Here's my take on the hard problem http://philpapers.org/rec/EARICG

Alfredo,

I am sitting in front of a table.  There are 2 apples on the table.  I am here telling you that and you understand what I said.  You understanding because as a child, you learn what an apple is, what a table is and a chair.  Later you learned how to count and how to write numbers and later you learned English and now this sentence is clear to you.  I learned all that as well, so I can express some aspect of my subjective experience into a clear sentence.  We say that this sentence is an objective description of the situation.  We say that because the message is unambiguous.  Everybody that has the proper cultural knowledge (ability to use the language used) understand it.  So third person perspectives are stardard expression of first person perspective.  They can only be understood by a person that can interpret the message by translating it back into a internal subjective narrative which is similar to my experience of seeing the apples on the table.  Science is a language for the standardisation of aspect of experience.  It does not allow to really leave the subjective, it simply format it for it to be transfer through a medium.

I totally agree, Louis. And after all we have a science of antiemetics and nobody ever had third person nausea.

I think it is timely, if brave, to raise this big issue, Alfredo. My quick take is that 20 years on the Hard Problem is dead. It is dead because philosophers have come to agree that nobody knows what they mean by physical. So the disparacy between mental and physical has no traction. In fact the dictionary makes it clear that physical is an epistemic category - that which we know through senses such as sight and touch. That which we know otherwise, like my memory now that I had a thought five minutes ago that I would need to leave at 5pm to meet my wife with the shopping we call mental. In both cases we think we are dealing with events or the operation of causal processes or whatever. We just know them through different routes. But that is only the start, the point that the HP is misformulated if it exists at all. The longer bit is what we replace it with, and that will have to wait for the shopping. The clue may be simply that mental is proximal and physical is distal. 

A couple of years ago I had the following discussion on the question of the HARD PROBLEM:

Turing Consciousness Conference (Montreal) 2012 (2)

Arnold Trehub 15 July 2012 08:52

The hard problem is turned into an insoluble problem by the mistaken notion that feeling must be something that is *added* to an essential brain process -- the activity of a particular kind of brain mechanism. So the objection is repeated "But the *doing* of the brain mechanism does not explain its *feeling*!" If we adopt a monistic stance, then the processes -- the doings -- of the conscious biophysical brain must *constitute* feelings, and nothing has to be added to these essential brain processes.

I have argued that we are conscious only if we have an experience of *something somewhere* in perspectival relation to our self. The minimal state of consciousness/feeling is a sense of being at the center of a volumetric surround. This is our minimal phenomenal world that can be "filled up" by all kinds of other feelings. These consist of our perceptions and other cognitive content such as your emotional reaction in response to reading this comment. 

On the basis of this view of consciousness, I proposed the following working definition of consciousness:

*Consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective*. 

The scientific problem then is to specify a system of brain mechanisms that can realize this kind of egocentric representation. It is clear that it must be some kind of global workspace, but a global workspace, as such, is not conscious -- think of a Google server center. What is needed is *subjectivity*, a fixed locus of spatiotemporal perspectival origin within a surrounding plenum. I call this the *core self* within a person's phenomenal world. A brain mechanism that can satisfy this constraint would satisfy the minimal condition for being conscious. I have argued that the neuronal structure and dynamics of a detailed theoretical brain model that I named the *retinoid system* can do the job, and I have presented a large body of clinical and psychophysical evidence that lends credence to the retinoid model of consciousness.

Maxwell J. Ramstead 16 July 2012 09:20

I agree wholeheartedly with you; I too think that the “doing”—“feeling” dichotomy is a false one, in that necessarily, from a monistic point of view—and we’re all monists here, aren’t we?— feeling must necessarily be something the nervous system does, and hence feeling is a kind of doing. I would even go so far as to say, following the late F. J. Varela, that “living is sense-making”. Up to here we’re in agreement. 

However, I disagree that feeling can be reduced to a privileged egocentric perspective. IMHO, such a position conflates subjectivity for phenomenality. Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor Trehub, but you seem to be implying that if we can determine the mechanism responsible for integrating information into a first-person perspective, using for instance a global workspace architecture, then the problem of phenomenal experience itself dissolves. Once we have specified the processes that generate a minimal ego-space, all we would need to do is populate the latter with phenomenal objects. 

I would argue that things are not so simple. Indeed, while models like Baars’ and Merker’s do an excellent job explaining this first-person vantage point, they do not yield felt qualities per se, at least not in an explicit way. Consider Merker’s example of the vehicle equipped with a camera and imaging software. The vehicle in question is able to generate a kind of minimal ego-space; yet, I would venture that it does not yet feel any of the things that populate its phenomenal world. Indeed, the claim that all I need to do is “fill up,” as it were, my egocentric perspective with objects (such as my perception of the text on this screen, or my feeling of great interest upon reading your comments) seems, at least to me, to be yet another spin on the “extra ingredient” solution. The only difference is that the extra ingredients you are proposing get their phenomenality from an equally mysterious property of the ego-space, which is to generate feeling, for some unexplained reason. 

I am extremely sympathetic to ego-space oriented views of phenomenal experience, but they do not explain away phenomenality, IMHO.

Arnold Trehub 16 July 2012 10:34

Maxwell J. Ramstead: "Indeed, while models like Baars’ and Merker’s do an excellent job explaining this first-person vantage point, they do not yield felt qualities per se, at least not in an explicit way."



I must say that Baar's and Merker's models do NOT *explain* the first-person vantage point. They *posit* a first-person vantage point, but they do not specify the neuronal structure and dynamics of a brain mechanism that can realize a first-person vantage point. Also, a vehicle equipped with with a camera and imaging software does NOT generate a minimal ego space because it has no internal analog representation of the volumetric space in which it exists. To my knowledge, my detailed model of the *retinoid system* is presently the only model that *explains* subjectivity/1st-person perspective. Moreover, the SMTT experiments that I cited actually demonstrate that a vivid conscious experience, without a matching stimulus, can be systematically generated and shaped by the properties of the brain's putative retinoid mechanism. 

What do you think has to be added to the biological structure and dynamics of the retinoid system to give us our phenomenal world?

Stevan Harnad 22 July 2012 09:21

HARD PROBLEMS NEED SUBSTANTIVE SOLUTION (Reply to multiple commentaries)



The "hard" problem is not a metaphysical one, and declaring oneself to be a card-caring monist does not solve it. Nor does "operationalizing" the measurement of feeling. (That's the other-minds problem, and the Turing Test -- T2, T3 or T4 -- is the best we'll ever get.)

Nor does one's monist-card do away with the doing/feeling dichotomy: Yes, the brain must cause feeling, somehow, for some adaptive or functional reason. And causing is doing. But the trouble is that we don't know how, and we don't know for what adaptive of functional reason. And explaining that is the hard problem. It cannot be hand-waved away by blurring distinctions or invoking monism or telling Just-So stories...

Arnold Trehub 22 July 2012 11:41

Some stories help us explain/understand consciousness/feeling. Other stories obfuscate our understanding of consciousness/feeling.  Stevan, what is the difference between a "Just-So story" and a scientific theory?

Stevan Harnad 22 July 2012 14:40

CORRELATION VS CAUSATION



A scientific theory gives a testable causal explanation of the evidence. 

A Just-So Story just gives a causal interpretation (hermeneutics), viz: 

"Why do plants grow toward the sun?" Because of a phototropic force. 

"Why do organisms feel?" Because of activity in this neural system...

Arnold Trehub 23 July 2012 08:17

THE RETINOID THEORY IS A CAUSAL EXPLANATION OF HOW AND WHY WE FEEL (have conscious experience)



Stevan: "A scientific theory gives a testable causal explanation of the evidence."



Consider the following:

 I am conscious if and only if I have a *sense of being here with something all around me even though the particulars are constantly changing*. Call this the minimal conscious content (MCC).

2. MCC must be the product of an active brain. Given this stipulation, I have proposed, as a working definition, that consciousness (MCC) is a transparent brain representation of the world (the space that is all around me) from a privileged egocentric perspective (me here).



HOW:


1. What system of mechanisms in the brain has the competence to cause MCC? I have proposed that the human brain has a system of neuronal brain mechanisms with the structure and dynamics that can represent a global volumetric spatiotopic analog of the world space we live in, including a fixed locus of perspectival origin that I call the *core self* (I!). This part of the retinoid system is called RETINOID SPACE. I have specified the minimal structure and dynamics of the brain system that regulates the content of retinoid space and call it the RETINOID SYSTEM.

 2. Why should we think that the retinoid system is a competent causal model of MCC? It seems clear that any competent model should be able to make relevant predictions that can be tested and are empirically validated. One thing we should NOT expect is that a competent causal model must be able to exhibit ALL the properties of MCC. (I think this unwarranted expectation plays a part in the "explanatory gap" notion in consciousness studies.) What we should expect is that the candidate model of MCC be able to generate matching *analogs* of relevant properties of the phenomena.

 3. In a wide range of empirical tests, the operating characteristics of the retinoid model successfully predicted/explained previously inexplicable conscious phenomena/feelings, and also successfully predicted novel conscious phenomena. Among many examples are hemi-spatial neglect, seeing-more-than-is-there (SMTT), Julesz random-dot stereograms, the pendulum illusion, 3D experience from 2D perspective drawings, the moon illusion, the Pulfrich effect, etc.



WHY:



 Organisms without consciousness/feeling do not have an internal global representation of objects and events in the world they live in, and can only respond to the immediate exigencies of their environment with reflexive adaptation. Conscious creatures, on the other hand, do have internal representations of the world they live in and gain an evolutionary advantage by being cognizant of the objects and events in the world with affordances for their survival and flourishing. In humans, consciousness also enables the imaginative and practical reconstruction of the world we live in.

Stevan Harnad 23 July 2012 17:49

Why do internal representations have to be felt, rather than just representing?

Arnold Trehub 24 July 2012 07:40

Stevan: "Why do internal representations have to be felt, rather than just representing?"



There is only one kind of internal representation that is FELT; it is any representation that is located in retinoid space, which is the phenomenal world in our extended present. All other internal representations are NOT felt. Each of our different sensory modalities may contain representations in its synaptic matrices, but these distinct representations remain PRE-CONSCIOUS/UNFELT until they are projected into retinoid space, via recurrent axonal excitation, and bound in proper spatio-temporal register where they become SOMETHING SOMEWHERE in our phenomenal world in perspectival relation to our core self (I!). This is the SUBJECTIVE DOING of the retinoid system that CONSTITUTES feeling/phenomenal experience. 

What are the counter arguments?

Stevan Harnad 1 August 2012 16:32

Arnold: Why and how is "any representation that is located in retinoid space" felt? I assume this is the activity of some neural system, actual or theoretical. But it is not enough to just say it is so: Why is retinoid activity felt? How does retinoid activity generate feeling? 

One cannot just posit that a neural system feels, and then ask for counter-arguments. One has to explain how and why it feels, rather than just does whatever it does, unfeelingly.

Arnold Trehub 2 August 2012 07:50

Stevan: "One cannot just posit that a neural system feels, and then ask for counter-arguments. One has to explain how and why it feels, rather than just does whatever it does, unfeelingly." 


I did explain how and why one feels in my post above of 23 July 2012. Apparently you are still puzzled. Let me approach the problem from a different angle. If we are to explain how and why we feel, we must offer an overt description of what it is like to have any kind of feeling. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE? IT IS TO FEEL LIKE YOU EXIST IN A SURROUNDING SPACE.

 This is your primitive phenomenal world. But with no sensory transducers to detect the space around you, how can you feel that you are in a space? This is the astonishing aspect of feeling that is the key to understanding how and why we feel! The neuronal structure and dynamics of retinoid space provides an innate brain representation of the space we live in, and it is organized around a fixed locus of spatio-temporal perspectival origin which is our self-locus -- our core self (I!). This special kind of neuronal brain mechanism CONSTITUTES *subjectivity*, which is the fundament of all feeling/consciousness. So autaptic-cell activity in retinoid space CAUSES FEELING and NOTHING ADDITIONAL HAS TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR AS A GENERATOR OF FEELING.

The WHY question is also answered in my 23 July post. You should note that all of this is not mere speculation as there is a very large body of empirical findings that support the retinoid theory of subjectivity/consciousness/feeling. The bottom line is that the retinoid system CANNOT DO WHAT IT DOES UNFEELINGLY!

