I do not want you to think I am dismissing your responses, quite to the opposite.
If you would appreciate it, I can go back and address your responses each as I originally had considered doing.
However, after meditating on your response for a day I arrived at a consideration that most of what your responses were readdresses of earlier discussions and therefore I conclude that I am needing to change the approach of showing you the concepts rather than readdressing the concepts in the same manner as has been done.
I need to learn of you more than I was previously, I think.
Let me start with a question and a positive challenge.
In no more than 50 words, describe how a pinch on your hand arrives as something you are aware of in your thought.
Do not describe how you then react to a pinch, only how the pinch arrives as something you are aware of in your thought.
Describe this one direction of information, in as much of a biologically understood manner as you know, from the hand all the way up to your brain and in each place in between the two along the way that you can.
Meaning, how does your skin tell your nerves in your hand, where do your nerves travel to from the hand, how do those nerves transfer the information, etc… until you reach the brain.
I had hoped I made some critical points, but I shall endeavour to read those post before making further.
I am by the way, very much a mind-philosopher 24/7 [yes even in sleep], in fact I wouldn’t call myself a philosopher as such, more a seer/intuiter, and certainly not any kind of scientist. I hope that wont be held against me as we all have our fields.
Well I really don’t know so much about biology and neurology etc. from what I gather cells communicate [objects interact and make effect on one another as opposed to informations proper] both hormonally and electromagnetically, so if you touch something it sends an impulse ~ which I presume to be an EM frequency, along the nerve channels to the spinal chord and thence the brain. An emotional sensory experience would be both that em sensation along with additional hormonal changes ~ in the crudest of senses, that is to say that such devices to me are there to provide the mind with the experience.
The mechanisms are not so critical to me as in my mind I go straight to the end result, that is, where those impulses arrive in the brain and are translated into informations that the mind can then understand and build its world with. I also contemplate the idea that; ‘mind is present throughout’ and that there seams to be a level of thought beneath the linguistic [I often catch myself thinking faster than words will let me lols].
I’m not sure if you’re going to reply to the last couple posts (mine and quetz’s), but I would like to ask you one final question: would you say that all your generous and much appreciated replies to my questions in this thread are representative of physicalists’ views generally, or are they uniquely your own?
I am going to respond. I just haven’t had the time to respond at length to more than simple threads in the past few days.
Today, I hope to find myself some time now to respond more fully, as is deserved.
I consider myself a physicalist in the sense that Jefferson considered himself a Christian.
Meaning, in the literal sense of the word, I am a physicalist because I hold that there is no requirement for what is observed than the physical. Yet, further than the physicalist’s normative, I push more and state that the physical is indeed paramount to anything one could consider non-physical, such as fictional writing.
Even if one believes in the Almighty God, one would be cheap in stealing from such a god the authority to command the intricate components of the physical so to accomplish everything that is in every dimensional arrangement desired.
There is far more beauty in the actual Niagara Falls than there is in a virtual reality of Niagara Falls.
Why someone would desire to imagine such a god as in need of a slight of hand to escape a reality they could otherwise not accomplish their ends within, even when they created such, is beyond my understanding.
Truly, if there were a real construct of a transient human soul in some fashion due to such a figure as an Almighty God, then such a god would be far more wondrous and impressive in their artistic expression of creative finesse and mastery in revealing to man, through experience, the transformational limitlessness in which this god would be capable of manipulating the constituents of the physical to accomplish grand end motives of converting temporal energy into eternal energy within the physical bounds necessary.
I do not marvel at the painter for superseding their medium in the manner of mysticism, but accomplishing a transformation of their basic materials into a display which causes such articulated provocation in my spiritual and cognitive emotions in such a manner as to give me cause to be transfixed to its facade.
Here’s something to meditate on. This was my original point.
If the brain and mind are united, then there is no possibility of creating a zombie in which has the brain identical to a fully functioning human but lacks conscious self-awareness (or a mind, as many would call it).
It is akin to having water without a wave or current, which you do see as indivisible.
Or it is akin to asking how we might arrange paint in such a way as to recreate the sistine chapel ceiling in perfection, yet not provoke the essential spiritual emotional impact of the work.
And again, it would be to ask how we might arrange the threads of a flag so as to recreate the identical emblem of the Nazi party, yet not provoke the emotional turmoil and confliction in which such a symbol invokes today.
I do not know physicalist philosophy intimately. I know science to an amateur learned degree, and also hold within myself a deep and core resident of spiritual provocation with which I must not neglect seeing in man throughout our existence physically if both are at once to make respectable sense of either.
A wave cannot dismiss the water, nor the water up and dismiss the wave.
Either approach is reckless and neglectful of the fact of human’s own existence which stares at us daily in a sum larger than we can see stars in the sky.
Dualism only exists as a spade is from a hoe.
Dualism itself is not dualistic, though the dualist may think as much that it is.
For every split into two arrives with it an inherent requirement to split again in the same manner, and its children the same; endlessly for the length of the analysis.
If you split at length in such a manner, regardless, you will find yourself arriving at the root from which you started, but contradictorily doing so from both ends of the first split.
The right and left splits of the tree of endless splitting will both reroute back to the primal origin and confuse the examination of the tree.
But dualism has its use in that it is a simple means of focus.
If I throw a basketball at your face, dualism will allow you to dodge the ball by separating the ball from everything else immediately.
