has some capacity to self-direct beyond the purely passive data-gathering of simple sensations. It would seem that consciousness includes the ability to focus or move sensory attention to different aspects of the sensory data received from the external world. This ability to focus attention would have tremendous survival advantages as it would enable the organism to direct its body so as to change physical location and avoid danger, or acquire food that is not immediately at hand. It would also add value to sense perception too. The ability to move so as to optimise vision, hearing and touch would also improve the organism’s ability to avoid predators, catch food and find a mate. This ability to move both physically and mentally is the origin of volition, of choice, at its most primitive level. At still higher levels of complexity, organisms are able to retain data in a way that enables the organism to learn, to gather experience as an individual living being, rather than rely solely on genetically programmed actions and reactions. At a certain point on the complexity continuum, this data accumulation enables integration of different groups of sensory data that results in the ability to identify entities – three dimensional solid objects, shapes, discrete items that are complex combinations of bits of existence that function as a single unit. For example, to us a rock or a tree is an entity, but to the lower species they are not. To explain this crucial aspect of evolutionary development, some examples may help. The single cell amoeba literally slides along the bottom of its puddle and accepts whatever food it encounters. It cannot ‘see’ ahead (by light wave or sound sensation) to direct its movement. It probably has developed some ability to track chemicals in its environment – the primitive ancestors of touch, smell and taste sensations, but that is as far as its sensory capacity extends. It cannot act purposefully in any way to chase food, avoid predators, or manipulate its environment to its advantage. Most plants have similar capacities and limitations. Plants need light energy to convert chemicals in the environment to chemicals needed for self-sustenance and self-generated action, so their sensory capacities are based on light i.e. they are photosensitive - the primitive origin of the visual sense, and gravity (down means less light and up means more light). Some plants have primitive sensory organs and can utilize primitive reflex mechanisms to capture prey (the Venus fly trap is an example), but it is animals that have developed the most sophisticated sensory awareness and movement capacities.
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch sensory capacities are the sensations that reflect the physical world we inhabit. Sight utilizes light energy, hearing utilizes mechanical energy moving the molecules in the air or water in which we are immersed. Taste and smell enables an organism to sample the chemical makeup of the environment. Touch is the foundation of spatial awareness – where the organism is in relation to other things - and is the basis of shape and form. Most modern multicellular organisms have some capacity to sense light, sound, shape and chemical composition in the immediate environment. Depending on evolutionary pressures over time, some species have developed extra-ordinary sensitivity of some senses and some senses have either not developed or have become less sensitive. The eyesight of the dragonfly or eagle is an example of extra-ordinary visual sense evolution. Cetacean and bat ability to hear sounds in the ultrasonic range are examples of extreme hearing adaption. The blindness of fish that evolved at great ocean depths or in cave environments are examples of devolutionary adaption. The detail and cause of the wide biological variations is beyond the scope of my intent here. What is important is that different species have responded to different environmental pressures over geological time and some species have evolved to have highly sophisticated or limited faculties of sensory and conscious awareness. The higher species are more than just aware of their environment. They can group and retain sensations in their nervous systems so that entities and objects can be perceived as objects per se. Thus a dog can perceive a rock or a tree as a discrete object that they can walk around or climb. It can grasp its solidity and even grasp what may be on the other side of the rock or tree, even though it has never actually seen the other side of that particular rock or tree. Furthermore, the higher animals can actively direct consciousness and their bodies towards items of interest, and they can learn and teach their offspring. Humans have one further capacity that is unique among the species. As far as is known, humans are they only species that can introspect although there may be doubt about other primates. The other higher animals can look outwards and actively choose to focus on this or that aspect of reality, and humans also have this capacity. What humans can do is to look inwards: focus consciousness on the content of consciousness itself. This is not just self-awareness. Some of other higher animals can grasp that the image they see in a mirror is their own reflection. What only humans seem uniquely capable of doing is to observe the content and working of their own minds, and actively modify its content and activity. This is volition, free will, the freedom to choose, in its most developed expression.
In summary then, consciousness is a faculty, specifically a faculty of awareness that may be directed outwards – extrospection, or, in the case of humans, inwards – introspection as well. It is a faculty that is an attribute of living entities, not inanimate objects, and its existence is dependent on the body and brain that makes it possible. When the body and brain ceases to function, that is on death, the individual consciousness goes out of existence. Consciousness is not a ‘thing’, or an energy or force of some kind that is separate from the body and brain. It is not some sort of force that inhabits or is imprisoned by our brain and body. It is an attribute and has no existence apart from the entity of which it is an attribute. As an analogy think of consciousness as a mental attribute of the brain of certain living organisms, in the same way as colour is a visual attribute of objects we see. When we perceive a red object, we are not receiving ‘redness’ as distinct from or apart from the object which is red. We are receiving light from the object which interacts with our eyes and brain which interprets a certain range of wave lengths as fitting into a band which we label ‘red’. As soon as the brain and eye of the perceiver of coloured objects dies, the faculty of perceiving colour goes out of existence for that (now dead) organism. The light from objects still exists and may be seen as ‘red’ by other entities with the faculty of vision (and the learned percept or concept of ‘redness’), but the dead organism sees nothing, for it has no faculty, functioning organ or brain with which to ‘see’. In the same way, the faculty of consciousness is wholly dependent on the existence of a functioning brain and body of which it is an attribute. When the life of the body and brain ends, so the individual consciousness ceases to exist along with the life of which it was a part.
References
[1] Cloninger CR. Evolution of human brain functions: the functional structure of human consciousness. Aust N Z J Psychiatry 2009;43:994-1006.
[2] Rand A. Introduction to objectist epistemology. The Objectivist 1966.
[3] Rand A. Introduction to objectivist epistemology (expanded second edition). New York: NAL Books, The Penguin Group, 1990.
I agree with much of what you say, Mark but I would like to pick up on one thing.
You say ‘one does not need to grasp quantum mechanics to understand consciousness’. I agree to the extent that it is not necessary to follow the mathematical structures of the equations involving ‘imaginary’ numbers. However, I disagree at a deeper level. Quantum mechanics is just the most fundamental level of our entire physical science programme, and it shows through a lot at higher levels. For instance ‘chemical valency’ turns out to be just the scaled up effect of quantized energy levels. Since about 1980 quantum theory has started to explain the properties of large objects **directly**, not just by summing lots of little quanta. Electrical conductivity and reflection light arise from QM operating at the macro level. Neurobiology has tended not to need to get involved in this yet, but it will become as outdated as a 1983 BBC B computer if it does not soon. There is nothing to be afraid of but modern condensed matter physics uses QM directly all the time, particularly for electrical phenomena and structural order. Over the last twenty years a number of bad ideas about QM and the brain have been floated but that is not an argument for not learning up to date physics.
Much more importantly, QM gives us some fundamental rules about the entities that populate the universe and I think this has to be central to any coherent theory of consciousness. QM says that the universe is populated by indivisible dynamic units. These are in a way just a new version of Democritus’s atoms but the crucial difference is that the new units are not specks of minimally extended matter but units of dynamic disposition – nearer to force, although it is obviously more complicated. In a sense they are units of cause. So what do they cause? Not movement of specks of extended matter because there are none. The theory actually says they cause **observations** to be likely to be a certain way. Sounds odd but it shouldn't maybe.
Why should this rather odd metaphysical turn in physics matter to consciousness? The answer I think was understood by Leibniz, whose version of physics was uncannily similar to QM. There were no specks of stuff, just indivisible dynamic units of force, and their relationships were nothing other than **perception**. In fact, as in a typical quantum field theory equation today, the only relation that exists is between the dynamic unit (now Psi) and the universe, in the form of a field of potential (now V(x,y,z,t)). Note that not only are there no billiard balls here, there are no ‘systems’. But because the units are not specks of stuff they can have domains of any size you like – maybe the domain of a person, as Leibniz believed was so for souls. Condensed matter QM has units the size of gongs and transatlantic cables.
And this is where I think there is a sliding together in your account that needs separating. A whole brain, together with sensory receptors on mobile limbs, provides a human being with the apparatus to collate information from the world in ways that allow complex concepts to form. So the story building machinery is much or all of the whole person. But awareness requires something to have what it is aware of available to it. (We may have to change the way we think about what awareness has to mean to make sense.) The collated signals lined up by a brain are not available to anything other than very small neural units inside that brain. They are not available to the liver, larynx or latissimus dorsi. So whatever is aware in the sense of having information about the world available to it is going to be one of a number of very small units in the brain. And it has to be a unit because two units cannot physically receive the same signals – only similar copies or offshoots of signals. Descartes understood all this but made the mistake of thinking there was only one such unit in a brain. Leibniz thought he could make it a big whole body unit but he should have known that it couldn’t work. (Both were influenced by religious beliefs.)
So QM, as an updating of Leibniz’s monadic system, tells us that we need to find indivisible units in brains that can receive as complex a scene as we feel we receive when looking out of the window. (Actually a sensible reflection on neurology ought to tell us that too but it is good to ground things in tested fundamental ideas.) There is no indivisible unit in a computer that receives information about the world of this level of complexity. It is all shunted around in bits. So nothing in a binary computer will ever see a sunset. But neurons receive hugely complicated patterns of information so that’s a start. And the QM of condensed matter allows neurons to be inhabited by indivisible units. Looking for bigger units would be no good because they would not get the right sort of input.
These sorts of arguments are always dismissed as 'Cartesian' by neuroscientists but the irony is that neuroscientists are even more Cartesian, in the sense of wanting one aware unit, when they actually draw diagrams and without a Cartesian 'aware unit' any theory of consciousness is simply incompatible with basic physics (not to mention information theory). The Emperor is still in the altogether but not for long now.
Best wishes
Jo E
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards
Mark, thanks for your "C is an attribute of the organism" argumentation. I agree that C can be considered an attribute, but I maintain that attribute C is still mysterious in the dictionary sense of the word (difficult or impossible to understand).
Let us do Sunday-morning thought experiments of the statement "C is an attribute of the brain". This statement is compatible with the notion that individual atoms or non-brain-like arrangements of many atoms do not generally have C. I accept Mark's assumption that C is not present in a dead brain. Even if the brain is alive, it can be in states with no C (e.g., coma, deep sleep or anaesthesia).
G1. A (classical physics) Gedanken experiment. We can imagine an expanded arrangement of all brain atoms where each atom is, say, a million times further from the centre of gravity of the brain than in the original case when the brain has C. We can also imagine that each atom would have an instantaneous movement (momentum state) that is identical to the movement in the conscious brain. Most people might agree that this system would not have C. Now imagine replacing these atoms with new, identical ones and bringing them back to the original positions and states. According to our present understanding, the system would continue working as the original; I think we would then have a situation where the C-property (as well as other properties of the brain) is back. We may conclude that C is a property of the arrangement (positions and momenta) of the atoms.
It may be instructive to obtain an answer the following question: Why do the atoms have to be close to each other to have property C? If the answer is that the atoms must be interacting with each other, then, because interactions are not exactly instantaneous, I would conclude that C is not an instantaneous property; it has some extension in time.
G2. Another Gedanken experiment. Many of us assume or believe that on the time scale of thoughts or instances of C (less than a second or so) the attribute C arises solely from the information processing of neurons (advocates of quantum-mechanical explanations of C might not agree). What if we would blow up the brain as in G1 but separate all neurons from each other, but arrange things so that there is machinery that sends the signals from presynaptic vesicles to postsynaptic cells so that the system would work exactly as in the original brain. Would this arrangement have property C? What if we would remove one or more cells but the others would continue to receive exactly the same signals as in the intact system? What if some (or all) cells would be replaced by a computing machine that would have exactly the same input-output relation as in the original brain? What if we would then do all the calculations and sending of the signals in the same computational machine? What if we would do the calculation very slowly, one logic operation at at time? Would the system still have property C?
Further Gedanken experiments are possible but I will stop here, because Sunday morning is over for me.
We think that our eyes are the windows of our mind. Our brain must be the seat of the mind . Our consciousness disappears during deep sleep or ephileptic seizers.I still can not understand how consciousness emerges from extremely well organized matter without triggering any soul(-stuff ??).Anyway we have to see this world and people not with our eyes , but with our hearts( like petit prince).
If C is merely an attribute of the brain, it ought to be a function of the state of the physical arrangement of the parts (classically, positions and momenta of the particles; quantum-mechanically, the QM state of the system). Giulio Tononi is trying to devise and investigate such a function (which he calls Phi).
But what does it mean to have an attribute that is correlated with C? Is this attribute not only a description, not the real thing (although Mark is saying C is not a "thing")?
I see a danger of the discussion running in to the usual confusions. I think you are quite right, Martha, that our eyes are the windows of our mind, although Leibniz points out that nothing actually comes in through these windows. The eyes are the pathways for chains of influences perhaps. The brain must be the seat of the mind. Consciousness does not require the body and the brain to be alive, it only requires the brain to be alive.
But there need be no puzzle about consciousness emerging from 'matter' without 'soul-stuff' because, as Descartes, Russell and the physicist Eddington said, 'matter' is just a rather badly thought out idea that soul-stuff has of the world. Soul-stuff is what we are sure about (Cogito ergo sum.). What Leibniz figured out was that other soul-stuff obeys rules that make it seem like matter-stuff to soul-stuff unless you think hard about it. Then it became clear to everyone that none of this is really stuff, it is more like force and schoolroom matter stuff is no longer allowed in a physics department. So no new soul-stuff needs to emerge. What does need to emerge is an arrangement of input signals and receiving (soul) units that allow the 'awareness' of the souls to be stories in time. That needs the story to be organised the right way by the brain machine, which we roughly understand, but it also needs the receiving 'soul' unit to be able to sense that this is a story in time. What is required for that we do not understand.