 Stevan, if you still believe that some additional kind of brain activity is needed to account for subjectivity/feeling, then please tell us what you think it is and how its properties might be empirically tested.

Jonathan: we are free to define "physical" however we like, including in metaphysical ways, regardless of what "the dictionary" says. So, it's not true that "physical" must be a purely epistemic notion. It can be defined to be a metaphysical notion.

Yet you make another point that I find more serious: you say that nobody knows what they mean by "physical." This is closer to the truth, as philosophers almost always mean the true physics, which hasn't been discovered, and presumably never will be discovered. Moreover, if panpsychism or panprotopsychism were true, consciousness or protoconsciousness would be part of the intrinsic character of events that have otherwise been given purely formal characterizations. We could call these conscious or protoconscious intrinsic natures "physical," in which case the physical would trivially entail consciousness. On Chalmers' way of thinking through the issue, however, any such theory would count as a kind of Russellian monism, which most materialists reject. Thus, when he argues that materialism is true only if Russellian monism is true, his thesis really is substantive in the sense that a lot of materialists disagree with it. For a lot of materialists think there are no conscious or protoconscious intrinsic natures.

Brian: Your paper makes a mistake. Chalmers wonders (very roughly) how our world's physics might entail our world's consciousness. Well, if our world's consciousness was labeled as primitively physical, then our world's physics would trivially entail our world's consciousness. This would explain why our world's physics entails our world's consciousness. Of course, it wouldn't explain why there is primitive conscious stuff in the first place; but that's not a question he's addressing. That question would be more along the lines of asking why there is any world at all, rather than nothing.

Louis: I have a hard time seeing how a description of two apples on a table, written in terms of the true physics, will express conscious experience.

James,

Physics or any science is an evolution towards unambigious communition of common language and all natural language are based on the relations our nervous system interact with the world.  My nervous system allow me to see two apples on the table.  What I see is much more than what this sentence say.  But I decided to express only this aspect of my experience and I did no using formally defined number and a common language.  It is a scientific statement in the sense that it is unambigious message. It begins with a complex experience of which an aspect was selected and expressed and then send on the web.  On your screen, you read it and understood clearly this specific aspect of my experience by enacting a similar one in your mind.  Nobody needs to know the details of the process involved in order for the sentence to be unambigious.  

Not all aspect of our experience can be expressed unambigiously.  It is not because something in it is beyond expression.  It is simply because humans only include in their language the aspects of their experience which they render usefull or important or fun to communicate.  Some words exist in all language and some are unique to certain language/culture because what is important is not the same for all culture.  But the most basic and most important is the same and common.  Each science is like a culture , it only concern itself with a phenomenal domain and develop concepts judged relevant for communicating on this domain.  

When trying to understand consciousness, I do not see a boundary between a so called material reality that can be studied by science and a  phenomenal reality that I experience but cannot be explained with the first realm.  All the domains studied by science are deal with within our human realm of experience using the art of unambigious language crafted specifically for each of these domains.  We transmit unambigious sentences on these domain to each other and operate within our own human realm of experience.  These descriptions/models are not really objective in an absolute sense.  Their unambigious nature allows us to act on Nature as if Nature was described.  It is never described in absolute sense.  These description allows to predict, build machines that interact with the world as if the world was really build according to our models.  But it is just an illusion that is not fatal since we contraint ourself to act within the proven limits of these fantasies. 

Hi Louis,

But for the scientific perspective on "pain", for example, will account for the unmyelinated c-fibers shooting bio-electrical impulses to the brain. However, the scientific perspective can't reach the rich internal subjective experience of the feeling "pain". Scientists can't point and say "that's pain!", for they can't feel someone else's pain. Instead, scientists are limited to their own experience of pain. That's why the Churchland's want to only use scientific language and cut out all this qualia talk. Galileo, Goethe, Chalmers, to name a few, see/saw that this is a problem that science, as we know it traditionally, can't solve. We can take color, for example, too. We have Newton's explanation on optics, but then we have the Romantic Rebellion movement by Goethe saying "hold on, if this is all you can say about light then we're not on page two yet. What about the experience of color or of beauty?"

Louis, I see your point, but where your course of reasoning gets muddy, I believe, is when we can't enter into an empathetic relationship with artificial intelligence and something like the Turing test. I'm not saying that a robot could be conscious, I do not know that answer, but in principle, how would we ever know if a robot was conscious or just faking it by way of very clever programming? How would we know that it can experience pain AND know that it knows it is experiencing pain?

To put it another way: We have these exterior quality of aspects that science can deal with. However, then we have these intrinsic qualities that science remains oblivious to. This is where traditional science is woefully limited. Why is that? well, someone said "this physical stuff is what exists. Then built a system of discovery to uncover physical stuff. Therefore, all stuff is physical." It's only scratching the surface of what exists, not intrinsic properties.

Maybe Chalmers is right when he says we should add consciousness as a fundamental entity in physics. I would personally go a step further adding our intentional side to the equation too though, not just the phenomena we experience. This might give us more explanatory power regarding why things, like particles, do what they do. As of right now equations like F=ma or E=MC2 are empty equations. I believe as metaphysics merges with physics we'll start asking the "why" question, why things are this way and not some other way.

Stephen,

''However, the scientific perspective can't reach the rich internal subjective experience of the feeling "pain". Scientists can't point and say "that's pain!", for they can't feel someone else's pain. Instead, scientists are limited to their own experience of pain. ''

The scientific perspectives on pain do not primarily concerns the experience of pain but are studying body mechanisms known to be involved for pain to be felt.  These perspectives are not intended to be rich description of pain.   For rich description of pain, one should search litterature or poetry and testimony of people feeling pain or experiment oneself.  

I learned how to walk without knowing anything about what science has to say about the mechanisms involved in the performance of walking.  There is a fundamental distinction between a practical mastering of my body and a theoretical knowledge of my body.  Science is about unambigious message we can send about the body, it is not about being able to walk, to see or any use of the body in practice.  But without the used of a body and inculturation into a science, there would be no message sent nor received about the body and no way to inquire about it and come up with a message.  Michael Polany has a theory about how personal practical knowledge is at the origin of all theoretical knowledge.  That practical personal knowledge is different in nature with theoretical scientific knowledge is not a problem.

''but where your course of reasoning gets muddy, '' I agree.

'H'ow would we ever know if a robot was conscious or just faking it by way of very clever programming?'' If one day you have an interesting conversation with someone that tell you he is a robot, I would personally do not change my opinion that is was an interesting conversation and I would prefer the company of this robot than the company of humans that I cannot have such conversation.  You cannot fake being interesting.  You are to me or you are not.  If there is metal under the skin, I do not care.  We judge our interaction with any agent not based on the agent's nature but on the interaction itself.  

''Maybe Chalmers is right when he says we should add consciousness as a fundamental entity in physics. ''  Consciousness is  not a concept but experience.  Concepts allows to communicate limited aspect of experience but experience is not a concept and so cannot be communicate as it is and cannot become a concept.  So the above statement by Chalmer is extremely muddy.  It is similar to the old idea that there exist a vital force or a desimbodied soul that enter a body to make it alife.  

The question is why is it that gradually more and more conscious being have evolved on this planet?  What is the function of consciousness into its multiple evolutionary forms?  Schrodinger's answer is interesting: consciousness = learning. 

Dear All: I am positively surprised to find here sophisticated answers to the question. Now I have the impression that 20 years after the problem was formulated some theoretical advances are evident. 

Some comments:

To Louis: Your example works well because human language was evolutionarily developed to bridge first and third person perspectives, but there is a limitation of what can be transmitted by means of it. There are many kinds of intuitions and feelings we cannot convey by means of language. Most cases of metaphorical uses of language are attempts to overcome these limitations, but receivers will grasp the meaning and ther related feeling of the utterer only if they previously had a similar lived experience.

To Jonathan: I am in agreement, and currently thinking of how to use Brian Greene's String Theory in a Monist approach that includes the three fundamental aspects of reality, the physical, the formal/informational and the conscious ones. I also reject a panpsychist view that consciousness is present in the subatomic vibrating strings, but I am in favor of a proto-panpsychist view, claiming that the seeds of feeling should be present in the vibrating activity of the strings.

To Arnold: As you may guess, I agree with Harnad when he writes: "One cannot just posit that a neural system feels, and then ask for counter-arguments. One has to explain how and why it feels, rather than just does whatever it does, unfeelingly." 
You replied that "autaptic-cell activity in retinoid space CAUSES FEELING and NOTHING ADDITIONAL HAS TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR AS A GENERATOR OF FEELING". Although you are not wrong in saying that brain cells somehow cause feeling experiences, I think you still did not explain why. First it is necessary to describe what is a feeling, and second to describe the kind of activity of brain cells that instantiate them. As you know, I have tried to perform these explanatory tasks, arriving to the conclusion that feeling is a non-digital, wavelike phenomenon and that brain activity able to support it must be wavelike (as calcium waves), not digital (like neuron action potentials). In your retinoid model, you use a boolean network made of hubs that look more like astrocytes than neurons (they are multi-connectors both in input and output, while neurons receive many inputs but have only one axonal output - this output can be distributed to many locations, but all derive from the same pathway).

Soon I will discuss more posts, thank you all for this rich interchange of ideas!

Alfredo

Dear James,

You are young and have clearly bought in to the contemporary academic philosophy debate. However, I am old enough to have had the opportunity to talk to scientific staff of all disciplines at Trinity College when Russell was still alive, although by then no longer present at dinner. The contemporary debate is I think just a reflection of the fact that academic philosophy has completely lost touch with what science is about – Russell bemoaned this 75 years ago but by 1970 it had become far worse. Perhaps the really hard problem is indicated by the end of your post – how to make progress in philosophy if the academic philosophy community does not (and seemingly prefers not to) understand what science is about.

The problem is, I think, encapsulated by Stephen’s comment: “This is where traditional science is woefully limited. Someone said "this physical stuff is what exists. Then built a system of discovery to uncover physical stuff. Therefore, all stuff is physical." It's only scratching the surface of what exists, not intrinsic properties.” The point is that nobody in science ever said that. Descartes, Newton and Leibniz tell us to be very careful not to think like that, and every major innovator in fundamental science that I am aware of has done much the same. Scientists have consistently said that there is experience (cogito) and there appear to be mathematical regularities in the dynamic connections between experiences (to paraphrase Descartes). We use the terminology of stuff for practical purposes but not as a metaphysical base. The irony is that, as you say, most philosophers think ‘physical’ is a metaphysical category based on physics but the one thing physics does not have is such a category – it just traces dynamic connections.

So when, at my first formal dinner at Trinity as a student, I was seated next to a senior physical chemist and expressed to him my puzzlement over how surface tension could actually be visualized in terms of ‘things’ he smiled and explained that science does not try to do that. People who go in to science and want to retain the naïve idea of stuff have a hard time and maybe often switch to philosophy having (somewhat tongue in cheek) been told that they were ‘too philosophical’, meaning, in truth, that they were not philosophical enough.

Russell’s own account seems to me to be reasonably good, but there is one unhappy word in it: intrinsic. This gets complicated but intrinsic is not supposed to be relational. Russell sees that all physics is relational, and so includes nothing intrinsic. That might seem to leave room for qualia to be intrinsic. But as Louis points out we communicate about qualia al the time so they must be involved in causal relation, so cannot be non-relationally intrinsic. In fact the whole idea of anything being intrinsic is probably vacuous. Russell never quite got his knowledge by acquaintance to work. Qualia must be relational. After all when I get green qualia it is likely because of my relation to grass (indirectly). It is not me that is intrinsically green. The solution to this difficulty is, I think, simply to say that qualia are always proximal, or immediate relations. They are metaphysically distinct simply in that they are here. Physics has built a language of relations that can work in chains going as distal as you like but a key feature inherent in the ‘inverse problem’ is that qualia are never passed on. That is why we cannot test for them ‘over there’ and why it does not really matter whether or not you are a panpsychist because there is nothing to be shown to be true about distal qualia. That does not mean, nevertheless, that we are not entitled to try to discover exactly what immediate physical dynamic relation has the proximal qualia we are familiar with – that is the very difficult easy problem to concentrate on.

