I see what you mean now about mirror neurons. We are built to see human beings and other animals as conscious and rocks as not, and this is largely a result of the roll mirror neurons play in our pyches. Although, I would say that if mirror neurons did respond to a rock being kicked, we would only misempathize with the rock - that is, insofar as we attribute anthropomorphic mental states to it like emotion, thought, intention, sensations, etc. In all likelihood, whatever the rock is feeling is nothing we can imagine.
This is good. It is very close to my views. It introduces a similar kind of panpsychism into nature.
The only difference I still see is in the approach to explaining this omnipresent flow of information, these ‘feels’. As long as the explanation hinges on the publically observable mechanics of a system being the basis for the presence of ‘information’ or ‘feels’, I feel there is going to be something missing, some conceptual gap. The zombie argument rears its ugly head again: I can imagine something like particles interacting with each other - sending and receiving ‘messanger particles’ as a means of ‘communicating’ with each other - but I see no reason to deduce from this that they must be ‘feeling’ this information in a sort of ‘private realm’ of subjectivity. They could be dead, cold, lifeless entities.
But if we were to switch the order of dependence the other way round, I would have a way of closing this conceptual gap and giving a reason to deduce a connection. If the information were primary, if the ‘feels’ were at bottom the ‘real’ entities, then I could explain the publically observable mechanics in terms of it. How I would do this is explained in detail in my website: mm-theory.com.
I’m not sure how important this is to you or any physicalist.
I want to ask you a few more questions if you don’t mind. First, would you agree that the way we experience matter and physicality - solidity, soft/hard, cold/hot, occupying volume in space, textured, colored, etc. - is better understood as how the human brain interprets the information given to its senses rather than how things ‘really are’ in themselves (i.e. in a sort of Kantian noumenal sense)? If you agree to this, would you say that everything we have constructing in our scientific models is more based on these interpretations of sensory information rather than how things are ‘in themselves’ (not that such models are in anyway unreliable for predicting future experiences, nor that they aren’t perhaps isomorphic to the state of things as they are outside our experience, but that they are better understood as mentally constructed models rather than picture perfect ‘copies’ of what exists outside our minds)?
And now you have a good starting point for this tangent: Shaking The Hand Of Reality, in regards to some of humanities more diverse behaviors regarding relationships with “reality” (the state of existence of everything not human).
I now see where the root of the problem is for you.
That can be a tricky issue to logic through.
However, I find it very simple personally…yet at times it can be an incredible pain in the ass to articulate.
Here’s my attempt here.
I’m going to use that game I mentioned before as the working model as it has just about everything in it that I need.
You don’t need the game to grasp what’s going on (but if you get it…you’ll be able to tangibly harness the concept far greater I think; nothing works better than first-hand interaction with a model outside of your own mind).
In the below, I’m going to refer to each “particle” as a cell.
I’m using the format of the game, so each cell has a numerical value and can be altered on exchange of reactions to other cells or its own kind.
I will abreviate “cell” as Cx, where x = the number value.
Your problem is this, essentially.
How does C0 carry a message to C1?
The logic works in the expression that the left side states what components are before an exchange, and the right side states what the components should become or do after the exchange, or because of it rather.
So if I write 0 1 → 0-1
This translates to a sentence reading, If a Cell with value 0 comes in contact with a Cell with value 1 (left side), then (->) bond (-) Cell 0 with Cell 1 (right side).
So we start with C0 and on the other side C1.
As I said, you are basically asking how C0 carries a message to C1.
However, this is exactly where a problem takes place in the difference between how we conceive of something and how things take place.
Let’s say we have three total cells: C0, C1, C2.
What we observe is odd.
We observe that C0 connects with C2 and then C2 shoots off to C1 and upon hitting C1, C1 switches to C8.
Therefore, C2 must carry a message from C0 to C1 that tells C1 to change because C0 “said” to.
Zombie argument ensues.
However, if we take a look at things, we can see more.
Let’s look again.
Our expressions look like this:
0 2 → 3 4
4 1 → 5 8
5 3 → 0 2
2 8 → 2 1
In long hand, this reads:
If C0 contacts C2 (the “carrier”, as you called it), then C0 changes to C3 and C2 changes to C4.
If C4 contacts C1, then C4 changes to C5 and C1 changes to C8.
If C5 contacts C3, then C5 changes to C0 and C3 changes to C2.
If C2 contacts C8, then C8 changes to C1.
Now, here’s that same logic again, but this time I’m going to highlight the “message” in red all the way through.
