[size=200]Comparing The Brain To The Rest Of The Universe: What Does The Brain Have Going For It The Rest Of The Universe Does Not?[/size]
[i]“It is widely believed that physics provides a complete catalogue of the universe’s fundamental features and laws. As physicist Steven Weinberg puts it in his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, the goal of physics is a “theory of everything” from which all there is to know about the universe can be derived. But Weinberg concedes there is a problem with consciousness.
Despite the power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not seem derivable from physical laws. He defends physics by arguing that it might eventually explain what he calls the objective correlates of consciousness (that is, the neural correlates), but of course to do this is not to explain consciousness itself. If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component.” [/i]
-Chalmers, David J: The Puzzle Of Conscious Experience consc.net/papers/puzzle.html
[i]“It is widely accepted that conscious experience has a physical basis. That is, the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties according to some lawful relation. There are two key questions about this relation. The first concerns the strength of the laws: are they logically or metaphysically necessary, so that consciousness is nothing “over and above” the underlying physical process, or are they merely contingent laws like the law of gravity?
This question about the strength of the psychophysical link is the basis for debates over physicalism and property dualism. The second question concerns the shape of the laws: precisely how do phenomenal properties depend on physical properties? What sort of physical properties enter into the laws’ antecedents, for instance; consequently, what sort of physical systems can give rise to conscious experience?”[/i]
-Chalmers, David J: Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia, consc.net/papers/qualia.html
[size=200]Are We Psychophysical? [/size]
Psychophysicalism, underlying the mind/body relation, holds that consciousness requires brains to exist. If consciousness cannot exist unless it is generated by a brain, it follows that no instance of consciousness can exist without a neural circuit corresponding to and giving rise to that experience. What do you think? Do you believe that if there are no brains (or no functioning brains) there is (or there is no longer) consciousness or conscious experience?
[b]If Psychophysicalism is true, consciousness does not exist where there are no functioning brains. Thus it is within neurons, out of every other object in the universe, that consciousness arises. If consciousness arises “outside” neurons rather than within them—why state the brain has anything to do with consciousness?.
The purpose of this paper is to compare the brain substantially and compositionally with every other object in the universe (in accord with secular mythology concerning the substantial and compositional nature of the brain and every other object in the universe) to discern whether or not the brain possesses a quality or property missing from the remainder of the universe, as the absence of this quality or property—which should exist even if consciousness does not (in cases of permanent vegetative state or coma)—makes the purported ability of the brain to create or generate subjective experience absurd. [/b]
[size=200]The Secular Origin Of The World[/size]
In Psychophysicalism, consciousness cannot exist unless and until there are brains, and brains seem to exist upon a particular planet. The brain is composed of specialized cells, and bio-evolutionary theory holds that multicellular organisms descend from a single self-replicating cell. Life’s pathway from single cell to the human brain (as the most significant example of brain and consciousness) is entailed to occur upon a particular planet, itself formed from the fallout of physical events occurring 10-15 billion years ago:
Without the laws of physics as we know them, life on earth as we know it would not have evolved in the short span of six billion years. The nuclear force was needed to bind protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms; electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together; and gravity was needed to keep the resulting ingredients for life stuck to the surface of the earth.
These forces must have been in operation within seconds of the start of the big bang, 10-15 billion years ago, to allow for the formation of protons and neutrons out of quarks and their storage in stable hydrogen and deuterium atoms.
Free neutrons disintegrate in minutes. To be able to hang around for billions of years so that they could later join with protons in making chemical elements in stars, neutrons had to be bound in deuterons and other light nuclei where energetics prevented their decay.
Gravity was needed to gather atoms together into stars and to compress stellar cores, raising the core temperatures to tens of millions of degrees. These high temperatures made nuclear reactions possible, and over billions of years the elements of the chemical periodic table were synthesized as the by-product.
When the nuclear fuel in the more massive, faster-burning stars was spent, the laws of physics called for them to explode as supernovae, sending into space the elements manufactured in their cores.