I think there is a problem because we assume that 'consciousness' is an attribute of something, but we use 'consciousness' to imply two different things, as I indicated earlier. One is the 'what it is like' having an experience awareness that David Chalmers made popular - which may well be an attribute of any dynamic unit in the world (most of them cannot tell us). The other is an attribute of a complex biological system in terms of sorts of responses to stimuli. I think it is a mistake to make both of these an attribute of the same thing. It is a bit like saying an apple is red when what we really mean is that the skin is red.
I think the awareness bit has to be an attribute of single units. This solves the problem of replacing units with chips - you lose an awareness of the biological sort every time you replace the biological unit with a silicon maze of binary units. The behavioural bit is an attribute of the whole organism, but we are not so interested in that I think. And I do not think either is an attribute of the brain. The brain is the part of the whole system that does most of the computational work, but it does it together with arms and leg and eyes and ears. The receiving souls are inside the brain for sure but they must be much smaller.
I think there is a potential confusion about the word 'system' too, Risto. In QM a 'system' is the combination of an indivisible dynamic unit and the process of measuring its properties. This is nothing like a 'system' in 'systems theory' terms which is an aggregate of interacting units. I do not think awareness can be a property of an aggregate because each element of an aggregate is subject to different influences (inputs). This was Leibniz's central insight. Tononi gets this confused. He rightly wants to find a pattern of information that is somehow 'all together' or integrated. The only possible way for information to be all together is for it to all be together as the input into one unit. There is no other meaning of all together in physics. But he cannot see what this requires so he wants a 'system' of interacting units to have this 'integrated information'. But he cannot do that because each unit has only its own inputs. What he does not see is that his theory collapses elegantly into a theory where the integrated information is the input to a single neuronal dynamic unit. The rest of the story is complicated but on my website (surprise surprise).
Jo
Response to Jonathan Edwards post
Jo’s text is in quotes and my response is indicated by “Comment:”
“I see a danger of the discussion running in to the usual confusions. I think you are quite right, Martha, that our eyes are the windows of our mind, although Leibniz points out that nothing actually comes in through these windows. The eyes are the pathways for chains of influences perhaps. The brain must be the seat of the mind. Consciousness does not require the body and the brain to be alive, it only requires the brain to be alive.”
Comment: For the brain to be alive it has to be nourished and maintained by the body, but even this fact is less important than the problematical implication that the brain with its C attribute can function without a body. I don’t think it can. For the brain to be aware it must receive input i.e. have sensory connections. In experiments during the early part of the American space program (circa 1960’s I believe), there was work done on sensory deprivation. In an environment with vastly reduced sensory input, the brain starts to malfunction very quickly – hallucinations, distorted time sense etc. There is a well known correlate in pain research where the loss of sensory input (say from an amputation of a limb) results in bizarre sensations perceived as arising from the now absent limb. It seems that even below the level of the brain (as we construe it to be within the skull) even the most primitive parts of our nervous system (spinal cord) start to malfunction when even part of our normal sensory input is interrupted. It also seems reasonable to argue that without the brain connected to the body, the body ceases to function and literally dies unless maintained artificially. The implication here is that the brain and the body are fully integrated, and that any separation in practice and real life is lethal for both. I agree that consciousness is an attribute of a brain, and though we may be able to separate ‘body’, ‘brain’, ‘consciousness’ for consideration, study and debate at the conceptual level in the same way as we can conceptually separate ‘redness’ from the objects that are themselves ‘red’, to do so physically, it is impossible or destructive to the objects.
“But there need be no puzzle about consciousness emerging from 'matter' without 'soul-stuff' because, as Descartes, Russell and the physicist Eddington said, 'matter' is just a rather badly thought out idea that soul-stuff has of the world. Soul-stuff is what we are sure about (Cogito ergo sum.)”
Comment: This I don’t buy into at all. The implication here is that there is something called ‘soul-stuff’ which is different and separate from the world (universe) in which we live. This bizarre dichotomized world view is the metaphysics of religion. It allows for the view that somehow there is something outside the universe looking in: “.. matter…. is an idea that soul-stuff has of the world”). Who says that ‘soul-stuff’ is what we are sure about? Descartes’ famous phrase “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) is a philosophical confusion of metaphysics and epistemology in the classical Platonic tradition. One can understand how it occurs e.g. I am thinking therefore I must exist – which is more of an epistemological statement rather than a metaphysical law of some kind. However, there is the other perspective i.e. that one has to exist before one can do any thinking at all. i.e that something has to exist first before consciousness has anything to be aware of. The two perspectives articulate two opposite and mutually exclusive world-views: the ‘primacy of existence’ versus the ‘primacy of consciousness’ question, or more simply: What comes first, existence or consciousness? The Platonic and religious view is that a god-like soul conceived the world and brought it into existence – the creation of something out of nothing i.e. consciousness (albeit a divine one) has primacy. The alternative (Aristotelian tradition) view is that the world we live in is all that there is and that consciousness is ‘in this world’ and part of it i.e. existence has primacy. We may not know all there is to know about matter, energy and consciousness, but positing a consciousness (soul-stuff or God) prior to existence solves nothing but adds confusion in my view.
“What Leibniz figured out was that other soul-stuff obeys rules that make it seem like matter-stuff to soul-stuff unless you think hard about it.”
Comment: It obeys rules? ‘It’ remains undefined, and what are these ‘rules’?
“Then it became clear to everyone that none of this is really stuff, it is more like force and schoolroom matter stuff is no longer allowed in a physics department.”
Comment: I am ignorant of modern physics, but rejecting the existence of matter seems a little hasty. ‘Soul stuff’ seems far more way out than ‘matter stuff’. I would hate to think that ‘soul stuff’ has more credibility based on ‘cogito ergo sum’, than ‘matter stuff’
“So no new soul-stuff needs to emerge. What does need to emerge is an arrangement of input signals and receiving (soul) units that allow the 'awareness' of the souls to be stories in time. That needs the story to be organized the right way by the brain machine, which we roughly understand, but it also needs the receiving 'soul' unit to be able to sense that this is a story in time. What is required for that we do not understand.”
Comment: This sounds like an attempt to reconcile a religious metaphysics with science, by trying to blur the distinction between the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of existence question.
“I think there is a problem because we assume that 'consciousness' is an attribute of something, but we use 'consciousness' to imply two different things, as I indicated earlier. One is the 'what it is like' having an experience awareness that David Chalmers made popular - which may well be an attribute of any dynamic unit in the world (most of them cannot tell us). The other is an attribute of a complex biological system in terms of sorts of responses to stimuli. I think it is a mistake to make both of these an attribute of the same thing. It is a bit like saying an apple is red when what we really mean is that the skin is red.”
Comment: There appears to be a number of equivocations here that are hard to sort out. I think my previous post offered some reasonable explanation of what constitutes enough of an experience to constitute a conscious one. To suggest that any ‘dynamic unit’ is capable of having a consciousness is inappropriate. I would argue that the atmosphere is surely a dynamic unit; but conscious, I don’t think so. I also think that the other alternative offered as being a response to stimuli is too narrow. As I indicated in my previous post, a key characteristic of human consciousness is that it can introspect and act on its own content. While a proportion of such actions may be responses to stimuli, I believe many are not. While it is hard to be sure about other species with a less evolved consciousness, I suspect some are able to initiate action that does not constitute a ‘response to stimuli’. In other words free will is possible.
Dear Mark,
I admire your enthusiasm for the subject but if you want to relate consciousness to science I think you need to knuckle down and learn what science is actually about – a very long way from what contemporary philosophers think it is about, and much closer to what Russell thought it was about – maybe the last major philosopher to learn enough detailed physics to be informed.
Otherwise you will misunderstand what the other guy is saying and start attacking absurd straw men. Plato and Aristotle are irrelevant here – science as we know it starts with Galileo more or less. With the act of measurement came a better understanding of the illusoriness of the intuitive matter concept.
I will respond to some comments in sequence:
All our practical experience indicates that no living body is required for consciousness, in the awareness sense, to continue in a brain. I have kept people’s brains alive for many minutes with effective cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a situation in which the body was effectively dead and never recovered. All you need is water, glucose and haemoglobin really.
There is every reason to think that if you avoided sensory deprivation using devices like cochlear implants a ‘brain in a vat’ would be happily conscious. (Note that there are issues about Brentano’s intentionality and externalist meaning that do get tricky but they do not impact on awareness.) There are many people with no sensation up to the neck who are normally conscious - like the late Christopher Reeve I believe. ‘Locked in’ patients may have even less input but those who can use hearing show fMRI signs of considered thought. Space travel is I think a red herring, because, as I personally know, vestibular malfunction is particularly disorientating, and hallucinations require consciousness.
You have misunderstood my slightly light-hearted reume of Descartes and Leibniz. There is NO implication of a soul-stuff which is different and separate from the world we live in. It is that world. Descartes thought there were two sorts of dynamic unit but he wanted these to be within science. It has been the dumbers down in philosophy who have thought he was in to ‘spookiness’. It turns out that he was right – there are two sorts of stuff, broadly speaking fermions, which form extended (antitypic) matter, and bosons, like light, that have no domain of antitypy. Where he was wrong, which Leibniz put right, was to think human souls are unusual. Leibniz realized that boson type non-antitypic entities should be everywhere – and they are. You need to get down to the technical detail to understand this stuff I think.
Most people think that matter has some intrinsic ‘matterness’ or stuffness about it. However, if you think about it all our ideas about matter derive from its causal effects on our sensations – they must do. So what we call matter is just a pattern of mathematical regularity in dynamic casual relations that affect our experiences. (Read James Ladyman – as well as Leibniz.) That was really what Descartes wrote the Meditations to say to Sorbonne students to try to get them out of ‘stuffness’ thinking. (The Sorbonne did not want the book.) Nobody is denying that all this EXISTS– merely that it has 'intrinsic matterness'. We now know that mass is a dynamic relation with the Higgs field. Nothing is ‘like matter’ other than in that it appears as matter in our experience. If we experience and we are part of the universe it seems reasonable to think that all these dynamic relations involve experience, and operationally they must do. (There are further layers here but no space.)
I would very much recommend reading Leibniz’s Monadology to see how he defines the fundamental dynamic units of the world – very precisely – and what sorts of rules they must follow. He gets a few things wrong but most of what he says is now conventional quantum field theory. And read some physics – get into the elegant structures of field theory – they are often very simple. Probably the last great physicist who believed in matter in the sense you seem to cling to was, ironically, the real father of quantum theory – Einstein. But in his very last years he may have realized his realism was misplaced. How can soul stuff be way out when the one thing we know is experience or perception or feeling – soul – and all we know otherwise are the regularities of ways that experience changes?
With respect, there is nothing religious in any of this, it is merciless atheism. The religion is the belief that physics deals with matter stuff when most of the inventors of physics were at pains to teach us this was not what they intended. Now that we know precisely how antitypy arises from the Pauli exclusion principle the origin of the mistake is clear for all to see.
We are all agreed that not all dynamic units will have consciousness in the sense of being aware of a story of distant objects told in space and time. You need a brain to organize that. But simple awareness, in the only operational sense we can expect to be able to decide on, is just part of ‘being influenced by’ so is no big deal. The atmosphere is not a dynamic unit. It is an aggregate. Note, however, that the column of air in a flute IS a dynamic unit that has a quantized mode of oscillation (quantum theory handles large domain modes too these days). I am afraid that most of intuitions about what are ‘things’ go out of the window. Modern physics gives us new definitions for what individual indivisible units are. However, in some cases these turn out to be closer to intuition than atomistic physics. A bell involves a real unit, which is its ring, for instance. Follow this line of argument and I think you begin to see how things might have to work. There is no longer an option for relating consciousness to old fashioned ideas like atoms, or to ‘persons’ for that matter. Science has moved on.
Free will in the sense of not being a response to stimulus has been dead since Spinoza. If it is not a result of ‘sufficient reason’, as Leibniz called cause, then it can be of no use to anyone. We may have to update the causal rules of physics but you can never prove that there are effects due to causal rules that are not causal rules. Free will is the spooky sort of soul stuff you seemed to be at pains to deny, Mark!!
I completly agree to Mark's answer and comments( might be ephemeral?).I feel just sad that I cannot discuss these stuff ( matter&soul) with my philosopher father and jesuit brother( they are no more in this world). Well, I am oblized to go back to my origins(philosopher, theologian,chemist&physicist).I knew that ,medicine is not a exact science, but not in this point.Fourtunately I am connected with researchgate.Thank you to you all. You helped me to think( to exist ..Decarte)!!!!
Well, that was a conversation stopper Jo. Despite a somewhat patronizing beginning, your further remarks are more clarifying to me. Also if my previous remarks offended, I apologize unreservedly. While I have no formal education in mathematics and physics beyond high school, I do not think advanced training in mathematics and physics should be a prerequisite for considering oneself a scientist. I have taken your suggestion and downloaded James Ladyman’s “Understanding Philosophy of Science 2002 – available as an ebook – and am about half way through. So far, it seems very similar to Alan Chalmers’ “What is this thing called science” 1976 that I read as part of the philosophy of science courses I took in the early 1980’s. It remains to be seen if Ladyman will add anything new besides inclusion of science developments since the 1970’s.