If I shoot you in your gut, your ability to find aid will be accomplished by a separation of pertaining facilities and not.
However, in doing either, nothing is determined about everything together. Dualism is simply a process of focus.
To claim it as otherwise and layer it as a skin of reality is to declare a metric as the matter itself.
As far as humans are concerned, you are correct. There is no red without the perception of it.
For instance, there is no blue in the pigment of the Blue Jay, yet there it stands in our perception as exactly this; blue.
(Whether this is by consequence similar to our sky’s physics, or by consequence of how oil looks blue is still in debate)
Everything, at some point is tied to another for its explanation.
We haven’t found one thing in which we can truly say stands independent of everything else completely.
Of course.
Again, there is a rather practical reason eye-witness accounts are commonly not enough evidence in law, isolated, and removed of all other evidence.
Magicians would have no trade if this were not the case.
Well enough, and no, no man’s life can be held against him unless he holds his life against himself.
So, now that you have done that exercise.
Describe, as best as you can, how it is possible that you are physically capable of feeling joy from a musical piece?
How does something such as music physically accomplish such an emotional response?
Is there in you an entity which you call the ‘I’ or the ‘mind’ or the ‘self’? Is there a co- ordinator who is co-ordinating what you are looking at with what you are listening to, what you are smelling with what you are tasting, and so on? Or is there anything which links together the various sensations originating from a single sense – the flow of impulses from the eyes, for example? Actually, there is always a gap between any two sensations. The co-ordinator bridges that gap: he establishes himself as an illusion of continuity.
The eyes are like a very sensitive camera. The physiologists say that light reflected off objects strikes the retina of the eye and the sensation goes through the optic nerve to the brain. The faculty of sight, of seeing, is simply a physical phenomenon. It makes no difference to the eyes whether they are focused on a snow-capped mountain or on a garbage can: they produce sensations in exactly the same way. the eyes look on everyone and everything without discrimination.
You have a feeling that there is a ‘cameraman’ who is directing the eyes. But left to themselves – when there is no ‘cameraman’ – the eyes do not linger, but are moving all the time. They are drawn by the things outside. Movement attracts them, or brightness or a color which stands out from whatever is around it. There is no ‘I’ looking. The consciousness is like a mirror, reflecting whatever is there outside. The depth, the distance, the color, everything is there, but there is nobody who is translating these things. Unless there is a demand for knowledge about what I am looking at, there is no separation, no distance from what is there. It may not actually be possible to count the hairs on the head of someone sitting across the room, but there is a kind of clarity which seems as if I could.
Do the pleasing and impressive qualities of sounds lie in the edardrum of the beholder? Does it lie in the arrangement of the vibrations? Where does it lie? Quality (joy, beauty, etc) is thought-induced. What happens is there is suddenly something different that is heard because the vibration has changed. Clarity is there, which probably wasn’t there before the change. Then this consciousness suddenly expands to the dimensions of the sound taking place inside of you, as in an echo chamber.
It is acquired taste that tells you that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is more beautiful than a chorus of cats screaming; both produce equally valid sensations. The appreciation of music, poetry and language is all culturally determined and is the product of thought.
In conception, yes there is.
In neurological capacity, yes there is.
Yes, it is the human brain.
There is no tiny man inside of a human running a switchboard, however.
Yes.
Absolutely not.
If you run into any physicalist stating this, then you need to send them back to human biological behavior 101 so that they may relearn the biology of neurological functions in the visual cortex and its relationships to the amygdala for compulsory response to beneficial mediums.
Color even has such pull on the neurology of the brain.
You can’t sweat the apatite of a human being by surrounding them in blue because there are no foods with which contain such coloring, thereby our biological disposition is not set to trigger a response.
Counter to this, yellow, red, and green stimulate the appetite readily due to the volume of vegetations that are red, yellow, and green, and meats that are red.
Furthermore, physical attraction to anything is based on visual representation of context, ratio of proportion, and relative symmetry.
The reason that a perfectly symmetrical object strikes us as strange is because in all of nature, symmetrical objects - which are plenty - are always just slightly asymmetrical by a minute value, often unnoticed cognitively; thereby a purely symmetrical object immediately catches our attention, especially when it is an organic object.
However, artists use this knowledge to their advantage frequently.
An easy such example is also one of the oldest friends of humanity; the labyrinth:
This concept in art pulls on the fabric of visual perception in which an apparent symmetry is accomplished through an actual asymmetrical form.
Humans commonly prefer symmetrical features, however humans are equally entranced by slightly asymmetrical features; similar to how the labyrinth is slightly asymmetrical, or rather, it difficult to pinpoint in how it is not perfectly symmetrical upon first glance.
This then attracts the eye to look more.
In some cases, this creates an attractive feature on a human, a slightly turned lip on once side; a slightly higher eyebrow on one side.
However, in others, the extreme’s become too much and a repulsion takes place as a radical lack of symmetry represents malformation in mammals and all mammals seem to repulse these features. Interestingly, these features of strong asymmetry are typically caused by a lack of health or an affliction of some kind.
It is extremely likely, and heavily studied at this point, that the attraction to symmetry in features is a consequence of being interested in healthiness as the surrounding and mating social groups around a given individual that is not so afflicted themselves (and possibly even among the afflicted; that they still continue to desire the symmetrical).
That is what a brain is for.
Both.