Dear Alfredo,

I used to call myself a panpsychist but the more I ponder the more I think we can avoid stressing ourselves about this. Physics tells us about dynamic relations that are underpinned by the premise that if you put a helpful human being in the right place she will claim to have had certain experiences in certain contexts. If experiences are dynamic relations then all dynamic relations ought to be experiences maybe. But if the relations in human heads are really rather high tech - whether based on Goldstone modes or calcium waves - and are fed by a very high tech input from all the other brain hardware, then maybe we can say that any phenomenal aspect of lower tech interactions undergone by electrons or quarks or whatever are going to be so unlike ours, and ineffably so, that all we can want to say about them is the mathematical structure that physics already gives us?We would still be allowed to say that a robot could not possibly be conscious in anything like the way we are unless there are within it certain interactions with at least similar dynamic parameters. We may be left wondering whether photons experience agony and so we should always switch off the light when it is not needed but that does not seem to me to be a realistic way to lead a happy life!

Jonathan: physicists try to describe, e.g., early stages of the Big Bang. How is this not a metaphysical project?

And, as for Russell's intrinsic/relational distinction, there is a difference between being relational and being a mere relation. Qualia is relational even though it's not merely relational: it's got its own character, too. In fact, we define it in terms of that character, whereas the standard model of physics only describes relations.

Dear Jonathan, you give a good reason for not being a panpsychist! My suggestion is far weaker: the elements of reality that establish the relations that result in our experience should have a "seed", otherwise the emergence of conscious mental activity is a miracle! The vibrating strings (instead of inert atoms)  would be a candidate for the seed that, under adequate conditions, grows into lived experiences. In the current age of epigenetic thinking, we should not take the seed as a miniature being (as thought by the "preformationists" some centuries ago). The resemblance of the seed to the lived experience would be like the the resemblance of the DNA with the phenotype.

Alfredo,

''There are many kinds of intuitions and feelings we cannot convey by means of language. ''

Any body movement intended for expression or unintended as fascial muscle movements expressing our emotions are language forms.  Music and all art forms are language forms. 

There are languages because there is communication/sharing of experience among humans.  Two person dancing a valse are communicating/interacting.

Dear James,

You ask: 

": physicists try to describe, e.g., early stages of the Big Bang. How is this not a metaphysical project?"

I am unclear how that relates to our discussion? I am happy to discover. I was saying that physics does not have 'stuff' as a metaphysical, or in other words ontological, category. It only deals with dynamic relations, as Russell knew and John Worrall and James Ladyman have re-emphasised in the context of contemporary physics. No extra metaphysical issues are needed to study the Big Bang as far as I can see - it is just trying to trace dynamic relations back until there is no way of them going back any further. If by metaphysical you mean untestable, then that does not seem right since people are constantly testing the consistency of background radiation with theory etc. It is much the same as tracing back evolution using fossils that do not actually contain any living material is it not?

And I think you may have misread my point about Russell. He specifically contrasts phenomenal experience with the relations dealt with by science - suggesting that this is the one thing we can know that is not relational but intrinsic, and because we know it a different way we cannot study it with the relational methods of science. I think he was wrong there - to say that 'qualia' are genuinely NON-relational. I did not suggest that qualia are 'mere relation', as I am not sure that that would have any obvious meaning. They have character, but why is that 'intrinsic'. As I indicated above, the problem 'gets complicate' because we constantly conflate issues of type and token and of relational disposition and of instance of operation of disposition and all sorts. My suggestion is that 'proximal' is nearer to what we want to mean. I think part of the problem is the continued use of ideas of object and property inherited from Aristotle that should have been buried long ago. We are not really talking about 'properties of entities' here at all, but perhaps the nature of token events. In a dynamist account, which is basically the scientific account, all these old Aristotelian categories lose their meaning, as James Ladyman illustrates in 'Every Thing Must Go'.

Physics does not give the 'character' of distal relations in this sense but as Louis points out, it is always cashed out in terms of predictions of what character the proximal experiential relation will have, so in this sense character is very much deeply embedded in physics. When we learn the word force we learn it is a 'push'. Without this sort of character base physics books would be incomprehensible.

Alfredo,

The problem with protopansychism for me is combination - which I take to be impossible, or incoherent. Emergence may be a miracle (like everything else) but to my mind Goldstone theorem shows why it is totally unsurprising and unthreatening. I am not sure that emergence is quite the right word since in this context the analysis in terms of asymmetries is top down rather than bottom up so it might be 'immergence', but no matter. I prefer my phonons to your calcium waves but if it is your calcium waves then as I see it these would be strings just as much as photons and electrons - indivisible dynamic connections, or modes, arising with or co-entailed by certain asymmetries in the local environment. They would be rather more upmarket strings - sort of Alpha Romeo strings. They might not come up on the chart as 'fundamental' but more recent charts seem to have dropped that distinction. Their existence might require the ordered collection of masses of more Ford Fiesta strings but these would not be parts of the Alpha Romeo, merely the people in the inside lane that the Alpha could show its true function by overtaking!

Dear Jonathan, I am definitely not thinking of Goldstone or symmetry breaking, since I do not even understand the theorem.

My reasoning moves along a different path that I will try to summarize below. This is work in progress and possibly has many errors.

I begin with structural considerations, later I treat the principles of dynamics (not reproduced here):

Let N be a natural system.

N is described at three spatial scales, N1 (subatomic), N2 (microscopic) and N3 (macroscopic)

The ensemble of all possible states of N is given by the state space of N(1,2,3).

Each N2 state is composed by a selection of N1 states. Each N3 state can be formed by many N2 states, but in a temporal moment only one is actualized.

The elements of N1 are submicroscopic vibrating strings Sn.

Each Sn has a variety of possible states.

Each Sn at a moment of time is in a definite location and has a single qualitative state defined by the pattern of vibration.

Each potential state Sn is equiprobable in the long run.

Each Sn continuously fluctuates between all its possible states.

The elements of N2 are wave packets containing a transient Sn collection.

A microstate is defined by a matrix containing the respective Sn collection.

While the wave packet is in the coherent kind of state, the Sn qualities are superposed.

The quality of a macrostate (Mi) of N is given by the dominant mode of the Sn elements actualized in the respective microstate.

The dominant mode can be narrow or wide, depending on the entropy of the system.

When the entropy increases and the wave packet decoheres, only the diagonal of the matrix is actualized. In this case, the diagonal constitutes a narrow dominant mode.

When entropy decreases and the wave packet remains coherent, all superposed qualities have an opportunity to be expressed in the macrostate, in different degrees of dominance, thus composing a wide dominant mode.

In a wide dominant mode, the mechanism of Order from Fluctuation (Prigogine and Nicolis) is active and allows for a temporal dynamics with the emergence of new qualitites in the macrostate.

Emergence is defined as a qualitative variation in the dominant mode, such that a collection of qualities is no longer expressed, and another collection is expressed.

Does this sketch makes sense to you?

Best Regards,

Alfredo

Dear Stephen and James, in the above post I try to insert qualities at the elementary level of reality, allowing for complex combinations of these qualities at the micro and macrolevel, composing our lived experiences. It is a historical curiosity that Aristotelian and Thomist philosophies thought of Nature as composed of qualitative substances, while the Modern scientific revolution assumed that "primary"qualities exist in Nature, while "secondary"qualities existed only in our minds (conceived as separated from Nature). Goethe was probably the first philosopher to rebel against the idea that our minds could not perceive Nature's qualities. Rudolf Steiner`s essay on the epistemology of Goethe makes a criticism of Kantian epistemology in this regard. In contemporary thought Goethe's perspective reappears in J.J. Gibson, but now considering invariants of motion, not static qualities. I believe these considerations are part of the solution of the Hard Problem. I do not think that strong emergentist and proto-panpsychist strategies conflict. The link below leads to a very nice essay on animal play and a discussion of the Hard Problem, but the weak part is - in my opinion - that the author believes that emergentism and panpsyhism are incompatible.

http://thebaffler.com/past/whats_the_point_if_we_cant_have_fun

Aristotle's theory of visual perception conceived vision as the transmission of an object's form and its reception by the eye and then its further actualization (development) at the rational level into the human mind, this later development creating its understanding.  Aristotle conceived all living organisms as embodied developing forms and form perception was performed by their embodiement  in the mind and their perception and understanding comes from the form development itslelf.  

Descartes and the other philosophers of the enlightment destroyed that theory that the object's form are being transmitted.  They discovered that images are formed on the retinas and that they are very different from the original animal form.  First these images are 2D projections of the light radiations reflected by the 3D object surfaces.  These depend on the way light illuminate the object, the way the viewer is relatively placed with respect to the object.  Closer examination the physiology of the eyes revealed that even this image cannot be transmitted to the brain as it is but has to be transduced by multiple nerves. While our phenomenal impression that we perceive the object's form more or less realistically contrasted with this newly discovered nature of the primary image stimulus which was very dissimilar with the source 3D object surface and what is perceived a 3D like object surface.  Most theoretician posited that the visual system already contain the 3D prototypes and used the image stimulus as cues for selecting the actual 3D prototypes best appropriate.  The visual process problem was conceived a reverse imaging process.  The original structure/form of the 3D surface was assumed mostly destroyed by the imaging process and so the reverse imaging process had to be heavily constrained by built-in 3D a priori knowledge.  

Goethe did a lot of scientific work in the field of comparative anatomy of plant and animals and in colour perception.  Goethe had a original empirical approach.  Instead of trying to infer mathematical theoretical model, Goethe was trying to trough intense visual observation of plants, of animals to gradually form an internal refined organ of perception so that the phenomena become intelligible.  It is very much in line with Aristotle's conception of vision.  Kant was arguing that science could not go beyond appearance nor human reason. Goethe took the appearances seriously and claims to get inside the appearance without theoretical model.  His Delicate Empirist method was a training of the sense for the phenomena structure being directly perceived. His studied of the growth of plant was an amazing piece of work.  Although Goethe's way of science did not get momentum, it inspired the phenomenologist movement as well as many German biologists and psychologists.

Von Uexkull took  Leibnitz and Kant  to evolutionary biology.  The organism physiology defined an interacting apparatus with corresponding aspects of the environment. The organism and the aspects of the environment interacting forms an umwelt. An umwelt is the whole phenomenal world of an organism. Nothing outside of the umwelt interfere with a given organism type.  Each organism defined a particular umwelt and the whole ecosystem form a kind of inter-penetrating umwelt networks. Each organism is an action loop within the umwelt.  Biological evolution will stabilized into the physiology of animals the stable relationships.  Biological evolution become the a phenomenal exploration of the phenomenal world and animal physiology converges towards relational invariant.

Ernst Mach also contributed to the conception of animal body as based on special geometrical framework custom made for the type of interaction each organism has.  Mach supplement the Kantian analysis limited to euclidean geometry a priori and extended it to novel idea in physics at the time that geometry was not intrinsic to nature but was itself custom made to the empirical domain under investigation.  

In psychology, the study of perceptual form, especially visual form was carried out by the Gestaltists.  The forms were not any more be the result of bottom up inference.  Like Leibniz and Goethe, the most global aspects of forms were assumed to emerge first. The perceptual process was not conceived as an inverse imaging process but as form emerging process into the stimulus as sensed.  

Influenced by Mach, the Gestaltists and J.J. Gibson and Ian Koenderink scale-space approach, I conceived a science of image as a hiearchical tree of all image structure.  I conceived the evolution of biological visual system as a convergence towards top down detection system whose structure converged towards this science of image.  Surprisingly I came to conception similar to Aristotle, Haeckle, Goethe, Von Uexkull which I discovered later.

Great post, Louis. I hope that by now you have found that Kantian epistemology still belongs to the Modern scientific paradigm that refuses the reality of natural qualities. This paradigm is probably one of the roots of the Hard Problem. 

In Criticism of Pure Reason, Kant advances his well-accepted (but ultimately untenable) theory that percepts (phenomena)  are composed by a priori and imagined forms, while experience (interaction with Nature) contributes only with non-qualified matter. One of the problems with this conception is that we do not have a priori forms for all sensory qualities! The most serious issue, in my opinion, was raised by Steiner in his book about Goethe's epistemology: Kant simply does not allow for natural forms to be perceived. Heidegger also has ideas in this regard, but they are involved by a cloud of linguistic pyrotechnics.