I am fully aware that with modern medical methods, a brain or a body can be kept alive artificially. You say that you can keep alive a brain for many minutes even though the body is essentially dead. In any event, is it reasonable to argue that the water, glucose and haemoglobin is still a ‘body-substitute’ made possible by technology rather than biology? Is not your proposition regarding cochlear implants just another technological means of giving the brain sensory input so that consciousness can have some anchor in reality? Again my point is that the ‘body’ I refer to is just the usual means to support the brain and for it to acquire input, and to which it may output. I am very aware of the tetraplegic patient. My sister endured 35 years of it. Even the patient with Guillain–Barré syndrome where both sensory and motor conduction loss is severe, can remain ‘happily conscious’ as you put it – with medical assistance. I accept and understand that while a brain with consciousness may be kept functioning with external support should its normal sources of support and input be interrupted, and that consciousness may be suspended in sleep or coma. However I have a question that seems relevant to me: If a brain with the capacity for consciousness has never received any input would it ever achieve consciousness?
I would like to correct what seems to be a misunderstanding. It was not I who started using the terms ‘soul-stuff’ and ‘matter-stuff’ and I find the use of these terms somewhat distracting. To be honest, I cannot see that it matters what we ultimately discover about how the universe is constructed (bosons and fermions) in relation to this subject. These particles or energy effects still have to interact with the particles and energy effects that make up our sensory apparatus and brain for us to be aware of the particles and energy effects within which our bodies and brains are immersed.
I accept your chiding of my ignorance of higher mathematics and physics without rancour. However, I think you should know there is an alternative perspective on philosophy of science and epistemology that to my knowledge has never been addressed by mainstream philosophy departments which seem to be entranced by what appears to be an extreme form of relativism or skepticism derived from the Heidiggerian and Focaultian viewpoint or ‘post modernism’. The analytic-synthetic dichotomy of Kant upon which Popper’s falsification concept was founded, was well addressed (and debunked) in a paper by Leonard Peikoff first published in 1967[2]. This perspective resolves the issue of the apparent split in our knowledge into analytic and synthetic statements, by use of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts. The book I have referenced above is the second edition that compiles Rand’s theory of concepts, Peikoff’s paper and an extensive dialog between Rand and a number of philosophers who raised most of the questions that seem to bedevil modern philosophy. In essence, this perspective regards knowledge as possible and that our concepts do have referents in reality i.e. skepticism and relativism are invalid / self-contradictory. This perspective in no way conflicts with modern scientific developments, and indeed a recent book[1] has specifically addressed (and resolved I believe) the ‘problem of induction’ using the history of the development of modern physics and chemistry from Galileo onwards. I would strongly recommend Harriman’s book to your attention.
References
[1] Harriman D. The logical leap: Induction in physics. New York: New American Library, 2010.
[2] Peikoff L. The analytic-synthetic dichotomy. In: Binswanger H, Peikoff L, editors. Introduction to objectivist epistemology. New York, N.Y: New American Library, 1990. pp. 88-121.
Lieber Marc, Vielen Dank!!. I appreciate your honesty and kindness to bother to explain me. I will read your reference books. I just did not have time to study contemporary philosophy( metaphisics etc. ). My knowlege is also quite limited. I have only studed chemistry, physics. philosophy and logics in Vienna University to earn my PhD. Ihre dankbare Martha
Mark: "However I have a question that seems relevant to me: If a brain with the capacity for consciousness has never received any input would it ever achieve consciousness?"
I would say, "In theory, yes". To get a better idea of why I say this, read "Where Am I? Redux" on my RG page.
Linsker showed in the 1980's that the visual cortex can self-organize into orientation columns even with no visual input to the system. In principle, thus, higher-level self-organisation seems possible or even probable even without sensory input. That a closed system can become conscious has been proven by there being consciousness on earth (no input from the outside seems necessary) or the universe. I am unaware of any argument that would forbid C in the absence of input.
Arnold. Thank you for your information. I have downloaded three articles from your page and will absorb them over Christmas / New Year.
My immediate response to you and Risto is that I need to emphasize the 'never' in my statement : "If a brain with the capacity for consciousness has never received any input would it ever achieve consciousness?" I read into both of your responses and also in Jo's response to an earlier post that a brain once having achieved consciousness, can remain or develop further despite being isolated. But my question relates to a brain's first awareness. If it never receives any input and never has had any, can it achieve consciousness - and my feeling is that it cannot. Of course, once the brain (with the capacity for consciousness) does 'wake up' presumably from receiving input, consciousness emerges immediately and rapidly develops and expands its capabilities. I completely accept that we are genetically provided with the anatomical mechanisms that permit consciousness to emerge i.e. there are known neuron pools that make it all possible. There is a wide divide between saying we have innate mechanisms (biology - which I thoroughly approve of) and saying that we have innate ideas (which I do not accept).
While this may seem like a couple of nit-picking points, I think it has huge significance in that it grounds the idea of consciousness in a biological mechanism, the exact anatomical basis of which you and Risto are way ahead of me - my knowledge of brain anatomy and neurophysiology is very limited - but rejects the idea that consciousness is something independent (thing or energy of some sort) of the body of which it is a part or attribute. I acknowledge Jo's disparagement of the distinction between different types of 'stuff', but I am using the words that enable me to most easily convey the questions and responses I have.
Hi everyone,
Here is what Vedanta philosophy says: The explanator and the explanation of the origin of consciousness both require consciousness in the first place. Unconscious things cannot be expected to explain anything. Thus consciousness must exist by itself before any attempt at explanation of its origin can be made and quite independently of whether there are such people bothering about it or not. But "consciousness of something" may require brains and all that. This "consciousness of something" can be explained in the manner as have been discussed in all the responses.
Regards.
Rajat: If I understand the meanings you apply to explanator and explanation correctly, the fact that consciousness is required for explanations does not lead logically to the idea that consciousness must come first in a metaphysical sense. Consciousness is required for an individual to explain anything (including consciousness) as a fact of physics and biology, but metaphysically that-which-exists is required for a consciousness to be aware of it. Any other interpretation leads to the idea that a consciousness creates the existence in which it is immersed - a circular argument - is formally called the primacy of consciousness premise. The opposite premise - the primacy of existence - resolves the circular argument and one can then reason to the view that consciousness is an attribute of certain entities in existence. The primacy of existence premise avoids and rules out the theistic perspective that a (divine) consciousness created existence. Those with a religious perspective will have great difficulty with this premise.
Dear Mark,
Wonderful post. Thank you very much.
In Vedanta, Primacy of existence and primacy of consciousness both are resolved in the amalgamation of the two into the primacy of the same entity "Existence-Consciousness". And when this is realized through meditation in Samadhi (attainment of oneness with the Reality), it is also Bliss. Thus Vedanta proposes that the Supreme reality is "existence-consciousness-bliss" absolute (sat-chit-ananda).
If you say that consciousness cannot be primary, existence can also not be primary, since it would require consciousness for knowing and justifying its primacy. It is an existence that is conscious, not unconscious, that is primary. Thus existence and consciousness are equally primary without any circularity. In fact they refer to one and the same fundamental reality, just different names so to say, different perspectives of the reality by our limited human intellect.
There is no problem with theistic or religious perspectives either. They are also valid human perspectives through the avenues of emotion etc. everything has its place and sphere of validity in the Absolute, which is inclusive of and at the same time transcends, all perspectives.
Regards.
Thank you all. It is a great help to study the consciousness and unconsciousness.I hope that I could write an essay someday. I did not have much time to read again all the stuff (Freud, Young, Leibniz, Descartes,Hegel,Kant etc. etc. ...).Have a nice vacation( X-mas& New year).For the moment, I have to practice very hard the piano part in order to accompany my 3 year old Monika. Prosit NeuJahr 2014! Ihre dankbare Martha 서 효 자
Hmmm. I know nothing of Vedanta philosophy but what you have written. Are you saying that existence and consciousness is or can be somehow blended together? Do you mean that existence is in itself conscious?
I disagree with your statement “..consciousness cannot be primary, existence can also not be primary, since it would require consciousness for knowing and justifying its primacy.”. I find the statement confused or at least, confusing. Whatever ‘comes first’ is primary and any other phenomena are by definition secondary. There is nothing contradictory about stating that either existence or consciousness is primary. However if the choice is that consciousness is primary, then that immediately implies that existence cannot be without consciousness i.e. is caused by it. This is the standard theistic premise. However, as I have pointed out previously there is no contradiction implied in positing existence as primary with consciousness being an attribute of certain entities within existence, and this does not imply a theistic metaphysics. Correct me if I have misunderstood your meaning, but what I read from your statement is that you believe you avoid a theistic premise by having both existence and consciousness as primaries. The only construct that I can imagine from this belief is that existence itself is conscious, and by this means consciousness has existence. Is this correct?
Mark,
(1) you can by all means know Vedanta from the various websites or can read some books (available free on the web) by eminent saints from india like Swami Vivekananda or Swami Sivananda.
(2) yes, that supreme existence is itself conscious(ness) also.
(3) Who decides what came first, if at all there was a succession between existence and consciousness? Therefor, they both came together, or rather, are together and shall be together worlds without end.
(4) What is wrong with a premise that is theistic? In the investigation of Truth, we must, first of all, rid ourselves of all kinds of bias and preconception. Who knows, the theistic position may be correct finally !
(5) We are talking about the ultimate supreme reality, that is independent of all conceptions, preconceptions etc. The notion that existence can be unconscious derives from our daily experience with stones etc. (which exist in an unconscious state) and from our materialistic and objective sciences. This is why you say that existence is primary and consciousness evolved later on. What can evolve later on must inevitably have been present previous to its coming into being in some from or the other. This is the crux of the matter. If existence was unconscious in the beginning, it could never have evolved into conscious beings later on, by any kind of evolutionary method. Evolution can only come from that which has been involved prior to evolution. Consciousness is not an evolved characteristic of some living systems only, it is fundamental to existence itself. It may be unmanifest in stones etc., but it is present in the stone nevertheless. This is a queer point. But it is true and we have to realize this through meditation on the stone, beyond its materialistic structure and function. There is a metaphysics of the stone, hiding behind it, the thing-in-itself of the stone, and that is existence-consciousness, which is also the substratum of all that is. This is Vedanta.
Regards,
Rajat
As long as we are not restricting ourselves to academic resources for this question, I have always found the most meat to chew on in Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous" (Gurdjieff's paradigms of man and the universe) and in Castaneda's middle books, especially "Tales of Power," "The Eagle's Gift," and "The Art of Dreaming." Both of these authors set up models for levels and degrees of consciousness, pointing out that any given (concept of) reality depends entirely on what state the person has assembled of themselves, so that there are degrees of dreaming (including lucid states), degrees ("assemblage point positions") of ordinary (often ordinarily called "objective") consciousness, and then realities available only those who have crystallized "Higher (or sorceric) Mind" through prolonged disciplines. As far as I can tell, these models are consistent with Vedanta and other mystical traditions.
Rajat: I seems that your belief system - Verdanta - is another variant of the theistic world view / metaphysics. My apologies in advance if my next remarks offend, but Verdanta seems no different in principle from the monotheism of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic axis. None of the positions are defensible in science whether you have the perspective offered by Jo to which I originally responded or the perspectives of Arnold or Risto. These three other participants, myself, Olli and Martha and are struggling to understand consciousness from a defensible i.e. scientific perspective. For example - how would you defend the statement that a rock is "unconscious" rather than "a-conscious"? The difference between these two alternatives is that "unconscious" means that the entity has been, or currently has the capacity for consciousness, whereas "a-conscious" would imply that the entity has never been and can never have the attribute of consciousness. There is an ancient and venerable principle in logic and reasoning that the onus of proof is on he who asserts the positive. If you say that a rock is conscious / has the capacity to be conscious, then the onus of proof is on you to provide evidence of this actuality or potentiality. When I say that the rock does not possess the attribute of consciousness, has never shown any of the characteristics of consciousness, I am not obligated to 'prove' that. This venerable principle is based on the simple and obvious fact that to require proof of the non-existence of anything is simply not possible. If something does not and has never existed, there can be no facts in existence to point to regarding its non existence. On the other hand if one makes a positive statement that something does or has existed, then one is obligated to provide evidence. This is the basic reason why reason, logic and science can never be reconciled with a faith based belief system. The fact that scientists are sometimes theists too, does not lend credence to the theistic position, but illustrates that human beings are very good at what is called 'compartmentalizing'. In one compartment is the reasoning scientific mind, and in the other is the faith based non-rational faith based belief system. An agile mind can easily keep them separate.
Very good Mark.
Let me rectify your first remark. Vedanta is not a belief system. It is , by definition, the end of all knowledge, and therefore while we are in the middle of rational scientific knowledge-gathering, still far far away from the completion, we can hold any kind of view and we are fully justified in that. When all our knowledge comes to a close, when we have no more questions left to be answered in the rational process, then we will be better placed to judge Vedanta, not before that.
Before Einstein came and showed that the stone possessed enormous amounts of energy, how many of the rationalists believed in the existence.of such energy, which is not manifest? Similarly, our rational science has to wait for a pretty long time before recognizing the existence of an unmanifest higher order of reality in the stone, which is the original source for the energy, which condensed to form the stone.