The right frequency must be received by the right receptor.
No, they do not.
An infants yell, for instance, is linked to a specific range of frequency that is unique to specifically piercing its mother’s eardrum and causing a sharp impulse to the amygdala consequentially triggering panic in the near perfect efficient.
An infant is attracted immediately to white noise akin to the frequency of its mother’s heart beat from inside, and from which the amygdala produces greater levels of serotonin during the input of this frequency of sound.
Yes, over time, experiences and your reflections alter aspects of your musical interest, but most of the basic attractions are going to be established within the first five years of being alive.
However, neither is such a thing as sound or music fixed.
At different growth stages in a human life, different music and sounds will be of interest to satisfy their emotional plateau desired.
This is no great secret.
Generally speaking, the older that you become, the more sound you lose sensitivity to and therefore less attracted to complicated sounds which use meshes of sounds in robust formats that require an ear which can hear the full spectrum of sound to accomplish the harmonies therein.
Similar to this, the young can hear certain tones which many of the older humans cannot and now we use this as a tool against loitering; driving frequencies at them which neurologically disorganize their internal cognition to a point of provoking painful experiences physiologically.
I can play quite specific drumming patterns towards you and you will move into a cycling of brain waves that mirror the beat patterns in which I am playing.
Indeed, with nothing more than a few drums, it is possible for me to entrance your mind and take control over your brain waves.
Neurologists actively study this feature of many tribal ritual practices involving such drumming practices.
I can even place you in Stonehenge with only a couple drums and possibly, depending on your empathy biologically, knock you out or at least cause you to vomit just by playing the drums in specific placements while you are at varying distances.
Sound is not a transient and impassible object with which only our psyche is titillated with.
Not even remotely.
I presume the subjective mind enjoys the experience, and so gives feedback into the brain [not meaning to be dualistic here] in terms of ‘mental’ informations. Equally, to begin with music creates effects in the brain which are translated into informations, some sounds are soothing some positively nauseating. When you add lyrics to that then you get informations that one can relate to and that info alone can send charges of electricity - so to say [not sure if it is literally so?] down the spine in a most moving way. A love song may connect you [informatively] to memories from experience, and can make you laugh or cry, the influence of some songs and musical pieces are too profound to even put into words ~ yet what is correspondingly occurring in the brain and body is comparatively gross and base!
To me you just gave a great example of the majesty of the soul [mind-body] over the machine of the body.
Hmm I know I say things like that when I don’t have so much scientific knowledge of the body/brain, however I have in similar debates in the past looked up papers on how e.g. neurons work and similar, then whenever I look at the particulars it gets increasingly gross the more one understands of a singular aspect. that’s why I see it all as chemicals and electromagnetism in a mundane way, I know it is very complex and sophisticated but so is a computer and that doesn’t know, experience or feel anything.
I just cannot get to grips with how any of that can amount to; information, experience, knowing, being and thinking in every way. If anyone can show me how it does then I will happily capitulate to their argument.
oi…gotchya.
Well, a shit load of reading child psychology books when I was getting ready for having kids was part of that.
Understanding the common child developmental milestones.
Then there’s just neurology of which I’m morbidly fixated in learning.
Looking around for some summary places that might help, I see this site has a general summary of the development of consciousness in infants and some resources linked which you may like looking at: the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2007 … sness.html
Most of my understanding of sequential memory comes from my fascination with autism neurologically.
However, there are some interesting reads on the subject of sequential memory development (which is in flux neurologically in its details)
There’s this, which is interesting: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do … 1&type=pdf
I don’t keep rigorous records, and I will make sure to be clear that that outline is a grand sweep of generalization that mostly addresses when things (as far as we can tell right now, anyway) kick off, but not when they are “done” (if there is truly such a stage - jury is still out on that).
What I meant by amateur is that I do not hold a degree in neurology or a degree in anything.
I simply learn as much as I can wherever I can find it. (loved finding the Standford classes when those came about on youtube!)
There’s also some really, unrelated, interesting information on mapping the brain’s use of data in newer approaches using sound tones, or music, as representations of the data therein from the fmri’s.
Here is a media blip summary youtube.com/watch?v=ynMiopPCHXk
‘Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life—all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards as his own intimate private self —is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else… Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West—but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.’
V. Ramachandran Phantoms in the Brain
Alternative theorists are suspicious of this over enthusiasm of neuroscientists and reject their ‘findings’ on the ground that the neuroscientists haven’t been able to repeat their experiments to produce identical results as incontrovertible proof, simply because you cannot really reduce human experiences or human consciousness to purely neural mechanisms. These scientists succeed only in explaining away the complex relationship between the nature of the human brain and consciousness.
Sorry for the wait, really busy day yesterday so I only ended up with one time to check in.
At any rate.
Good response, and a grand summary for capturing the spiritual essence of how I see this all in us as well.
That was an elegant description of the majesticness of human nature.
You need to learn more about V. Ramachandran before just making sweeping belittlements such as this.
The fellow is the only neurologist with consistent successes in record for curing phantom limb pain through neurological approaches.
If you think that V. Ramachandran thinks so particularly daft, then you have over simplified his statements’ intention much in the same light with which your statement asserts scientists over simplify the human being.
Also, “alternative theorists” range from people that believe aliens inhabit our bodies, to God gave us souls, to neurology is just looking at it slightly wrong, and all point in between.