Considering these problems, I am tending to agree with people that propose  Qualitative Physics (e.g.  at the link below), one that complements the Modern paradigm.

It is also interesting to remember that Hegel, in his Science of Logics, possibly under the influence of Goethe, tried to conciliate the quantitative with the qualitative, and then coined the term "quantum", which means a quantity with quality, or a quality with quantity. I suspect this was the origin of the term that later was used as "Quantum Mechanics".

Brian Flanagan also discussed physical qualities in his now-classic 1999 paper (I published the first version in the Brazilian journal "Informação e Cognição"; the revised version appeared at Neuroquantology: http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/20/20). He tries to define qualities in the context of Quantum Chromodynamics and Gauge Theory, which are difficult subjects for the majority of us. His approach has the advantage of being formulated in the domain of fundamental physics, while I suspect that the proposal of Qualitative Physics became a computational affair, like Computational Ontology.

Dear Alfredo,

Your proposal raises a very large number of issues to debate - enough for about six threads - so I will just have to touch on one or two. I looked up Greene and found a 2005 video on string theory for dummies. Two things stood out for me. The first was the irony of his prediction that CERNE might corroborate string theory. My understanding is that the most significant aspect of all the work at CERNE is not the corroboration of a boson a bit like that predicted by Higgs, but maybe not quite what he suggested. It is the complete failure to corroborate the predictions about supersymmetry central to the motivation of string theory. 

If supersymmetry goes down we might still think that the idea that the fundamental elements of nature are strings rather than 'particles' is worth retaining. However, the other thing that struck me about Greene's presentation was that it made use of a sort of naive realist approach to envisaging indivisible dynamic elements that either indicated that he thought his audience was really dim and could be fobbed off with phoney ideas or that he himself did not realise the phoneyness of such an approach. His charismatic delivery also left me distinctly uneasy. If we already accept that our three spatial dimensions are constructs of our minds I find it hard to see the point in describing the extra degrees of freedom found in fundamental modes of excitation as further 'spatial dimensions' using fanciful diagrams. I come away feeling that calling fundamental units strings rather than particles is even worse than calling them particles since we had all got used to the idea that 'particle' bore no relation to our intuitive concept of a tiny billiard ball. Certainly, there is an oscillatory form to the underlying mathematics, but tio call this 'vibration' I think is something of a travesty.

Leaving that aside, and calling fundamental units whatever you like, the point I wanted to get across is that Goldstone modes are just as much strings or particles or modes of excitation (all the same thing) as those inside atoms. And in fact the ones inside atoms are of no real interest since they just stay there, Even the electrons we might be interested in are ones that do not belong to atoms but to molecular bonds or more complex modes in proteins or supramolecular protein complexes, and in conducting materials, macroscopic objects. The idea that 'strings' are always 'tiny' does not seem right to me. There is no actual 'size' even if you call them particles. There is just a de Broglie wavelength and a domain of high probability density - like an orbital. For valency electrons in metals the domain occupies the entire chunk of metal - it does not belong to any particular atom. 

What I am getting at is that if we want a principled division of scales, it need not involve subatomic at all. It should not be arbitrary, but rather should be based on some sort of dynamic relation to other scales. The Goldstone modes of organised structures seem to me to be ideal for this sort of relation, since we can consider relations between wavelengths, domains and the presence of other modes of excitation in these domains. The maths of Goldstone theorem is a little bit hairy but the basic message is very simple and to my mind intuitive. The fundamental dynamic units of reality are modes of excitation with a mathematical structure of oscillation. Structural asymmetries in condensed matter provide new ways of oscillating and Goldstone theorem shows why these can be considered modes of excitation, or particles, or strings, like the 'fundamental' ones, but with some rather odd parameters. The Higgs field idea derives from the same theorem. 

In short, I am not impressed by string theory but if we want to call fundamental units strings then to me it makes much more biological sense to go for ones that live at a biological scale rather than the subatomic ones that do not even get involved in chemistry, let alone biology. 

The other thing maybe I will tackle just now is the thing about qualities in nature. I think Kant was right here, although I do not think it was his idea - it goes back surely to Athens if not Elea and is the basis of the 'absence of windows' in Leibniz's monads. Modern science holds that qualitative, rather than causal dynamic, features of the outside world are not available to us, not for reasons of metaphysical attitude, but for reasons of empirical demonstration. Perhaps the happiest demonstration is the recent provision of cochlea implants for congenitally deaf people who have never heard a sound. These people can now hear sounds. But there does not need to be any acoustic waves in the outside world for this to occur. The implant can be provided with electronic signals synthesised using a speech simulation programme and they will hear speech. The qualitative features were in the person's brain all the time and can be retrieved for Platonic 'reminiscence' just with electronic signals. A simpler example is getting ringing in the ears with too much aspirin.

However, I do not think that means that we do not have access to qualities - we obviously do. My contention is that the qualities we have access to are always determined by immediate or proximal relation to internal signals. These signals correlate with the outside world and are 'about' the outside world but the qualia belong to the immediate relation of subject to signals. Nothing else is consistent with everything from sciatica to transcranial magnetic stimulation. And this where I think I see things differently from the structure you propose, Alfredo. Within the head we need one or more dynamic units that are subjects and we also need some signals, that are not themselves the subject, for the subject to relate to dynamically. So I cannot see the 'whole system' being the subject. I agree with the nesting relations you propose in general principle but for me this nesting must be based on dynamic relation. The rich pattern of qualitative features must relate dynamically to something within whose domain they fall. Otherwise we have the problem that Russell was inconsistent on - the nesting could not lead to any reporting if it is not a causal relation. Put another way I deny that 'there is anything it is like to be a bat', in the way that Hume did. There can only be something it is like to be a bat in hell, or in a cave - it is not being that is like something but relating.

Prigogine was brilliant but it may be ironic that both of us can quote him for quite different reasons. I also suspect he was nuts half the time, so we should be a bit careful!

Jonathan: "My contention is that the qualities we have access to are always determined by immediate or proximal relation to internal signals."

I am in strong agreement with this claim. This is why the retinoid system is able to generate controlled hallucinations as demonstrated in the SMTT experiments.

Dear Jonathan, I reply to some points of your high-level last two posts:

"If supersymmetry goes down we might still think that the idea that the fundamental elements of nature are strings rather than 'particles' is worth retaining""

Alfredo: Yes, I am interested in this idea, not in supersymmetry.

"If we already accept that our three spatial dimensions are constructs of our minds I find it hard to see the point in describing the extra degrees of freedom found in fundamental modes of excitation as further 'spatial dimensions' using fanciful diagrams. ""

Alfredo: An abstract state space, of course! Just a model of a complex reality.

"Goldstone modes are just as much strings or particles or modes of excitation (all the same thing) as those inside atoms. And in fact the ones inside atoms are of no real interest since they just stay there, Even the electrons we might be interested in are ones that do not belong to atoms but to molecular bonds or more complex modes in proteins or supramolecular protein complexes, and in conducting materials, macroscopic objects. The idea that 'strings' are always 'tiny' does not seem right to me. There is no actual 'size' even if you call them particles. There is just a de Broglie wavelength and a domain of high probability density - like an orbital. For valency electrons in metals the domain occupies the entire chunk of metal - it does not belong to any particular atom.""

Alfredo: Now that you explained Goldstone to me (thanks!), I agree that these modes do exist at different levels.

"What I am getting at is that if we want a principled division of scales, it need not involve subatomic at all. It should not be arbitrary, but rather should be based on some sort of dynamic relation to other scales. The Goldstone modes of organised structures seem to me to be ideal for this sort of relation, since we can consider relations between wavelengths, domains and the presence of other modes of excitation in these domains. The maths of Goldstone theorem is a little bit hairy but the basic message is very simple and to my mind intuitive. The fundamental dynamic units of reality are modes of excitation with a mathematical structure of oscillation. "

Alfredo: Then it's OK with me, but please see below.

"In short, I am not impressed by string theory but if we want to call fundamental units strings then to me it makes much more biological sense to go for ones that live at a biological scale rather than the subatomic ones that do not even get involved in chemistry, let alone biology."

Alfredo: Are you suggesting an ontology (theory of reality) based on biology?

"The other thing maybe I will tackle just now is the thing about qualities in nature. I think Kant was right here, although I do not think it was his idea - it goes back surely to Athens if not Elea and is the basis of the 'absence of windows' in Leibniz's monads. Modern science holds that qualitative, rather than causal dynamic, features of the outside world are not available to us, not for reasons of metaphysical attitude, but for reasons of empirical demonstration. "

Alfredo: Just look at a rose and perceive its form and smell...when you do, you refute Kant! Heidegger used this example against Leibniz, but although I enjoyed reading the book (The Principle of Reason) it seems to me that he did not realize that the naked king was Kant!

"However, I do not think that means that we do not have access to qualities - we obviously do. "

Alfredo: Exactly! This is the point. Here I am not claiming for Empiricism (although I did in a paper 15 years ago), but just for the possibility of a natural quality being perceived.

"My contention is that the qualities we have access to are always determined by immediate or proximal relation to internal signals. These signals correlate with the outside world and are 'about' the outside world but the qualia belong to the immediate relation of subject to signals. Nothing else is consistent with everything from sciatica to transcranial magnetic stimulation. "

Alfredo: The internal signals may be opaque (bringing to consciousness their own message), or transparent to the external quality (bringing to consciousness the message from the distal stimulus; the latter option is what Arnold says in his definition of consciousness; I don't know why he agreed with your last post!)

"And this where I think I see things differently from the structure you propose, Alfredo. Within the head we need one or more dynamic units that are subjects and we also need some signals, that are not themselves the subject, for the subject to relate to dynamically. So I cannot see the 'whole system' being the subject. "

Alfredo: I am afraid I did not make this proposal. I distinguish, with Husserl and others, the subject (that I consider to be a sentient unit before being a cognitive one) and the object (the content - episode - constructed by the brain using information from the environment).

"I agree with the nesting relations you propose in general principle but for me this nesting must be based on dynamic relation."

Alfredo: Dynamics is scheduled to be the next chapter in that the project.

"The rich pattern of qualitative features must relate dynamically to something within whose domain they fall."

Alfredo: Yes, of course!

"Otherwise we have the problem that Russell was inconsistent on - the nesting could not lead to any reporting if it is not a causal relation."

Alfredo: I agreed with your criticism of Russell in the Journal of Consciousness Studies discussion list. No "intrinsic" relations, all relations are relational.

"Put another way I deny that 'there is anything it is like to be a bat', in the way that Hume did. There can only be something it is like to be a bat in hell, or in a cave - it is not being that is like something but relating."

Alfredo: Yes, I think you refer to the metaphysical concept of Self that Hume criticized.

"Prigogine was brilliant but it may be ironic that both of us can quote him for quite different reasons. I also suspect he was nuts half the time, so we should be a bit careful!"

Alfredo: Then I will quote what he wrote during that half!

Best,

Alfredo

Alfredo,

''One of the problems with this conception is that we do not have a priori forms for all sensory qualities! ''

Psychologists studying young babies developments have uncomvered a massive amount of information about all the a priori cognitive capacities we are born with.  Young reptile can see and walk immediately after they are borned.  If it is not a priori knowledge, what is it.  All the fundamental visual structure being perceived are built-in a priori knowledge of our visual system.  I am not talking about a piano but about trees, human bodies, faces, moving object, etc, etc.  It might have been a subject of debate in 1781 but not anymore.

Dear Louis, please look at Kant´s book to clarify what he meant by apriori forms and which ones he identified and classified. You will note that even basic geometrical forms are absent. 

Young baby´s cognitive capabilities are well explained as the result of an epigenetic process that builds on genetic information and interaction with the environment (beginning, of course, inside the mother´s body).

Genetic structures are physical structures that contain Nature´s qualities and this is precisely the point I am making. If we do not allow for the existende of qualities in Nature, how could a biological system make use of them?

The traditional answer of Descartes and Kant is that qualitative forms do not belong to Nature, but to a separated immaterial Mind. In this case, you cannot consider apriori forms as being biological! They are a transcendental structure that cannot be scientifically studied.