But, we do not have to wait that long. It requires a little going above and beyond logic?! Is it possible to go beyond logic? How do you know that you are conscious? Is it the result of some reasoning or is it self-evident to you? Surely, you would not say "cogito, ergo sum" as Descartes did. This is an example of something beyond reason. But there need be no quarrel. Be happy with your rational position. There is no problem with that and we should let others have theirs also.
Whether there is consciousness inside the stone or not, can be decided only by experience after attaining deep communion with the stone through meditation. So even if I am able to get to the root consciousness, it is not going to benefit your rational appreciation. So putting the onus of proof on me does not help your cause, in this particular case. You take it upon yourself, and prove, by at least six hours of meditation on the stone, when the mind becomes stone itself, the thing-in-itself will shine forth in your own consciousness, and you will experience the consciousness inherent in the stone. But this vedantic experiment is too difficult for us, since we cannot fix our minds on any object for even more than 5-10 seconds. It is a difficult thing to attain but not impossible. At least twelve years of continuous unceasing practice is required for such attainments.
Thank you very much.
Regards
Rajat.
Arnold Trehub: Thanks so much for letting read those three articles Arnold. It has taken me some time to process the information, given that my background as a scientist is clinical diagnostics particularly as it relates to the musculoskeletal system and pain. My knowledge of neuroscience and psychology is rudimentary at best, though more advanced than the average layman I think. My intellectual hobby rather than profession is philosophy with special reference to metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. I have only a marginal interest in politics or aesthetics – the other two traditional branches of philosophy. What I am trying to say is that I have enough of a neuroscience and psychology background to read your material but it takes some processing!
What I came to realize as I read your articles, was that despite the frequent use of terms such as “the phenomenal world”, “subjective perspective” and “objective perspective” which have somewhat different connotations in philosophical discourse, you arrive at definitions of consciousness and descriptions of the functions of consciousness that are wholly consistent with an objectivist philosophical structure which I have put forward in previous posts to Researchgate.
Consider your definition of consciousness: “Consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective”, which you nicely unwrap by actually defining your terms (uncommon!): “Brain representations are transparent because they are about oneʼs world and Trehub 5 are not experienced as the activity of oneʼs brain. The brain representation is
privileged because no one other than the owner of the egocentric space can experience its content from the same perspective. Notice that this working definition is framed in terms of brain processes assumed to constitute the subjective/phenomenal property of consciousness. Since, in this theoretical model, retinoid space is the space of all of our conscious experience, vision should be understood as only one of the sensory modalities that project content into our egocentrically organized phenomenal world. All of our exteroceptive and interoceptive sensory modalities can contribute to our phenomenal experience, as shown in Figure 1.”
Contrast this to Ayn Rand’s definition derived from page 29 of her monograph “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”(1). “Consciousness is the faculty of awareness – the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
Awareness is not a passive state, but an active process. On the lower levels of awareness, a complex neurological process is required to enable man to experience a sensation and to integrate sensations into percepts; that process is automatic and non-volitional: man is aware of its results but not the process itself. On the higher, conceptual level, the process is psychological, conscious and volitional. In either case, awareness is achieved and maintained by continuous action.
Directly or indirectly, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from one’s awareness of the external world. Some object, i.e., some content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outwards – a process of apprehending some existent(s). Introspection is a process of cognition directed inwards – a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.”
The point and purpose of her of her definition is to assist in the development of her theory of concepts (as distinct from percepts and sensations), which is dramatically different from the modernist and post-modernist positions found to predominate in most university philosophy departments. Ayn Rand was not a scientist, but her philosophical system of metaphysics and epistemology forms the best foundation for the scientific method at this time, in my view. It is quite radically different from the sceptical, relativist positions of most philosophers where knowledge is considered either impossible (the extreme sceptical position taken by post modernists), or inherently flawed (the Kant through Popper ‘modernists’), and where (a divine) consciousness is either the creator of the universe (theists of most kinds) or collective consciousness creates individual reality (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lenin), or individual consciousness literally creates individual reality (post modernists). Rand’s perspective is simple enough – there is only one reality – the one we are in. Consciousness is an attribute of certain living entities (as far as we know) and its function is to perceive reality. Existence i.e. external reality, has primacy over consciousness since without something to perceive there could be no consciousness and no means of perceiving reality. It is a faculty / attribute of individual organisms, not the disembodied floating abstraction of the theists or the collective will of Kant and the Marxist axis. The Randian / objectivist perspective posits that consciousness involves the recognition of entities – three dimension objects.
In Part 8 of your discussion in the pre-publication article “Where am I? Redux.” You provide a succinct statement about the function of consciousness: “When we are asked to define any named concept, we normally select an identifiable object or event in our phenomenal experience as the referent of the word that names the concept. In this respect, the concept of consciousness is uniquely different because any and all of our phenomenal experience qualifies as a proper referent. A clear implication of this state of affairs is that from the first person perspective consciousness is comprised of all of our phenomenal world, and from the third-person perspective consciousness is whatever creates our phenomenal world. I think it would be fair to say that the most important function of consciousness is to present us with a coherent phenomenal world. If we are to explain the origin of consciousness we have to explicate a brain mechanism that can create a phenomenal world.” This statement is wholly consistent with the objectivist position that existence has primacy and that the purpose of consciousness is to be aware of it.
Where I see the connection between this objectivist perspective and your own is that what you (and the others you cite) have done, is provide the biological / neurophysiological substrate for the mechanisms the organism uses to achieve and maintain consciousness i.e. awareness of reality – beyond mere sensory input. You specifically refer to an “egocentric space” / 3D-retinoid (based on the understanding of the eye and vision but not confined to it) anchoring the I-token – which can only be a property of individual entities, not collectives or non-defined or undefinable entities like “god”. You also refer to the “heuristic self-locus” which you describe as in neurophysiological terms as the means by which the “spotlight of attention” of psychologists is achieved. Rand’s word for the “spotlight of attention” is the concept of focus – the primary and irreducible voluntary act of directing the attention of consciousness to any specific task – exterospective or introspective. The similarities here are not accidental. There are many other aspects of similarity between Rand’s philosophical perspective and your scientific presentation and I see no obvious disagreements or contradictions. Perhaps I will find differences in time as I chew this over more. These thoughts are simply my initial responses to my first reading of your material.
The tragedy of modern academia is that science and philosophy are so widely divided from each other, that many scientists reject philosophy entirely. A classic example of this is the first sentence in second paragraph the book “The Grand Design” by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2010)(2) which states: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.” Tragically Hawking is mostly correct, but is clearly unfamiliar with some more recent developments in philosophy such as Rand’s basic system of objectivism and Harriman’s interpretation of the scientific revolution from Galileo through to Einstein and beyond in physics, and also in chemistry(3).
Although it is clear that there are many different views on what consciousness consists of and what its functions are, it seems apparent to me that there is a great deal of coherence between Arnold Trehub’s presentation of the scientific understanding of consciousness and an objectivist metaphysical and epistemological perspective.
References
1. Rand A. Introduction to objectivist epistemology (expanded second edition). New York: NAL Books, The Penguin Group; 1990.
2. Hawking S, Mlodinow L. The Grand Design. London: Batam Press; 2010.
3. Harriman D. The logical leap: Induction in physics. New York: New American Library; 2010.
I belive that consciousness is a pysical entity , namely quantum soliton of EM Field or maybe some other field which we physicist do not know at the moment
sitting in the skull being fed by metabolic stream. I have a quantum theory of reincarnation. If someone is interested I can presented here
jerzy
Dear Jerzy,
Consciousness seems to arise from the activities of the brain. TRUE. But that need not imply that it actually does result from the brain processes. However your idea that it is some kind of a field, which we don't yet know is OK. But the field need not arise from the brain processes.
Kindly send your article (English version) to me.
Regards,
Rajat.
Daer Rajat
how come
if not brain processe *currents, changing , genereating EM firlds(
can you propose anything logical !!!!
Dear Jerzy,
One would arise from the other if their is a precedence of one over the other in time. That is they would be related like cause and its effect. Let me again clarify one point:
Consciousness as such is different from consciousness of something resulting in and from some external (objects) or internal (thoughts) perception. Consciousness as such is the knower in us, not the known or the knowing process.
You may like to see my article "Quantum mechanics of consciousness" on RG in this regard.
It is like a field and its source. For example, the electron at rest and its coulomb field or the gravitational field of a mass like the earth. can we say that the creates the gravitational field, in the sense that the earth was there first and then one fine morning it started creating a gravitational field around itself? The gravitational field and the earth are coeval and they co-exist. If at all, we want to assign primacy to one of them it would be the field, rather than the source. In the field-source duality, from quantum theory we come to know that the Fields are primary not the sources.
Thus consciousness as a field (as you propose) associated with the brain processes will be primary, not the brain processes themselves.
What do you actually mean when you say that consciousness is a physical entity?
What is a physical entity? Something that is physically perceivable? Who has perceived consciousness physically? We may see its physical effects, but no one can claim to have "seen" consciousness. It is not to be known through any of the sense organs, though it works through them. No instrument can measure consciousness. You may like to see Schrodinger's "What is Life?" in this regard.
Regards,
Rajat
I do not agree !!!
I think i cam measure consciousness namely its physical incarnation !
To do that you myst just take budist monk, measure his EEG coherence and when he/she reaches the deepest meditation stage *invincibility( you just keep monitoring online gamma waves coherence and apply gentle stimulus .
It shoud be stedy magnetic field penetrating his scull *coil put on the top of the head will do(. If you slowly increse this field from zero to e.g. 3 x The Earth natural field and observe jump *dip( or any disconuity in the coherence being at this time close to one /hard to belive/ then you can say that consciousness is a quantum soliton of EM field sitting in the skull and fed by metabolism of human body !!!!.
Prof Brian Josephson to whom I had suggested that brain hemispheres with commisural fibers can act as SQUID at this moment had said / / jerzy it can not be that simple !!!/
I am writing this as the experiment is simple and maybe someone will do that ASAP.
Me myself had found intersubject EEG coherence for a distance of 5 meters during transandental meditation /TM/ session !!!.
If 5 meters why not 5 kilometers !!!
Want some more experimental data on that it !!!
Jerzy
Jerzy, by 'intersubject EEG coherence' do you mean that one subject's neural electro-magnetic fields influence another subject's? If so, I too would be interested in seeing some research on that. I think it is dangerously presumptuous to begin thinking about consciousness as an individual, monological phenomena.
But I am not sure that the field itself is consciousness or can explain the origins of consciousness. Rather, it likely points to a phenomenon of consciousness.
best regards, Jonas
Rajat, you mention an article on RG: "Quantum mechanics of consciousness". I can find only "Psychophysical Interpretation of Quantum theory". If this is not the article to which you referred could you let me know. Cheers, Jonas
@Jonas Hill. Yes, it's there, but not on the first page. You have to click on "10 Publications"at the top and it will take you to the full list; it's near the bottom.
Dear All,
See the recent paper by Max Tegmark on the material origins of consciousness on arXiv.org/1401.1219. It could not have come at a better time for us all.
Regards,
Rajat
just synchronicity effect
i.e. global (Earthly) field of conscousness
Schuman Resonances
Ted Bullock motto was
"Nature loves to oscialte"Quantum resonance thats the source of consciousnes
I will present you soon my
"QRT" Quantum Rencarnation Theory
it will be physics and nothing but physics
See my abstract on RG
On Quantum Coherent Soul
Jerzy
Dear Rajat,
Thank you bringing attention to this paper by Tegmark, which seems to have just been posted this week. I am sorry to say that it seems to me to be a long list of category mistakes. The deep problems he talks of simply do not exist in the form he suggests. The assumptions he makes about how the brain computes are completely unfounded. He makes a lot of use of Tononi's rather fragile idea of integrated information but then seems to invent his own different meaning for integration that as far as I can see is quite irrelevant to biological functions. He seems totally out of touch with the subject in hand.
To be honest I am baffled that a professor at a high level institution could made such a muddle of things.
Best wishes
Jo Edwards
Dear Jo,
It is precisely for this reason that i brought that paper to the attention of people like you so that things can be set straight. Of course, I am yet to go through it, but the very proposal of a physical, that too material, basis for consciousness seems peculiarly childish. Physicists are prone to Category mistakes, when they step out of their forte, because of lack of exposure combined with arrogance of being know-alls.
Anyway, I hope you'll do some thing about it.
Regards,
Rajat
Rajat: thx for sharing such outstanding material (Tegmark's paper) to use in class when discussing methodological questions. Allow me to add that we are all subjected to the risk of making Category mistakes, not just physicists; still, Physics and good old Natural Phil are possibly the richest of fields to look for good, nearly intuitive examples of that, to exercise in class.
I was away over Yuletide and have been going through the posts. I noted Mark’s reference to Rand, who I know only as an apologist for the misery of capitalism, so I had a look at her metaphysics. I fear that the argument with Rajat may be at cross purpose. I find Rajat’s position fine, except that I doubt that meditation would ever put one in touch with the consciousness of a rock. (Very careful inference based on detailed scientific analysis might one day but not just deep breathing and emptying the mind.) But again, it is too easy to argue broad brush about positions and generate confusions. My specific point would remain that ‘consciousness’ in the sense of just some sort of phenomenal or experiential aspect needs to be kept firmly apart from ‘consciousness’ as inference about distal events – consciousness of… Rand must be right to say that existence is prior to consciousness of… but I see no problem with Rajat’s proposal that existence and consciousness as experience are co-primary and I think this is a more parsimonious position than the alternative.
