If the deterministic view says there is no thinker nothing that is ‘mind’, I assume it is saying something like this:
Information carrying electrical signals, communicate with the chemicals in our neurons. There is no thinker.
Yet we know something experiences and perceives.
That it experiences informational thought.
So the question becomes; can the experience or perception of information change it?
A second question is; does knowing info [memory] and mixing that with inputted info [1] involve the experiencer?
My experience of thought is that the thinker {experiencer/perceiver} performs the act of extrapolating information it requires or wants, perception could perhaps be considered as the arms and hands of the mind, in the sense that it grabs info. As I experience it chooses that info from a selection.
That choice could be determined by connections to relevant memories, then perception may be the search by electromagnetic fields to find and connect signals to memory locations.
Though it is an experienced search!
I hope I have begun at a neutral position!
For me it comes down to weather or not it is the experiencer [as I experience thought to be] which conceptually makes choices and ones which are probably prior to yet also including linguistic informational thought.
The survival of the individual seems pointless if there is none. I would expect something as complex as the human brain to be able to deduce that it is it that thinks and that there is no self to protect. But I also think that the brain would know there is something experiencing its thoughts.
For me there are only two posible propositions:
a) an experiencer that thinks with informational thought [as info itself is not physical] and can change that.
b) an experiencer which observes without effect. is observation itself not an effect/affect?
I would say that the deterministic view tends not to say this, but I think it can be deduced from determinism that there is not thinker or self with agency.
Some determinists would say the experiencing is an epiphenomenon. IOW that it is merely an effect, a kind of side effect, of causes and is not causal in itself. IOW the self is a kind of quale.
I think it gets very tricky trying to determine what that ‘it’ is, which is necessary to see if it changes.
Again this is often argued to be merely an epiphenomenon. There is this feeling of participation by consciousness when in fact it is a mere observer. Certainly the organism creates something new with new input. The new input would be said to cause new structures in the body of the organism. Information causing physical changes. This process is not usually mere introjection - that being that the information simply ends up inside the organism without having been modified by the organism, mixing with what is there or affecting what is there but not transforming it entirely.
Yes, a good point. Often perception is seen as basically passive - light entering the eyes - but it is much more like the blind man tapping his cane in patterns that help him build a ‘picture’.
This book gives an excellent defense of this position…
But no determinist is going to deny that the experiences of organisms affect their perceptions, what they seek to know and their experiences. They do tend to deny agency. This is inevitable internal causes (which mix with inevitable external ones) creating inevitable perceptions and experiences. What we call thinking is just what we get to witness, the tip of the iceberg of an inevitable process.
I hope I have begun at a neutral position!
For me it comes down to weather or not it is the experiencer [as I experience thought to be] which conceptually makes choices and ones which are probably prior to yet also including linguistic informational thought.
The survival of the individual seems pointless if there is none. I would expect something as complex as the human brain to be able to deduce that it is it that thinks and that there is no self to protect. But I also think that the brain would know there is something experiencing its thoughts.
I think a determinist would call this a category error. Information is an abstracted pattern in matter. We conceive of it in a way that makes it seem immaterial, but it is actually merely a pattern in matter. Two atoms of oxygen might be a message, but they are not therefore more than matter. Certain organizations of matter cause things that we call information.
The latter doesn’t contradict the former. Most would argue that it is an effect that is not a cause.
I don’t agree with the determinist position, or better put, I am not remotely convinced. Just giving my sense of their position. Or at least one held by many of them.
As a determinist myself, I must emphatically deny everything Moreno said about experience being an epiphenomenon. I don’t think determinists take the epiphenomenal view of experience any more frequently than non-determinists. In fact, viewing experience as an epiphenomenon usually seems to imply some extra-physical “soul” that can experience but that can’t effect the physical world, which most determinists would deny.
Obviously we experience things, and quite clearly, our experience informs our actions. We are talking about experience right now, ffs. If experience doesn’t affect our actions, then it’s very strange that our actions are in direct reference to the phenomenon of experience. I would say it’s fairly obvious to anybody who thinks about it for just a second that the epiphenomenal view of experience is false. Here’s an article on the subject, written by a determinist
If you mean the thoughts that you experience and take place in your brain then yes, they are your thoughts.
If you mean our own as in something that we create/originate then no, they are not your thoughts.
The deterministic view follows the series of objects without break, and so deduces that’s all that’s happening. I don’t think we can know that exactly because we cannot determine if the informations associated with objects [e.g. in the electrical signals, and chemical changes in the neurons] change or not.
We only have instrumentation that observes a very approximate EM field, or we can target specific areas of memory etc.
What we do know is that there is an experiencer, I use that term specifically because I am not associating personality with it, as the personality is across the brain and a function of that I.e. you could in theory change the memories in brains and hence the personality, and yet there would remain something that experiences.
