Revisiting the zombie argument

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
201

As am I.

I don’t know. I think you’re thinking of consciousness as like a clerk who goes to a filing cabinet to retrieve old documents (memory). Maybe this is how it happens neurologically, but as far as the introspective experience goes, I think memories come to consciousness automatically (or through some trigger) rather than consciousness deliberating go to retrieve its memories from storage. Then when the memory is in consciousness, the experience is that of awareness of a past event having occured. This, at least, is the experience in normal adult humans.

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My bad … I think I’m getting the notion of consciousness and thinking mixed up there. You see, I have the tendency to remark that we think when we want something. To me they go together. When thought is not there, because there is no want at the moment, consciousness is still there in an alacritous state, … yeah …. then something happens (trigger?) okay …. what triggered it if not a deliberate movement of thought. Well, it could be a deliberate triggering by thought (like concocting a future and pursuing it) or something else can trigger consciousness yeah you’re right and I’m guilty of regressing in the progress of our understanding. Dang it.

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Spot on.

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Dormant network thinks. You just aren’t aware of it.
Think of it something like a whip; most effective when kept in regular motion so that when you want to apply direct attention with the whip at one target, the results can be accomplished rapidly.
Or again, and far more apt of an illustration, you could think of it as a water circuit. If you make a water circuit of one primary value to a pipe ring that routes from a primary valve and passes 4 sub-valves and their pipes, then if the primary valve only turned on when each of the sub-valves opened for a demand of water flow, then the system would be in constant waist of energy while it turned on water flow to get through the primary valve, moved to the location of the needed sub-valve, and then shut off of the primary valve and cycled back out the water in the system.
Instead, if this water was continued cycling through the primary valve and back again then when a sub-valve opens for water, the water would not need to reach the area, but instead would naturally already be there and simply shoot down the sub-valve rather immediately without effort.

We work something akin to this. Our dormant network is carrying an energy in cycles constantly through an evenly distributed and large circuit range of the brain. Then when there is a direct need, a sub-valve so-to-speak, then the energy cycling around in the dormant network draws into a specific circuit segment of the brain (more then one area of the brain, for instance, vision of a basketball coming at you would apply in more than just vision, naturally, or you would be hit in the face every time), rapidly, to accomplish the primaries needed to prep to consciousness taking over and making the “final call”, so to speak, in action.
In some cases, consciousness is not required because of the element of danger that is “discovered” when starting the dormant network shuffle of energy in the brain to the appropriate segments.
For instance, the basket ball may not require a full conscious decision because at the time of moving to the premotor cortex (which is actually a trigonometry level microsecond calculator on top of it), it may have already accomplished visual cortex “target lock” on the object and because of it’s direction (coming at your head) dispatched to hit the amygdala response sharply with a response of fear that dumps norepinephrine into the system which increases heart rate rapidly (increase blood pressure), causes the release of glucose from energy stores in the body, and increases your blood flow to the skeletal muscle…basically…thanks to this, we can dodge that basketball before it punches us square in the face.

And how do we know the premotor cortex can calculate microsecond trigonometry?
Look up a rather radical and jewel of an individual to neurology named Scott Flansburg, who’s brain has moved mental calculations from the normal region in the broca’s area of the brain (where we all normally do math) into the premotor cortex region responsible for tracking objects with the eyeballs and blinking (as dynamic examples).
The results? He can do extremely advanced math faster than computer calculators.

So this let’s us know two things about visual contact: 1) It’s fast. 2) It’s articulate in calculation of trigonometry levels with little effort.

So what’s the point?
You are always thinking.

You just aren’t brought to mind of it at the same moment that attention begins to pay attention to something that will end up in your conscious focus.
For instance…

The red line there shows when the person became aware of their decision making.
The earlier spike shows the introduction of energy for the task needed transferring in from the dormant network into the needed active region well before conscious awareness of such.

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Okay, then I’d like to ask about the basic elements out of which these emblems are created. You said they were replications. I asked of what. You answered of sensory information. I want to turn our attention to that.

I figure these emblems have to come from somewhere; their ‘basic materials’ have to have an origin. If not, then they are created ex nihilo and I am puzzled once again.

But if we can suppose that the basic materials from which emblems are built up are the elements of sensory data, then I question whether these elementary sensory data are themselves ‘emblematic’ (or ponces).

Take that newborn for instance. If it is to eventually form a full blown emblem of ‘fire’, it must experience fire a first time. It won’t know what it is, of course, but its brain comes equipped with at least the basic neural circuitry to recognize some of the fire’s elementary aspects. For example, in are V1 of the occipital lobe, there are motion detection neurons. The newborn should therefore see the flicker of the flame. There are also color detection neurons in area V4 (and elsewhere I believe), and so the newborn should see the yellow/orange hue of the fire. Assuming the newborn comes close to the fire, its thermoceptors should detect its warmth and send signals to the somatosensory cortex where ‘heat detector’ neurons will respond (I haven’t actually come across ‘heat detector neurons’ in my research, but I assume they exist).