That doesn’t really help anything in the statement.
neuroscientists haven’t been able to repeat their experiments to produce identical results as incontrovertible proof
Exactly which studies that are in question are you referring to?
Please try to answer all the below, as I very much respect your views and you are helping me get to grips with this fundamental philosophical problem.
quetzalcoatl wrote:I presume the subjective mind enjoys the experience
You make a good point as ever, one would expect that this would be achieved through the medium of the brain/body. We could say that there is only mind and info, then the rest is of the physical, but I want to find more than that [as it leads to horrible moral issues].
Our answers are all in the same dichotomy; is the experience in the mind or the brain?
On both sides we could ask what does that mean; the experience of joy would make little sense if the mind was thinking/experiencing it, but it had no brain to physically deliver its expression. Equally it would make no sense if there was no mind actually experiencing the brains/bodies expression.
I could also ask you the question; name a single instance of information in the physical, anything at all? …info as we experience it in the mind that is!
I could also go on to ask; what is it we are seeing? Here again we have a dichotomy; if you turn of all neural activity to do with vision then you would see nothing, however, what we do see are not physical colours!
We cannot just say that those colours, the 3D image in the mind, does not exist, even though we cannot find it in the brain or the physical generally. It is your entire experience of seeing! I feel we can say the very same thing about all our senses, and indeed about our entire experience.
If our entire experience is in the subject and is located/exists in another world [the mental world], then you see how I can arrive at the idea that the physical is the medium which provides that subject with experiences about the world and other subjects. Then also that there is nothing left to be experienced in the physical ~ the whole experience is in the mind.
At most we could say that if we take away all the things which inform the subjective mind, then there may not be anything left creating the subject ~ nothing to individualise mind. In which case we could rightly say that the individual does not actually exist. …we got a long way to go before that though e.g. the mind produces and changes information and the qualia it experiences, so we don’t just have a receiver but a producer of the effects [the only effects!] experienced.
I think it’s time to switch gears again. I started off this thread in the mood to debate. I then got to a point where I thought a gear switch was in order - so I stopped debating and started inquiring. Stumps was very helpful towards this end. Though he may not be totally representative of physicalists in general, I have seen the themes he’s brought out elsewhere in physicalist circles, and it seems to converge on consensus.
Now I feel the need to switch gears again - from inquiry to conclusions.
I’m going to draw two sets of conclusions from all the foregoing. I first conclude on where the miscommunication lies between physicalists and non-physicalists (or physicalists who, like Dawkins, recognize the work left to do), for that is what I feel (at this point) the problem is - miscommunication (I also suspect there is some eagerness on the physicalist’s part to pursue an alterior agenda - namely, to attack religion - and therefore clarity on the internal consistency/completeness of his philosophy tends to take a back seat - hence the miscommunication).
So here’s my concluding remarks. I will present my second set of conclusions in another post. The physicalist is to take these conclusions as suggestions for clearer communication when engaging with dessenters. So the “top ten” pointers for physicalists to take note of:
Explain what you mean by ‘physical’. The misconception is that the physicalist wants to deny the existence of internal states or that such so-called ‘internal states’ are really just the things we can observed ‘externally’. On the contrary, the physicalist wants to say that such internal states are just as worthy of the label ‘physical’ as any externally observed state. It is comparible to the claim that Paris is in Germany. Without being clear that by ‘Germany’, one really means all of Europe, the claim seems blatantly false. Why one would want to call all of Europe ‘Germany’ is up to him to justify, just as it is up to the physicalist to justify why he wants to call both externally observable states and internal ones ‘physical’, but so long as it is understood that this maneuver is one of expanding the term ‘physical’ to encompass more territory than it had hitherto covered, rather than bring phenomena (like ‘internal states’) into its territory when they just don’t belong there, then all’s fair as far as the nomenclature is concerned.
At the same time, however, I don’t think it’s warranted to expand the meaning of ‘physical’ too broadly, as for example: “whatever happens to exist.” That’s cheating. You can’t go wrong that way. If Berkeley happened to be right, the physicalist would then say “Yeah, by ‘physical’, I meant God” If Descartes happened to be right, the physicalist would then say “Yeah, dualism is a version of physicalism”? To define ‘physical’ in such broad and all-encompassing terms is an evasive maneuver and only betrays an unwillingness to admit when you’re wrong.
Be clear on whether you’re using a reductionist scheme, causal one, or an emblematic one. It makes a difference. The bane of most non-physicalists is that they just can’t bring themselves to understand how such internal states just are the external ones they correspond to. It’s like trying to understand how red reduces to a particular pattern of black and white. If the physicalist were but to explain his views in causal terms instead - much as how I suggested the mind might be to neuro-chemical events as electromagnetic fields or heat might be to those same neuro-chemical events in that the former aren’t reduced to the latter but caused by them instead - it would go a long way to helping the non-physicalist understand. It wouldn’t go all the way, for he still won’t understand how the external events cause the internal ones, but at least it won’t seem like a plainly incoherent concept. Same applies to the emblematic scheme, but here too the non-physicalist is probably going to expect some kind of explanatory connection - as in how emblems can arise from neur-chemical events as externally witnessed.