For me it is critical to get beyond the labelling like; epiphenomenon, ‘an effect’ etcetera. Outside the body or in the lab we wouldn’t observe such things in chemical exchanges or electrical signals, it’s a bit like we wont see colour in light-waves.
We have to be honest and thorough with our reasoning and logic here; unless we can specifically classify such quale` as within the objects [which I am sure we wont be able to], we have to assume something else is occurring alongside or relevant to those objects.
Sure but we must at least admit it exists, and as like ‘information’ that its existence is not in the form of objects even if entirely relating to them [which I also disagree with].
We don know that the brain changes info, but we don’t know if that is more than one area of the brain interacting with another.
From what I know of physics, you don’t ever get something ‘involved’ or ‘observing’ things, without that making changes to that something.
1. Can we all agree there is an experiencer? [aside from a personality or any other kind of me-ness].
2. Can we all agree it observes?
2. Can we all agree that observation is another term for interaction, and so makes a change to whatever it observes?
Fact is something else does occur in brains [the experiencer], and it appears to be deeply involved in information, indeed the two seem to be one in informational thought!
Could we say that perception is both the receiver and searcher of info then?
That it is the experiencer being extended;
That primarily there is the experiencer and perception is another name for it in action.
Note; there may be areas of the perception that are not conscious.
Can we also say that the perception is also a reviewer of informations ~ in an after the fact subjective manner?
Interesting and nicely put! Agency is critical of course. What we witness ergo the tip of the iceberg, for me is the most important part of the mind, the rest we could say are the instrumentation there to serve it ~ like a complex video camera, and many other instruments there to extrapolate info from the senses and environment and to compare to those in memory.
Another thread sometime, but I think info is far more than patterns/holograms, it is the informational background which the physical takes instruction from.
There are many kinds of info that don’t relate to patterns in objects, and that’s without even going into poetry and art, metaphor etc. even math is a metaphor of what it describes in physics.
An interesting link, I have read quite a lot of stuff from there.
I’d see the zombie as like the sleepwalker; naturally for a third party to be able to act in the world, then its vehicle must be able to perform all its duties [that of the third party]. So the body can potentially walk around without being conscious as if like a biological robot, though I think there is a dream-like consciousness going on in sleepwalking rather than an absolute vacancy.
When in that link Eliezer_Yudkowsky talks about awareness as if the linguistic accompaniment to inner conceptual thought is what the consciousness primarily thinks. This in my view is a mistake, in our meditations we can see that this level is a layer on top of inner thought. Maybe I misunderstood his position but I wanted to make the point that we are conscious on many levels, language is a secondary level of thought where we perform an internal dialogue concerning everything else, rather than that being thought itself.
From the link; The intuition that the “listener” can be eliminated without effect, would go away as soon as you realized that your internal narrative routinely seems to catch the listener in the act of listening.
The observer here seems to me to be watching the listener, so the listener is in fact more likely to be the zombie performing its duties as that which enacts what the consciousness wants. It is something the experiencer can either do [can take the role of that aspect of the zombie] or can step back from being within the performance of the act, and then observe that very same thing as a process [as what the zombie performs].
You see, in each case there is something that can take the third person perspective, no matter what area of the zombie brain we are talking about.
I could explain this perhaps as ‘the user of the conscious network‘, but it is the elusive experiencer simply making utility of anything it so wishes in terms of the zombie brain!
All the epiphenomenalists I have every read are ALL materialists/physicalists. They do not consider the epiphenomenon some immaterial ‘thing’ but rather a non-causal facet of matter.
No, epiphenomenalist denies that experience affects actions. But they see this all happening in an utterly determinist way, conscousness merely an observer. They often cite experiements where people have already made the decisions before they are conscious of doing this.
I don’t think you understand the epiphenomal view. I disagree with it also, but I am quite sure, as I said, that not a single epiphenomenalist denies that experiences affect organisms and their future actions.
I hope some epiphenomenalist will hop in since I would rather not defend a position that is not mine, however good training this is.
I don’t think you understood, Q. You don’t need to argue against him talking about awareness as merely the linguistic accompaniment. That’s his point. His point is that “the listener” is indeed not merely a listener at all. Awareness plays a much larger role than merely “listening”. That’s his point. In your explanation of why you disagree with him, you essentially repeated his argument.
@moreno, if someone says “x is epiphenomenal” and then they say “oh, i don’t deny that x affects organisms and their future actions,” they don’t understand what epiphenomenal means. They’ve contradicted themselves. For something to be epiphenomenal in that sense, it cannot affect anything at all.
merriam webster: a secondary mental phenomenon that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal influence itself
wikipedia: Epiphenomenalism is a theory in the philosophy of mind that states that mental phenomena are produced by physical causes and processes in the brain, and produce no effects themselves.