Assuming this hardware is in place before any emblem of ‘fire’ can be constructed, then would it be fair to say there are emblems/ponces corresponding to this hardware, emblems/ponces that are the basis for any composite emblems/ponces to be built from?

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If I am reading you correctly, are you asking if there is, as an example, a singular neurological thermo emblem?
(Whereby “emblem” or “ponce”, this time, refers to one singular reactive behavior to such a singular stimuli)

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In a manner of speaking, yes, but the word ‘ponce’ still refers to something only privately observable (unlike the ‘heat detector neurons’ that anyone with a microscope can observe).

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Well, there wouldn’t be a single neuron, say, but a given “ripple”, one could say.
I say this because we don’t work on direct line communication, but instead on small-world networking whereby node to node transfer is accomplished by vicarious travel through other nodes where possible and typically uses repeated paths unless newly obstructed.

I’m not sure I fully understand what we’re looking for at this point though…any help clarifying further?

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For the past page and a half or so, I’ve been trying to strip down the physicalist’s model into its most simple components. This includes both the simplest system of sonces required, which I think we established with a basic memory system that associates various sensory experiences into composite emblems, and the simplest system of ponces required, which at this point is just that composite emblem. Now I’m trying to break down that emblem. It is composite - or so it seems - and now I’m enquiring about its basic building blocks. That’s where my question about color perception, motion detection, heat sensation, and everything else involved in the experience of emblems like ‘fire’ or ‘chairs’ comes in.

What I’m asking is whether you would consider those basic elements emblems or ponces in and of themselves, and whether you think they could arise by themselves (i.e. without being part of a more composite emblem/ponce). I would think they are at least transient - that is to say, they can occur in more than one emblem. The yellow/orange of the fire, for example, can be incorporated into a peach, or the Sun, or leaves during the fall, which tells me they can at least be conceptualized as emblem-like or ponce-like elements all their own.

And I agree that such elementary emblems/ponces almost never arise from the activity of a single neuron.

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In that case, I would say no.
You can’t strip an emblem down to the singular like that as by its very nature, an emblem is a composite of all properties and I can’t think of a single stimuli that can be truly said to be singular in property that is detectable by the human senses.

Even the absence of a sense constitutes a negative property in the absence of any input to a given sense.
For instance, if I give you something that hasn’t any touch sense to it, but just visual, then at least the combination of those two concepts will be applied in tandem. A) sight. Which leads directly to a memory of B) no touch sense.

Ergo, while we may duck out of the way of something that appears solid coming at us the first time, that won’t happen on the second time.

If we could somehow get a developed, yet, never stimulated brain (impossible), then hypothetically, we could give it a singular sensory input stimuli and could monitor the entire travel of the chemical exchange of original contact, to biological contact, to neurological contact, then we could identify - in theory - one singular embedding (original stimuli recording).
And that might classify as an “emblem” in nearly the most crude form, but I would say that it would be to the concept of an “emblem” as one line in the letter “V” is to the total letter “V”.

However, that all said…I would say that it is capable of being a ponce as it still satisfies the privately observed portion.
Anything our biology reacts to at all, no matter how finite or not, is a ponce if it impacts the central nervous system at all.

We just happen to be capable of measuring something about that exchange in most cases.
About the only ones that really slips past our ability to relate a sonce to a described ponce are consciousness and self-awareness.

We have a hard time nailing those down, but then again, it doesn’t help that the subjects themselves have a hard time describing consciousness and self-awareness as they have them as ponces either.

So yes, individual properties of various emblems are transient indeed; ergo why I continually call is associative and recursive. It’s not enough to describe this as subjective; it’s worse than that (or better, depending on if you are a neurologist or existentialist philosopher). It’s, instead, like sticking 500 balls of 100 types in a box in space and stating a property function definition whereby each type of ball can connect to 25 other types.
And that these balls have motorized gyroscopes within them, each set a bit differently per type.
Then giving the box a smack on the side sending it tumbling around and obstacle course of 1,000 varying types of materials to run into along the way.
And then trying to define the governing force of it’s movement specifically.

Good luck.

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I’m glad to hear that. Common sense remains.

Can we still say they are neuro-chemical events? I only ask because some might say that things like color, motion, heat are properties of things in the world, and our neuro-chemistry only allows us to be aware of them. But if color, motion, heat, etc. are neuro-chemical events themselves, and you agree that they are privately observable, then they do qualify as ponces. You say they don’t qualify as emblems, but would you say they still serve a representative function? That is, are they still not symbols in a manner of speak of their corresponding sonces? I would think they are because the same reasoning applies - that is, we must still experience red as red, heat as heat, pain as pain, in order that we’re given something simple to behold and appropriate to respond to. To be aware that “such-and-such neuro-chemical events are going on in my brain” won’t do much, but “I see red” will prompt one to investigate to see if its food.