0 2 → 3 4
4 1 → 5 8
5 3 → 0 2
2 8 → 2 1
Now, you might already see how the “message” from C0 isn’t “carried” at all.
Or how, for instance, this sentence isn’t carried to you from me at all.
What happens is that a reaction of state changes take place internally from each that causes a network to take place.
A chain reaction that can be replicated and causes a specific change is what we call a “message” in common daily talk when we are referring to a specific occurrence.
We would say, C2 carries a message from C0 to tell C1 to change to C8.
Yes, in convenient speaking terms, it does.
However, if the instruction to flip to C8 from C1 is held within C4…well…then we have only repeated our same folly in thought.
Because C4 didn’t carry anything.
C4 arose out of C0 contacting C2.
This C4 then found its way to C1 and caused two, not one, reaction.
A reaction to C1 and a reaction into C1.
So C4 flipped to C5 and C1 flipped to C8 by consequence.
Information, such as that in our brain, works identical to this.
The difference is that the variables are one a far greater scale; might as well be infinity by comparison to this simple example.
Now, at this point, the average physicalist would stop and say, “See? It’s that simple!”
However, I beg to differ.
And here’s why.
That’s not just C1 up there.
That’s really {(C1 <> C4)==(C8 <> C2)}.
Or, it’s not the color red, we hear the physicalist’s say. It’s light frequency 400–484 THz.
No it’s not actually.
It’s really {(X <> frequency 400–484 THz)==(human retina <>red)}
(Where X represents consequence of state, condition, reaction, etc… that separated a portion of light into the 400–484 THz range from what it was previously, say light hitting a prism, for example.)
Now you might have already quoted something from above and written something in regards that the expression itself is a message and that’s the intangible zombie problem.
But I would stop you and have you go back up and delete that portion of the response if you started such, and here’s why.
Fire + gasoline = more fire.
Or.
0 1 → 0-0
The expressions don’t need to be “entered” or exist separately because they exist inherently in the properties of what a thing is.
Bullet + human tissue = separation of cellular integrity
Or.
We’ll start with 10 linked 1’s, and one single 0.
1 1 → 1-1 (this is the skin bond, now all 1’s are linked like a body)
0 1 → 0-0 (this is the bullet, 0, entering the skin bond 1-1)
1-0 → 1 0 (this is the bullet, 0, causing the skin bond to separate and replacing the bond with a bullet or fragment of the bullet)
The chemistry, so to speak loosely, of everything determines what kind of reactions it will have inherently with other types of things.
Where I have to write the expressions in a computer to build a digital universe of things, our real universe already has the expressions inherently supplied.
Our brains work in the same manner.
Therefore, as I said at the onset, if you build a human zombie…it won’t be a zombie because by building a human in every respect, it contains the conscious self-awareness that we find in humans by nothing further than the physical markup alone.
Ergo why we’ve spent time mentioning biological variances such as Alzheimer’s. Because Alzheimer’s changes the biology by introducing another variable that is otherwise not present, or activates after a very rare arrangement of the biological constituents in the human body.
I build such things in the game.
Really rare and destructive functions that are part of the same constituents that bond everything together.
Once in a while, the perfect conditions of variables mixing take place and with only the same set of expressions that I might have run ten times or more, a “perversion” happens and degradation begins to take place because the specific “perfect storm” arrangements became present.
The construct ceases to have the pattern of behavior in the same manner and alters into another description because the physical constituents have been altered.
But if they always remain the same, then their description in full remains the same.
This question comes up a lot.
I always think it a question that has one of the easiest examples: intended context.
Let me put it this way. First, would you agree that the way we understand a sentence is better understood as ‘our understanding of the sentence’ rather than what is actually being intended by the author? If you agree to this, would you say that every sentence that we write in response is more based on the interpretations of our understanding of the original sentence rather than what was actually intended by the author?
It becomes immediately clear how this works out.
In short, of course; rather naturally and consequently by mandate of the physical existence of common bonds.
This is the one part that I can interpret as closest to my own views.
Would it be fair to paraphrase you: the ponce of any system (or pope?) is always inherent in the physical constitution of the system, or at least that it is inherent as a disposition that, under the right condition or in response to the right stimulus, would actually occur (actually be ‘felt’).
This ‘inhering’ in the physical system is what brings the discussion at this point closer to my own views, and if I’m interpreting you correct, may in fact bridge them.
