meaningful awareness in an apparently mechanical universe

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Been gone a while, so I don’t really know what’s been goin’ on in these forums, so I decided to just jump back in.

I am interested in starting a discussion on the mind-body problem, or rather, first just getting a sense of where people are at in terms of this question.

Here’s the situation as I see it: we’ve a pretty damn good idea of what’s going on in the universe and even what we don’t, thanks to the scientific method, we should eventually figure it out. Well, sort of… Lately, we’ve been coming across all sorts of freaky stuff going on in the universe, but we don’t have to get into that now. Really, there’s a bigger problem. We’ve a wonderfully mechanistic view of the universe that makes prediction and all wonderfully easy. Problem is, this mechanistic view makes no room (or rather, little room) for awareness, which just so happens to be the only thing we can be absolutely, empirically certain of (that awareness is going, because we are, well, aware of it). I’m using awareness in a very fundamental sense (some might say synonymous to consciousness); aware of essence, meaning, etc. Whereas a billiard ball might traditionally be said to blindly/mechanically bounce around a billiard table, an aware billiard bottle would, well, be aware of impacting a wall… Hopefully you kinda see what I’m saying (if anyone can articulate it better, please go ahead). So, in our mechanistic view of things, where does awareness come into play? How is it possible? Which one is the more fundamental of the two (if that makes sense)? Does mind arise from body, body arise from mind, or both arise simultaneously, either creating each other, or by something else all together? Is awareness simply a complex arrangement of matter? What is and is not conscious then? How does the will play into this (I don’t care if its free or not)? What is the role of awareness in a causal universe? Role of the will?

Alright, I’m sure I missed some stuff, but that’s a good starting place… Anyone? What do you guys think? Just kinda trying to get a sense of what people think about this one that will hopefully evolve into a good discussion.

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I guess I’m not so sure what you mean by ‘aware’.

It is a useful survival trait to be aware. Plants are ‘aware’ which was the sun is, and adjust themselves accordingly. But how is this different from chemotaxis in a bacterium? How is that different from my awareness of big boobies (which I do follow, as a plant would the sun).

Any non-violent response to a stimulus requires some sort of awareness. A billiard ball is responding to the violence of another ball smashing into it, but there is no violence in the above-given examples.

Stimulus-response, stimulus-response. Awareness manifests itself in the ‘-’ in Stimulus-response as options are weighed. Some decisions are easy (follow the sun for a plant) some are harder (do I punch the guy who made a dirty joke about my Mom? If not, what else can I do to him?). But that is all just calculation. What we percieve as free will is merely the weighing mechanism. While different outcomes are possible, they are limited to a very constrained field and are made up pretty much automatically.

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While there is stimulus and response (what you are describing), this can be talkeb about without necessarily any ‘awareness’.

For example, you can talk about how chemicals affect brain operation (without does not take into account ‘awareness’) and you can talk about the emotions one feels while the brain reacts with these chemicals. While our mechanical view of the universe describes the chemical level quite well, which is a mechanical way of talking about emotion, it says nothing about the actual feeling, or awareness, of emotion. Make sense? Same thing with other cognitive processes. You can talk about the neurons firing (mechanical). And you can talk about the sensation of thoughts (awareness). Maybe consciousness is a better word…

Hope that clears things up a bit.

I guess I’m not quite understanding the distinction here… You can describe a plants reaction to light as photons smashing into molecules…

Right. Sort of. Thing is, we are actually aware of our thoughts, emotions, stimulation, etcetera. The ‘-’ seems to repressent quite a big concept for such a tiny little line… And I’m not just talking about decision making. You can still describe ‘decision-making’ without awareness… Its just a stimulus-response on a smaller scale (neural firings, molecular reactions, whatever…)

Make sense? What do you think?

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While the photons are smashing into the plant, the photons aren’t actually driving the plant’s movement.

The photons trigger a series of reactions that cause the plant to turn. This is different from the photons hitting the plant, and providing the force (directly) for the plant to turn towards the sun. I guess my attraction towards boobies is a better example here. It would be far tougher to argue that the photons bouncing off the boobies are a violence unto my eyes that make me follow them.

As for the perception of the chemicals . . . perception is such a fragile thing. Put the wrong chemical in your brain and your whole perception comes crumbling down.

I am not sure that the awareness that I percieve right now is any more real than the trial on the purple moon with yellow-wash skies I once had before a Tribunal of ex-girlfriends. Or when the red pheonix and the blue pheonix fought for control of my soul.

Or the phantom itch that amputees get. Simply because their leg itches doesn’t mean that their leg is there!

So, I guess I would be cautious about stating that our perception of these chemicals mirrors reality. We percieve joy after a jolt of dopamine. Joy is useful because it will cause us to repeat that action. Those who are likely to repeat that action are likely to produce more/better offspring.

The awareness is just the number-cruncher part of the equation. For simple actions (1+1=2) we can figure them out automatically and there is minimal number-crunching. However, if we want to integrate 1/x=f(x) that gets a might tougher. So, we bust out our graphs and ponder over it until we solve it. That doesn’t mean that there was any solution beyond ln(x)=f(x), it just took us a while to get there, weighing what we know and what we should know.

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Personally, I don’t think conciosness or awareness can be explained. It’s very easy to correlate complex behaviors with certain areas of the brain, using imaging, and it’s not so tough to see what brain chemicals tend to correspond with certain emotional states. The real question is HOW these behaviors and mental states are produced/caused by the brain, how the body (matter) makes the mind. I don’t think a sufficient answer has been offered yet, and I’m not inclined to believe one will be any time soon.

