In my opinion, we can absolutely say that, yes. Also, when I consider alternative theories, the most likely are those that make the connections between concepts and physical processes closer, not the reverse.
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Do Concepts Exist Apart from Physical Processes in the Brain?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
Then we have reached complete agreement on this point, which should alarm and scare both of us!
I'm fascinated which alternative theories would make the concepts and physical processes closer.
the part in bold is the issue, as it means you're probably assuming that a concept has physical properties of existing, i.e. at a guess, it is a solid and is a whole and cannot be reduced to neurological patterns. it is probably a much more fluid relationship rather than a strict process of reducing one "idea" to one "neuron" in the brain. (But I am really outside of the ream of my expertise).
Materialism is a form of apriori reasoning so the belief in that ideas can be reduced to material processes of the brain. it is an assumption rather than a conclusion which can be scientifically verified. There is a point when all language descends into nonsense because words can never fully express the meaning of the object or process they are describing.
In both these cases, I think it is a "chicken or the egg" problem; what came first causality or the concept of causality, the object or the concept representing it.
i.e. it is the physical processes that become concepts, but have to change in response to physical processes. physical causality is represented in reasoning which has to change relative to our approximation of causality.
Because dialectical materialism is a form of apriori reasoning, it assumes the 'egg' come first. If you use these ideas enough, it becomes a habit and you make a 'leap' towards accepting it as a way of organizing ideas because it erodes the conception of truth and objectivity from being reducible to a scientific method, to something more philosophical. Science itself is based on philosophical assumptions and is not a form of pure reasoning or a wholly objective method of investigation.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
I don't agree .. the concepts are valid whether you are conscious or not!
Reality does NOT just center around you, you know
I don't agree .. the concepts are valid whether you are conscious or not!
Reality does NOT just center around you, you know
Are you suggesting that concepts have a metaphysical existence apart from any physical processes?
allfoak
Alchemist
I would suggest that they have a metaphysical existence created through physical processes, but once created have a life of their own in our energy field.
It is like creating steam from water.
The water creates the steam through the process of heating the water.
Tthe steam that is created now has a life of its own.
I believe that is what we are doing when we are transforming our bodies and making them fit to enter the kingdom.
Well, then.
I haven't run into a formal philosophy that matches my ontology, though admittedly I have not made a study of the philosophy of ontology in great detail. It would probably be misleading to describe me as a naturalist, because naturalism presupposes substance dualism, which I reject.
That may be so. It's just difficult for me to grasp that as someone who rejects substance dualism. Stuff changes and transforms. I wouldn't categorize the stuff in the manner being presented.
Not fair, though, responding to a question with another question. I was curious to see the answer to the question.
Orbit
I'm a planet
An atom exists whether or not I think about it. I do believe there is an objective reality. Mathematical concepts describe the behavior of the planets whether or not my brain entertains them. Neuroscientists cannot tell us how consciousness happens, not precisely what it is. What is an idea? How does it arise? Nikola Tesla believed that we tapped into a type of overmind, that we didn't produce our own ideas. I think given the state of science at this point in history, the concern behind your question is unanswerable.
muhammad_isa
Veteran Member
Well, yes..
Any concept, any mental pictures, thought, fears, emotions/personalities and muscle tension are all one and the same. They are completely physical. They are all a part of the way we have a death grip on our bodies...wearing them out. The awareness we are only resides in our brains, not throughout the body. It took a long time (about 5 yrs for most) just to learn the proper movements through the brain (frequency shifting) just to master fluidity in movement and speech. All any idea or picture we conjure up mentally is only moving the brain intensity to the places we've 'stored' them. You can feel yourself moving around in the brain as thoughts change. You can also feel it in the changes of muscle tension. It's the billions of control loops the brain waves are receiving and sending out.
You wrote "If the physical processes cease at any moment to function, my image of a barn comes to an abrupt end." That's exactly right. And believe it or not, that is possible as long as the body still supports life. At that instant, you would enter into spiritual life, becoming in sync with the moment of time. That also causes the release of the body. But that's another topic.
Excaljnur
Green String
What do you mean by concepts are products of mental experiences? and what is a mental experience?
Excaljnur
Green String
I challenge you to explain why there is essentially a connection between 'abstract' and 'non-physical'.
Well, thank goodness. After ~3,000 years of philosophical, metaphysical, and/or scientific inquiry, we finally have the answer.