Alfredo: "The internal signals may be opaque (bringing to consciousness their own message), or transparent to the external quality (bringing to consciousness the message from the distal stimulus[1]; the latter option is what Arnold says in his definition of consciousness; I don't know why he agreed with your last post![2])"

1. I'm puzzled here. I think of "opaque" and "transparent" in the context of internal (brain) signals as referring to what the signals represent in our phenomenal experience, not to the signals as such. An opaque representation is consciously experienced as merely a representation of something real. A transparent representation is consciously experienced as the real thing itself, out there in the world. For example, the hallucinated triangle in the SMTT experiment is experienced as a real triangle in front of the subject, so it is a transparent representation. 

2. My definition of consciousness is this:

Consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world from a privileged egocentric perspective 

I have claimed that the global pattern of autaptic-cell activity in retinoid space realizes my definition of consciousness. In my theory, this activity in retinoid space is the proximal signal mentioned by Jonathan, so I agree with his statement.

Dear Alfredo,

I fear we are getting in a muddle and it is one that people rather rarely get out of. But we can try. The position that Arnold and I are talking on qualitative, or phenomenal properties always arise proximally within the brain, is not open to negotiation because you can demonstrate its necessity 1001 ways. In fact you can work out by reductio that it has to be true. 'Just look at a rose' is not an argument. If I look at a rose the dynamic dispositional property of the rose to reflect more long wavelength than short wavelength light gives rise to a sense of a red quality in my head. If I were a bull, being colourblind despite the matador's cape, it would not. If there are any phenomenal fetures in the vicinity of the rose I have no reason to think they will in any way resemble (to some component of the rose presumably) this sense of redness. Qualitatative features in the sense of colours and smells are always and only proximal.

As another example, mice have been bred with a wide range of olfactory receptor variants. When given various stimuli - I forget the detail so let us say 10 flowers including your rose - they will not agree on which smells are similar. If the quality was a property of the rose then it would either be similar to a second flower or not. But for these mice there is no fact of the matter. Similarity for mouse A is similarity in a dynamic dispositional property to give the same proximal quality in the brain of mouse A. There is no such similarity for mouse B because the dispositional property is a property of a combination of the rose's volatile oils and the receptors of a particular mouse. The 'qualities out there in the world' approach is dead and buried. 

I do not understand the argument that we do not have all the forms a priori within us. It is not necessary that we should be able to name these forms or know anything about how they relate to other forms but the forms appear to us as soon as we are exposed to the dynamic dispositional powers of the relevant objects. There is no need for these forms to be encoded in the genes like a list of shapes needed for a maths syllabus. All that is needed is a set of pathways that can give rise to a different combination of signals for each form. For shapes the signals can encode square or circle of triangle and much more complex forms like oak leaf or E-type Jaguar. 

There is certainly a subtlety to this because for speech sounds we can lose the ability to perceive certain sound differences if these are not meaningful in our language. This has been studied for children with Basque, Spanish and Catalan parents or a mixture. Teenagers can re-learn the missing sounds with great difficulty if the skill is not used by age 4, so the form is not lost, just inaccessible. The situation is very closely analogous to the antibody production system in immunity, where all possible form options are covered by random generation of receptors but discrimination can be further improved by further rounds of random generation of refinements. 

From what I have read Descartes is actually the best on all this. He was an experimental biologist. Leibniz and Kant never got to grips with internal mechanisms so some of what they said was based on rather dubious abstract modelling I suspect. I cannot see any evidence for there being a deficiency in form repertoire. These qualitative forms do not exist outside the proximal relation that hosts them.

Dear Arnold, please think about the following drops of philosophy.

Aristotle wrote that our knowledge of natural beings is a knowledge of form. When we perceive an object. e.g. a rose, we perceive its form. We do not perceive its matter (what is it made of).

Kant wrote that our knowledge is composed of apriori forms (apriori=previous and independent of experience) and empirical matter. As the forms are those that come with our immaterial mind, we cannot perceive natural forms or natural qualities. The quality of our perceptions comes from the immaterial mind ("transcendental ego") itself.

Arnold wrote that "consciousness is a transparent brain representation of the world...". Are you Aristotelian or Kantian? I claim that you are Aristotelian in this regard, because the transparency of the signals (representations) assures that what is perceived is the natural form with its qualities. "Transparency" means that the proximal signal does not impose its own form/quality on the message, but constitutes a neutral medium that transmits the form/quality of the distal stimulus.

In a footnote to my chapter in our book, I wrote:The dispute of epistemological Idealism against Realism may lead to a long series of philosophical arguments. I assume, with Trehub (this volume, Chapter 7), that our perceptual representations are most frequently transparent, revealing veridical features of the world.When looking at a street scene through the glass window we usually assume that the medium is transparent, and what we see is veridical. It would not be impossible that the glass is actually an opaque, high tech screen and that the street scene is generated by a computer. Even though it may be a great scientific fiction, in everyday life this possibility is not plausible." 

As argued by Descartes in his famous "dream argument", representations can also be opaque, allowing the apreehension of their own message, as in dreams and hallucinations. Descartes believed that God is sufficiently good not to let us be fooled all the time. Kant, however, does not appeal to God and mistakenly takes Descartes's lesson as implying that ALL mental representations are opaque, and therefore we could not know things themselves. 

I do not deny that our knowledge of the world is always mediated by proximal signals and that sometimes (dreams, hallucinations) these signals are opaque. However, I do not fall in the fallacy of concluding that all proximal signals are opaque and that we can never perceive natural forms and their qualities. Many proximal signals are transparent and afford us perceiving the forms/qualities of things themselves.

If we were not able to perceive natural forms/qualities, how could we know the huge diversity of forms/qualities we do know? We would need an infinite reservoir of apriori forms in our transcendental egos, but this would still not be a complete solution of the problem. The "frame problem" of AI remains: how do we know when to use one of the apriori forms we have to interpret a given empirical stimulus? These are philosophical dead ends that fortunately do not have practical implications for us, because we do perceive natural forms and their qualities.

When I was a graduate student around 1985, I had one Kantian and one Gibsonian professors. During a class of the Gibsonian professor, one colleague influenced by the first professor  tried to argue for a Kantian view. The professor became so angry that he left the room, slamming the door loudly. I was sitting close to the door and the loud sound in my ears made me realize that the Gibsonian view could not be false. This was also the view of many great philosophers, including Aristotle, the Scholastics, Goethe, Husserl, Russell and Popper.

The only other bit that we seem to be in trouble over, Alfredo, is the distinction of subject within the brain from the signals that are bringing to it information about the world. In your earlier schema you had a system N and talked of a range of states of N within making this distinction. If you make the distinction later then that is fine. Another point I would make in favour of Goldstone modes is that since they are Bose modes their domain can be co-extensive with the domain of all the signals that they are to be informed by. Rather than having to be 'bumped into' as for Fermionic matter modes the Golstone mode can 'emperipolese' (an immunology term) or 'swallow up' the signals it is to experience - which seems to me to give the sort of nesting structure you are wanting.

And I think the nesting has to have this sort of dynamic relational flavour. I worry about the idea of 'state space' which reminds me of Churchland. To me this is not reductionist science, even if he thinks it is, because it is not dynamics. 'All the ways things can be' is no good. What we want is 'all the ways relations can occur'.

Dear Jonathan, it would be great if you could collaborate with me in this effort (or if I could collaborate with you, since you are more advanced).

Please take a look at the figure below, this is the consciousness system I would like to arrive at. The left side is the experiencer, the right side is the experienced content/object.

Since the superb reconstruction of Boltzmann´s work by the Ehrenfests, the state space is widely used in physics for a description of a structure of a system. It does not explain dynamics. I think the Churchlands (mostly Patricia, in the book Neurophilosophy, and in her book with Sejnowski, The Computational Brain) made a good job in the past, introducing this tool in consciousness research, but I am afraid they conceived it in a physicalist reductionist fashion, aiming to model representations that emerge in neural networks without taking into consideration the subjective side of consciousness (the entity who experiences the representations). A better usage was made by Gardenfors in his MIT Press book, Conceptual Spaces. He explicitly provided the modeling of sensory qualia.

In regard of your second note, I can agree with the idea. It seems close to the claim that our percepts are somehow entangled with the perceived stimulus. Of course, this positions counts favorably to the "Extended Mind" hypothesis, but I suspect not to an ""Extended Consciousness" view, since phenomenal experience occurs to the experiencer and this entity is not widespread in the world. What do you say?

Dear Alfredo,

I am happy to keep debating but I am not sure what I have to offer in terms of collaboration as of now. I continue to learn and I put what I learn on my website. Ver very few people are interested in this level of analysis, as you know, so I tend not to go to the effort of writing for journals whose reviewers fail to understand. I have had too much of that in immunology!

Alfredo,,

''The "frame problem" of AI remains: how do we know when to use one of the apriori forms we have to interpret a given empirical stimulus? ''

The a priori forms are not store explicitly in the mind.  The mind is a capacity to detect the form.  The mind has form detection capacity which is an tacit or implicit form.  Do you know how anthomologist or botanists identified an insect or a plant.  They proceed along a decision tree.  Form detection is biologically done that way, along decision tree and that detection tree is the way forms are tacitly  built-in in the Mind.  

There is no contradiction between Kant, Aristotle and Gibson and Von Uexkull. Gibson did not have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge Von Uexkull.  The process of form detection along a detection tree sequence is equivalent to a re-emergence of the form, it is a form ontogeny and the detection tree is a Kantian schemata tree. The forms are Gibson invariants and the pick-up of invariant is done by the schemata tree.

That sounds a good way of putting it Louis.

Dear Louis, how does the botanist identify a plant if he/she does not - according to Kant -perceive the form of the plant? The problems of AI are the same problems of Kantian philosophy.

Gibson invariants are by no means Kantian apriori forms. Invariants imply direct perception of the patterns of movement in Nature.

Aristotle, Von Uexkull and Gibson are fully compatible. Kant is not. The transcendental ego is a non-material cognitive mind that contains apriori forms. Perception for Kant is a process of activation of these forms by empirical matter. The forms of things thamselves and the forms of movement itself are not perceived; it is only the empirical  matter that activates the apriori forms.

In contemporary thought, the idea of *epigenetic* schemata is compatible with Gibsonian direct perception, as originally proposed by M. Arbib, and also by yourself in your thesis. Epigenetic schemata is the product of a biological system interacting with the environment. You cannot identify them with Kantian schemata, because Kantian forms belong to a non-biological mind outside the domain of natural evolution. They are fixed forms, completely independent of the living body and interaction with the environment.

Alfredo: "If we were not able to perceive natural forms/qualities, how could we know the huge diversity of forms/qualities we do know? We would need an infinite reservoir of apriori forms in our transcendental egos, but this would still not be a complete solution of the problem."

A reasonable question, and one that I addressed in The Cognitive Brain. For a succinct explanation of how the cognitive brain does the job, see The Pragmatics of Cognition and Creativity, pp.300 - 302, in "Overview and Reflections"on  my RG page. It turns out that we don't need an infinite reservoir of a priori forms. Is this a refutation of Kant? I ask because I am on uncertain ground in the arena of philosophy.

Alfredo,

'H'ow does the botanist identify a plant if he/she does not - according to Kant -perceive the form of the plant? ''

I was making an analogy. I did identified dragon Flies  in a naturalist camp when I was 13.  You use a book that guide you in a step by step method structured exactly as the dragon flies are classified.  Step 1: If this part is a go to question 2a, if the part is b then go to question 2b and so on.  Kant did not explain where the schemata detection tree comes from.  We know it was developed, like everything biological, in biological evolution.  Already Schelling in his Nature's philosophy went that route and Von Uexkull following other germain biologists such Baer and Haeckell which were all Kantian and Goethean.  Haeckel was the first in modern time (Aristotle was the first) to propose a tree of life.  He did so using observation and his artistic visual skills.  His visual system phylogenic schemata tree (see Ph.D: The Perception of the Image World) did most of the job without him knowing.

''Gibson invariants are by no means Kantian apriori forms. Invariants imply direct perception of the patterns of movement in Nature.''

The forms in physics are called  Invariant and it is related to the modern concept of geometry based on symmetry transformation.  Invariant is a new name for ''order of nature'', what does not change.  A ''direction perception'' is a identification process , the form of the identification process is known a Kantian a priori, its actualization is done every systolic period.