From what I can glean from the usual web sources Rand’s philosophy does not say anything very new and is put together in a language that looks very open to the sort of holidays Wittgenstein talked of. I may be wrong but I cannot tie it in to empirical neuropsychological data on perception. It is either wrong here or too vague to be useful I think. Moreover, it is in a sense the classic naïve reaction to sceptical arguments – which almost anyone could cook up. Rand says some fairly sensible things about how concepts arise – and I agree more sensible than most contemporary philosophers – but there does not seem to be anything new or exciting here. Sceptical arguments are often wrong but often not for the reasons either the man in the street or academic philosophers think they are, to my mind. I am not an academic philosopher and find little of interest in recent philosophy. I certainly have no time for post modernism, Heidegger, or Kant. But the paradoxes of our knowledge of the world, as indicated by people from Heraclitus to Descartes and Leibniz are not solved by claiming there is an ‘objective external world’. I do not think knowledge is possible in the sense we tend to think of knowledge but not for the reasons given by Kant or others since. There is nothing ‘unknowable to know’. It is just that knowing is a hybrid relation that cannot quite do the work we think it should.
So I have not yet found Rand’s proposals enlightening. But I am left with two thoughts that may be relevant to the discussion. The first is relativity. The contribution that Ladyman (following Worrall) has made that I find interesting is in the ‘Everything Must Go’ book. I am familiar with his other work. He points out that everything dealt with by physics has to be a dynamic causal relation because those are the only ‘things’ that can cause us to know about them. So everything is relational. I think this is probably nothing much to do with the ‘relativism’ of post modernism though. There can still be real entities but they must be relational entities (Ladyman himself may go further I admit). Knowledge has to be built of relations. In fact ‘grounding’ of knowledge, which might be thought of as ‘non-relative’ can only come from further relations – truth is the concordance of relations so the more different relational paths between us and what we want to know the firmer the knowledge. The special nature of human knowledge may indeed be that we are able to multiply that relationality in much more complex ways than other animals.
If we then ask what are these causal relations that are the only aspects of the world we can know about they seem to turn out to be rule based sequences the existence of which can only ever be apparent through experience. That does not have to be a direct ‘seeing of an object’ experience. It can be an experience of being satisfied that the inference of the existence of a Higgs boson is valid, but it is still an experience. So inasmuch as can talk of anything existing we have to define existence in terms of sequences that lead to experiences. So existence without experience is something we have never encountered and have no reason to think is ever encountered. Mass and charge are just sorts of dispositions to relations that engender certain types of experience. We have no reason to think they are anything else, other than to the extent that we know that these relations can form chains that obey constant rules.
What to my mind is of key interest is the nature of the relational entities that host the experiences we discuss here. They ought to be something well known to physical science. Their experiences ought to be direct relations, because it does not seem to make sense for experience to get carried over in chains from previous relations.
BW
Jo E
Dear Jo,
It is good that you followed the earlier conversation between Mark and myself, and I was surprised to find that almost all of my posts were systematically down-voted and the ones by Mark up-voted. I do not who were the people involved and it is very unhealthy as a practice on a forum like RG, and on a philosophical string like this one. Anyway, I wish a very Happy new year to all the down-voters.
Now, back to the question of realizing the inherent and hidden consciousness in the stone through meditation, it being purely a matter of experience there is very little to argue about. The proof of the pudding lies in the eating thereof. In meditation only are the deepest truths realized. It could be an Einstein meditating on the nature of time or a Kant meditating on the thing-in-itself, or an Edison meditating on a new invention, or any of the Indian sages meditating on the ultimate Reality, which they declared was of the nature of EXISTENCE-CONSCIOUNESS-BLISS. There are definite gradational techniques of meditation available in e.g. YOGASUTRAS of Patanjali or in the Upanishads, for such realization by anyone who strives with sincerity.
Tank you very much.
Regards,
Rajat
That sort of meditation seems to be broad enough to handle my concern, Rajat!
Jo: "What to my mind is of key interest is the nature of the relational entities that host the experiences we discuss here."
If you think of the "hosting" *relational entities* as biophysical entities, what do you think are the major competing biophysical models of the experiences under discussion?
Rajat: I have little knowledge of meditation, and less of Vedanta - apologies from the outset. For you, there might be no argument about the efficacy of meditation, but there is surely much to be explained before the uninitiated can think possible the consciousness of stone and imagine the concept 'consciousness' under these conditions of possibility. I am curious and sympathetic to your argument, but am left with some questions.
Referring to your paper: why should we see consciousness as a quantum particle -- light? I understand that you want to establish an analogous relationship between the spin of the particle and various states of consciousness. But I don't understand why consciousness should find its analogue in the purely material, least of all in the single particle. Can a lone consciousness exist? Can consciousness exist in an absolute vacuum? I gather it can't, and that the exercise of meditating on the consciousness of stone likely reveals that even stone contributes to universal consciousness, that the being-stone-of-stone is not limited to its substantive and mute stone-ness even while necessarily predicated on that essential stone-ness. This gives us an image of consciousness which I find agreeable, one in which consciousness does not inhere in the individual. To restate this: while we think of the individual as possessing consciousness, consciousness is not possible in the truly monadic individual who exists (impossibly, of course) without the social; presumably such a consciousness would be like the empty consciousness of a stone; nonetheless, even a stone-like consciousness can contribute to consciousness in general; it is, thus, only on a generalised level that consciousness is a meaningful category. Thus, the consciousness of the reflective individual is necessarily illusory, an illusion of the impossible, of being conscious individually.
On what level can we understand consciousness, then, if it transcends the individual and material and yet is irreducible from both? Somewhere between its this-ness and its that-ness, its quiddity and its quoddity. Between its potentiality and its im-potentiality (Agamben). For me, this is the most compelling aspect of your particle analogy -- that the nature of consciousness is uncertain until resolved into a particular state. That certainly resembles consciousness as I understand it. But, then, what is the nature of this 'certainty' achieved if it does not pertain to the essential (pre-collapse) nature of the particle? Or, if we take the particle in its resolved state to be the essential state, don't we imply a destiny and an observer present to observe the collapse -- an Other capable of intervening in my consciousness, perhaps even a supreme consciousness?
Isn't it better to think of consciousness as 1) a process brought into play by the co-potentiality of states (in which the im-potentiality of stone consciousness plays a vital role) 2) and as an ever-unresolved superposition whose 3) apparent resolution is an epiphenomena which no longer speaks meaningfully of its constitutive potentialities?
Thank you Ed for your thoughtful contribution. Before responding to some of your points, I would like to observe that your remark about Rand being “an apologist for the misery of capitalism” is evidence that you have been sold a ‘package deal’ that ignores content. I am not aware that Rand apologised for anything. It would be a mistake to take her stance on capitalism as evidence of failure or weakness of other parts of her philosophy. She, as we all are, are creatures of context. She escaped the heaven of early Soviet socialism to the hell of 1920’s capitalist America. Her experience of Soviet society may be gleaned from her first published novel “We the Living”(1). She never lived to see the Berlin Wall come down, or to see China begin the its slow grind out of communism, but I think she would see these historical events as positive and confirming her view that while many evils have been carried out by individuals and groups in the capitalist West, the evils of the alternative (which she personally experienced) were far worse, systemic, and perpetrated as expressions of official policy. She vehemently opposed not just the misery of socialist and communist dictatorships but its source – collectivism and collective bondage – and advocated the alternative - individualism and individual rights and freedom. Enough of politics which is not the subject of this discussion, but taking anything out of context is a mistake and the essence of my response to your latest comments.
I believe you have put your finger on the issue which I hope I can expand on. Your remark “..Rand must be right to say that existence is prior to consciousness of… but I see no problem with Rajat’s proposal that existence and consciousness as experience are co-primary and I think this is a more parsimonious position than the alternative.”, identifies the issue I believe. The issue of the primacy of existence is a metaphysical one, whereas the notion that existence and consciousness seeming to emerge together is an epistemological one. The notion of existence and consciousness being “co-primary” seems to be self-contradictory at the metaphysical level – both cannot “come first”. However, to even discuss this issue requires that a mind must have reached a complex and sophisticated level of conceptual level development – a child simply could not do it. It is in this developed state that we consider the two issues separately, whereas to a child consciousness and existence will be immediately apparent together. The actual development of this separation at the conceptual level is what we are struggling with in this discussion and many aspects of this process are discussed in Rand’s original work on epistemology(2) and a wider integration with metaphysics in Peikoff’s book on Rand’s philosophy(3)
With regards to Wittgenstein, I guess it depends on whether you refer to the early or late Wittgenstein. My personal knowledge of Wittgenstein is limited, but as I understand it, Rand agrees with both positions at one level: Early Wittgenstein held that there was a direct connect between language and reality, whereas the late Wittgenstein appeared to contradict that with the view that language was contextual. It seems that Wittgenstein could not resolve that apparent contradiction, but Rand cogently argues that not only does language have referents in reality, but this consists of acknowledging and respecting context. In essence she claims that all knowledge is contextual and that language is a reflection of the necessary relationship of concepts to reality and existence.
Rand never claimed to be original in her metaphysics and acknowledged Aristotle as the first philosopher to reject the mystical view of the universe and posit the primacy of existence position. She does claim to be quite original and new in her epistemology though and I agree – her theory of concepts is quite revolutionary and is the origin of the first successful attempt to solve the problem of induction (Harriman 2010 (4)) that has plagued the philosophy of science since Hume. I am still working on Ladyman at your suggestion and may come back to that in due course, and I have no problem with the “Everything must go” stance – at least with regard to most of modern and postmodern philosophical underpinnings of current scientific knowledge. Your comment “..that everything dealt with by physics has to be a dynamic causal relation because those are the only ‘things’ that can cause us to know about them” is wholly consistent with Rand’s view of the contextual nature of all knowledge. In this sense the contextual nature of knowledge and that “everything is relational” seems to be saying the same thing. Your further remarks on this are also eminently sensible to me.
References
1. Rand A. We the living. New York: Macmillan (1936), Random House (1959); 1936. 978-0-451-18784-0
2. Rand A. Introduction to objectivist epistemology (expanded second edition). New York: NAL Books, The Penguin Group; 1990.
3. Peikoff L. Objectivism: the philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Dutton; 1991.
4. Harriman D. The logical leap: induction in physics. New York: New American Library; 2010.
Dear Jonas,
You have raised many interesting issues regarding my work "Quantum mechanics of consciousness". Let me clarify that the analogy with photons/light is qualitative and a specular or particulate consciousness (like our feeling of a little individual conscious "soul" in us) really exists as an excitation of the field of the universal consciousness, which as you point out exists even in the stone. The model proposed there resolves many deep issues perfectly well.
The pure consciousness that is advocated in Vedanta as the primary entity is absolute and is free from all relativity or relationality. It is not consciousness of anything, consciousness emanating or emerging from anything--- but is pure consciousness as such, which transcends all but includes all as the source, support and substratum of all that is. It is a repository of contradictory elements and qualities which only give complementary descriptions of the ONE ABSOLUTE. Now in such a scenario, we have to give rationality a bye-bye, and be ready for attaining the necessary qualifications for the purpose of being able to continuously meditate on it, and realize it in our innermost selves as the very basis of our existence, nay as coexistent with our existence. This is Vedanta in practice, which always goes hand-in-hand with the Vedanta theory. To transcend the limited human reason, the logical intellect in meditation is the one surest way to settling all disputes regarding the absolute, which must be independent of human reasoning, to say the least.
Often, we shudder to think that we have to give up reasoning for realizing the absolute. But, it is like that and cannot be helped. One of the arguments that Vedanta provides for transcending reason is the following:
The existence of oneself is self-evident and needs no external proof or reasoning. You never need to be told or proved by perfectly logical mathematical reasoning that you exist. Your existence is self-evident to you and so is mine. No one can truly say "I don't exist !" Thus one's self-existence as a fundamental attribute transcends reasoning. Therefore we should not be afraid of going beyond reasoning when the question is one concerning the absolute truth.
Finally, (Answers to your questions in the end.:
1) Pure Consciousness is not a process, but mind is. Behind the mind is the consciousness as it is behind and beyond every thing that we experience or can ever hope to experience.
2) Seen from the manifold expressions of the one supreme existence-consciousness, it looks like being an unresolved superposition, but then because of its absoluteness, it is also beyond all such conceptions like superpositions.
3) There is no pre-phenomenon (i.e. pre-existent potentiality) to this pure consciousness, and hence it is never an epiphenomenon of anything. But, seen from the manifested multiplicity of expressions of the same absolute, it can certainly be said that all potentialities inhere in it. This is true from our view point who are part of this manifest expression as the universe. But, when one attains the absolute, all these various manifested expressions are felt like non-existent and unreal dreams or mirages.
Please read the books, "The attainment of the Infinite", and "The Realisation of the Absolute" by a very Great philosopher saint Swami Krishnananda available from www.swamikrishnananda.org probably freely downloadable as ebooks.
Thank you very much.
Regards
Rajat
Dear Mark,
To my mind, some of the problems you raise have the flavour of the false problems that grew up in academic philosophy after 1750. I do not think there can be any ontology that is not dependent on knowing. Kant said there was an unknowable thing in itself but Schopenhauer pointed out this was self-contradictory. Knowledge can only be the inference, with variable degrees of certainty, of patterns of dynamic disposition. If Kant inferred the existence of an unknowable thing in itself, then he knew it – with whatever degree of certainty he inferred it. On closer inspection the inference looks to be baseless. The philosophers’ desire to believe that there is more ('ontology') to what is than can be known is to my mind just a reflection of a refusal to face up to the paradoxes one meets if one considers perception carefully enough. Having lived in a philosophers’ department for a year I am familiar with the barricades put up to protect them from neuropsychology.