I don’t know how closely you’ve been following along in this thread, but before we started engaging each other, I was about as engaged with Three Times Great. We almost came to an agreement on the nature these inherent ‘feels’. One of the interpretations we (sort of) agreed on was the Heideggarian ‘being’. If these feels are as inherent in the physical system as you say, I would venture to call them the system’s ‘being’ - what could be more inherent than that?!
I would say this with two qualifying remarks: 1) ‘being’ as such is never constant. It is always in flux. Thus if human consciousness and mind are the ‘being’ of the human brain, then they are ever changing because the brain itself is ever changing (i.e. ever processing signals, excreting chemicals, metabolizing, etc. 2) the ‘being’ of any physical system is not Being. It is a particular being, and so it must take a particular form. Thus we get different ponces: pain feels different from thought which feels different from color which feels different from music, and so on.
Putting these together, we get the following: though the firing of c-fibres might correspond to the experience of pain, this experience only inheres in them (as I said) as a disposition when they’re not firing. But this isn’t to say there is no feeling of anything whatever when they’re not firing. The being of the c-fibre is always in flux, and so when it is not experiencing pain, it is experiencing something else. This manifests publically as the many physical events that go on within the c-fibre: the ion pumps reallocating sodium and potassium, the reuptake of emitted neurotransmitters, its own inner metabolizing, and so on. Even the countless molecules it is composed of are constantly active: trillions of electrons buzzing around their nuclei. Thus, when it stops firing, the pain transforms into different qualities, different ‘feels’, but we cease to be conscious of them because they go on, as you say, sub-cognitively. We only become conscious of such experiences when the corresponding physical activity (like the firing of neurons) is able to stimulating the ‘knowing’ part of the brain such that I can say “I know I’m experiencing X” and believe it.
That being said, it might also be clear to you why I would say the reduction must work the other way around, the other way from consciousness/mind to brain. If consciousness/mind is really just the ‘being’ of the brain, then what else could you ask for something to be reduced to? What else is at base in every physical system, in every existing thing, what else is utterly fundamental to it, than its being?
I’m glad you answered
For in that case, you will agree that what we recognize as physicality or matter is only an interpretation of information supplied to our sense. What we see of brains is only a representation of what brains “really are” - and if I’m right, that consciousness/mind is really the ‘being’ of the brain - then what the brain “really is” is just its own consciousness/mind.
In physical terminology, we say that one physical object affects another, or that one physical state causes the next. But if physicality as we experience it is really a representation of the ‘being’ of various things, then what this ‘affecting’ or ‘causing’ boils down to (in my view) is something much like ‘implying’ or ‘entailing’. If consciousness/mind is really information, then we can say that this information ‘implies’ or ‘entails’ the information that is our sensory experiences of brain (in a similar way that premises imply or entail conclusions in syllogisms). This would have to be a very indirect implying/entailing for there are many intermediary stages for this information to go through - many intermediary ‘arguments’ to imply/entail - which are nicely represented physically by the light reflected off brains, entering our eyes, getting transduced into electric signals, and finally impacting the brain. This formula generalizes, of course, to all matter and physicality, not just brains.
*It contains the mechanism of that but not the thing itself that we experience.
Firstly I have to say wow at your intellect and conceptualisation of all this. However I remain at a loss because to me you are describing a mechanism, there is nothing there that would experience self-awareness by that alone. When that occurs in my brain then I experience self awareness ~ where here that is awareness of my own form rather than my inner being, I mean some creatures cannot do that as they don’t have the tools to, but they know themselves and a mirrors reflection to them is not that, it would probably appear to them as like another animal of their species.
I would happily concede that we are such mechanisms alone, but I know that I think in terms of meaning and ideas, and that these are an entirely different kind of information to that you describe as being within the machine, I mean, where is the ghost in that machine? I would go so far to state or insist that what you describe is not information nor mindfulness et al, one element does not ‘inform’ to another element by the use of information as it properly is [how the greeks would have thought of it/what it is you are thinking right now], what is occurring are charged nerve cells interacting [well I don’t know the exact science and I am sure you will allow me that?].
What is interesting to me is that some of these processes seam to create [as far as we are concerned] informations proper, and the mind can read that then parse that back into the processes in the same manner it came out. Thing is that there is not a physical occurrence going on here that creates this information ~ or we would surely detect that in the mechanisms of the processes? Or maybe there is? I can remember watching sine-waves on an oscilloscope at collage, now when I picture this in my mind I don’t see information anymore than I see colour qualia in a lightwave! So I am lost in wondering where info is being created and received but surely there must be a way?