8 ) Be clear about what the term ‘neuro-chemical event’ (and similar terms) refers to. When the non-physicalist hears these terms, he typically thinks about only those externally visible phenomena involving neurons, chemicals, and their activity. He may not be aware that a ‘neuro-chemical event’ refers, to the physicalist, not only to those externally visible phenomena, but to the internal ones as well - that is, without necessarily equating the two, much as how the electromagnetic fields or heat may be called ‘neuro-chemical events’ even though they are not to be equated with neurons or chemicals specifically but only come from the latter’s activity, and therefore are still worthy of the label.
Define ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, ‘thinking’, ‘experience’, etc. Many who aren’t part of the ‘inner circle’ don’t understand these terms in the more narrow sense that professionals in the field use. If its true that a nematode feels something when his single neuron is stimulated, then those who aren’t prevy to the technical definition of a word like ‘consciousness’ might say that ‘feeling’ constitutes a form of consciousness. They may not be aware that you reserve the word ‘consciousness’ for “having at least a minimal awareness of the immediate world of an organisms environment, currently and in the past insofar as the past is relevant or useful to the organism, and having a minimal ability to predict future events insofar as those are also relevant or useful to the organism”. Only mammals and other sophisticatedly evolved creatures can be said to be conscious in this sense. The problem is that as much as this definition may be valid, most think of consciousness in this fully evolved sense as fundamentally no different in ‘substance’ (for lack of a better word) than the simple and elementary ‘feels’ that single celled organisms like nematodes and individual neurons experience. Consciousness and mind are ‘made up’ after all of these latter ‘feels’ - it’s the same kind of ‘stuff’. Many think of consciousness/mind as a ‘stuff’ (not necessarily literally) and that it manifests in many different forms (qualia, these ‘feels’) and what we call human consciousness, or the human mind, is just the particular configuration that consciousness/mind in general has taken in us - just a particular combination or system of qualia, of ‘feels’, unique to us. But it’s not as though other configurations, like that found in the nematode, aren’t consciousness/mind - that is, not unless you explicitely define ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ the way neuroscientists and other experts in the field do - and you do need to make it explicite.
Tease apart your philosophy and your science. Don’t say that science ‘proves’ physicalism. It doesn’t. Science proves that there are publically observable neuro-chemical mechanics going on in our cranium, and that these mechanics can explain why we respond behaviorally to stimuli in a cause-effect manner. That these mechanics just are consciousness and mind, or that they cause consciousness and mind, is the philosophical part. When speaking as a scientist, one has an obligation to deliver the truth as science has unveiled it - that’s the ethics of good science - and when one mixes his own personal philosophies in his delivery, feigning it as ‘scientific fact’, he is being dishonest and unethical. Be clear what the facts are. Be clear what your personal philosophies are.
Don’t assume your contender is a dualist. Don’t assume he is just another religious devotee promulgating the reality of the eternal soul. Dualism is not necessarily the only other option when physicalism is rejected. I suspect this is probably where the attitude that “science proves physicalism” comes from. I certainly agree that science proves dualism false - at least, the brand of dualism that would have it that the mind or soul controls the brain or the body (brain damaged patients is good falsifying evidence of this). I can also understand how physicalism seems to be the “only game in town” when you cross dualism and idealism off the list (I agree that idealism has its fair share of problems as well), but don’t be so bold as to assume that your insight into the matter is sufficiently deeper than your contender. It just may turn out that your contender can see a game just beyond that so-called “only one” that you and your limited insight are fixated on, a game other than classical dualism or idealism. So investigate first - he may enlighten you.
You need a word for whatever it is a nematode ‘feels’ (give me something that I don’t have to use scare quotes around ). ‘Qualia’ doesn’t seem to cut it as it doesn’t encompass everthing that might be described as ‘internal’ or ‘privately observable’, and some physicalists even doubt their existence (Dennett to wit). This may be part of the reason why non-physicalists generalize words like ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ - they need some word to describe these concepts.
Once you get a word for the above, be clear about how generalized or universal these things (I’m going to call them ‘feels’) are in nature. Be clear if you think they can be generalized beyond human beings and other animals, beyond neurological systems or single neurons, beyond life in general, and if they can be generalized to things as simple as fundamental particles interacting with each other. You can call this ‘information’ if you want, but be clear that this term is to be interpreted in the same way as ‘feels’ (i.e. as ‘internal’ or ‘privately observable’). This makes it very clear that the problem to be grappled with is not how the brain creates consciousness and mind - the non-physicalist should see, at this point, that the latter problem is not that hard to solve if you know enough about the brain sciences - for ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’, or at least its basic ingredients (the ‘feels’), were there before the brain even started to evolve. The problem, therefore, is at least diverted away from human beings and other brain possessing animals in particular, and it is diverted away from the question of ‘consciousness’ and ‘mind’ in their more narrow and customized (neuroscientific) definitions.
This last point deserves some elaboration.