Would you agree?

Are you sure? I mean, there are a few centers in our CNS that don’t seem to be associated with anything we feel. For example, I wrote in my website:

“The medulla and pons control autonomic body functions such as heartbeat and breathing. In addition, the medulla also controls certain reflexes such as coughing, sneezing, and vomiting.”

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Yes.

That’s hardly worth the distinction. Those that was say the former as some argument are wasting time, as regardless of either case, nothing happens in sense without a neurochemical exchange.

Yes.

Yep.

I didn’t state that it would be cognitive, just that it involved the cns.
Keeping in mind that there is a grand distinction between cognition, consciousness, and self-awareness neurologically: I am conscious regarding my breathing but it is not a cognitive function.

I wrote this in my Philosophical Spiritual Ontology thread over in religion:
stimuli > sense > reaction > provocation > expression > action
The first two after stimuli could be said to be sub-cognitive to quasi-cognitive (sense and reaction [reaction is biological reaction, not cognitive in this term]).
Provocation is capable of being sub-cognitive, quasi-cognitive, or cognitive.
Meanwhile the last two are directly cognitive (expression and action [Expression refers to the impulsive provocation in our mind; for instance, being happy would be an expression that could be consequent from one’s spiritual sense. Action is the physical outward act that may occur as a result, like happy expression may consequent being nice to everyone).

Why I bothered to plop that in here is because breathing, for example, runs up to reaction and stops.
It requires only a response by the system.
The less to the right you go in this diagram, the more sub-cognitive a thing is that is being described.
So if something only requires a biological reaction and nothing more, then that would be sub-cognitive.
However, as I stated in the same thread where I pulled this from:
Reflexes, for instance, are satisfied at reaction; though we reflectively assess after the event anew treating the reflex itself as a new stimuli.

Ergo, the automatic sneeze that is biologically satisfied at the reaction stage then recursively loops back as if it is a stimuli that itself then moves to sense > reaction > provocation > expression > action, where action then commonly becomes, “Excuse me!”

But a heartbeat has a ponce nevertheless.
And this is because, inescapably, the cns includes the brain, and as I stated before, if there’s a brain involved to any degree, then a ponce exists.
If there is not a brain, but only a nervous system with neurons, then a ponce does not exist.

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And you say that these ponces - color, heat, motion, etc. - can’t be privately observed unless they’re incorporated into an emblem?

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“observed” consciously, correct.

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Ah, that wording is important. What I’m wondering is if we can say there’s something ‘there’ - something other than what science can observe.

Let’s take pain as an example. I believe the firing of c-fibres correspond to the feeling of physical pain. If all you had in a fully developped adult human brain were the firing of c-fibres (i.e. every other network of neurons therein were kept somehow dormant), would the subject be “in pain”?

Another way to ask this: if we’re calling a sensation like pain a “privately observable neuro-chemical event”, could we draw a distinction between this and a “privately observed neuro-chemical event”? The difference is subtle. The latter implies that conscious recognition must be there (which I think is what you meant) whereas the former only means that it could be observed, in principle, should the system be conscious to recognize (observe) it.

Do you think it makes sense to talk about the existence of pain as a ponce (as something privately observable rather than actual observed) even if conscious recognition of it was disabled?

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Yes it makes sense, but it might confuse some folks.
In the sense of how we’re now using it, it’s something akin to saying, “reaction”, when you strip out consciousness.

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… hmmm … I wonder (only because I have an experiencing structure well intact and cannot imagine from a POV where it isn’t there but I’ll try) … In a Twilight Zone episode, a guy born blind was given sight after an operation when he was an adult. In his eagerness while in his recovery room alone, he removed the bandages and started staring at the sun out the window in amazement and then went blind again. Wouldn’t the protective reaction of the brain tell him to avert his eyes from the sun even though he had no past experience in memory?

To what extent is the ‘life’ of the neural systems ‘aware’ of itself, and correspondingly ’knows’ what to do in the immediacy of an emergency situation without interference (not in a bad sense) of cognitive thought?

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Gib …. The brain, through a developmental process will eventually realize the spirit of a mind … purely non physical comprising myriad qualia. If you are comfortable with this notion, and are of the persuasion that your mind is inextricably you, then what can be inferred as to your nature? (I don’t mean you personally … it could be any ‘you’)

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Well, as long as it doesn’t confuse us.

If we can continue to call these ponces, would you say that any network of neurons come with, when stimulated, their own ponce - maybe even a single neuron?

This would make sense out of a couple things you said earlier:

and

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Beats me, finishedman… what did you have in mind with this?