In space, gravity could gather these elements into planets circling the smaller, longer-lived stars. Finally, after about ten billion years, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements on a small planet attached to a small, stable star could begin the process of evolution toward the complex structures we call life.
(Stenger, Victor J: Intelligent Design: Humans, Cockroaches, And The Laws Of Physics,
talkorigins.org/faqs/cosmo.html)
The secular myth also holds that everything in daily experience, extrapolated to the formation of the planet itself, are composed only of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons.
[size=170]The Particles[/size]
Since the dawn of science, people have been wondering what the universe is made up of; what the most fundamental objects are in the universe. Well, the answer to this has changed over the years, and what you see here may or may not be the final answer, but it’s the best answer we have right now.
The most fundamental particles we know about can be divided into three categories: quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons. Within the spectrum of these particles, there are several patterns that emerge. Historically, when patterns emerge in a collection of particles, this is an indication of the substructure of the particles. That is, it’s an indication of what the particles that make up the particles are like. For example, some years ago, Mendeleyev arranged all the known elements according to their chemical properties into an array which we call the periodic table. The patterns he discovered are indicative of the fact that these elements are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. As another example, earlier this century physicists noticed patterns within a group of particles called “hadrons.” Two physicists, Gell-Mann and Zweig, discovered that these patterns could be explained if hadrons are composed of more fundamental particles, now called quarks.
And so the patterns observed in the spectrum of quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons may be indications that these are made up of other particles. However, so far there’s no evidence that this is the case, and no indication of what these smaller particles might be like. So these particles, as far as we now know, are made up of nothing smaller.
[size=130]Matter[/size]
Anyway, here’s a table of the quarks and leptons, which are sometimes referred to collectively as “matter.”
[size=130]Stability[/size]
Many of the particles listed in the table above are unstable. That is, they decay into other particles. For example, a muon will live for only a short time before it decays into an electron and two neutrinos. (Well, not exactly two neutrinos. See below.) Particles can only decay into lighter particles, never heavier ones. As an example, a muon is heavier than an electron, and a tau is heavier than a muon. So a muon can decay into an electron (and other things) but it can’t decay to a tau. In the chart above, the masses tend to get larger as you move from lower left to upper right, so in general particles tend to decay from right to left, and top to bottom. (Neutrinos, for example, are massless as far as we can tell. If this is true, then they’re stable.)
Also, any quark that decays will always decay to at least one other quark, and an unstable lepton will always decay to at least one other lepton. This fact, along with the fact that particles must decay to lighter particles, and a couple of other constraints, is the reason that some particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons (inside nuclei) are stable (don’t decay, or at least don’t decay for a very long time).
Because most of the particles above are unstable, all of what we normally consider matter, rocks, trees, people, etc. are made up of just u and d quarks and electrons.
(Slaven, Dave: Dave’s Microcosmos: The Particles, webs.morningside.edu/slaven/Phys … icro2.html )*
[*Note: Don’t agree that up quarks, down quarks, and electrons exclusively form everyday matter? I’m sure Dave knows what he’s talking about. Here are his credentials: webs.morningside.edu/slaven/Physics/about.html]
[size=200]If Brains Adhere To What We Know About The Standard Model, There’s Nothing Special About Brains At The Microphysical Level[/size]
“Thus…macro-objects each have their own respective beginnings in time in at least the following sense: For each of them, there is a time such that it did not exist in its final form before then, but did exist as of then or since. Incidentally, without additional theory, the correctness of this claim of temporal origin is by no means obvious in regard to all elementary particles, for example, some of which might conceivably have existed in their present form throughout all past time. But let us grant the claim for macro-objects.”