As stated in 5), one of the major attacks launched by physicalists is against dualism, and specifically against the notion of a ‘soul’ - that is, the notion that human consciousness and mind is this single unified entity, that it is not dispersable or fragmented throughout the brain, that it is at the ‘center’ of ourselves (indeed, constituting our ‘selves’), that it can survive the body’s death, and that if there is a link to the brain at all, it is at a very focused center (like the pituitary gland). I agree that this idea has to be done away with. But this is only half the battle. One quite subtle implication that follows from the idea of a soul, an implication that goes unnoticed but is probably the source of much confusion on this matter, is that only those beings who have a soul can be said, not only to be conscious and have a mind, but to ‘feel’ anything (i.e. as a nematode or even an electron might be capable of). This has the surreptitious effect of making everything else seem ‘soulless’ - that is, inanimate, dead, utterly without consciousness or ‘feeling’. My electric screw driver, for example, though evidently quite complex and could conceivably be describing as having something like a ‘nervous system’ (i.e. an electrical system - the trigger being perhaps like a ‘sensor’), could never be conscious or feel anything. It is dead, inanimate, spiritless. But now I question whether the elimination of the idea of a ‘soul’, or at least its downplaying (its dispersing, its decentralizing), might be grounds to introduce a ‘soul’ (or something like it) into things that aren’t considered conscious or mentally endowed. I wonder, that is, whether the idea of a ‘soul’, being a sort of black and white, all or nothing concept, would make things which were hitherto considered to be completely ‘black’ or possessed with ‘nothing’ seem not so ‘black’ or possessed with ‘something’ if that which was hitherto considered ‘white’ or ‘all’ (i.e. the human soul) were to be rethought as less ‘white’ and not so ‘all’. Is this dichotomy - soul-endowed and soul-devoid - symmetrical? Ought they be considered symmetrical? If we don’t have ‘souls’, does it follow that everything has a ‘soul’ of sorts?
In short: maybe the problem of consciousness shouldn’t be phrased: “How is it that a brain can produce consciousness or a mind?” but “How is it that my screw driver doesn’t produce consciousness or a mind?”
Be clear on whether you subscribe to the model-in-the-head view of the world as we subjectively experience it or the window-to-reality view as I call it (I play on an analogy here: consciousness is conceived as a window through which we see reality for what it is. The window is featureless, meaning that it doesn’t taint or distort any information as it passes through, and thus reality is exactly as we see it. Its only function is to allow for our seeing it, our being aware. Replace the window with a mural and you get how this contrasts with the model-in-the-head view, or phenomenal consciousness as some would call it, or the system-of-experiences view as I would call it). This point ties in quite directly with a couple other points made above (and the physicalist might want to note these as they may be very useful connections to highlight in a debate with a non-physicalist): it ties into 10) where one’s definition of ‘physical’ is paramount. Does ‘physical’ refer only to the world as subjectively presented (i.e. the elements in the model)? This is, after all, the arena in which we have ‘hardness’, ‘softness’, ‘extension’, ‘sharp’, ‘dull’, ‘shiny’, ‘rough’, ‘wet’, ‘dry’, etc. Is anything outside the model really hard, soft, extended, etc.? It also ties in with 6) where a separation between the actual science supporting physicalism and one’s philosophical opinions supporting physicalism is emphasized. Science, more often than not, turns on the model-in-the-head view, particularly when the question of whether or not a theory ever counts as ‘true’ when its only defensible virtues are its ability to predict future empirical experiences and perhaps its elegance in explaining certain phenomena with clarity and simplicity. This has quite profound, if not obvious, implications for whether one can legitimately say that science ‘explains’ consciousness. If what science can tell us - namely, about the externally observable mechanisms in the brain and how they cause our behavior - is really just a model-in-the-head, then it stands to argue that what this model represents may indeed be consciousness through-and-through, and not just something that causes consciousness or is correlated with it. Yet at the same time the consciousness represented is outside the model, just as any phenomenon science supposedly explains is outside the model, and therefore shouldn’t be identified as the model. But this all hinges on one’s philosophy of science. Science doesn’t prove the model-in-the-head view; rather, it’s the model-in-the-head view that proves (or justifies) science. The physicalist, if he is speaking as a scientist and if he endorses the model-in-the-head view, is obligated not to argue otherwise.
And finally, the number 1 pointer for physicalists to take note of (drum roll)…
Shit or get off the pot. Concerning the zombie argument: either solve it or admit that it remains to be solved. If the zombie argument rests on a misunderstanding of the physicalist’s position - namely, in the manner described in 10) - then it still underscores an important conceptual gap between how these two ‘physical’ phenomena - the publically observable neuro-chemical events and the private ones - are connected. It need not count as proof that no such connection exists, but it surely highlights the imcompleteness in the physicalist’s account. If that account points to something far removed from human consciousness and mind - namely, to ‘information’ as it is supposed to exist almost universally, that is in each and every interaction between particles whereby energy is exchanged - then it has work to do even there, for the zombie argument has only been diverted from humanoid zombies to physical systems in general, but the logic of the argument remains steadfast. I can imagine particles interacting without feeling anything - most people do imagine it this way.
That’s my “top ten” for you guys. In my second set of conclusions, I will present what I believe to be three of my best arguments for my anti-physicalism, and why I believe ‘mind’ is what’s at the bottom of any existing thing.
Here are my top three arguments for why I think ‘mind’ exists at the base of everything. For my purposes, I’m going to use the word ‘experience’ (as I do in my website - see my sig for link) for ponces and popes (i.e. any privately observable subjective feeling - whether consciously recognized or not).
The argument from irriducibility: This one you’ve already heard (if you’ve been following this thread), so I won’t rehash it but quote it instead:
Note that this argument works not only for the reduction of experiences to neuro-chemical events (or sonces), but to anything at all that doesn’t appear, or isn’t felt, in the experience itself. Hence, we get that some believe, as I do, that all such experiences are, as a matter of principle, irriducible. Therefore, one either embraces dualism (which in my mind is untennable) or one places mind at the bottom of all reductive hierarchies.