By mechanistic shape changing, with the record the needle simply bobs up and down on the grooves of a record producing the respective frequencies ~ as were used when producing [or ‘cutting‘] the record from the same frequencies. Its all just objects changing shape, the brain - if I may, simply a bucket of magnets, so to speak. I reason things down to a ridiculous level because to me the mechanism as compared to the mind is an absurd comparison. Call me an elitist but the wonder and majesty of life and consciousness is massively belittled by science.
Depends on how you mean this. I can surely communicate what a bat experiences when he experiences his own echolocation - that is, by saying “he is experiencing the results of his own echolocation mechanisms” - but not in any way that definitively expresses what that echolocation experience feels like to the bat - but then again, how do I communicate ‘red’ to a color blind mind?
Is there an entity who is co-ordinating the messages from the different senses? Each sense is functioning independently in its own way. When there is a demand which makes it necessary to co-ordinate one or two or all of the senses and come up with a response, still there is no co-ordinator, but there is a temporary state of co- ordination. There is no continuity; when the demand has been met, again there is only the uncoordinated, disconnected, disjointed functioning of the senses. Isn’t this always the case? Once the continuity is blown apart – not that it was ever there; but the illusory continuity – it’s finished.
To simply not know what red is is sufficient to be excluded from any mind. Unless you think we come equipped with a mind full of knowledge. Doesn’t mind undergo a process of being filled up?
For example, if I ask you a question that you haven’t the slightest knowledge about, what would be your response. Probably a big fat, ‘I don’t know.’ So, then where does that place your mind if you have no knowledge of anything whatsoever? Seems to me it would reside outside of or separate from you.
I’ve come up against this point before, and my response is always that there’s a difference between not knowing what something is (like red for the color blind man) and knowing it but not being able to offer anything further (like red for myself). I mean, I do know what red is, unlike the color blind man, but what I know of it is all there is to it. If you were to probe my knowledge for something further or deeper, I surely would have nothing to offer, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what red is; it just means that red, or what I know of it, is fundamental, that there is nothing more to it.
As far as sensory perception goes, by itself, without translating the sensory perception within the framework of the knowledge had of it, am I seeing? The optical signals are not being translated by the physical eye.
The moment I recognize that it is a fire truck, and a red fire truck at that, I have separated my self from it. When the recognition is there, I am there. So this self, this I, this mind becomes a center point of reference there. Without the center there is no ‘around.’
No, the eye does process the signals. It relays them back to the occipital lobe. From there, usually, the signal gets passed on up to the higher cognitive centers where we ‘know’ what we are seeing, but if this last step fails for whatever reason (brain damage?), then we would see whatever it is we’re seeing but not know it (as I explained before).
The self is not merely the center point - it’s something we posit occupying the center. Remove it and there is still a center, but nothing there.
I’m not sure how far I would go along with Heidegger, but I do agree here with you.
That “being” is a potentiality of, not a given state of that is running.
As roberto put it once, “I is made up of everything that it is not”.
Similarly, a “being” would probably be described by a negative (not “rejection”, negative as in a white circle on black background is in the negative when we make the background white and the circle black, stating all the while that we describe the white) outside of itself as correlated to itself.
Or better said…since I’m really not making sense here (sorry, I’ve been in a fog the past two days due to dental work that had me post-op drugged heavily for two days…I don’t recall much from the past couple days and I am still fighting clarity of mind…this thread ran it’s course of subject matter during that time though…I remember chuckling at the irony of the consideration of conscious self-awareness while at the same time struggling to recall even parts of myself).
Being…latch onto something which strikes you as separated from the rest of this image.
Maybe one of the enclosed circles, maybe a cluster outlined by a divisional line, doesn’t matter what you pick.
Now, each thing in here that could be unto itself separate from the other parts (even if it is but one line and nothing more) is so because of it’s reactions that have taken place.
But, it is also because of what it could do as a reaction to whatever it was reacting to, which whatever it was reacting to was doing the same upon it in like form to its own restrictions.
If such wasn’t the case, then we would just have an omni-encompassing mono-existence.
“You”, “me”, “this”, “that” would not exist conceptually.
There would only be “this”.
Divide light and you have definition, allow light unity without division and there is your omni-encompassing mono-existence form of light: you might as well be blind.
So I agree, that the potential of what a thing can do is a definition of it’s being, and in so doing immediately we have to describe every possible exchange with that thing.
However, that…is for a human, impossible.
We can only conceive of the idea of doing that, and we can do that with really tiny piece of controlled subjects like I did above in that cell logic example.