''Aristotle, Von Uexkull and Gibson are fully compatible. Kant is not. ''  Von Uexkull is well known to be extending Kant to biology.  Cassirer and Heidegger saw that. He was also a Leibnizian and Goethean.

In general I see similarities and I am not very good at seeing the differences. And my interpretation of these philosophers is very personal.

No Arnold, this is not a refutation of Kant because he did not argued for infinite apriori forms. On the contrary, he identified very few. Your refutation of Kant lies in your requirement of transparency of representations. If representations are transparent, we can know something about the things themselves. 

Dear Louis, a personal philosophical synthesis is valid and desirable, as long as the differences between the philosophers are taken into account. I have been criticizing you on your interpretation of Kant just because you do not mention important differences. As long as you recognize them, your proposal has merit.

Alfredo,

I am interested in understanding.  For that I have explored different engineering fields, mathematic and physics, experimental psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience, ... and philosophy and the history of ideas and civilisation.  I am not a scholar of any science , even less in philosophy.  I did not sail blind.  I went where the know thyself guided me, where my guts told me to go and a lot of what I discovered, I had already intuitively discovered myself.  But a sholar, I am not.

Alfredo: "Although you are not wrong in saying that brain cells somehow cause feeling experiences, I think you still did not explain why. First it is necessary to describe what is a feeling[1], and second to describe the kind of activity of brain cells that instantiate them[2].

1. What is a feeling? A feeling is a transparent brain representation of the world (including the world within one's body envelope) from a privileged egocentric perspective.

2. What kind of brain activity instantiates feelings? It is the brain activity in retinoid space that instantiates feelings. The hallucination of a triangle in motion (as in the SMTT experiment) is a feeling. The experience of inner speech is a feeling. The pain of a headache is a feeling. The experience of love is a feeling. The experience of wanting to understand consciousness is a feeling. The experience of reading this comment is a feeling. Each is caused by its unique pattern of pre-conscious exteroceptive/interoceptive sensory excitation that is projected into egocentric retinoid space where it is experienced as quale somewhere in spatiotemporal relation to one's self (subjectivity). That is my theory.

Dear Arnold,

1) A feeling is a non-representational state. It belongs to the subjective side of consciousness. It is a state of the "I". A representation belongs to the objective side of consciousness. It is one of the contents of a conscious episode. As you have argued, representations are placed in egocentric space. Feelings may not be located; where iare my feelings of happiness or sadness?

2) Representations can be instantiated in digital machines and operated by them. Complex mathematical calculus can be made by a computer.  When representations are instantiated in these machines, they are probably not conscious. When our mental representations are conscious, I claim that there is a felling anchoring them. However, the brain mechanisms that instantiates feelings cannot be exactly the same that instantiates representations, because both mental phenomena are different.

This is difficult philosophical discussion, but one that is necessary for the conceptual foundations of a science of consciousness. For the moment, I will only make a critical remark about your identification of representation and feeling. In your first point, you say that consciousness is representational, while in your second point you say that the mechanism of consciousness when excited generates feelings. Both statements together imply that feeling = representation. My claim is that although both appear together in our conscious experiences, they are different and generated by different brain mechanisms. I will stop here because I still do not know how to argue in a  convincing phenomenological basis for the distinction of representation and feeling. I already had this difficulty in a discussion with other philosophers and scientists, but was not able to explain the distinction that for me is intuitive.

Alfredo: "As you have argued, representations are placed in egocentric space. Feelings may not be located; where are my feelings of happiness or sadness?[1] ...... When our mental representations are conscious, I claim that there is a felling anchoring them. However, the brain mechanisms that instantiates feelings cannot be exactly the same that instantiates representations, because both mental phenomena are different.[2]"

1. Your feelings of happiness or sadness are located somewhere within the spatial envelope of your body in your egocentric space. If you do not experience them as a part of you (within you), to whom do the feelings belong?

2. I grant that there is a qualitative difference between a conscious representation of a particular visual object (say a face) and a conscious representation of a particular affect (say happiness), but both are caused by the projection of particular patterns of neuronal excitation into one's egocentric space -- the visual object generated and projected from the preconscious mechanisms in the visual modality, the affect generated and projected from the preconscious mechanisms in the limbic system.

I understand your intuition, but you have to make a principled argument as to why conscious affective representations must be essentially different from other kinds of conscious representations.

Dear Arnold, thanks for the responses.

Intuitively, a representation is a map, image or symbolic notation that refers to an object or process. There is a duality in all representations: the representation itself and the thing or process that is represented (there are names for the two in Peircean Semeiotics, but I am not sure about them).

A feeling is a wavelike experience that the subject has, without the need of referring to another thing or event. In this sense, a feeling is a presentation, a sensation or a (conscious) emotional event that affects the subject in present time. This concept is clear to me, but unfortunately important theorists and experimenters as Damasio and LeDoux are still attached to the view that feelings are representations of the body (I made a RG question in this regard: "Are Feelings Representations of the Body?").

Besides experiencing feelings, we can also represent them, but "the map is not the territory". We give names to kinds of feeling, but uttering a name or researching with it in working memory/inner speech is not the same as experiencing the feeling itself. 

There are also cognitive feelings, which should be distinguished from cognitive representations. An example of a cognitive feeling is when, responding to a questionneire, soon after reading a question you feel that you know the answer, before you formulate the answer.

One of the reasons why the Hard Problem is difficult to solve is because phenomenal experience includes all these phenomena: emotional feelings, cognitive feelings, cognitive representations (maps, images, symbols), and representations of feelings.  There are also unconscious representations and emotions that influence conscious dynamics. I have claimed that only feelings are necessarily conscious (another question I raised in RG is about this issue - "How Could Feelings be Unconscious?")

On the one hand, as (I think that) these mental phenomena are phenomenologically different, the mechanisms supporting each one should be different. It is not plausible to say, for instance, that activation of the retinoid system is responsible for them all. On the other hand, as phenomenal experience is first-person and non-representational states are difficult to define linguistically, I do not feel myself able of convincing you that they are different.

If the reader of this message has a suggestion to help me, please post!

Alfredo: "... feeling is a presentation, a sensation or a (conscious) emotional event that affects the subject in present time."

Affective feelings are transparent representations (in retinoid space?) of particular kinds of bodily sensations. In this sense they are presentations just as the transparent representation of these words (in retinoid space?) is a presentation for you that affects you in present time.

Dear Arnold, it seems that I failed in my attempt to distinguish presentations and representations...You are in good company: Damasio and LeDoux also think that feelings are representations of body states...

Dear Alfredo,

As I see it, any transparent representation must be a presentation. Unless Damasio and Le Doux distinguish between representations and presentations, I agree with you that they are not explaining conscious affective feelings.

Dear Arnold, thanks for the message. I see light at the end of the tunnel. We are moving in a complex conceptual issue that surprisingly has not - to my knowledge - being addresed by philosophers or scientists. There is one book by Benny Shanon (The Presentational and the Representational; see review at the below link) that did not receive the deserved attention. I discussed with him personally 15 years ago. Now searching the web I found that the book has a second edition (http://www.imprint.co.uk/books/9781845401115.html) by Imprint Academic (the same publishers of the Journal of Consciousness Studies). Shanon conceives the presentational mostly as related to the interaction with the world (enactive) than subjective feelings (my approach).

Returning to Damasio, I think that although he has given a central role to feelings in his concept of consciousness, his concept of feeling is philosophically naive (as LeDoux's). It seems to me that these scientists read so many texts of philosophers of mind where mental content is conceived as "representation" that they taked it for granted! They did not realize that the concept of representation is dependent on assumptions of Modern philosophy abandoned by contemporary philosophers who adopted a phenomenological approach. They took a philosophical boat that is making water all around.

You suggestion that transparent representations are presentations is very inspiring to me. It opens the possibility of overcoming the apparent dichotomy between presentation and representation. Thanks again!

http://www.rogerbissell.com/id11eee.html

Dear All, I would like to invite you to comment on the chapters of the book "The Unity of Brain, Mind and World: Current Perspectives on a Science of Consciousness" (see the Google Books link below). The online journal Quantum Biosystems will publish a special issue dedicated to the book (see the Call for Papers below), including a $1000 prize for the best contribution. I have one exemplar of the book (printed volume) to give to a researcher compromised to write a review of the whole book (ten chapters). My chapter  (Ch. 10) is not in Google Books, but I can send the PDF privately to colleagues who would like to write a review of this chapter (Louis Brassard, would you like to publish your comments?). A first review of the book appeared in Mens Sana Monographs (see below).

http://books.google.com.br/books?id=GY5tAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=mind+brain+world+lehmann+pereira&source=bl&ots=sv9opreKKk&sig=yD5kBfQaHDFHfClpE__xIh1cExw&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ei=794_VJLcJojygwT7h4G4Dw&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=mind%20brain%20world%20lehmann%20pereira&f=false

In my July 23 post on this thread I wrote:

"As I see it, any transparent representation must be a presentation."

My statement should be qualified as follows:

Any transparent egocentric representation must be a presentation.

Yes, Arnold, the "egocentric" makes the difference. In this case, the presentation is a presentation for a subject. You may also consider the subject as implicit. As Maturana wrote (I don't have the reference), "all that is stated, is stated by someone". Then (Alfredo's paraphrase) "all that is presented, is presented to someone"

The egocentric viewpoint is a key issue. So we should ask what is "ego", what algorithms are the base of it or how do neuronal sub-nets interact to create it. If these question(s) are answered the rest will be easy.

Dear Wilfried, in my view the ego (or I, or Self, etc.) is the feeling entity. Not a fixed structure, but a dynamical system that involves the whole body, as proposed in the attached papers

Many thanks Alfredo,

I will read your papers as soon as possible. If I am right, the rest will be easy ... I hope.

The rest is discussed in this forthcoming book chapter (see book cover attached):

Can Qualitative Biophysics Solve the Hard Problem?

Alfredo Pereira Jr, Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal and Massimo Pregnolato

Abstract

A solution to the Hard Problem formulated by Chalmers should include a biophysical non-reductive explanation of the qualities of conscious experience (‘subjective qualia’). This task is nearly impossible to be performed in the context of Modern Physics, since most influential scientists and philosophers conceived such qualities (color, sound, smell, taste) as being mental phenomena without a physical counterpart. We propose to extend the concept of dual-aspect state introduced by Ram Vimal into the concept of potential qualitative aspects in fundamental physics, allowing for its expression in biophysical systems under adequate conditions. We conceptually model a structure, the N-dimensional dual-aspect state space of Nature, having elementary waveforms as the qualitative building blocks, and three dynamical phases: a) coherent wavefunctions, b) decoherent and c) recoherent macrostates. In coherent wavefunctions composing microstates, elementary waveforms are superposed and entangled. In decoherent macrostates, the Heisenberg matrix is reduced to the diagonal, generating - according to the principles of chemistry - one macro (not conscious) qualitative state. In living systems, chemical processes combine in a self-organizing manner, keeping the system at low entropy states and making room for the emergence of new structures and functions by means of an order from fluctuation mechanism. In the brain, the instantiation of macrostates is spatially distributed and unconscious. Brain recoherent macrostates are formed by means of the operation of quantum computing gates, and can be expressed by a hypermatrix (or hypertensor), corresponding to the binding of qualitative features in one integrated conscious episode. In the theoretical context of systems theory, the global recoherent state would correspond to a phase in Scott Kelso’s framework of metastable dynamics. In such a dynamics, each recoherent macrostate alternates in a time scale of nanoseconds with decoherent macrostates, but we consciously perceive only the sequence of nanosecond recoherent states, which appear to us in continuous chunks with the duration of at least one second each.

Alfredo: "In my view the ego (or I, or Self, etc.) is the feeling entity. Not a fixed structure, but a dynamical system that involves the whole body, as proposed in the attached papers"

If you have a pain in your left toe and the doctor asks you to point to where the pain is, you might point down to your left toe and say "I feel it down there". If the pain is "down there", where is the I, the SELF that is spatially distinct from the particular locus of the pain, so that you can describe the location of the pain within your larger body envelope?