-Adolf Grunbaum: The Pseudo-Problem Of Creation In Physical Cosmology
b The formation of Earth (from interstellar dust and gas) presumably involved only u and d quarks and electrons–after all, save for their anti-particles all other particles of the Standard Model are too unstable, alone or together, to have formed anything at all; macroscopic objects, including even the smallest pebble of interstellar gas and dust going into the formation of Earth from the very beginning, required up and down quarks and electrons in order to exist in the first place.
(ii) Every environment, every kind of atmosphere and planetary condition sustained on earth from its formation to present day was/is comprised of nothing more than u/d quarks and electrons.
(iii) The chemical elements of the Periodic Table, natural and synthetic, are all composed only of u/d quarks and electrons.
(iv) If (iii) is true, the formation and evolutionary pathway of life, from single cell to the complexity of the human brain, is explicable, at bottom, to a history of causal interactions between up quarks, down quarks, and electrons (mediated by the strong, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces).
So given that all particles of the Standard Model, in every generation, are unstable save for up quarks, down quarks, electrons and their antiparticles (such that any object remaining that object longer than a fraction of a second must, by process of elimination be comprised only of the stable particles [[/b]u,d,e[b]] of the Standard Model)…
…the brain, and all brains—like every other object in the universe—is/are composed[/b] only of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons. If not, what other particles (beyond u,d, and e) comprise brains, and how does one know there is more to the structure of the brain than u/d quarks and electrons?
[size=70]Moore, Alan and Gibbons, Dave: The Watchmen (the comic), DC Comics 1986 [/size]
If brains are fundamentallly composed of the same particles as footballs, trashcan lids, toilet paper, and every other non-brain object in the universe, the only structual [b]differences between brains and non-brain objects are:
(a) The difference in type of Periodic Table chemicals “Lego-blocking” into brains, as opposed to the chemical elements (and their proportions) “Lego-blocking” into non-brain objects
(b) The[/b] collocational arrangement [b]of atoms making up brains—such that atoms of particular chemical elements, if positioned relative to each other in certain ways, will always form brains—as opposed to the collocational arrangements yielding every other object in the universe
If what is now known about the Standard Model is right, everyday reality (dark matter and energy notwithstanding) is comprised only of the stable particles in the Standard Model, with the brain at the atomic level no different (in terms of type of particle making up the brain) from all non-brain objects, or at least every non-brain object on Earth. The brain is unremarkable, then, in the sense that there are no particles making up brains that do not also make up trashcan lids.[/b]
[size=130]The Moral Of The Story:[/size]
[b]There’s nothing about neurons in terms of their atomic or subatomic structure, given that every other object (at least on Earth if not the universe—i.e. dark matter and energy) are composed of the same types of particles (with all particles identical in nature to every other particle in the universe of its type).
If the only stable particles in the universe (that we know of so far) are up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, there is no structural difference—in terms of particles going into the makeup of the objects of everyday experience —between brains, trashcan lids, DVD movie covers, tampons, and everything else. The upshot of this is that there is nothing special about the brain in comparison to everything else in the universe in terms of it’s[/b] physical structure If neurons somehow create subjective experience, it is far from obvious how subjective experience arises (or why it must arise) by reason of u, d, quarks and electrons Lego-blocking into brains as opposed to their Lego-blocking anything else.
[size=200]Appearances Are Not Deceiving: The Apparent Difference Between Neurons…And The Remainder Of The Universe[/size]
In the quest to demonstrate that, while it is believed that neurons give rise to or create subjective experience, neurons themselves (neurons qua [b]neurons) are not subjective experiences. It is believed that neurons give rise to subjective experiences, but apparently (visually), neurons certainly cannot be mistaken for the experiences to which they give rise.
Example: An orange fruit appears like other orange fruits in the vicinity, but an orange cannot be mistaken for an apple (unless we shift semantics overnight to call apples ‘oranges’)[/b]
[b]In the same way, neurons as they appear to us in pictorials and in “real life” (during neurosurgery or neurological study and categorization) do not in the least resemble visual perceptions not involving visual perceptions of neurons.