The argument from being: A fairly heavy theme in my website is the placing of ‘realness’ into experience itself. This goes counter to the conventional wisdome: being caught up in the thralls of the Cartesian legacy, we tend to think of perception and experience as necessarily felt but not necessarily real. Coupled with this assumption is that of the perceived or experienced as necessarily real but not necessarily felt. My philosophy spins on a fusion of what’s true in the two assumptions and a razing off of their errors: experience, as I’m defining it, is both necessarily felt and necessarily real. What this means to say is more than just what classical idealism (out of the mouth of Berkeley) has to say. The latter says that experiences (or ideas) are real as mental objects. What I mean to say is quite different. I mean that what Cartesian dualism tells us are ‘mental objects’ are really objects in the world. How is this so, you ask. It is by the appropriation of ‘realness’ out from the world and into experience, out from the “necessarily real but not necessarily felt” and into the “necessarily felt but not necessarily real”, which is consequently a dualism between the “necessarily real and felt” and the “unreal and unfelt” - which is really a monism because the latter, by its own definition, not only doesn’t exist, but there isn’t even the illusion of such. ‘Being’ in other words, is not something outside our experience (which, according to the conventional wisdome, our minds only poorly report to us), but is at the core of our experience. Who, except the philosopher, wonders whether the color of the sky really is the blue that his experience makes it out to be? The experience of the sky’s blue, therefore, is not “just a perception” - it is the sky’s color.
What else but being qua being could do this? What else but being could we be experiencing in apprehending the reality of things by way of our experiences? The being of things is not something we’re conscious of, it is our consciousness. It saturates qualia of all kinds, every state of mind.
Thus, what sense does it make to reduce mind and consciousness to the brain? It has its own being. It is self-sufficient in its existing. I’m not saying the brain isn’t real, or that it doesn’t have being. I’m saying there is no point to such a reduction. Moreover, such a reduction presupposes that being itself needs to rest on some more basic foundation. This is nonsense. What would being be founded on? Non-being? Being, by its very nature, by the very definition itself, is foundation - not a foundation - but foundation itself - the word just means ‘foundation’. Thus, the reduction of experience to anything else is not only unnecessary, but incoherent.
The argument from justification: matter is contingent, mind is necessary. That’s what I try to argue in my website at least. The presentation of a physical object to our senses is given without explanation. Things are just there. We don’t know why, we don’t know how. They are contingent. Thus, we recruit science as a means to seek out their contingencies in the hopes of fostering more of a sense of necessity. Once we figure out that the rock, which presents itself to us so contingently, is made of a network of atoms, it suddenly becomes necessary: the rock must exist because its atoms exist. Unfortunately this only passes the buck along. Now the atoms seem contingent, and we push our science further along.
With the mind, we have our answers instantly. Why is Socrates mortal? Because he is a man and all men are mortal. Why does a square have four sides of equal length all at right angles to each other? Because that’s just what a square is! It just seems necessary - so necessary that no motive to question it arises. But this string of logic is just thought, an example of mind. Thought, therefore, justifies, necessitates whatever comes out of it. It is a justifying power.
I realize this point can seem rather weak unless we focus exclusively on logical thinking alone. There are, after all, irrational modes of thinking, and then there are non-cognitive experiences like emotion which are notorious for defying all rational sense. But if I may, I want to argue that all experiences - emotions included - have their own brand of ‘logic’. What I would argue in the case of emotions or irrational forms of thinking is that, if ‘necessity’ seems like too strong a word to describe them, then ‘justify’ can substitute. It’s somewhat of a softer term, but it does the trick all the same - namely, replacing contingency, which is just a lack of reason or explanation, with something that halts the need to seek out such a reason or explanation.
The justification in experience appears in how they seem like ‘good reason’ for whatever follows from them (whether that be more experiences or decision to act). Take music for example. Why is it that Wagner’s Rise of the Valkyries seems to fit so well with scenes of war in the movies? Is there anything logical about the association between the way the song sounds and the theme of war? I would say not. But somehow, the way the music sounds just seems to justify its being used to express or highlight war. Why is this? Because mind - in this case the experience of music - is a justifying power, and in this case it (somehow) justifies associating Rise of the Valkyries with the theme of war. The ‘somehow’ is only so mysterious because of how difficult it can be sometimes to translate certain experiences into thought, and into rational thought in particular. It is only rational thought that finds its way best into our ability to explain and put into words. Emotions, on the other hand, are notorious for their obstinacy to explanation and effibility. But this is only a happenstance occurence traceable to our evolution and neurological constitution. Emotions never needed to be “put into words”, but expressed in more primative wholesale actions such as flight-or-fight responses. This should not be taken as a sign that emotions lack any “rational justification” - on the contrary, they have their own sort of justification, a sort that is unfortunately difficult to express rationally, but is nevertheless there. Why else would we feel that, deep down within us, in moments when we are emotionally overtaken, that those emotions somehow justify our actions, even if we can’t justify such actions publically, even if we have trouble remembering those justification ourselves when we later come out of our emotional storms and resume a more level headed calm. There’s something in the emotions themselves that scream out a justification for the actions they push us to engage in, and this is true of any experience, any state of mind, for as I said, mind is a justifying power. We happen to be logic-biased, we tend to give the final say to our rational thoughts only, and the difficulty with which the justifications of our other experiences struggle to be heard is due to the difficulty with which they can be translated into thought. Thought therefore - that is rational thought - tends to tyrranize the rest of the mind and make it appear to ourselves that they are the only ones with any justification whatever.