We say '' I feel pain in my toe''  , the ''my'' indicate that this toe is part of ''me''.  We naturally recognize that we have parts at the same time that these parts form a whole which is ourself. We reach this level of metaphysic I guess arouns 3 years old.  Arnold's question: '' If the pain is "down there", where is the I, the SELF that is spatially distinct from the particular locus of the pain,'' is totally strange.  How could someone start to see his toe as separate from the self.  If I loose my arm because of an accident, I will feel diminished and it will take me quite a while to recover and adapt with my new condition.  The new I will be different from the old I.  

Louis: "How could someone start to see his toe as separate from the self. If I loose my arm because of an accident, I will feel diminished and it will take me quite a while to recover and not entirely with my new condition. The new I will be different from the old I."

One's body, including its parts, like a toe, belong to one's self, and your self is a part of your body. Your body is owned by you. It seems to me that your puzzlement results from a failure to distinguish between two different concepts relating to the self: (a) the core self (I!) which is the fixed perspectival locus of all conscious experience, and (b) the phenomenal self-model (PSM) which includes one's body image. Our body image always changes over time, and the loss of an arm would certainly make you feel changed in some significant way but, at your core, you are always you. In fact, building a changing phenomenal self model depends on your having an unchanging core self. See "Two arguments for a pre-reflective core self ..." on my RG page.

Arnold,

''belong to one's self, and your self is a part of your body. Your body is owned by you. ''

I am glad to learn that I own myself!!!! This is Descartes's dualist 101 and the three year old are not yet educated enough to separate their ''I'' from their ''Body'' and I think they are more wise than Descartes.  There is no need for a solution of a mind's body dualism that do not exist.  It is just a self-create theoretical problem.  So since all of us were three year old at some point who see themself as their body and could not conceive a separation, we should do a Freudian analysis of ourself: What educational event for the first time create a doubt that is was not so and that there is a real problem there to be solve? 

Louis, the body has many parts, but it is only the part that we call the brain that contains the the part that is the self. The self owns the body in its phenomenal self model (Metzinger's PSM). This is not dualism. This is dual-aspect monism. It is an epistemological problem, not an ontological problem. See "A Foundation for the Scientific Study of Consciousness" on my RG page.

Arnold, consciousness has a two-sided structure, the I and the objects of conscious experience (conscious contents). When I focus on the toe, the I is the feeling system that is focusing and the toe is the conscious object. However, when I focus on the pain, the toe is part of the feeling system, IOW it is part of the I.

Arnold,

Could you use simple argument that a five years old beleiving that he is his body would understand.  Very sophisticated explanations assumes a lot and it is difficult to criticize.  Just provides me for a reason , one that a five year old would understand why I should doubt that I am my body.  

''The body has many parts''  the five year old agree.

'' but it is only the part that we call the brain that contains the the part that is the self. ''

The five year old do not understand that.  All his body parts are part of him. Why is my hand not part of myself while you say that the brain is part of myself.  

If it is not too painfull to answer, please remember that you are talking to a five year old that do not understand words such ontological or can read academic book.

Louis: "Just provides me for a reason , one that a five year old would understand why I should doubt that I am my body."

Suppose I told a five year old that there are people who cannot see or feel their body or anyone else's body, but that they still know who they are. Do you think the child would wonder if he or she was just their body?

If they know that they are it is because I can remember body interactions I had.  All I can remember is of this nature and if someone presently has no body interaction, he might be able to remember past body interactions and still identified with the one that had these experiences but someone who never had any body interactions or experience cannot remember anything nor even imagine anything and so even less be somone.  Because somone is somone by being able to do something and without being a doer , there is no being.  So the five year old reject this possibility of being someone without a way to remember, to imagine, or to do.  Removing this is removing everything.  No mister Descartes you could not be a thinking substance by removing all what your body provide you. And Mr. Darwin told me that we are intelligent primate and the primate are not thinking substance, talking substances and and so that primate part of me is surely the part you cannot remove before the thinking and talking part because you have to remove in the reverse direction of evolution and I agree with Mr. Darwin.

Louis: "No mister Descartes you could not be a thinking substance by removing all what your body provide you."

Of course a self needs a body to keep it alive. But the body is not a self, just as the body is not a finger or an eye. Try this: Say "I am not my body!" Are you telling the truth or are you lying? If you are lying, who is lying? If you are telling the truth, who is telling the truth?

The substrate of our consciousness are just qualia. But without senses, which are parts of our body, qualia will never appear. So our knowledge will have no sustenance in qualia in similar way like in our computers, which have knowledge (definitions), what is love, but didn't feel it.

Also learning will be not possible, if no experience will be available and if without our body we will have no motors, which allow us to react on sensations. So the self can't appear without body

But if consciousness already exist, qualia are well established, the body is no longer necessary to sustain the self.

ahhh, probably hanging myself for getting involved in this conversation but here goes...

From Doug Anderson, “Three Appeals in Peirce’s Neglected Argument” (apologies for mixing order of quotations):

"The more time one spends with C.S. Peirce’s “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” the more one realizes that there are few essays in the American tradition that can match its richness.  It is in a class with Emerson’s “Nature” and James’ “Will to Believe.”  This richness is illustrated in a wealth of interpretive essays each of which is able to say something both different and true about the “Neglected Argument.”

On a number of occasions Peirce argues that there are in general three kinds of person: 1) “those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feeling,” 2) “practical men,” and 3) “men to whom nothing seems great but reason”.

Specifically, I want to display what I see as the organic interdependence of the three stages of Peirce’s argument…

With this description in mind, let me turn now to the works of Smith and Trammell who together provide a foundation for the project at hand.  Smith employs the “Neglected Argument” as an example of how to integrate experience and reason in the context of religious belief: “the dyadic alternative (that is, the claim that either experience or reason produces belief),” he says, “is an error because each is required and the task is to see that they are related in a way that does full justice to both”

Our being “whole” depends on it.  It is in this sense, not in a narrower logical sense, that the SA (scientific argument) “encloses” and “defends” the inner arguments of the nest.

__________

...and from Chomsky, starting ~5:35

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgd8BnZ2-iw

"Some of these assumptions that began to take shape seemed to me as if they ought to be truisms…but they’re highly contested, in fact vigorously denied, right to the present.  So, maybe it’s worth mentioning them…

One thing that is and should be regarded as a truism is that languages are spoken by people.  Doesn’t sound very remarkable.  So, it’s something that individuals do.  And they don’t do it because of something in their feet, you know… 

They do it because of something, mostly in their brains.  So language capacity must be a biological property that’s mostly in some part of the brain…just gotta be there. Which means that the core problem of language should be viewed…"

Arnold,

Louis, does a person who loses both legs and an arm in an accident have less of a self than someone with all limbs?

Arnold,

That person is a complete person although she has been greatly diminished in some of her capacities and that she will need to a lot of effort in order to increase these capacities and to adapt to her new life.  She now live into a different world than she was living before and she will have to find new aspects that she would not probably have considered in her past conditions.  She has a new body and a new life to build and some of her old life she have to grieve because it will not be there again.  We have always one interacting interface until we die.

Arnold,

My body is more than you can see.  When we communicate here our bodies interact and to a certain extend englobe each other.  We do not have completely separated bodies.  We become part of mutliple bodies that we interact with and form social bodies.   I am only my body but this body can extend and transform and combine with others.

Louis,

I doubt your idea of non-separation of bodies. It may be a kind of synchronization in mind but not in body. You can imagine that extension but there is no real transformation. We also are not sure that our ideas of some thing are the same that others has (of the same subject).

Louis,

This is what I wrote in "Where Am I? Redux":

"This paper proposes that we should consider the core self to be a real biological part of the human brain and, as such, an integral part of the human body in the physical world. It also proposes that the phenomenal self and the phenomenal body do not necessarily occupy the same locations in our phenomenal world. This aspect of human experience has various interesting consequences that are supported by close observation, theoretical implications, and some recent experimental findings. Some of these findings will be presented and discussed in the sections below."

If, as you claim, the self is the whole body, how can you explain the empirical findings that are discussed in my article?

Wilfried,

What is your body?  One possible answer is all that is within my skin that everybody can see and that I can see.  This is an answer that is very usefull for many purposes.  When we adopt a phenomenal (experiencial) viewpoint, my body is my interacting (experiential) interface and all that we call the world is what you interact with and it has to be connected to the body or interacting interface.  Now with this point of view, training for becoming a violonist is a training for the incorporation in your body of a violont. You do not play the violont but you learn to  extend your body sp it includes violont.  It is not as simple as holding a violont in his hands.  It takes a lot of practice for your nervous system to include the violont into your body , to extend your body in that way.  Learning driving a car is a different form of extension of your body, through the training you become the driver of a car which is an extended body.  The blind man learned to extend his body to the stick and after a while can touch through the stick.  We have one single tool and it is our body and the human is the only animal which can extend his body in multiple of ways, we are shape-shifter. More interesting is the coupling of human bodies to form componded bodies.  When two persons learn to dance together then have to extend their interacting interface in a way that will allow a dancing couple to dance gracefully on the music.  As dancers, these two person learn to become a compounded dancing couple each of them creating the interfacing to the other but the result of which become a single dancing couple. The violonist can also learn to be part of a bigger body: an orchestra where all the musician and the maestro together tries to merge their bodies into the one of the orchestra.  This is a coupling limited to a given task, dancing but two human marrying will become coupled in a much profound way and if they have children they will extend themself to these children in a verry profound way.  Your nervous system is not only about what is inside your skin but a lot about all these relations and what is done together.  Is it just a way to describe thing which add nothing to our understanding?  I hope not.  I am trying to understand the evolution of the mammalian nervous system that would explain why it led to this kind of polymorphic nervous system.  I think that this way at looking at the body clarify my task. 

Louis,

I understand very well your point of view. The violin becomes part of the body if the human, playing the instrument has a deep ability of playing. Well, but I do not agree with this view. We do not need to "incorporate" tools to use them perfect. These artifacts will rest separate tools but we learn to handle them more and more perfect. I see, it is possible to change the point of view, to open it and to include the artifact in our bodily feeling, but I doubt if this view is helpful, more helpful than the restricted view of the body.

Where is the problem? I am not able to control the "extension". The second dancer is autonomous like me but both are highly sensible to react fast and adequate to all impulses of the other person. The ability to control is the primary factor of my body-self. I think this is the key to understand the concept of self. The intention (will) is the cause of all reactions "I" want to do and I think both (will/I) are identical.

Wilfried: "The intention (will) is the cause of all reactions "I" want to do and I think both (will/I) are identical."

Before you want to do any particular thing, you must have a brain representation of something in relation to you (I!) that you want to change in some way (your own motive/intention/will). Doesn't this imply that will and I cannot be identical? Doesn't will depend on the prior existence of I?

Wilfried,

I adopt views in the hope they become usefull and I discard views  when I feel it is not helpfull.  I am giving a try for this view and I will see how much return I get.  But adopting new views is like learning to play an instrument, we have to adapt to them and work with them.  In that way to see thing, adopting new view is a form of extension of the body which open new realities.  You will recognize Von Uexkull view of the organism in this.  

In the case of learning to dance with a partner, both bodies have to work in coordination.  Each of the partner has to cooperate in the operation of the dancing couple and so these two bodies which can function independently before the dance can learn to function in cooperation of the operation of the dancing couple.  It is not false to say that in that operation they form one system.  I repeat, if it is only a new way to present the situation that do not help us understanding it better than this viewpoint is a waste of time.  Nervous systems have evolved to control bodies and then within a very very short period of time evolved a speical type of primate that use tools, play music, dance, tell story about all kind of things, they make them up and they even tell stories about how this universe began, they can create models of nature and all that from a nervous system which was 99.9% about controling bodies.  On the surface things may appear very different but I think that the real change was not about the creation of a nervous system doing all kind of things not at all relate to the control of bodies but do it perfectly not according to one development scenario but according to multiple of scenario, at will where everything can be include in the body.

I think that 'a feeling' can be construed as information, some kind of primitive knowledge. In this vein, human feelings could be viewd as more primitive kinds of knowledge (compared to e.g., our knowledge of a language) acquired by biological systhems throughout the evolution. Insofar as string vibrations carry information they could be called 'feelings'. These are just hunches and speculations, of course.