It’s not a contradiction, but sloppy language use.
If experience is the epiphenomenal manifestation of switches in the brain being set (or whatever physical process you wish to ascribe), then the experiences you have had - concurrent with the switch-flipping - can have an effect. Of course, the physical effect of experience on decisions and actions is caused by the switch-flipping in the brain, but if “experience” is just a way of (loosely) describing the switch-flipping taking place, it’s not entirely misleading. And given that we don’t know the mechanism, but all share experience, it’s not unreasonable for language to work as it does.
no, humean, if you say that something doesn’t have an effect, you can’t then say that it does have an effect. it’s not an issue that is difficult to comprehend. you don’t need to step light-footedly around the issue. you don’t need to walk on linguistic egg-shells. it’s really clear. if you say something doesn’t have any effect, and then you say it does, you’ve contradicted yourself. it’s pretty clear.
Please yourself. You’ve not addressed what I said at all, though. What would you call the neuronal switch-flipping that arguably gives rise to the epiphenomenon of experience, if not “experience”? We talk of computerised neural circuits learning by experience in exactly this way.
There is no “epiphenomenon” of experience, because experience isn’t an epiphenomenon. It has effects in reality. It’s just a phenomenon. It has effects, one of which is the very fact that we talk about the experience of it. If you call it an epiphenomenon, you’re essentially saying that everything that we do that’s apparently causally linked to it is actually caused by something completely different. The zombie argument, the argument that experience is epiphenomenal, essentially has this: experience has no effect whatsoever in reality, and so if you removed the ability to experience from people, they’d do the exact same things – which includes talking about the experience of having experience. If that doesn’t sound like an incredibly strange and unlikely hypothesis, I don’t know what does.
Is thought perhaps the process that does the sifting, decides which aspects of particular experience are worthy of sustained attention? Hence the concept of the epiphenomenon, which is just the junk rejected by thought at any given moment.
Imho no matty, any ‘epiphenomenon’ can and should be described by more corroborative labelling. I hate those kinds of terms, they are only used when we don’t know something, really we can label things as information, experience, perception etc.
Logic dictates we should say what ‘it’ is.
fj
That will teach me to skip through links lol. thanks for puting me right.
Only_Humean
Would you say that there is ‘only’ such switch flipping? The way I watch it happen in my brain is such that, the subjective experiencer watches or observes information passing through a given epicentre [as relative to the sensory input different areas of the brain appear to then be the seat of perception], it pulls memories into the mix and primarily decides weather or not to simply let the info pass by, or to select a given information and consider it further.
I’d expect that holistic thought process to be represented by what’s actually occurring in the brain!? After all in the deterministic view it cannot be anything else.
Would you say that kind of experiencing is the same as what we sense ourselves to be as an experiencer? A computerised neural circuit could be looked at as a zombie, after all that’s what the human brain is ~ it acts exactly like a human because humans wouldn’t be able to act like they do if it wasn’t their arms and legs [and brain centres] in doing so.
However we look at it there appears to be something being drawn upon, ~ both info and experiencing cannot be called physical, especially when there is such a compound dichotomy between a zombie [or robot etc] and what we experience ourselves to be?
Please ignore the implied emotion, I am merely stating that terms like that should be avoided when there are better descriptions. I mean the term doesn’t really mean anything, because once we describe what we mean by it we no longer require it.
Experience is a tricky word. Of course the experiences of a creature - what happens to it - affect it. The awareness, the witnessing of this is what the epiphenomenalists think of as not having any effects.
and note: the awareness is not seeing or feeling. It is not that the nervous system is affected by photons or physical contact, etc. It is the consciousness of ‘things happening’ that is considered epiphenomenal. Of course seeing the charging lion, they would say, causes the gazelle to move. But the consciousness of these utterly mechanical, biochemical processes, is simply a non-causal byproduct. And then epiphenomenalists and often also determinists cite those studies that show that the motor cortex of the brain of people had already decide to move and where to move, before the test subjects were conscious of making a decision. The former use this to show that consciousness is a non-causal result of biophysical processes, the latter use it to show choice is a quale. And of course many of the determinists are also epis.
Are awareness and experience not equivalent? and if not then we still have to think of awareness in the manner I was thinking of the experiencer.
Btw for those of you from Britain, horizon; ‘out of control’ is on TV at 9pm, from what I gather it will show us that our thoughts are not our own. I am looking forwards to debunking it.
edit; nothing new on that show, i was looking forwards to something dramatic.
As I said, the word experience is tricky. It can mean consciousness/awareness, it can also mean ‘undergoing certain events’. No epiphenomenalist is denying that creatures undergo events and these affect the creatures. What they deny is that the witnessing is in anyway causal. See my previous post, I added more since you posted and hopefully made it clearer.
