The title of this article is actually a nickname or nom de guerre for “The Illusion of Physical Existence” and is a continuation of the Berkeylian Realms Series, itself a continuation of Bishop George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning Principles of Human Knowledge (My humble attempt at a “Part II” to his unfinished “Part I”).
I apologize for the gap between my last and this one, but this is, I’ve decided, a yearlong rather than monthlong project. Part Two of this particular article is tentatively scheduled to appear, then, either the end of September or November. The final part of Part II of Berkeley’s “Treatise”, a philosophically technological description of what the world would be like and the causal generators behind it if the universe is purely mental (if the physical truly does not exist) will follow.
After completing Berkeley’s work in this regard, I hope to move on to what is probably my last, most important work: An inked (and “cybered”) “tome” of my true, heartfelt, religious belief, no punches pulled.
In the meantime discover, if you will, why Psychophysicalism, or the belief that the brain creates or generates consciousness, is probably untenable. The argument presented here (in Parts I and II) merely presents experientially gained knowledge of the brain and how it works, and challenges the reader to see the logical disconnect in the notion that experience, or experiencing, can derive from or be “created” by, that which, in the greater implication of the true nature of the brain independent of its experiential nature, is not experience nor experiencing at all.
I’m sorry, it’s just really long, unwieldy, and I couldn’t even copy and paste from it. If you could make a “just text version” (and maybe even simply link to it so as not to ruin your art here in this thread) I’d be more amenable to reading it.
I was weighing that option an hour ago, and I think I might do it. I love the graphics (my signature style), but the message is the important thing. Thanks for the advice.
I like the graphics, and the time that’s gone into them, but the text is hard to read - and impossible to quote. In addition, people browsing on mobiles will most likely miss out altogether. Perhaps the raw text with a link to the full experience is the way to go?
I’ve looked at a few of your threads and was really curious, but had too much trouble reading the text with my eyes being confronted by strange (in a good way) imagery.
That would be great, but I currently don’t have my own website and do not know of a website that allows you to place things on it. And ILP doesn’t, I think, carry a function that supports or “holds” PDFs.
Hi, I just created this account here because I saw that there were many interesting discussions. I agree with the others that the text is hard to read on top of the graphics, but I managed to get through most of it; still, feel free to correct me if I interpreted your ideas wrong.
There are two parts to psychophysicalism which you define. (1) is that consciousness is solely the product of the physical brain. (2) is that consciousness is directly connected to the external world. The former is what much of your article spends time attacking, but I feel these two issues should not be conflated and should be addressed separately. It is true that if psychophysicalism comprises both, then debunking one would debunk psychophysicalism, but it is not true that debunking one would debunk the other. A complete solution should address both, or at least make clear which is the one we’re interested in. If the goal of the article is to attack the latter, then I agree: although we perceive the external world, the brain reconstructs that perception, then produces consciousness. However, if we are interested in the former, then that’s a different story.
To start with, I do not have a neurobiology background, but my understanding is that it is not just one neuron firing off to create one experience, but millions of neurons firing off in succession creating an experience, recursively. As Walter J. Freeman, professor of Neurobiology at Berkeley, writes:
This can be consistent with Bertrand Russell’s Time-Lag Argument, but whether the Time-Lag Argument is actually true, the premise that a time lag occurs between perception and its reconstruction in the brain must be true, unless one is to believe neurotransmitter substances, or even neural electrons approach the speed of light. Perception, according to this view, is a continuous process (perception is continuously modified in the lag-time instance between when a neuron first fires, and then another neuron fires, all within Bertrand Russell’s hypothetical 1/10 of a second. The brain interprets these signals more with fuzzy logic than distinct 1:1 neuron-perception.
This could actually be conceived to explain the second precept of psychophysicalism, that experience is not quite what we perceive, but it doesn’t quite explain the whether consciousness exists solely from the physical brain. If all this perhaps explains a time-lag between perception and perception processing, it doesn’t explain if there’s a time-lag between perception processing (i.e. firing neurons included) and the phenomenon of consciousness.