As Leibniz pointed out, the only ontology we are entitled to entertain is an ontology of dynamic relations. Experience seems pretty much like a dynamic relation so it seems straightforward that experience and existence are the same thing – as Leibniz held (he called it perception). There is no issue of one before the other. That is not to be confused with **knowing** and existence being the same thing – Leibniz reserved knowing pretty much for humans. So it is not that the knowing comes before the ontology, just that the ontology has to be in terms of the sorts of relations that knowing builds on, I think.
And I do not recognize a problem of induction. That seems to me a pseudo-problem raised by philosophers who found Hume unsettling. But there is nothing unsettling in Hume to my mind. He just denies certainty, which is the right thing to do. The fact that Nelson Goodman’s grue is terribly popular with philosophers seems to me to indicate that they have again failed to understand that all we can hope to do is infer dispositions from evidence. Rand may have twigged to the fact that this is a non-problem but it is easy enough to twig to if one is not brainwashed by academic philosophy. It is not a problem that has ever plagued a scientist as far as I know, only philosophers with a false understanding of what knowledge can be!
So I am very happy to believe that Rand may have made some headway in how to unpick the problems of post 1750 philosophy but in my view one might as well chuck virtually all of it in the bin (bar Whitehead and a few others) and just read the seventeenth century stuff that is actually founded on some clear scientific thinking.
Best wishes
Jo (not Ed!)
Dear Arnold,
I would argue that for any biophysical entity that hosts an experience that experience must be its direct relation to the world. It cannot be an indirect relation via some chain of events. So we are looking for a dynamic entity with a single indivisible direct relation to the world, or at least some local domain of the world where the relation is non-trivial. As I understand it that means that the entity must be a single mode of excitation of some field. I am interested to see quite a bit of overlap here with Rajat's ideas, although we probably differ on details.
Candidates in brains would be modes of excitation in neural matter and as you know I favour phononic modes, and Steven Sevush, although more agnostic, tends to agree, I believe. Large domain electron modes do not seem to fit too well and photonic modes are not tied to ordered structures in the right way. I don't know of other models that would fit my requirements. My requirements may be wrong but I find them inescapable.
Best wishes
Jo
Jo: "The philosophers’ desire to believe that there is more ('ontology') to what is than can be known is to my mind just a reflection of a refusal to face up to the paradoxes one meets if one considers perception carefully enough."
I have considered perception very carefully for a very long time and I have not been hit by what you seem to think are insurmountable paradoxes. Can you give a succinct account of these killer paradoxes?
Do you deny that the physical universe existed before the evolution of biological creatures that were capable of knowing? If not, do you claim that the the physical universe and knowing creatures somehow emerged together?
Jo: "As Leibniz pointed out, the only ontology we are entitled to entertain is an ontology of dynamic relations."
With apologies to Leibniz, I think I am entitled to entertain any kind of ontology that I want to entertain. And what are the entities that are in "dynamic relation" with each other? If the constituents of dynamic relations are no more than a subset of dynamic relations then I find the concept vacuous.
Jo: "My requirements may be wrong but I find them inescapable."
Inescapable only if you believe that pure reason/intuition trumps empirical evidence.
I believe it goes the other way: evidence > intuition.
Despite these reservations, Jo, I find your comments very interesting and intellectually provocative.
Dear Arnold,
A storm in a teacup. I said nothing about the paradoxes of perception being unsurmountable. No doubt you will have surmounted them in your first semester in college. My grouse is that contemporary philosophers don't want even to play ball at that level. I am thinking of ER Clay's specious present in which we can hear a tune, despite the fact that once the fifth note has come the fourth should have disappeared, not to mention the others. Or the fact that we seem to see movement at a place at a time, when motion cannot be at one place at one time. As you yourself point out, the brain builds these representations within, using inferences from collation of inputs. Your own elegant perception experiments seem the best indicators that Rand's idea of perception being 'objective' and free of error at least needs very careful reading.
My grouse is with philosophers like one I met recently who claimed that 'redness' could now be defined as that property of things in the world that engenders a sense of red in us. You will be familiar with the territory. What about the 'red' light emitted by a tungsten filament that looks white, unless of course you put a prism in the way?
All simple stuff but all demonstrating that our only meaningful ontology can be of aspects of the world that can cause us to know about them. That has nothing to do with whether or not some of these aspects involved events prior to our existence. Knowledge has to be inferential. We can infer back to the big bang so we can know of the big bang, with some degree of confidence. The same applies to the pepperpot in front of me - my knowledge is subject to a degree of confidence in an inference. A photon hitting the retina indicates nothing unless the brain has been checking for photons before, or has receptors for other energy photons, or has ganglion cells to do edges and so on. Seeing a pepperpot is inferring from a few more of this sort of photon here, a few less there.
Idealism does not require that there was nothing there before man - as long as it is a panexperiential idealism like that of Leibniz, I guess. (And for Leibniz the 'perceptions' experienced by things like rocks need not even rise above what we might call a stupor or fog. They are too trivial even to ask questions about since it is only their third party operational aspects that would reasonably concern us.) As I tried to indicate, existence in no way requires knowledge or inference but it may be inseparable from the building block of inference, which is a causal, or dynamic, relation and I see no real problem in calling this 'experience'. To me Leibniz's metaphysic is not about making the world spooky it is about making spookiness just the usual old world.
You are entitled to entertain whatever ontology you like but you are not entitled to have it taken seriously by any one unless you can justify it, surely? The problem I am aiming at is perhaps most clearly indicated by David Chalmers suggestion that there might be a world in which there is no mass, only schmass. Mass and schmass endow their bearers with exactly the same disposition to resist acceleration under force and to attract other dollops of the same, but, as 'intrinsic' properties they may be different. To me this is a childish misinterpretation of Newton's idea of mass. Mass is just a name for a disposition to resist force and to attract (they turn out to be the same thing now) that Newton thought up. We have no justification for having theories about an 'intrinsic basis' for such dispositions. Humans are either genetically or culturally programmed to believe there are such 'intrinsic' properties but nobody has ever come across one and nobody has a justification for positing one! Kant fell into this trap and said they must be there, but why? Why should the world not be made of dispositions to entrain certain sorts of experience - which is what physics says it is. Schrodinger's equation is quite explicitly a formula for a disposition to entrain a certain sort of observation/experience under certain conditions.
So there is nothing peculiar about 'dynamic entities'. They are what Newton set up for us. All their properties are relational so they have dynamic relations. What could the constituents of dynamic relations be other than dynamic entities (things with dynamic properties like mass and charge) having relations?I agree with you that if you take the argument to the point James Ladyman may take it - to deny any ontology of relata for the relations then you get nowhere, but I am not following that track. For me the relata are absolutely real but their reality is only in terms of their relational properties. You need real relata to have experiences. With no specific relata, just patterns of relation, experiences are inexplicable - as both Barry Smith and I have challenged James with. Leibniz's monads are just what we need, relata that experience their relations.
What I think may confuse, although maybe more others than you, is that knowledge and experience have to be seen quite differently and if the knower is the experiencer is the whole person that difference is hard to understand. Like you I think experience relates to some very special component of the brain that is wired up to a huge input collation system that gets things ready for the representation point. Knowing involves all that collation. Experience is much more local, I believe. And I think you might agree that there is another paradox here in that the knowing system cannot generate knowledge unless it feeds the representing system but the representing system does not itself have any inferential apparatus so has to take things on trust so cannot 'know' in the sense of being able to check the reliability of the collation. I see no reason for that to be seen as problematic in a detailed analysis like yours but the philosophers don't appreciate the complexity of the process and think that there must be some sort of transparent non-inferntial knowledge - which God might have. To me that is pure confusion.
Best wishes as ever
Jo
Jo: "I agree with you that if you take the argument to the point James Ladyman may take it - to deny any ontology of relata for the relations then you get nowhere, but I am not following that track. For me the relata are absolutely real but their reality is only in terms of their relational properties. *You need real relata to have experiences. With no specific relata, just patterns of relation, experiences are inexplicable ..."* [emphasis mine]
OK then. We agree on this. But it seems to me that to say "X (relata) exist (are real) but that X do not exist (are not real) without their relational properties", is a confusing formulation. For me , it is just "All relata (Xs) have relational properties and are necessary for the existence of experience." This also implies that real Xs (a real world) is a precondition for conscious experience.
Dear Rajat,
thank you for your very patient explanation in reply to my questions. Vedanta appears a very nuanced system of thought. You are right to question my use of the word 'process', but even if I could have located the edit button, I would have been left with more accurate but less-defined terms like 'field', 'register' and the like, specific to my branch of research. You were not correct, however, that I maintained that "a specular or particulate consciousness (like our feeling of a little individual conscious "soul" in us) really exists as an excitation of the field of the universal consciousness, which... exists even in the stone." My point is precisely that a universalised consciousness does not imply or presuppose particular consciousnesses. (I suspect my thinking has much in common with Jonathon Edwards, above, when he says: "our only meaningful ontology can be of aspects of the world that can cause us to know about them.")
You say: there is no pre-existent to consciousness but "when one attains the absolute, all these various manifested expressions are felt like non-existent and unreal dreams or mirages." Isn't that what I am saying? Further, you reply: "it looks like being an unresolved superposition, but then because of its absoluteness, it is also beyond all such conceptions like superpositions." Well, yes, that is what analogies are all about: ways of expressing indirectly, and with an expectation of a certain level of inaccuracy, what cannot be expressed directly with available language -- and, after all, the analogy is yours! Of course we feel the need to be as precise as possible -- although it doesn't seem guarantee the transmission of meaning -- but aren't you straining at small differences and missing larger commonalities?
My intuition is that Vedanta is a great system of thought, primarily because of the demands it places on our understanding, demands which de-centre the ego and rationality. But it seems to dispense with rationality fairly late in the piece, relying as it does on the a priori assumption of self. In your words: 'No one can truly say "I don't exist !" Thus one's self-existence as a fundamental attribute transcends reasoning.' Well, quite simply, not everyone says this. I can truly say that I don't exist simply because I admit that my consciousness is exogenous; it is the consciousness of stone, coca-cola, horse, Eiffel tower and so on. Is it possible to say "'I' exist" as an 'I' distinct from all that constitutes me?
The problem is knowing when our intuition of existence and non-existence is correct. Descartes attempted to resolve this in "I think therefore I am". I believe we can't go beyond tying consciousness to existence -- as individual selves, as opposed to species-existence -- but this seems to chain us to the rational, which is clearly a dead-end. Jacques Lacan solves this impasse by inverting Descartes as: "I think therefore I am not." Existence for Lacan is intermittent: I exist only when I cease to think.
Perhaps this is what Vedanta finds in meditation, this coming into existence. I might just read more about it on the off-chance. I would like to know what existence feels like ;-)
Thanks again for your reply,
best regards, Jonas
Jo (sorry about my previous misnomer – slip of the digits!): Your comment about the ‘problem’ of induction is well placed. It is actually a pseudo problem as you indicate. I agree that modern philosophers have put up phantoms and seem to spend their time investigating the non-existent, all the while ignoring the incredible scientific advances of the last 300 years which have been (mostly) the result of the inductive reasoning they claim is invalid.
With regard to the validity of the senses – something denied by most philosophers (including Hume), there is much on this in Peikoff’s book, but his discussion using a common straw man put up by academic philosophers – the stick appearing bent in water – illustrates that not all modern philosophers suffer from the paralysis and avoidance of neuropsychology that you were obviously exposed to. The relevant text:
“A so-called sensory illusion, such as a stick appearing bent, is not a perceptual error. In Ayn Rand’s view, it is a testament to the reliability of the senses. The senses do not censor their response; they do not react to a single attribute (such as shape) in a vacuum, as though it were unconnected to anything else; they cannot decide to ignore part of the stimulus. Within the range of their capacity, the senses give us evidence of everything physically operative, they respond to the full context of the facts – including, in the presence instance, the fact that light travels through water at a different rate than through air, which is what causes the sick to appear bent. It is the task not of the senses but of the mind to analyse the evidence and identify the causes at work (which may require the discovery of complex scientific knowledge). If a casual observer were to conclude that the stick actually bends in water, such a snap judgement would be a failure on the conceptual level, a failure of thought, not of perception. To criticize the senses for it, is tantamount to criticizing them for their power, for their ability to give us evidence not of isolated fragments, but of the total.”
Much of the epistemological debate includes fruitless discussion of “sensory qualities”. Again, a relevant piece of text from Peikoff’s book:
“The dominant tradition among philosophers has defined only two possibilities in regard to sensory qualities: they are “in the object” or “in the mind.” The former is taken to subsume qualities independent of man’s means of perception; the latter is taken to mean “subjective and/or unreal”. Ayn Rand regards the alternative as defective. A quality that derives from an interaction between external objects and man’s perceptual apparatus belongs to neither category. Such a quality – e.g., color – is not a dream or a hallucination; it is not “in the mind” apart from the object; it is man’s form of grasping the object. Nor is the quality “in the object” apart from man; it is man’s form of grasping the object. By definition, a form of perception cannot be forced into either category. Since it is the product of an interaction (in Plato’s terms, of a “marriage”) between two entities, object and apparatus, it cannot be identified with either. Such products introduce a third alternative: they are not object alone or perceiver alone, but object-as-perceived.”