The more central point is that, if rational thought is a tyrant, and we are biased towards it, then there is no reason to take the rest of the mind, and experience in general, as any less justified (maybe even necessary). Mind therefore is a justifying power. It supplies its own reasons for its flux, for its on going metamorphosis. Just as why Socrates is mortal or why a square has four sides and angles of equal magnitude, every state of mind, every experience, is self-evidently without need for questioning. It makes no sense to question why a square has four sides and angles of equal magnitude, and it makes no sense to question why we are having such-and-such experience. This is why we just ‘roll’ with our experiences. A fish never questions why he is having such-and-such experience. He just rolls with it. His experiences explain themselves and urge him on to have other experiences and engage in ensuing behaviors. For this reason, mind and experience are, once again, the perfect candidate to place at the bottom of any reductive hierarchy. We are searching for this bottom when we apply our sciences to contingent physical objects in the hopes of finding something necessary, or at least justified in a way that no further justification is needed, and the irony is that we have just the necessary or justified basis we are looking for within ourselves.
If there are any objections to this, it would be 1) that what all our experiences seem to begin with, namely sensations, seem to arrive out of the blue, and in fact are the whole reason why the physical world seems so contingent in the first place. Where are their justifications? 2) If the justification of mind is so manifestly self-evident, why has philosophy been grappling with the mysteries of consciousness for several millenia. The answer to 1) has been answered elsewhere in this thread. It is that our sensory experiences are backed up by justifications, but we just don’t have epistemic access to them. I won’t explain this in detail as it’s been explained already in this thread (in my conversations with finishedman). In short, we do experience their justifications, we just don’t know it. To address 2), I will say that in our attempts to tackle the problem of consciousness, as in our attempts to tackle any philosophical or intellectual puzzle, we withdraw from the world and enter an arena of abstractions. It happens that we have evolved with this arena in such a way that anything that enters therein (i.e. any concepts and assumptions) become ‘objectified’ - that is, we make them into objects - thus, as with the physical objects which we sense, they all of a sudden appear contingent - as though they are just ‘there’. Hence, we get Descartes imagining that mind or consciousness is a kind of ‘substance’, and the soul is a sort of metaphysical ‘object’. We get Plato imagining that the ‘forms’, which are really just conceptual abstractions, are really “out there” in some transcendental netherworld. Objectification is inescapable when we contemplate things abstractly and philosophically, and so we must be wary that when we engage in this sort of activity, things are going to lose their ‘justification’, their ‘necessity’, and will be replaced by the same sort of ‘contingency’ as the physical objects presented to our senses. We can surmount this deceptive allure if we keep in mind to be skeptical of this objectified veneer - or we can maintain our hold on the justification and necessity that resides in our experience simply by “being in the moment” as opposed to withdrawing and reflecting on such experiences in a realm of abstraction. In those moments, no questions ever arise - we just roll with our experiences.
This last argument is probably the sketchiest of the bunch, but only because it requires the most elaborate defense, and ILP is not the place for it. If anyone’s really interested, I will direct you to my website for a full treatment: mm-theory.com/execsum/execsum.htm.
I’m questioning the beliefs that questions on the self and consciousness can be approached and explained solely empirically. And I am questioning the scientific idea that the ability of a theory to predict and control the forces and processes of physical phenomena proves its truth. It merely proves that we can turn this crank and get the right answers in a certain area. If you restrict yourself to these areas, the theory naturally appears unassailable.
A few alternative theorists theorizing that neuroscience is part of a process:
Fritjof Capra suggests: ‘Mind is not a thing but a process of cognition, which is identified with the process of life. The brain is a specific structure through which this process operates. The relationship between mind and brain, therefore, is one between process and structure. Moreover, the brain is not the only structure through which the process of cognition operates. The entire structure of the organism participates in the process of cognition, whether or not the organism has a brain and a higher nervous system.’ For that matter, ‘At all levels of life, beginning with the simplest cell, mind and matter, process and structure are inseparably connected.’
Rupert Sheldrake suggests that ‘the brain is like a tuning system, and that we tune into our own memories by a process of morphic resonance, which I believe is a general process that happens throughout the whole nature.’
Saul-Paul Sirag, a theoretical physicist, suggests that ‘in some cosmic sense there really is only one consciousness, and that is really the whole thing—in other words, that hyperspace itself is consciousness acting on itself, and spacetime is just a kind of studio space for it to act out various things in.’
Karl Pribram, a professor of neuropsychology, who explores the similarities between current findings in neuropsychology and in quantum physics, thinks that our ideas of mind-brain, for that matter our whole understanding of life, are still caught up in terms of classical mechanics, with cause and effect relationships. In actuality, he says, we can never find out what and where the cause of a particular act or event is. ‘The whole system does it. There isn’t a start and a midst and so on, because time and space are enfolded, and therefore there is no causality.’ Every act is ‘very much a quantum type, holographic, implicate order kind of idea.’ In view of this, there is no such thing as self, or mind as such; rather, there are only ‘mental processes, mental activities. But there isn’t a thing called the mind.’