Outside of this, however, immediately the being of anything escapes us into relative infinity. It might as well actually be intangible and non-physically ethereal even though it is not.
Dead on.
There is a reason that water and waves in water are the method I prefer to explain metaphors of ourselves.
The relationship of a “wave” in a body of “water” is relatively the same function of the physics of our “conscious self-awareness” is to our “brain”.
The difference is in the constituents involved in the function.
One could be within safe bounds with declaring that our conscious self-awareness is a force.
There should be no surprise why waves, electromagnetic radiation, thermodynamics, and pressure (as examples) chokingly fascinate the human population endlessly throughout our history.
There is an uncanny identification with a thing being present from another thing, yet not being present itself in any tangible manner unto itself.
It’s nearly a paradox.
We actually run into the same paradox, for instance, when we try to describe the simplest thing witnessed. A wave in water.
What is a wave?
If you try to tear that apart in the same way that we endeavor to tear apart human conscious self-awareness (absolute and total deconstruction), then you’ll find yourself standing in the same kind of corner with nearly as confusing of an array of puzzle pieces that don’t seem to give you what the wave is at all by the constituents therein separated.
Nailed it again.
This is what has happened in neurology recently.
The wake up call that “white noise” in the neurological system is anything but just idle crap with the system really being “off”.
That there is no such thing as “off”.
(Honestly, why it took so long to realize the neurological systems compartments are never “off” is beyond me. It seems to me that to suggest such a concept is to suggest death.)
Using the wave again, the wave must be allowed to move the constituents of the body of water.
Thereby in likeness, I absolutely agree.
Forces are not independent of being caused by their constituents, nor are their constituents independent of influence from the force in which they create.
To an extent, but that is like saying that what a body of water really is is just its own wave.
Kind of, but not exclusively.
Or rather, they are inescapable from each other.
Those waves are what carves out the geology around the body of water which causes the water to exist in the form in which it exists and the waves are only carried out in the manner that they are due to the geological restrictions that causes the water to exist in the physical capacity with which it does.
So both are each other and neither is each alone.
Metaphorically, it is a family.
As I tell my wife, We are not us without the other and We are ill defined as I and You without We.
I drew a diagram of this strange observation while back…I might be able to find it if you want to see more on that, but it basically shows how in a coupling, you have an extension of the mirror neuron in the dual relationship of identity (we) that otherwise would not exist; thereby creating a new identity of your own individual self that simply would not exist otherwise…again, like a wave.
Not only does it make sense, it’s how our neurology literally works.
Like I said, “white noise” of yesteryear is now recognized as subtle networks of activity that are extremely powerful; indeed cardinal.
Without them…we would just be dead.
It is like saying, you cannot have a wave without current.
You cannot class current as white noise and only focus on when waves are present, because the waves would not be there without the current.
Neither of these two would be there without the physicality of the body of the water, and as stated, the body of water would not be so formed in it’s nestling of geological form without the currents and waves.
Of course you think in emblems. That has been a cardinal point of discussion here.
We cannot think otherwise, how would we?
As I said before, we do not have “matrix vision”.
We replicate, mix, and imagine by emblematic representation based on observation from our entire being; not through literal rise of the constituent parts.
A wave is seen in a body of water because of the motion; not because of the constituents.
However, without the constituents, that motion would not be present.
As well, without that motion, the constituents would not be thusly arranged.
As I’ve mentioned, existence is inescapably recursive.
Our conscious self-awareness is no alien to this consequence.
Which is precisely what allows me to point out the highlighted red parts of the logical expressions in the previous model.
It does not exchange a piece of information that persists itself through the system.
Just as a wave does not do this, nor does an arrangement of domino’s transfer “the fall” to each domino making the entire “falling” of all domino’s in the chain a united identity that was transferred throughout the system in it’s unaltered integrity.
Each domino exchanged upon the other as it’s relation allows.
The total motion therein is conceptually zipped up as an idea in our emblematic methods as “the falling of the domino’s” or “the wave moving through the ocean”, as if either are a unique identity unto itself.
This is why I used the term, “replication”.
Because we more or less burn the results into our constituents of our brain in tandem order as they occurred.
When replicated, called upon for “memory”, they are required to replicated the sensory reaction.
This is where biology does something non-biological formats cannot.
The water cannot send a charge unto itself to replicate a wave without the wave taking place in full extension.
Biological organisms can replicate internally without requiring external replication.
There is no such thing as information being created.
There is information being transferred.
Biological organisms can do something unique in that they all can reserve a form from one single interaction and simulate that same reaction without the stimuli directly present.