Compare, for example, Part One’s Old School clip of Frank “The Tank” Ricard (Will Ferrell)’s underwater hallucination of reconciliation with his ex-wife to the retinal connections leading to the occipital lobe. [/b]
What’s going on here? Occipital lobe neurons are believed to create or generate our visual perception of the film clip above, but unless one is delusional or psychotic, occipital lobe neurons do not in the least resemble the visual experience itself. Neurons appear and behave nothing like the conscious experiences to which they are believed to give rise. This complete absence of apparent identity between neurons and everything else in the universe presumably exists in the non-mental external world (if a non-mental external world exists) as well. Presumably non-mental, external world neurons, if it were possible to experience them, could not be mistaken for non-mental trashcan lids, non-mental jungles, or anything non-neural in appearance (and makeup!).
[size=200]Lessons Learned: What We Now Know[/size]
[b]1. Neurons are structurally and compositionally unremarkable. That is, neurons are composed of conglomerations of the same three particles making up everything else in the universe (dark matter and energy excluded); neurons are not made of anything that do not also make up trashcan lids.
- Neurons in external or internal (if we cut them open) appearance and atomic makeup do not resemble and cannot be confused for any other object in the universe, despite the fact it is believed neurons create visual experience of these objects.[/b]
[size=200]If Neurons Create Consciousness, And Upon Inspection Are Only Cells “All The Way To The Bone”…Whence Cometh Consciousness?[/size]
“Well, let’s first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose - there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let’s focus on things that are easier to study - like visual awareness."
-Koch, Christoff: What is Consciousness?, Discover, November 1992, p. 96
The lack of apparent identity between neurons and the content of visual perception is hugely important for arguments against Psychophysicalism. For all talk of logic and reason or the “obviousness” of the mind/body relation, logic and reason is unconsciously suspended in the face of painfully obvious facts about the locality of consciousness in relation to visual perception of the brain. Brain sub-structures, discovered under neuroscientific scrutiny have the same sub-structures as all other cells (independent of axons and dendrites):
New discoveries may help us make significant progress in understanding brain function, but for any neural process we isolate, the same question will always arise. It is difficult to imagine what a proponent of new neurophysiology expects to happen, over and above the explanation of further cognitive functions. It is not as if we will suddenly discover a phenomenal glow inside a neuron!
(Chalmers, David J: Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness, consc.net/papers/facing.html)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJxPLNiRqnA[/youtube]
[size=200]If Neural Structure Does Not Suffice For Consciousness,
What Of Neural Function? [/size]
If the structure of neurons or the brain cannot give rise to consciousness (perhaps “evident” by cases of unconsciousness leaving the structure of the brain more or less identical to brain structure during waking consciousness (in cases of coma or hypothetical state of cryogenic suspension), what of the function of the brain? After all, the brain is nothing more than structure and function:
To put the issue differently, even once it is accepted that experience arises from physical systems, the question remains open: in virtue of what sort of physical properties does conscious experience arise? Some property that brains can possess will presumably be among them, but it is far from clear just what the relevant properties are. Some have suggested biochemical properties; some have suggested quantum-mechanical properties; many have professed uncertainty. A natural suggestion is that when experience arises from a physical system, it does so in virtue of the system’s functional organization. On this view, the chemical and indeed the quantum substrates of the brain are not directly relevant to the existence of consciousness, although they may be indirectly relevant.
(Chalmers, David J: Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia, consc.net/papers/qualia.html)
But aside from a heretofore unknown or magical feature of the brain found nowhere else in the universe, and given that, at least according to what we know of fundamental particles in terms of mass and stability (that only massless particles are stable i.e. they have not been observed to decay into smaller particles) brains are made up only of up and down quarks and electrons. Function, however, means movement or in the case of stable or robust machines, repetitive or contingent movement of components in circumscribed or predictable ways.