I don’t think science can do the trick. It’s impossible for scientists to observe matter and then make up a meaningful conclusion about mind. All science can do is some hand waving, and correlate neural states with observable behaviors, not show how the brain actually makes those states.

Philosophy can’t help either. Philosophers can make up a logically consistent view of conciousness, but there’s no way to test it. Thus, we can’t know if that idea is correct or not, so it’s essentially meaningless.

I write conciousness of as a noumena, a thing-in-itself, and I think all we can do is try to understand the phenomena of psychology, the behaviors, emotions, desires, mental images, language and decisions (and much more) of people, all of which can be observed, and look at the neural correlates of these functions. We can describe our minds, and our brains, but we can’t really know how one makes the other.

I read a book about this last week… or rather about a single moment of conciousness… it was more neuro- and cognitive science-based that philosophical, but it’s still relevant. It’s called Going Inside by a guy named McCrone, a science writer.

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Xunzian:

Aren’t these more complex behaviours reduceable to ‘violent’ reactions? Photons smashing into your retina releasing an onslaught of neurotransmittors which smash into the dendrites of neurons… Is what you describe as ‘violent’ simply basic physical reactions? How is the collision of billiard balls anything more than a simplified version of the reactions that go on in any other system? Taken from a point of view of the table as a whole, the complex patternings of balls colliding with each other have the potential to form the kind of coherent behaviour of the molecules and photons which make up the reactions you describe… Or am I misunderstanding you?

Oh, I didn’t mean that perception is a perfect mirror of reality… far from it. I am saying awareness is the only thing we can be sure that exists, in extreme empirical sense. We don’t what we are aware of, what allows us to be aware, why we are, who we are that is aware. We just know that there is awareness… I guess I am talking about this more fundamentally than psychology. Awareness is our only access to reality, whatever reality might be. If something happens that does not affect our awareness, no matter how indirectly, it does not matter. Awareness is our existence. Does that make sense?

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Our mechanistic view of the universe is largely due to the astounding results obtained in physics in the 20th century, adopted by the general public through popular science books. Physics is by definition deterministic, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this worldview is deterministic.

Physicists like to claim that the “unity of science” holds, i.e. that all other scientific disciplines are in the end reducible to the physics of elementary particles. But this is far from a proven fact, I think it sounds plausible because it follows the dominant scientific worldview of today, but it could very well turn out to be wrong.

Physical theory doesn’t deal well with complexity, as anyone who has attended a course in quantum mechanics would know. It is possible that a future physical theory will be able to explain all the phenomena of biology and psychology, but I think it is equally possible that non-deterministic methods (whatever they might be) of study will be more successful (or more useful?). This is of course highly conjectural since it is impossible to imagine what science would be like 500-1000 years from now, but in my opinion the physicists are not guaranteed a deterministic victory.

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While they are ultimately reducible to individual violent acts, what I am talking about is driving force through violence.

A when ball A hits ball B, the momentum of ball A is transfered to ball B, and ball B launches off at the tangent to the perpendicular of where it was hit.

When a photon smashes into my retina, it is a very different sort of thing because I have to provide the driving power. I am not directly translating the energy of the photon-collision into movement, it requires something extra.

As for our awareness, it is really just a data collection method. We are aware of our surroundings to we can manipulate them. Given that, I am inclined to think that our self-awareness is really just a by-product of this. We are good at collecting data so we can better respond to the world around us. Now, in enzymology one of the tricks an organism uses to speed up a reaction is to keep concentrations well above what is needed at the ready. That way when they get released, Le Chat’s takes over and the whole reaction goes real fast.

Our data collection system works the same way. In order to be able to effectively respond in decisions where we need to, we have a massive reserve. When not in use, this reserve provides self-awareness as a side-effect. Since our reserve is larger than other animals, we were then able to use this side-effect in new and unexpected ways, like developing modes of communication which are far more advanced than any other species.

But ultimately our awareness is merely the sharpening of the knife, not the intended use of the knife.

So, the mechanisms of it can and will be elucidated by neurophysiologists.
Here is an abstract I found:

Self-awareness after acquired and traumatic brain injury.

* Bach LJ,
* David AS.

Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK.

Self-awareness deficits are common after acquired and (traumatic) brain injury (ABI), particularly in social behaviour, yet the underlying cognitive and neuroanatomical structures supporting social self-awareness are not fully understood. This paper reviews the current literature on prevalence, type and severity of self-awareness deficits in ABI. Neuropsychological and neuroanatomical models are reviewed and theoretical frameworks are examined. We summarise results of a case-control comparison of 20 ABI patients with and 20 ABI patients without behavioural disturbance. Our research found that lack of social self-awareness predicts behavioural disturbance in acquired and traumatic brain injury independent of cognitive and executive function. Theory of mind ability was related to self-awareness and a possible role for metacognition and affective processes in self-awareness is discussed to account for social self-awareness deficits.

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quibbles,
You are using awareness in the Spinozan sense. I like it. I’ve found that most who object to a matter to mind evolution do so out of human hubris (Don’t put my ancestors into the primordial swamp or describe them as apes!) To deny an evolution of matter to mind is to place limitatiions on matter that do not exist. Describing things as physical does not necessarily describe them as brute, mechanical and deterministic. There is enough room in evolving of matter(becoming) to include any experience of minds and souls.