Arnold: I very much like your responses to Jo’s position. I think that the complexity of reality is matched by the complexity of any brain’s neurophysiology that has evolved sufficiently to understand it. Animals don’t understand the complexity but are sufficiently evolved to survive and reproduce within the complexity. Man’s evolved brain may not be as complex at the reality it tries to understand, but is sufficiently evolved to discover many of the entities and causal relations between them that make up complex reality. There is ‘something out there’ independent of entities capable of knowing it, and there are ‘knowers’ that are sufficiently complex to ask “How?”. In principle (i.e. in philosophy) it is not more complex, but unwrapping the “How?” is devilishly complex and I think your work on perception is heading in the right direction.
I'd highly recommend "Being no one: The self-model theory of subjectivity" by Thomas Metzinger to anyone interested in this topic. In many ways, I think Metzinger hits the nail on the head.
Stewart, in "Being no one ...", Metzinger denies that there is such a thing as a "metaphysical self". I don't know what a metaphysical self is, but I claim that there is a real neuronal part of the human brain that we are justified in calling a self. For my argument, see "Where Am I? Redux" on my RG page.
Dear Jonas,
I sincerely hope that your doubts eventually get resolved through deep thinking and meditation.
Regards
Rajat
Hi Martha,
I recommand you reading "A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination" by Edelman G.M. and Tononi G. It describes the consciousness both by a physical and an embodied approach of the the human phenomenology.
Dear Fabrice, Thank you for your information. I read that book in long time ago in french. I should read it again in original version. Since I am only an amature cognative scientist, I did not have enough time to study all the necessary articles.
Chère Martha,
N'hésitez donc pas à vous replonger dans celui-ci, la conscience étant une émergence, je suis sûr que vous y trouverez de nouveaux attraits.
Regards.
Hello Mark Laslett. I read with interest your comments on Ayn Rand's with how to characterize quality. You say there that " Such a quality – e.g., color – is not a dream or a hallucination; it is not “in the mind” apart from the object; it is man’s form of grasping the object. Nor is the quality “in the object” apart from man; it is man’s form of grasping the object. By definition, a form of perception cannot be forced into either category. Since it is the product of an interaction (in Plato’s terms, of a “marriage”) between two entities, object and apparatus, it cannot be identified with either. I think I am saying something very similar in my paper "An Essay on Existential Space." which I placed on Research Gate some time ago. I would like to read your comments on it. A pertinent paragraph I have high lighted in yellow in the attachment I am sending is the following: "Visual existential space [there is also auditory, olfactory and tactile existential space] is the space I engender by seeing. It is the space wherein I see the rainbow out there over the mountain, it is the space wherein I see that iridescent splash of colors on my beige carpet where sunlight has fallen after being refracted through a crystal chandelier. Indeed, a careful description of actual experience, requires that I say that that patch of rainbow hues is the color of the carpet as long as that multicolored patch of light falls on it, and as long as there is a visual being that is seeing the carpet in that color. I see the world in color not because the objective world is colored, but because the visual space I open up discloses the world as colored, and as up and down, and so on. Briefly and generically stated, my visual lived world is what my body-subject makes visible. That squirrel over there by the tree does not depend on anyone seeing it to be what it is. But my making it appear is inseparable from its being something that appears to me. Thus it is for me a real phenomenon. It is something that appears, and my making it appear as it does appear to me is an activity of my species specific kind of seeing. The squirrel is visibly cute to me and to any person who can experience visual cuteness. Moreover, I can literally see that the squirrel is aware of its surroundings. Of course it appears the way it does also because of what it is-in-itself: a living natural squirrel.
William: "Briefly and generically stated, my visual lived world is what my body-subject makes visible. That squirrel over there by the tree does not depend on anyone seeing it to be what it is. But my making it appear is inseparable from its being something that appears to me. Thus it is for me a real phenomenon. It is something that appears, and my making it appear as it does appear to me is an activity of my species specific kind of seeing."
See "Where Am I? Redux" for a brief description of the retinoid system, a putative brain mechanism that does the job you describe. How would you deal with results of the SMTT experiment described in "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness"? Both papers are on my RG page.
Dear William and Arnold,
How do you assume first of all that there is a squirrel out there, without knowing for sure that that is a squirrel? Is the squirrel-in-itself really a squirrel or is it a product of the interaction between the subject and the squirrel -in-itself (whatever it is)? If subject-object interaction is responsible for bringing about the appearances that constitute the world that we experience, then obviously, we do not ,or may be, cannot ever hope to know either the subject-in-itself or the object-in-itself? Are we not heading towards Kantian noumena again? Even the squirrel's knowing itself to be what it is is a n assumption of the subject in us, which is truly the product of previous interaction with the objective world (probably including the squirrel also) and of the fact of knowing oneself by oneself without any external reference. This latter quality we are superimposing on the squirrel when we make the statement:
"That squirrel over there by the tree does not depend on anyone seeing it to be what it is. "
I think there is still some more ground to be covered before we can rest contented.
Regards,
Rajat
I am puzzled and intrigued by the discussion. To my mind, our perceptual relation to the world was resolved long ago. There was a particularly important period of 25 years in the history of human thought between about 1665 and 1690. During that time physics was developed as a general system of dynamic description for the world. At the same time and as part of the SAME DIALOGUE the metaphysical (fundamental) nature of our perceptual relation to the world was sorted out. The key figures involved were Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, Hooke and Locke. All of these figures regarded themselves as natural philosophers. There was no concept of a distinction between scientist and philosopher. Newton's mechanics builds directly on metaphysical arguments (based on pure logic) arising from Leibniz's response to Hobbes and Hooke.
But problem arose. The physics, which fell to Newton to write, was easy for everyone to understand and became the basis for extending education in mathematics and 'science' to the general public over the next two hundred years. In contrast, the metaphysics, or fundamental principles of dynamic relation, which fell to Leibniz to write, were incomprehensible to all but a tiny few. As a result physics acquired a naive pseudo-ontology of 'physical matter' - it became dumbed down.
For this reason, a hundred years later Kant felt it necessary to redress this naive view by pointing out that we have to distinguish the apparent from the 'actual'. Like Leibniz (and Parmenides 2000 years before) he disagreed with Locke about primary and secondary properties, holding that sensed space and time are just as illusory as colour. The few who understood Leibniz pointed out that Kant was reinventing the wheel and, moreover, getting it wrong (there is no ding an sich). But Kant's position, even if buried in a vast heap of redundant verbiage, was just about understandable for enough people to become trendy and form the basis of a new bogus discipline - 'philosophy', which distanced itself from those applying Newton's laws, mostly to mill wheels and trains.
For those doing the mill wheels, interest in metaphysics dropped away: to the extent that by Rutherford's time people could think of atoms as little solar systems made of tiny billiard balls. Some, like Maxwell, Mach and Helmholtz understood the fragility of the ontology only too well, but in schoolrooms throughout the world children learnt about billiard balls. In 1965, 50 years after it had become clear that there were no billiard balls after all, I was taught billiard balls at school and introduced to the 'strange' ideas of quantum theory only for extra-curricular interest. There was not a whisper of the fact that Leibniz had described in detail in 1714 why no theory of physics can be based on billiard balls and why instead it has to be based on dynamic units very much like QM. Why was I, a student at one of the most prestigious schools in one of the most culturally advanced countries in the world, not told about the fundamental ideas of physics that had been developed as part and parcel of the development of the equations 300 years before?
Because very few people understood them.
People doing fundamental physics at the coal face now accept the implications of Leibniz's ontology for their practical work, because it gives the right results. They get to ride the bicycle without necessarily knowing how. But neuropsychologists have not twigged to the fact that perception follows the same dynamic laws. Philosophers arguing from Kant have lost the plot completely. The ancient Eastern texts are very close to Leibniz in many ways but they lack the precision needed to apply the ideas to testable theories. People like Merleau Ponty and Rand go round and round on Wittgensteinian word holidays when all they need to do is loosen up and accept that words like redness or space have many different context-sensitive meanings and as long as one accepts the basic Leibnizian principal that all existence is relational and dynamic, rather than intrinsic, nothing is a puzzle.
But very few people seem to understand!
Dear Jo,
Could you please explain your theory of perception in brief and name that work of yours which deals with perception (if any) for ready reference?
Regards,
Rajat
Where Does Consciousness Come From?
Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind. Yet basic questions about the precise timing, location and dynamics of the neural event(s) allowing conscious access to information are not clearly and unequivocally determined.
Some neuroscientists have even argued that consciousness may arise from a single "seat" in the brain, though the prevailing idea attributes a more global network property.
Do the neural correlates of consciousness correspond to late or early brain events following perception? Do they necessarily involve coherent activity across different regions of the brain, or can they be restricted to local patterns of reverberating activity?
A new paper suggests that four specific, separate processes combine as a "signature" of conscious activity. By studying the neural activity of people who are presented with two different types of stimuli – one which could be perceived consciously, and one which could not – Dr. Gaillard of INSERM and colleagues, show that these four processes occur only in the former, conscious perception task.
This new work addresses the neural correlates of consciousness at an unprecedented resolution, using intra-cerebral electrophysiological recordings of neural activity. These challenging experiments were possible because patients with epilepsy who were already undergoing medical procedures requiring implantation of recording electrodes agreed to participate in the study. The authors presented them with visually masked and unmasked printed words, then measured the changes in their brain activity and the level of awareness of seeing the words. This method offers a unique opportunity to measure neural correlates of conscious access with optimal spatial and temporal resolutions. When comparing neural activity elicited by masked and unmasked words, they could isolate four converging and complementary electrophysiological markers characterizing conscious access 300 ms after word perception.
All of these measures may provide distinct glimpses into the same distributed state of long-distance reverberation. Indeed, it seems to be the convergence of these measures in a late time window (after 300 ms), rather than the mere presence of any single one of them, which best characterizes conscious trials. "The present work suggests that, rather than hoping for a putative unique marker – the neural correlate of consciousness – a more mature view of conscious processing should consider that it relates to a brain-scale distributed pattern of coherent brain activation," explained neuroscientist Lionel Naccache, one of the authors of the paper.
The late ignition of a state of long distance coherence demonstrated here during conscious access is in line with the Global Workspace Theory, proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Lionel Naccache.
Journal Reference:
1. Gaillard et al. Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access. PLoS Biology, 2009; 7 (3): e61 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061
Ralph: "The late ignition of a state of long distance coherence demonstrated here during conscious access is in line with the Global Workspace Theory, proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Lionel Naccache."
Re "long distance coherence" in the brain, here is my comment on EDGE in response to a presentation on this topic by Stanislas Dehaene:
.............................................................................................................
Stan Dehaene has done excellent work in exploring the neuronal correlates of the brain's global workspace. But we have to recognize that what he and his colleagues are measuring are the brain changes in response to a novel perception of a previously masked object by a person who is already conscious. I agree with Steve Pinker that a global workspace is a key function of consciousness, but it is not an explanation of consciousness. In order to understand consciousness we have to explain how the brain is able to represent a volumetric world filled with objects and events from our own privileged egocentric perspective — the problem of subjectivity. This challenge is compounded by the fact that we have no sensory apparatus for detecting the 3D space in which we live. Recent work combining empirical measures of phenomenal experience, brain imaging, and detailed neuronal modeling, are making encouraging progress in our effort to understand consciousness and subjectivity.
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I do agree with you completly. I have met both of them and arrived the same conclusion..Steve Pinker's theory is much more plausible. Since I have not published any article., I do not have much to say. I do hope that we can understand the mystery of Consciousness some day. Martha 서
I have proposed a working definition of consciousness, something I find lacking in most discussions of consciousness. I have also proposed a particular kind of brain mechanism that I claim generates patterns of neuronal activity constituting proper analogs of what consciousness is like. For more details, see "Where Am I? Redux" and "A Foundation For the Scientific Study of Consciousness" on my RG page.
Thank you for your information. I will certainly read your RG page. I was unawear the existance of your study on the cosciousness( I am quite new on RG).I am presently in Paris, I will be back to Montreal in few months.My husband will remain here in Paris( Sorbonne). Thank you again for your valuable and costructive discussions.
Martha 서
Dear Rajat,
I cannot explain my theory of perception sufficiently briefly to fit in a post here, I am afraid. The best I can do is point to my webpage, which is designed to offer a wide range of ways of tempting people to explore the territory - some a page long, some 300 pages long.
The problem is that to get the framework right I think we have to confront a series of quite difficult counterintuitive conceptual shifts. Last time I counted there were twelve - maybe a bit like the levels of thought in some meditative traditions. Until one has got through them all one is not ready to synthesise an answer. None of these shifts is actually controversial within one or other discipline but few people are familiar with them all. Moreover, the synthesis that I think arises is very unfamiliar and challenging.
The site is http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jonathan-edwards
The fullest answer is in an essay entitled Reality, Meaning and Knowledge (300pp). My first published paper on consciousness in individual cells gives a quicker answer.
Dear Ralph,
I agree with Arnold. Dehaene has done excellent work on brain dynamics but:
'The late ignition of a state of long distance coherence demonstrated here during conscious access...' has no scientific content as far as I am aware. These are not concepts with any physical meaning and biology is supposed to be compatible with physics. The person was already conscious (of something else). The right answer to the problem is to be built out of the same empirical building blocks but not with this sort of bogus dynamics. What is 'ignition'? What is 'long distance coherence'? Let's have some science!