That's not as cut-and-dried as you might think. Before the advent of increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies and methods, and when classical cognitive science reigned supreme, it was an easier position: certain cortical regions are responsible for any such abstract conceptual processing, and awareness (like concepts in general) were amodal. Enter embodied cognition, which (even for those who don't accept it) changed the game. So too did the consistent failure of the sciences and programs out of which cognitive science emerged, in particular generative linguistics, information theory, and computer science. It was believed that, as an information processor, the brain was like any other information processor (or rather, what we then believed the nature of such systems to be). The physiological make-up of the brain was irrelevant; only the algorithms mattered. This failed, as most problems (from facial recognition to language processing) do not have well-defined rules and perhaps the most important aspect of human cognition is the ability to abstract from specifics and form categories/concepts.
More importantly, it appears that the representation of even highly abstract concepts is based upon perceptual experiences and requires perceptual systems. So it becomes hard to know where to stop when one is seeks to locate the physiological basis for something like "awareness". It is intimately tied not only to representations in sensorimotor regions of the brain, but intricately, integrally, and (at least almost) constantly systems that exist partially outside of the brain (e.g., the visual system).
Nothing is stored. Any idea you "conjure up" is not "moving the brain intensity" but involves certain changes to existing patterns of activity among distributed neuronal networks, and continual changes. Most of what is required to form such imagery is constantly represented by such activity and is constantly changing.
Again, most of the physical processes required to form such images continue to exist after your mental imagery ceases.
Then I'd say it's about time to start writing the monographs, papers, and so forth outlying your perspective (and make sure that it has a good name; usually this means a good combination of jargon, esp. jargon with just a touch of common parlance like "holographic substantivist consciousness" or "epexiphenomanist noeticicism" or "metamaterialist projective pluralist theory of mind'. And if you could write your first monograph presenting your theory within a week or two that would be great, as I really could use some fresh literature on this topic.
I've been thinking a lot about this question over the past few days (it's disrupted other planned activity, for which I blame Sunstone, but luckily foremost among what I'd planned to finish was in the way of commentary over some reading material I now have a scapegoat for). Neuroscientists tend to have a reputation for being the most hard-core reductivists around, as many of them come from backgrounds in psychology and approach the biological sciences (of which only a minority go beyond the very basics) as a necessary evil that need only be understood to the point at which psychological phenomenon can be descriptively reduced to biological processes. However, there are a lot of exceptions, although a great many of these aren't neuroscientists so much as they are specialists from other fields who have used their expertise in tandem with neurologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and others whose study is centered on the brain. Then there are those of us who are interested in closing the gap between computational neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, which is to say constructing explanatory models of cognitive processes through neurophysiological processes.
I started down my path to insanity (well, another kind of insanity than that I already had) by trying to show that, at the very least, we could rule out quantum theories of consciousness (and not via reliance on the quantum-to-classical transition). This was a mistake, as on the road to quantum physics lies madness. I usually describe my position as being that of a physicalist, but one of the problems with modern physics is that many physical systems are mathematical entities. It's not just that the fundamental constituents of all matter are (in the standard view) probability functions. It's not even the ontological indeterminacy. It's the ways in which the classical world we experience can be recovered through our forcing reality to exist as one thing vs. another. This is a central epistemic and philosophical basis (sometimes explicitly stated, as with Stapp's quantum consciousness theory) for quantum theories of mind: we seems to decide to do things in ways that nothing in classical physics can explain but that is built into quantum theory. To me, this is only a good starting point if one can use it as a foundation for identifying how quantum processes give rise to or even contribute to what little we know of the physics of consciousness, conceptual processing, & cognition in general. It hasn't, and until someone supporting such theories can offer this I think it is actually preventing (as quantum physics has in general) us from looking anew at "classical physics".
It is often somehow assumed that classical physics is only incomplete when it comes to the atomic/sub-atomic scale (or mechanics at scales astrophysicists deal with if one doesn't view special relativity as classical physics). That is, it's sort of tacitly taken for granted that if we don't need quantum physics or relativistic physics we can rely on classical physics. In reality, classical physics at its best wasn't a very good tool to understand most physical phenomena, but was virtually bankrupt at explaining the dynamics of living systems. And, while modern physics & chemistry have made tremendous strides in our ability to model, explain, predict, and in general understand even complex systems that aren't living, the glaring failure of similar progress in biology has motivated a great many to propose that we don't understand the classical realm as well as we thought.