Most of the time, small organisms use this only for faster response to a second physical reaction; like white cells.
But advanced organisms with brains (portions of their body used as governing networks to assess and decide a course of response and action, even if unaware) are able to replicate through trickery.
One part can trigger into another the impulse as if the stimuli were present, which causes the recipient to act accordingly.
The record can trick the needle into reacting as if it was carving the record from a live sound; thereby producing a replication of that sound.
Once in a while, we see this feature rear in ugly ways.
White cells suddenly attack their host thinking it to be alien; autoimmune disorders.
The replication has mistaken the sensory input to be associated with the wrong identity.
We do the same often; we prosecute the wrong person because we remembered the wrong face with the wrong act.
Ergo, why we don’t like passing criminal judgement on eyewitness accounts alone.
Of course science belittles the system.
You have to if you want to have any chance at looking under the hood at all.
We can’t start to learn much tangibly about something if we just assume it to be beyond our tangible grasp of witness and leave it at that holistically.
We must start some where, and we must move slowly through each piece at a time riddling it down to its most basic requirements so that we can create a tangible emblem of what this thing is apart from the rest so that one day we can watch all parts together and understand better what is being seen.
We’re not at the final stage of running.
We’re still at the stage of reverse engineering.
Now that we’ve taken apart a rather good chunk of some parts of our brain, we are starting to examine in larger sections at a time with the understanding of the individual constituents in mind.
And that’s where the really great insights are coming from right now; from the section of neurology that is looking at the “bigger picture” models that can now be ran by running the constituents in tandem partially holistically, though not completely holistically yet.
To understand a great piece of poetry written by an alien, and to see how it works, you have to break it down to its etymological, grammatical, syntactical, alphabetical, phonetical, and dictional constituents before you can even start to understand the prose involved in even half of one line, let alone the entire piece.
And this says nothing for understanding the allegorical, rhetorical, or metaphorical state of any of the constituents in any variable of dissection or entirety.
We are at the stage of noticing the prose of half of a line, and different neurologists are looking at different lines.
Ask a religion that question; not science.
Science uses what’s observed and applies learned logic from what has been observed onto what is being learned.
It doesn’t make representative conjecture asserted as existent without observation indefinitely.
Yes, this is always the case.
You could also have just described the entire universe as we have observed it so far.
That doesn’t place the mind outside of a subject.
It places the experience that allows for replication (knowledge) to be incapable in gradient equal to the separation of what has been described from anything relative to it that may have been experienced and can supply as a substitute for conceptual grasping.
What is sex like in a vacuum?
Your mind does not exist away from you.
You immediately jump to stimuli you have replication capacity with:
Sex, firstly as it is tangible.
Vacuum…that you have not experienced, but you have heard or read of its pressure and description.
You can scramble for a relative simulation of a vacuum and rest on something like being at the deepest part of the ocean, but without sensation on the skin of being there, like perhaps when you are given a local anesthetic and can only feel the pressure but not the sense of touch.
So you might mix these three together and try to imagine the concept.
But whatever you imagine will be a speculative replication through associative imagination rather than crazy Eddie’s actual experience that he had of sex in a vacuum (somehow).
None of this, however, indicates a mind beyond you.
It indicates experiences not experienced in which you must attempt to vicariously replicate with what you have experienced.
You separated yourself from that truck long before you even saw that truck.
You separated yourself from external objects waaaaaaaay back around the 12th to 18th month range of being an infant.
Your first separation of consequential identification that takes place is that your mother is not you and you are not your mother.
It is the first identification that takes place.
Even if you don’t have a mother, this process still takes place, just in manners more ambiguous and difficult to launch from; this part of the development may be slower by a margin than if your mother were present.
It’s cellular division realizing that it is not the cell it left by realizing that it can bump into the other cell and react to it separately (this analogy of course does not happen on the cellular level cognitively at all, but the comparison is kin in the addition of a brain where a cell alone lacks such in itself).
The truck in your example isn’t something which needs to be identified as “not me”, but something that necessitate, “what kind of not me” immediately upon the nano second of first response to any possible stimuli that truck may onset with first.
This is why Hume’s remarks on inductive logic work as a criticism.
Because we do actually run on inductive logic cardinally.
Every living organism that has a brain does.