In electronics, this “repetitive or contingent movement” ultimately involves the staging of electrically conductive materials and objects relative to each other in abstract patterns in order to circumscribe and route (“control through a maze”) a particular or varying amount of electrical energy in such a way as to force it to perform a particular task or produce a particular effect (output).
[b]The brain is no different. Action potentials circumscribe and route electrical energy (typically) from dendrites, through the soma or body of the nerve cell, to the axon in order to release neurotransmitters that activate the next neuron in line and so on (through the membrane surrounding the neuron). It is the passage of electrical energy through more than one neuron that counts as “brain function” or “nervous system function” (in non-brain neurons). As a general rule, two or more neurons establish a nervous system (at least insofar as humans and most other animals are concerned).
But if brains are nothing but Lego-creations of up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, and given that up quarks and down quarks form protons and neutrons and protons and neutrons do nothing else but form the nucleus of atoms (thus protons and neutrons are—in general—good only for holding an atom together as a discrete unit), the “function of the brain” is ultimately mediated by[/b] electrons.
[size=130]Electric current[/size]
[b]Electric Current is the flow of electrons through a wire or solution. In a solid the electrons are passed from one positively charged metallic atom to next but in solution the electron is carried by the ions present in the solution. A solution capable of carrying charge is called an electrolyte. Electrolyte solutions are found in batteries as well as in all living things.
• Is measured according to how many electrons pass a given point each second.
• The symbol for current is I
• The unit of measurement is the amperes (A) or amp (1coloumb/second or 6.24 x 106 electrons)
• The net charge on the wire carrying the current is zero.[/b]
In tautologies concerning the function of the brain (as opposed to the structure of the brain), mysterious terms such as “the flow of information”, “communication”, and “data”, etc. are often used. Information in the brain, data in the brain (leading to or indicative of consciousness), given that there is nothing but up quarks, down quarks and electrons forming brains and everything else is ultimately nothing more than the particular pathways the outer, high-energy electrons in the shells of ions within or forming the relevant “data or information processing mechanisms” travel.
That’s it. If everything said above is right, there is no mysterious “other” that is not electrons, not up quarks, and not down quarks that exist and operate within brains but not within every other object in the universe to give rise to consciousness. If there is, the question begs how this mysterious X factor exists alongside or arises from only those u and d quarks and electrons that form brains, and why the X factor is or seems mysteriously absent from the non-brain universe.
[size=200]The Cold, Hard Truth: Nothing About Up Quarks, Down Quarks, And Electrons Even Remotely Indicates A Connection To The Existence Of Subjective Experience (Consciousness) [/size]
At the end of the day, this:
…and this:
…are two separate, distinct existences. Open the brain and dig around, all you will find are neurons and sub-structures of neurons. But observe the remainder of non-neural reality; what do you find? Everything that does not appear or behave as neurons or conglomerate neural structures. [b]Yet the latter is believed created by or to “arise from” the former. How?
-
Where is the subjective experience of non-neural things[/b] before [b]it is supposedly created by or arises from neurons?
-
What material do neurons use, given that neurons themselves are nothing but up quarks, down quarks, and electrons, to come up with subjective experience?[/b]
[size=200]Panpsychism (Or Panprotopsychism) To The Rescue? [/size]
Having conceptually split the neuron only to find organelles and nucleus and splitting axons and dendrites only to find sodium and potassium ions, energy pumps, and protoplasm, the Panpsychists avoid the conclusion that consciousness magically comes into existence randomly or is created ex nihilo by neurons. Adolf Grunbaum, in his critique of religious cosmogonies explaining the origin of the universe, decries the Book of Genesis and its claims of creation ex nihilo in the verbal magic of God’s creation of light:
Even for those cases of causation which involve conscious agents or fashioners, the premise does not assert that they ever create anything out of nothing; instead, conscious fashioners merely TRANSFORM PREVIOUSLY EXISTING MATERIALS FROM ONE STATE TO ANOTHER; the baker creates a cake out of flour, milk, butter, etc., and the parents who produce an offspring do so from a sperm, an ovum, and from the food supplied by the mother’s body, which in turn comes from the soil, solar energy, etc. Similarly, when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person. But the dead body does not lapse into nothingness, since the materials of the body continue in other forms of matter or energy. In other words, all sorts of organization wholes (e.g., biological organisms) do cease to exist only as such when they disintegrate and their parts are scattered. But their parts continue in some form.