There is one line in your article that stood out to me that could offer insight into where our views might differ. You wrote:
I don’t believe the physical, constructed in the way that it is (e.g. in the brain), could exist in the absence of consciousness. Consciousness is a integral by-product of the physical, it is not a distinct physical process. Where as you seem to be concerned with where a neuron firing passes off to consciousness existing, I think a firing neuron, or any related after effect, is the sole process in which consciousness exists. Consciousness is not noumenal; the existence of any noumenon would be contradictory to the very idea of physicalism.
As an aside: I would go as far to speculate that any processing of an external stimuli produces consciousness, no matter how diminutive it may seem. It may not be the consciousness that you and I know it. For example, if we use a thought experiment: A baby is artificially created to be the biological equivalent of a real baby, except all his sensory organs are replaced by some numerical buttons that give a distinct electrical signal when they are pressed, sort of like a calculator. Since all the baby could perceive will ever be these buttons, his intelligence amounts to the equivalent of this simple calculator. All he could ever learn are the calculator functions. (Suppose the baby could not feel hunger, pain, or anything, but those biological functions are taken care of by a machine.) Is the baby still conscious? But I digress.
The concept “Contraption of Destiny” seems to beg the question of whether a Path of Actuality really exists as a separate phenomenon (or noumenon). The dissection of “Cycles of Destiny” as 24-hour periods seem arbitrary or unsupported. The fact that we could recall memories from less than 5 minutes ago, as well as memories from childhood, seem to contradict the idea.
Since consciousness is not a separate noumenon, I have no problems believing that consciousness simultaneously occurs with firing neurons, or at least instantaneously after. And since it is actually millions of neurons firing to produce one conscious experience, I have no problems believing that all of these neurons exist before the actual experience; ironically, your argument that no two experience is exactly the same supports this, since no two physical states are the same (the same time-states occurring twice is impossible).
I feel that the only real criticism that could be made against physicalism is the objective-subjective divide that is hard to define, as you mentioned briefly in your conclusion:
But you also say:
In other words, I feel that your whole argument begs the question of idealism, that consciousness is a nuomenon, that the physical process “gives rise” to consciousness as a seemingly separate process. As I understand it, physicalism cannot allow for experience states and neural states to exist separately, except that experience is the subjective equivalent to the neural function.
Your stuff is great, but one suggestion would be to add in the new research on glial cells. For a long time everyone has equated brains, intelligence, minds, etc., with neurons, but the lowly glue cells are turning out to be fundamental components of these things AND to function quite differently from neurons. IOW if brains are minds any model of minds based only on neuron function is partial and confused. (of course the rest of the body much be brought in for the model to make any sense - the endocrine system would be one glaring missing piece )
i can provide some links and suggest readings if you like…
but googling and looking in amazon.com will produce recent works on glial cells and the mind.
[b]After completing 85% of my re-writing and re-direction of this thread in text-predominant format (hope to have it up by Thursday night or Friday), I didn’t see your responses until now, whilst in bed trying to fall asleep before tomorrow’s shift. Very interesting stuff. I will offer a response to these posts on the morrow, after work.
The brain does indeed reconstruct the world, but for me that’s so that consciousness can understand what would otherwise be a bunch of vibrations and frequencies. The idea that we can then go on to say that our brain ~ which are also that bunch of vibrations, ‘creates’ consciousness is a massive jump.
I don’t see how we can construct a reality map without including mind and quale as fundamental to it. Mind is there already then the physical interacts with it to produce consciousness.
If the physical is something that existed before there was such thing as consciousness, which is merely experience, then the physical is not experience. Barring existence-magic in which something can make something that did not previously exist to exist, or barring existence magic whereby one type of existence stops being what it was to transform into what it previously was not, there’s no reason to believe that the physical produces experience or can interact with it. Everything we know or believe about the ‘physical’ is experiential, anyway, coming from beings composed of nothing (empirically) but experience or the act of experiencing.