The only organisms that do not are organisms, like the nematode, that do not have a brain; and even then one could argue autonomous response networks in the neurological networks could constitute inductive logic by assumption of immediate response of the “programmed” (where programmed refers to responding to stimuli due to previous experience with the relative same) without re-affiliation being required in the system.
that’s a good question, I am thinking of it in the context; can we communicate what we experience? In other words, we know there is something of us that experiences and thinks in terms of info, experience, emotions etc, but if we can follow the physical processes through fully and these non-physical elements aren’t a part of the causality, then are we the mind, merely passengers?
Naturally this still denotes that there is something else there other than those physical processes.
TheStumps
We would think otherwise if we were ‘purely and exclusively’ physical, we would literally be thinking in frequencies and matrixes of them. To me that would be like a computer ‘thinks’ in binary, if sophisticated enough that would seam like a thinking being, yet it would remain mechanistic. As you say; we don’t have matrix vision, so I am not so sure what an emblem is composed of? Not to mention that information/data ideas and meaning are not necessarily emblematic.
An emblem to me is a symbol or could be expanded into any visual representation of a thing, I could see such things as one kind of idea of even as a symbol that we haven’t as yet formulated into an idea, or even that which we simply accept as something representative in the world without cognition of what that is [perhaps e.g. scenery or something like that which is similar but not the same as other similar we had cognised before].
I could envisage an emblem as something like an image on my monitors screen, but to me the computer doesn’t see what that is [even if a webcam was showed it]. Those colours are not physical so the computer cannot see them, it can work out what those shapes are and know the symbol like so, however this remains a representation, the computer does not possess the correct kind of information to understand, it simply relays that ’info’ as a set of switches left open or closed. A computer does not have mind-information [or information proper], neither does the brain!
Define emblem? I mean if it were in a computer we would be able to define exactly what it is, so we should be able to define these things ~ and without using metaphor.
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Allow me if I may to make a subtle but distinct observation; the ‘awareness of self’ is to me innate, the ‘awareness of ourselves as a human being‘, its form our faces etc, this needs the necessary apparatus in order to be achieved. This comes as no news to my Buddhist understanding of the world, the human form is not what we truly are, not the real self. After all if like in the film avatar you got into a different vehicle, then you would have to recognise that as the outer self. In the holographic theory existence is inescapably derived of information, objects only appear to be something other than that.
We need to be the experiencer, prior to having an experience.
We need to think about information, before we can return that to memory [where it is not information but a matrix representative of said info].
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Isn’t that what I have been trying to say myself? Sorry for being terrible at explaining my complaints doh, I will learn eventually.
Right, so now we have the position where information does not exist in the physical model, yes.
So now we need to understand if it merely occurs [is a passenger to physical causality] in response to physical events, or if it can make effect to that. This where we the non-physical mind can think in non-physical informations, change that information and pass it back into the physical, therefore changing the physical causality! ………>>>
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hmm inteesting. I agree that information is produced much like a mirror makes a reflection [and maybe is even the primal instigator], but I don’t understand how that works in reverse, though I presume it does. On one level it would seam that info interacts with electromagnetism or maybe far subtler energies, but first we need to determine if it’s a one way system ~ weather or not info only occurs as a result but is never a cause. It would seam to me that for the mind to be able to read info from neuronal matrixes, there would necessarily be an interaction occurring.
Info is transferred and also transformed ~ as we do that all the time when thinking about stuff esp in the imagination, to wit I’d presume that new informations can indeed be created. Hmm I think maybe you were referring to mechanistic info again [if there is such a thing].
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Interesting! is that not chemical/hormonal rather than information interactions?
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Agreed, but we shouldn’t accept that as the all and everything of it.
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ha, indeed.
My worry is that if we don’t start looking at the metaphysical side of it, we could start building things within the next 30 yrs that we consider to be conscious. We may then transfer what we think is our consciousness over to that and create a race of zombies. Not to mention the lack of moral basis derived from thinking of life as purely mechanistic Imho, that’s another topic though.
Its really interesting stuff mate, but we all must keep an open mind I am sure you agree.
Well, it seems as part of this thread there is a discussion about how we may be simply experiencing the expressions of buzzing neurons. A kind of experience having the nature of an ever-present pervasive component in consciousness; perhaps even consciousness itself.
Now, you enumerated: info, experience and emotion. What can we say as to the endurance and extent of these so called non physicals? Info is limited to its quantity; experience is restricted to its existence in memory and emotions can escalate only so far and so long before being injurious to the nervous system. Could it be that these limitations, these boundaries outline the form and appearance of the passenger? Iow, when we, in a deliberate way, think about this notion of a passenger and the passenger’s mind, we get a feeling of being caught up in a vicious cycle, whereas the fluxing state of the millions of vibrating neurons provides for a great magnitude of innumerable and various expressions.