In the face of the inherently irremediable dynamical inscrutability of divine causation, the resort to God as creator, ontological observer of matter, or intevener in the course of nature is precisely a deus ex machine that lacks a vital feature of causal explanations in the sciences. The Book of Genesis tells us about the divine word-magic of creating photons by saying “Let there be light.” But we aren’t even told whether God said it in Hebrew or Aramaic. I, for one, draw a complete explanatory blank when I am told that God created photons. This purported explanation contrasts sharply with, say, the story of the formation of two photons by conversion of the rest-mass of a colliding electron-positron pair. Thus, so far as divine causation goes, we are being told, to all intents and purposes, that an intrinsically elusive, mysterious agency X inscrutably produces the effect.
(Grunbaum, Adolf: Creation As A Pseudo-Explanation In Current Physical Cosmology, infidels.org/library/modern/ … ation.html)
[b]But Grunbaum’s criticism of God’s creation of light ex nihilo ignores the double standard of the brain’s purported ability to create consciousness ex nihilo. Grunbaum’s criticism of God, then, applies equally to the brain, as both use the same magic to cause something previously as nonexistent as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny to become as real as a tree.
Realizing the dangers of creation ex nihilo in the face of the obvious ontological difference between subjective experience and neurons, Panpsychism comes to the rescue, holding that consciousness, like the physical, has always existed[/b] within [b]the physical. Holding to a “conservation of the phenomenal” alongside a conservation of energy effectively removes the ex nihilo problem.
David Chalmers fine-tuned panpsychism in his proposal of microscopic consciousness (or proto-consciousness) within the microphysical, stating that there may exist microparticles of consciousness that collocate in human and animal brains (through their physical “hosts”) to form organismic consciousness:[/b]
At this point some are tempted to give up, holding that we will never have a theory of conscious experience. McGinn (1989), for example, argues that the problem is too hard for our limited minds; we are “cognitively closed” with respect to the phenomenon. Others have argued that conscious experience lies outside the domain of scientific theory altogether.
I think this pessimism is premature. This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice.
Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world.
I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.
In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.
What results is a view on which the existence of consciousness is not necessitated by the structural or dispositional aspects of the microphysics of our world, but is necessitated by the categorical aspects of microphysics (the underlying categorical basis of microphysical dispositions), perhaps in combination with structural/dispositional aspects. This is an important view: it is the view put forward by Russell (1926) and discussed in recent years by Maxwell (1978), Lockwood (1989), and others. In effect, the view holds that consciousness stems from the underlying categorical aspect of microphysics. On this view, the nature of the categorical aspect is left open by physical theory, but it turns out to involve special properties that are collectively responsible for constituting consciousness.
We can call these special properties protophenomenal: they might not themselves be phenomenal properties, but they stand in a constitutive relation to phenomenal properties. We can call the view as a whole panprotopsychism.
It is not clear whether this sort of panprotopsychism qualifies as a version of physicalism. That question turns on whether the underlying protophenomenal properties are best counted as physical properties, or not. We need not settle that question here: We need only note that if it is a sort of physicalism, it is a quite unusual sort, and one that many physicalists do not accept. In many ways, it has more in common with nonmaterialist views, in virtue of its postulation of fundamental protophenomenal properties whose nature is not revealed to us by physical theory.