Dear Irena, feelings cannot be reduced to a modality of knowledge. Knowledge is a representation of something (an information pattern), while a feeling is the lived experience of the information pattern. In the case of feeling, the living body is affected by the information pattern instantiated in the brain. The same does not apply to knowing. I can know something without having my body affected by it. I can represent the information you have in your mental state, but I cannot feel it. I only can feel the information that composes my mental state.

Just for the sake of the argument, how would it 'feel' to you to temporarily assume that everything that is perceivable is information? 

There are cognitive feelings - when you feel that you know, or more generally, all cognitive beliefs are feelings. Such beliefs are one of the components of knowledge, according to the classical Platonic/Socratic definition of knowledge (knowledge as true justified belief). Therefore, feeling is more fundamental to the mind than knowledge.

But what is the relation of feeling and information? According to my approach, the mind can process information not-consciously, but feelings are always conscious. Feelings occur when the results of information processing (including meaning attribution) affect the body, producing what we call "an affective state". In this view, an affective state being produced by an information pattern present to the mind constitutes a case of "formal causation" in the Aristotelian sense. I go further to propose that both physical to mental and mental to physical causation are cases of formal (not efficient, material or final) causation.

Dear Alfredo,

As activities in/of our brain, feelings are no different than thoughts. They are only much more difficult to put into words. According to Damasio, feelings gide us in life (remember Phineas Gage http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage). That made me think that feelings are 'old knowldge',  accumulated in the times before there were words. Preserved as 'feelings'; telling us what we should or should not do and what is 'good or bad' for us. In that sense I think feelings are information. Feelings emerge in our limbic system, or the old brain, evolutionaly older structure while awareness and interpretations of feelings, to my modest knowledge, take place primarily in the cortex. 

I really would not want to suggest that I have any answers to the questions adressed here but I like to think about it and discuss it. 

Dear Irena, as far as I know feeling activities and knowledge activities are very different in the brain. This issue is a tabu in neuroscience, since neuroscientists hide their ignorance by assuming that feelings are representations of the state of the body (please see this discussion in my RG question page).

In my interpretation, feelings correspond to amplitude-modulated wavelike activity in the brain, while cognitive representations correspond to patterns of neuronal connection using a frequency-modulated digital-like activity (the action potential).

Cognitive information can elicit a feeling by means of the induction of ionic waves in dendrites of neurons and in astrocytes, and feelings can modulate cognitive processes. Although both are interchangeable, they are different in nature. One of the differences is that feelings always have a psychosomatic effect, while cognitive representations do not.

In machines, there are complex information patterns being processed without any effect on the hardware (for instance, the computer obviously does not feel sad if you insert the information that it will be destroyed, while we feel sad when we think we will die). Digital computers prove that complex information processing can exist without any feeling or conscious activity. Therefore, you should not equate consciousness with information.

"Old knowledge" is a form of knowledge that is ultimately encoded in the genome (which is the same for all parts of the body). Conscious contents are dependent on neocortical structures, but the state of consciousness is mostly dependent on subcortical structures (brain stem and thalamus).

These central structures are composed mostly of astrocytes, which are connected to the whole-brain astroglial network that participates in the instantiation of feeling wavelike activity. This is the reason why during general anesthesia the main worry is about the patient feeling pain. If the patient is feeling pain he/she is conscious, and vice-versa, if the patient is conscious he/she is able of feeling.

Alfredo,

''Feelings occur when the results of information processing (including meaning attribution) affect the body, producing what we call "an affective state". ''

All information processing affect the body in a variety of ways.  Why would some information processing affect the body in a way that it produces an emotion.  I am not asking how but why.

Arnold,

"Before you want to do any particular thing, you must have a brain representation of something in relation to you (I!) that you want to change in some way (your own motive/intention/will). Doesn't this imply that will and I cannot be identical? Doesn't will depend on the prior existence of I?"

I agree in the representation of something in relation to the observer (I!). The observer has also a representation of the change and the result of the action. There is also a motivation to act. Now it lacks the decision to do this act (will). Who or what comes to this decision? Oh, I! 

May be it is only a linguistic problem depending of the view point. The reason why an action is started is will of a person but this will could not be separated from the person. It is part of its character.

Take the focus to the decision making mind and ask the question: What is what we name "I"? Why do you think we need "I" first? This core "I" is not present from the beginning. It evolves slowly and there we will find the body, the will, the representations, and much more. 

Louis,

consult my question about feelings. There is an interesting discussion about it.

Willfried: "May be it is only a linguistic problem depending of the view point. The reason why an action is started is will of a person but this will could not be separated from the person. It is part of its character."

The brain mechanisms that we call "will" are discussed in "Set Point and Motive: The Formation and Resolution of Goals" on my RG page.

Louis,

your idea of a plastic body shape is interesting, but I do not agree. It is a trick of mind. You used the expression of a system and this is well done. Two dances are a system and the violin and the violinist are also a system but they are well separated, also in the mind of one of the dances as well as the violin and the violinist. Both persons have a model of the other dancer (or the violin) so they can react precisely if they are well trained. We do not need the idea of an expanding body. You would have such an expansion if you are connected to an cyber hand with mind control and feedback. Here is the idea of control once again ...

Arnold,

your RG-page is a cornucopia of answers. 

Wilfried, this is I assume the role of the Q&A section in RG

Alfredo,

in the view of Damasio, the way I interpret it, bodily reactions, making part of our feelings, give us a sense of urge, prompt us to act... For instance, to approach or avoid something. 

Irena, I have a disagreement with Damasio on the details of this kind of process. I think feeling is generated in the nervous system and affects the body, but feedback from the body is not necessary for us to feel the feeling. The feedback should have had an evolutionary role in determining the valence of feelings (according to their adaptive value), but after we are quipped with these determinations we are able of feeling sad without crying or feeling happy without smiling

Wilfired,

''You would have such an expansion if you are connected to an cyber hand with mind control and feedback''.  The control is external or internal, why  insisting on the difference?  One of the trigger on my extended/fusion body idea came from reading the following text. Read it carefully. I also encourage Arnold to read it carefully.

Consciousness in Action

By Susan L. Hurley

‘’We tend to think of perception and action as buffer zones mediating between mind and world. We tend to think of perception as input from world to mind and action s output from mind to world. This Input-Output picture of perception and action may hold in place traditional worries about the mind’s place in the world, as well as more specific philosophical assumptions. If perception is input from the world to the mind and action is output from the mind to the world, then the mind as distinct from the world is what the input is to and what the output is from. So, despite the web of causal relations between organisms and environments, we suppose the mind must be in a separate place, within some boundary that sets it apart from the world.

In trying to understand the mind’s place in the world, we thus study the function from input to output, especially the way central nervous systems process and transform inputs to human organisms. We argue about whether central cognitive processes must have a language-like structure that explains the conceptual structure of thought. But we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.

People and other animals with minds can be seen at one level as dynamic singularities: structural singularities in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits. Consider the circus performer who puts the handle of a dagger in her mouth, tips her head back, balances a sword by its point on the point of the dagger, and with the whole kit balanced above her head magisterially climbs a ladder, swings her legs over the top rung, and climbs back down the other side of the ladder. Each move she makes is both the source of and exquisitely dependent on multiple internal and external channels of sensory and motor-signal feedback, the complex calibrations of which have been honed by years of practice. An only slightly less intricate structure of dynamic feedback relations knits the nervous system of a normally active organism into its environment. This is what the contents of the creature’s interdependent perceptions and intentions both depend on. The whole complex dynamic feedback system includes not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning. As a result, external states can be needed to explain patterns of activity at the body surface, even if what is to be explained is not identified in terms of external states. The dynamic singularity is centred on the organism and moves through environments with the organism, but itself has no sharp boundaries.’’

Louis,

good ideas are never singular.

Thank you for this citation. I think this embodiment is a good way to come closer to an solution. In this sense argues also Alva Noé. There are some interesting interviews on youtube.

Wilfried,

Alva Noe was really in tuned with Hurley when she wrote this.  I was then searching in my own way from the side of visual perception.  I only knew about them fifteen years later.  I was reinventing Von Uexkull in my own way as well.  At the end of my thesis (not the published version) I invented the word sensacting loop for the functional cycle of the organism.  I was inventing very similar ideas but from the point of view of images: sensacting image loop. Not simply optical image but any map, any 2D scalar field of whatever information. All information taking the form of images and all processing taking the form of image processing.  My ideas where also located within an biological vision closed and influenced by Merlin Donald in his book: the evolution of the Modern Mind that traces the development in our primate ancestor of the episodic memory, leading to the "mimetic skill" required to rehearse and refine the body's movements in a voluntary and systematic way which lead to Mythic cultures. I had developed the notion of tree of knowledge as a hiearchical schemata tree mirroring hiearchical image structure and came to the notion of visual awarness as activation of node in the schemata tree.  This lead me to the notion of imagination as self-activation of node.  Merlin Donald evolutionary steps helped me to see how my concept of imagination could be used further structure towards the evolution of human mind.   I had read Heideger but did not manage to penetrate the meaning of what he was saying but now I can easily see where he fits, What initially attrracted me to him what the title: Being and Time.  The tree of knowledge was a phylogenic tree and so its activation from the root to the leafes re-enact the steps of the evolution of any surface structure and is thus a new notion time.  But Heidegger is not really innovator on time, his contribution is the return of philosophy from the sphere of rational knowledge of a subject to the sphere of a doing of an actor.  It fits perfectly with my philosophy which is in line with Aristotle. My notion of knoweldge tree (which can generalize to action tree) fits Its notion of perception-cognition as the actualization of form in the perceiver.  As you can notice in this summary, not only the notion of ''tree'' has played an important role in the formalization of my theories but it is the observation of actual trees that set me on this research path.

My current problem in formalizing my ideas is that they are spread over 10 or 15 interesting narratives and I have a great deal of difficulty to fit them into one meta evolutionary narrative from the origin of all that exist. I have so far blame my failure to express myself in writing in a signifant way by the lack of time but life is short I will have to express what I think into documents of a few hundred pages.  

Louis,

I am happy that you are back again!

If we could spend our time only by researching there were much more good ideas in the world.

Dear All,  my perspective in this debate will appear in a chapter written with Ram Vimal and Massimo Pregnolato in the book 'Biophysics of Consciousness" (see cover attached), edited by Roman Poznanski, Jack Tuszynski and Todd Feinberg. Our RG colleague Dorian Aur is co-authoring a chapter.

BIOPHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS: A FOUNDATIONAL APPROACH

Preface

Foreword (Searle)

List of Contributors

 1.    Neurobiological Naturalism (Feinberg and Mallatt)

 2.    The Evolutionary Origins of Consciousness (Feinberg and Mallatt)

 3.    How Language Evolution Reshaped Human Consciousness (Arbib)

 4.    Consciousness by Surprise: A Neuropsychoanalytic Approach to the Hard Problem  (Solms)

 5.    Can Qualitative Biophysics Solve the Hard Problem? (Pereira Jr. et al.)

 6.    The Causal Roots of Mental and Neural Integration (Manzotti and Chella)

 7.   The Two-Brains Hypothesis: Implications for Consciousness (Bercovich et al.) 

8.    On the Brain’s Electromagnetic Field System as the Origin of Consciousness (Hales)

 9.    Integrative Neurobiophysics Approach to Consciousness (Poznanski et al.)

 10.    Holoinformational Quantum Theory of Consciousness (Di Biase)

 11.  Neural Transition Dynamics and Conscious Perceptive States (Bernroider)

 12.  The ‘Quantum Underground’: where Life and Consciousness Originate (Craddock et al.)

13.   Quantum Spin Theory of Consciousness (Hu and Wu)

 14.  Consciousness in the Universe - A Review of the Orch OR Theory (Hameroff and Penrose)

Index

I was just reading about the species problem in biology (Igor Ya. Pavlinov, The Species Problem – Ongoing issues), and was getting confused as to whether I was reading about that or this problem of consciousness.

Given plurality of the things we want to know about regarding consciousness, who has the rights to that name, the hard problem of consciousness?

Scientists?

"The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real."-Peirce.

The general public?

"Only everybody can know the truth"-Goethe.

Or the commens?

“…that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take place … may be called the commens. It consists of all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the sign in question should fulfill its function.”

Charles S. Peirce, 1906

Is the problem, then, of making things understood better at the outset?  How can we do this when our values and attitudes about the scientific method are so different?