We cannot just say we are ‘experiencing the expressions of buzzing neurons’, without denoting how that literally is what we experience. How can neurons actually experience, then also think and understand informations? If we can say that info is not of the physical than at least part of our thoughts are not physical etc, etc.
The memory can and indeed does feed itself, as it is of the machine. To us the experiencer you have to experience something before adding your idea of that experience to memory. This is how we have the set of memories of the personal, and the set of those of the world. I don’t see how experience ‘exists in memory’ [?] if it did we would be able to prove it by looking at the memory and saying, look there it is right there! that’s the thing about machines, they are fully knowable.
Yes such things are limited.
The emotions are electrical and chemical, then as such they may be ‘injurious to the nervous system’, the emotions as we experience them are mental and subjective.
I agree about the fear of being the passenger [if there can be such a thing?], but it means that there is no information exchange between mind and material, which means even with ‘the fluxing state of the millions of vibrating neurons provides for a great magnitude of innumerable and various expressions’, that there is nothing but a machine that the person has no interaction with! All that variety doesn’t exist [at least as a freedom of any kind] as there are simply many options that the machine can make [virtually randomly]. Its organised chaos and nothing like our experience of being alive.
Actually, I think of it both ways. The universe is a ‘this’ when taken as a whole. The universe that we “divide and conquer” is, as you say, something of our own making, but it is nonetheless real (I don’t equate “we did it” with “we faked it”). We participate in the universe - not only engaging in it but create and defining it as well. The relation between the universe as a ‘this’ and as ‘you’, ‘me’, ‘this’, and ‘that’ is, as I see it, defined by ‘equivalence’ (I defined ‘equivalence’ in my discussion with Three Times Great here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174418&start=50#p2202934).
I’ll do you one better: there aren’t two distinguishable things - the water and the wave - but one thing “doing the wave” . Ultimately, this is the way I imagine the relation between the brain and its consciousness/mind. There’s just one thing.
The catch is, I think that one thing is our consciousness/mind, and what we (or laymen) think of as “the brain” is just a shoddy representation of it given to the senses (this is why I brought up the question of whether what we see are things-as-they-are or things-as-our-brains-interpret them). If you’re going to choose between the two - which is real: consciousness-as-the-being-of-the-brain or the-brain-as-a-sensory-representation? - you’d better choose consciousness-as-being, you’d better choose us (not that I would say one of them is “less real” than the other). It gives a whole new depth to the cogito, don’t you think?
Perhaps this is a misunderstanding I have of the physicalist philosophy, but by ‘physicality’ I understand mainly what we experience as physical (i.e. hard, clunky, sometimes cold, sometimes hot, sometimes soft, sometimes not, sometimes wet, sometimes gaseous, and so on) and also what science can tell us about that same experienced stuff (ex. that it is composed of atoms, that it is mostly empty space, that its true nature is quantum, etc.). If it isn’t this, you might as well call it Kant’s noumena or Schopenhauer’s Will (or some such). I especially like Three Times Great’s definition of “whatever happens to exist” (paraphrased) - I guess the physicalist can’t lose that way . Even the father of modern idealism (the polar opposite of physicalism), George Berkeley, believed there was something that exists - God - which was the ultimate substrate of the universe.
Tell me what you think: I’m going to introduce to you a concept from my theory of mind and then challenge you to call the conception of ‘substance’ (if it can still be called that) that falls out of it ‘physical’: I don’t believe in the dualism of perception and perceived. There is no such thing as the perception of red that isn’t the red of the object perceived. They are one. This counts even for the perception of whole objects. There’s no such thing as the sight of an apple that isn’t the ‘real’ apple out in the world. This holds for memories, emotions, beliefs, elements of our senses (sound, pains, depth perception, motion detection, etc.), and everything that could be considered ‘mental’ (basically, any ponce). I call this ‘projection’. Ultimately, I believe what’s real are the projections of our minds, of our subjective experiences (our ponces). For example, a belief will project as truth (or fact). Truth - in this abstract metaphysical sense - is real (it exists). Emotions project as value - they are the basis for our morality. Morals - even in this abstract and metaphysical sense - are real - as real as your hands and the money in your wallet. The essential substance of the universe consists (at least in part) of truths, morality, and sometimes physical objects like your hands, but also things like beauty and essences. Is beauty as such a form of physical substance?
See my comments above about what I mean by “the physical brain” in this context - namely, a sensory representation of something else (like a shadow puppet represents a hand).