(Chalmers, David J: Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness and Does Conceivability Entail Possibility? consc.net/papers/conceivability.html )
[size=200]A Failed Rescue? Panpsychism’s Mistake In It’s Assumption Of The Non-Mental [/size]
Panpsychism, particularly Chalmer’s panprotopsychism[b], is everything Psychophysicalism can hope for. It’s coherent, elegant, and simple; it easily avoids the question-begging magic of creation ex nihilo by refusing to treat consciousness as an existential late-arrival. By placing consciousness hand-in-hand with the physical before there were such things as brains, panprotopsychism creates a homogenous universe in which nothing must be explained out of existence: consciousness is more or less easily integrated from the very beginning with the physical world.
But the physical is the non-mental or non-experience itself, and all we experience is the mental (that is, we only experience our experience). Chalmer’s panprotopsychism, on further rational reflection, has good conceptual elegance and beauty but it takes for granted the existence of the non-mental. The non-mental, however, is beyond human understanding as the non-mental is everything we are not (the non-mental is everything that is[/b] not [b]the subjective “fourth wall” that is the experiencing being).
Hence, Chalmers only[/b] imagines the existence of the physical, imagines the physical can assume the shape and “appearance” of the content of a conscious being’s visual perception, and imagines consciousness “within” physical microparticles. He also imagines a causal nexus between the non-mental and the mental. But the causal nexus between the non-mental and the mental, and how the mental can (or worse, must) forever float “next” to the non-mental or “within” the non-mental, and the existence of the non-mental itself is beyond human understanding. As such, following Adolf Grunbaum, it is meaningless to propose the existence of things that cannot be explained or envisioned and is supported only by a weak notion of “metaphysical possibility”. As Grunbaum states:
Therefore, if creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) is beyond human understanding, then the hypothesis that it occurred cannot explain anything. Even less can it then be required to fill explanatory gaps that exist in scientific theories of cosmogony. Indeed, it seems to me that if something literally passes all understanding, then nothing at all can be said or thought about it by humans. As Wittgenstein said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Dogs, for example, do not bark about relativity theory. Thus, any supposed hypothesis that literally passes all understanding is simply meaningless to us, and it certainly should not inspire a feeling of awe. To stand in awe before an admittedly incomprehensible hypothesis is to exhibit a totally misplaced sense of intellectual humility! It is useless to reply to this conclusion by saying that the creation hypothesis may be intelligible to “higher beings” than ourselves, if there are such. After all, it is being offered to us as a causal explanation!
(Grunbaum, Adolf: Creation As A Pseudo-Explanation In Current Physical Cosmology, infidels.org/library/modern/ … ation.html)
Aside from this, if we assume the existence of the non-mental for the sake of argument, there is an implausible convenience (behind the existence of human and animal consciousness) in the placement of micro-consciousness in just those particles that happen, by godless chance, to make up human and animal brains. The implausibility may be solved by the proposition that micro-consciousness in particles making up human or animal consciousness also reside in particles making up trashcan lids, but all of this is more imagination passing for experience. In the end, the existence of the non-mental is force fed to the masses as reality, in a subconscious argument from personal incredulity [b]against the possibility that only subjective experience exists.
A second implausibility exists in terms of the brain’s ability to[/b] predict the future.
If for every experience a neural circuit must pre-exist to give rise to the experience, this requires neural circuits corresponding to future experiences to pre-exist within the brain. The brain, then, must predict the future or all possible futures involving the continued operation of the subject’s brain.
If one doubts this, do neural correlates of an experience five minutes in the future not exist in the brain now[b]? If not:
-
Are the neural correlates of an experience to be felt five minutes from now formed in the nick of time seconds before the experience?
-
Are the neurons of the correlates pre-existing, but the synaptic connections formed in the nick of time seconds before the experience emerges?
-
Can new neurons form in seconds?
-
How is it that a neural circuit corresponding to an “appropriate” future experience (one rationally called for given past stimulus) “wins the lottery” in a normal brain, activating in the nick of time in a way not explicable to lucky accident (Laplace’s daemon, perhaps?)?[/b]
[size=200]Conclusion[/size]
“There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear…”
-Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth
In the end, let’s face it: neurons are neurons, and non-neurons are non-neurons. There are neurons, and there are volcanoes, there are neurons, and there is the subjective, inward feeling of happiness. Neurons to the bone are just cells that conduct electricity. As Chalmers states:
“…everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness.”