Arnold, You write " In order to understand consciousness we have to explain how the brain is able to represent a volumetric world filled with objects and events from our own privileged egocentric perspective — the problem of subjectivity." Does this not assume that an understanding of consciousness has to have a physical explanation? Might this be a confusion arising from the fact that there are numerous correlates between brain activity and consciousness, and claiming that finding those correlates is an explanation? The amazing resourcefulness in finding brain correlates to subjectivity is impressive. But there are are physical correlates such as vocal chord activity when I speak, but they in no way explain what I am doing when I am expressing my thoughts by speaking. Have you ever wondered where that "volumetric world filled with objects and events" is? How big is it? What does it mean to say that the brain represents it?
William: "Does this not assume that an understanding of consciousness has to have a physical explanation?[1] Might this be a confusion arising from the fact that there are numerous correlates between brain activity and consciousness, and claiming that finding those correlates is an explanation?[2]
1. Yes. If we claim that consciousness does not have a physical explanation then we can argue on the basis of pure reason but not on the grounds of scientific knowledge.
2. I have been explicitly critical of studies that attempt to explain consciousness just on the the basis of brain correlates. Here is what I wrote in my chapter "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness" (See my RG page):
The problem we face in arriving at a physical explanation of consciousness resides in the relationship between the objective 3rd person experience and the subjective 1st person experience. It is here that I suggest that simple correlation will not suffice. I have argued that a bridging principle for the empirical investigation of consciousness should systematically relate salient analogs of conscious content to biophysical processes in the brain, and that our scientific objective should be to develop theoretical models that can be demonstrated to generate biophysical analogs of subjective experience (conscious content).
Thank you very much Joe for your response. I'll find time to go through your work.
Regards
Rajat
I think I understand what you are claiming when you say " I have argued that a bridging principle for the empirical investigation of consciousness should systematically relate salient analogs of conscious content to biophysical processes in the brain, and that our scientific objective should be to develop theoretical models that can be demonstrated to generate biophysical analogs of subjective experience (conscious content)."
Can you tell me what would suggest that it would be possible to "relate salient analogs of conscious content to biophysical processes" which would not be merely establishing correlates, and thereby suggest if not require dualism? Leibniz as you will recall postulated that God had set up a psycho-physical parallelism between what happens physically in our bodies and what happens psychologically in our minds.
I would rather believe that we should set aside our scientific preconceptions and regard our living bodies not as mere composites of molecules or organs but as persons who are naturally constituted such that they can disclose the surrounding world. Human and non human bodies are marvelous beings, for they make their surroundings appear well enough for them to live a life. There is no need for a bridge because there is no gulf between two entities mind and body. I fully realize that the simplicity and common sense of this approach is anathema to the contemporary mentality. By the way accepting this approach does not entail giving up programs aimed at trying to determine what exactly is happening physically in the brain when we have experience. In fact since we know that certain liquids can alter our consciousness there is no treason to doubt that consciousness depends on the state of the brain. However it must be the case that something astonishing is engendered when livings bodies come into existence and cease to be mere bodies. There is no ghost in this machine (my body) because there is no machine for the ghost to occupy.
William: "Can you tell me what would suggest that it would be possible to "relate salient analogs of conscious content to biophysical processes" which would not be merely establishing correlates, and thereby suggest if not require dualism?"
I reject dualism and psycho-physical parallelism, and I endorse *dual-aspect monism*. The problem is an epistemological one. To know more about my reasons for this, read "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness" on my RG page.
I re-read my burp, and I should have asked " What would be accomplished if you succeeded in "developing theoretical models that can be demonstrated to generate biophysical analogs of subjective experience (conscious content)"?. I assume you do not mean that the theoretic models can do anything as is suggested by your grammar, so I take it that you mean that the goal should be to detect biophysical analogs of subjective experience.and that this could be done by appropriate theoretical models. In any case don't you end up with attempting to correlate bio-physical analog with subjective experience. And aren't you assuming that there are two things one of them the analog and the other the real thing --Or....? Isn't this a kind very sophisticated version of Gestalt isomorphism ? or as I mentioned a version of psycho-physical parallelism?
Dear William,
I wonder if you are jousting at a windmill? Everyone may be on the same side.
You say that you prefer to avoid dualism. In fact Leibniz was monistic in this sense. Psychophysical parallelism is a misreading from the early twentieth century. I think you will find most current Leibniz scholars do not ascribe to it. For Leibniz 'physical talk' was just the pragmatic talk of empirical science dealing with aggregates. There was no substance duality of the sort in Descartes. Everything is monads relating to their universe by perception. But monad talk is not very practical because it is effectively first person talk, which does not work for describing other things. The idea of parallelism comes from some later paragraphs in monadology where Leibniz tries to explain how the two sorts of talk make it seem as if aggregates and monads operate in parallel. In fact it is just different levels of monads progressing in harmony.
I am pretty sure that like Leibniz, you, Arnold and I all see the universe as consisting of one sort of marvellous stuff that seems an order of magnitude more marvellous when it forms 'living units' and maybe an order more marvellous still for human units. We have to have third person 'physical talk' and we have first person 'mental talk' but there is no suggestion that there is physical stuff and mental stuff. You talk of scientific preconceptions but by and large scientists have no ontological preconceptions - they can't be bothered. And those that consider such things tend mostly to regard the distinction between physical and mental to be an artefact of religion and/or academic philosophy. I have never thought of anything 'being physical'. My job was to study what was really going on, that's all.
At least since 1980 physics very definitely does not consider bodies as mere composites of molecules. It sees dynamics in terms of a hierarchy of indivisible units, almost exactly as Leibniz did. In fact the larger units are not even 'constituted' by the smaller ones. They are new levels of dynamic being co-contingent on the arrangement of the smaller ones. So we do not need 'persons' even to be 'constituted' in modern physics. They could be larger and more complex and marvellous dynamic patterns. And since everything in physics is about relations there will be something that other things are like to these patterns. No bridges indeed. All is real dynamic relation, neither flavour P nor M. Such an idea is anathema to philosophers because they do not keep up with science but it may be commonplace amongst scientists interested in this sort of thing.
The only caveat is that if we enquire into these things and want a true answer we cannot cry 'foul' if someone discovers that our intuitive ideas about ourselves are wrong. Darwin pointed out that we are probably descended from apes, not made specially by God in a garden. I think we now know enough to know that there may be no 'person' units when it comes to human conscious experience. Arnold suggests that experience arises in a specialised net of cells. I have a different view but in some ways only a whisker away from Arnold's. The 'person' is an aggregate system that explains other things. We may both be wrong but an ability to marvel at the emotional complexity of human relationships should probably not colour a genuine search for the truth about experience. Precision is the friend of art as much as science, even the precise freedom of Pablo Casals or Django Reinhardt. In this case, as you imply, precision is finding where the buck stops for experience, not just a correlate two stops along the subway. But it will stop somewhere and it may not be the station we expected.
Dear William,
I wonder if you are jousting at a windmill? Everyone may be on the same side.
You say that you prefer to avoid dualism. In fact Leibniz was monistic in this sense. Psychophysical parallelism is a misreading from the early twentieth century. I think you will find most current Leibniz scholars do not ascribe to it. For Leibniz 'physical talk' was just the pragmatic talk of empirical science dealing with aggregates. There was no substance duality of the sort in Descartes. Everything is monads relating to their universe by perception. But monad talk is not very practical because it is effectively first person talk, which does not work for describing other things. The idea of parallelism comes from some later paragraphs in monadology where Leibniz tries to explain how the two sorts of talk make it seem as if aggregates and monads operate in parallel. In fact it is just different levels of monads progressing in harmony.
I am pretty sure that like Leibniz, you, Arnold and I all see the universe as consisting of one sort of marvellous stuff that seems an order of magnitude more marvellous when it forms 'living units' and maybe an order more marvellous still for human units. We have to have third person 'physical talk' and we have first person 'mental talk' but there is no suggestion that there is physical stuff and mental stuff. You talk of scientific preconceptions but by and large scientists have no ontological preconceptions - they can't be bothered. And those that consider such things tend mostly to regard the distinction between physical and mental to be an artefact of religion and/or academic philosophy. I have never thought of anything 'being physical'. My job was to study what was really going on, that's all.
At least since 1980 physics very definitely does not consider bodies as mere composites of molecules. It sees dynamics in terms of a hierarchy of indivisible units, almost exactly as Leibniz did. In fact the larger units are not even 'constituted' by the smaller ones. They are new levels of dynamic being co-contingent on the arrangement of the smaller ones. So we do not need 'persons' even to be 'constituted' in modern physics. They could be larger and more complex and marvellous dynamic patterns. And since everything in physics is about relations there will be something that other things are like to these patterns. No bridges indeed. All is real dynamic relation, neither flavour P nor M. Such an idea is anathema to philosophers because they do not keep up with science but it may be commonplace amongst scientists interested in this sort of thing.
The only caveat is that if we enquire into these things and want a true answer we cannot cry 'foul' if someone discovers that our intuitive ideas about ourselves are wrong. Darwin pointed out that we are probably descended from apes, not made specially by God in a garden. I think we now know enough to know that there may be no 'person' units when it comes to human conscious experience. Arnold suggests that experience arises in a specialised net of cells. I have a different view but in some ways only a whisker away from Arnold's. The 'person' is an aggregate system that explains other things. We may both be wrong but an ability to marvel at the emotional complexity of human relationships should probably not colour a genuine search for the truth about experience. Precision is the friend of art as much as science, even the precise freedom of Pablo Casals or Django Reinhardt. In this case, as you imply, precision is finding where the buck stops for experience, not just a correlate two stops along the subway. But it will stop somewhere and it may not be the station we expected.
Dear Jonathan ,
It is reassuring to me that there seems to be grounds for saying that you and Arnold and I are petty much on the same page about dualism. . After reading Arnold's comment on my last entry I felt that this was so.. I am intrigued to learn that Leibniz scholars dismiss his "alleged" psycho physical parallelism. . thanks for the tip. By the way I agree in part with Hans ? Behe. . The part about Darwinist vacuous recourse to the black box of mutation and natural selection to explain every adaptation, each of which is a stupendous feat even from a purely mechanical standpoint. By the way does not throw me into the pathetic recourse of Big Daddy with a beard magically creating the universe in seven days as your last paragraph might suggest. . It doesn't throw me into any group. I think this planet is so astonishing and marvelous that we humans not begun to realize it adequately, and it could probably be done perhaps only by some as yet combination of a new and much improved life science joined to an unimaginable ARTISTIC form--something that would touch the deepest sense of human capacity to feel the ultra sublime. Mutation and natural selection trivializes something awesome.
.
@William Springer. I enjoyed your paper on “Existential Space” and agree with your statement at the end of your comment above, “There is no ghost in this machine (my body) because there is no machine for the ghost to occupy.” My co-author and I (who are not philosophers by any means, but education specialists who only dapple – naively at that - in epistemology and philosophy of mind) have coined a term to express the intentionality of the lived body: ‘the enminded body’ (i.e. the flip side of Varela’s ‘embodied mind’).
Dear William,
But life science IS an artistic form, is it not? It is creative. It provides metaphors that strike chords. It often amuses. It extends our sense of wonder and the sublime. But I would agree that so far it has not handled well the immediate relations between physical dynamics and sensed experience. That should be the new artistic science for this century. The scene is set if people are prepared to throw away some cherished preconceptions about 'persons'! Just as Shakespeare and Woody Alllen have deconstructed this idea in various ways we should do the same in science. I think the main problem may be the vested interests of psychologists who make a living out of believing in 'persons'. Art is about loosening ideas up.
I think you may be unfair on Darwin. He did not imply that the marvellous fit of an animal to its environment has anything to do with random mutation. It is to do with the marvellous way our complex universe can fit together. It may use a random kaleidoscope type mechanism to get to the wonderful scenes but who cares? - the wonder of the scenes derives from the way the universe relates to itself - as Chomsky has emphasised.
You might find Leibniz interesting in this respect. He claimed that indivisible perceiving dynamic units (monads) were telic, and so was the universe, but not any half way house aggregates like persons. Modern physics seems to agree. The only problem with the telicity of monads is that they perceive the universe only indistinctly so their ends may not be quite what they thought they were - something we come across often enough in life I guess. Animals and genes can only change by random bumping about according to physics but the indivisible units involved are all being telic inside! I am not sure I could cope with anything more awesome than modern science. Nothing is trivialised as far as I can see!
Thank you for your excellent and pertinent answer. I have read those books only in german when I was student in Vienna University. I have to read again in english tlanslation in order to write on consciousness. Martha 서
The research of Professor Antonio Damasio is actually one of the reference on the origin of consciousness, and the development of it.
Their publications stands out on the subject:
- Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brainstem
- The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
http://books.google.pt/books?id=DCasWcSmrWUC&pg=PA135&dq=António+Damásio&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=_X7eUqPVBYvA7Abkg4CADQ&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=António%20Damásio&f=false
One of the most striking aspects is that Damasio argues that consciousness is a feeling ...
William: "And aren't you assuming that there are two things one of them the analog and the other the real thing [subjective experience] --Or....? "
No, I am assuming that there is only *one* thing, namely a particular kind of brain event (activation of retinoid space) that is described in two different ways, one the objective 3rd-person language of science, and the other the subjective 1st-person way of the person having the experience. So the problem of explanation is cast as an epistemological problem, not an ontological one. Detailing the biophysical mechanisms that generate relevant brain analogs (3pp) of conscious experience (1pp), I think, is the best that we can do to explain consciousness.
.
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