[b]If this is true, then it is coherently imaginable that cortical neurons can in principle conduct electricity with nothing occurring save motor responses in the body (if non-mental bodies and brains exist). To say this is impossible is to propose a necessary connection between consciousness and the physical that can be argued to be nothing more than a psychophysical connection of imaginary force; an imagined inextricableness of consciousness from neurons not mirrored by objective reality.
If consciousness has nothing at all to do with neurons, asks the psychophysicalist and non-mentalist, then why are there brains at all? Why are there reports of correspondence between neural manipulation and experience? [/b]
A paper published recently in the journal Nature (vol.391, page 650, 1998) called “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter” has provided a bit more information about how the brain is involved with laughter. The paper discussed the case of a 16 yr. old girl named “A.K.” who was having surgery to control seizures due to epilepsy. During surgery, the doctors electrically stimulated A.K.'s cerebral cortex to map her brain. Mapping of the brain is done to determine the function of different brain areas and to make sure that brain tissue that will be removed does not have an important function.
The doctors found that A.K. always laughed when they stimulated a small 2 cm by 2 cm area on her left superior frontal gyrus (part of the frontal lobe of the brain). This brain area is part of the supplementary motor area. Unlike laughter that happens after brain damage, the laughter that was produced by electrical stimulation in A.K. also had a sense of “merriment or mirth”. Also, A.K. did NOT have the type of epilepsy with gelastic seizures. Each time her brain was stimulated, A.K. laughed and said that something was funny. The thing that she said caused her to laugh was different each time. A.K. laughed first, then made up a story that was funny to her. Most people first know what is funny, then they laugh.
(Neuroscience for Kids: Laughter And The Brain, fc.units.it/ppb/neurobiol/Neuros … laugh.html)
[b]What’s happening here? The brain, manipulation of the brain, and any reports of experiences arising in response to neural manipulation are all subjectively perceived by something subjectively perceiving. The subjective perception of this perceiver is the only thing known with certainty to actually exist. Thus the central question of the nature of existence is whether or not the nonexistence of the subjective perceiver, and all subjective perceivers, leaves behind the objects perceived by the former perceiver in non-mental form.
Secular mythology of the nature of death sets the standard. If consciousness becomes as real as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny once electrical activity in the cerebral cortex ceases, the mythology must hold that there is a phenomenal (subjectively experienced) brain and subjectively experienced subject, and a non-mental counterpart to the brain and the subject that is a wholly distinct existence from their subjective twins, which are aspects of a particular perceiver.
We know the perceiver exists. Delusions aside, reality manifests at least as a “moving camera point-of-view” that is aware and perceives. We do not know if non-mental analogs of that which the “camera” observes exist, and it is beyond logic that non-mentality[/b] must [b]exist in order for there to be mentality. As two distinct existences (with one easily capable of existing without the other), it is inconceivable why one should depend or need the other to exist.
In the end, there is no logic behind the emergence of subjective experience from neurons. One would have to postulate interdimensional portals or find refuge in creation ex nihilo. Even if one accepts or takes into account panpsychism or panprotopsychism, one must hold to a magical “non-touching” connection between the mental and non-mental. Despite secular complaint of the use of magical thinking in religious or spiritual explanation about the world and how it works, this magical thinking exists in the notion that neurons, cells through and through, somehow “vomit” subjective experience—something that is definitely not a biological cell. This magical thinking wears the sheep’s clothing of “reason over faith”, but upon close examination one finds it is imagination that borrows the actual content of visual perception to create a false “actuality” for itself, backed by willful ignorance and denial of the obvious duality and incompatibility between electrified bio-cell and subjective experience.[/b]
[size=200]END[/size]