Classical physics arose out of natural philosophy as classical mechanics in order to explain why inanimate things moved the way they did. It continued to do mainly this right up through the origins of quantum physics. Take a system as complex as you'd like, such as the climate, and despite all the nonlinearities, highly complex interactions between and among "networks", etc., it's still all about how forces act on inanimate objects to make them move in particular ways. Living systems (even single-celled organisms) are qualitatively different. They are animate, for one thing, and classical physics was developed to explain the inanimate. Our models of their dynamics involve constant appeals to processes that we use to explain the dynamics of the "parts" of the system, only somehow these parts are also causing the functional processes.
Concepts, however they relate to the physical brain (and not just those of humans), are perhaps the greatest challenge to the fundamental ideas that drove the development of classical physics for centuries. Concepts involved in awareness, the sense of "I/me" that is self-awareness/consciousness, even those of desires appear fundamentally different kinds of "forces" than those that motivated most of physics up-to and including today: ethereal, seemingly non-corporeal abstractions that some how act upon a physical system causally. Moreover, the brain is in some ways the most complex system known (trivially speaking, it clearly must not be as the body contains the brain and much else, and therefore is necessarily more complex). We can not only model to a high degree of accuracy the kind of "learning" or reactions to environment that most living systems are capable of, but many of the methods used in AI, soft computing, computational intelligence, etc., are based off of how living systems of this type "learn" (non-conceptually). We are not remotely close to understanding or creating models of living systems capable of conceptual processing. So we have a physics that is particularly inadequate when it comes to understanding even the simplest life that we wish to use to understand something that runs counter to the foundations for classical physics and in most ways physics itself. Meanwhile, just what it means to be "physical" has becoming increasingly less clear.
When the most successful theory of all time tells you that a thing can be both A & ~A and that everything is made up of nonlocal, indiscrete components (there are no "particles", just things that are wave-like but whose wave-like properties become infinitesimal as the the size of the system exceeds its de Broglie wavelength), there's reason to think deeply about what it means to describe something as "material" or "physical. And as this theory didn't develop like the (mostly) progressive successes of classical physics but was born out of the catastrophic realization that the entire framework of physics was fundamentally flawed, are we really so justified in relying on that framework except where it failed so spectacularly before?
I started down my path to insanity (well, another kind of insanity than that I already had) by trying to show that, at the very least, we could rule out quantum theories of consciousness (and not via reliance on the quantum-to-classical transition). This was a mistake, as on the road to quantum physics lies madness. I usually describe my position as being that of a physicalist, but one of the problems with modern physics is that many physical systems are mathematical entities. It's not just that the fundamental constituents of all matter are (in the standard view) probability functions. It's not even the ontological indeterminacy. It's the ways in which the classical world we experience can be recovered through our forcing reality to exist as one thing vs. another. This is a central epistemic and philosophical basis (sometimes explicitly stated, as with Stapp's quantum consciousness theory) for quantum theories of mind: we seems to decide to do things in ways that nothing in classical physics can explain but that is built into quantum theory. To me, this is only a good starting point if one can use it as a foundation for identifying how quantum processes give rise to or even contribute to what little we know of the physics of consciousness, conceptual processing, & cognition in general. It hasn't, and until someone supporting such theories can offer this I think it is actually preventing (as quantum physics has in general) us from looking anew at "classical physics".
It is often somehow assumed that classical physics is only incomplete when it comes to the atomic/sub-atomic scale (or mechanics at scales astrophysicists deal with if one doesn't view special relativity as classical physics). That is, it's sort of tacitly taken for granted that if we don't need quantum physics or relativistic physics we can rely on classical physics. In reality, classical physics at its best wasn't a very good tool to understand most physical phenomena, but was virtually bankrupt at explaining the dynamics of living systems. And, while modern physics & chemistry have made tremendous strides in our ability to model, explain, predict, and in general understand even complex systems that aren't living, the glaring failure of similar progress in biology has motivated a great many to propose that we don't understand the classical realm as well as we thought.
Classical physics arose out of natural philosophy as classical mechanics in order to explain why inanimate things moved the way they did. It continued to do mainly this right up through the origins of quantum physics. Take a system as complex as you'd like, such as the climate, and despite all the nonlinearities, highly complex interactions between and among "networks", etc., it's still all about how forces act on inanimate objects to make them move in particular ways. Living systems (even single-celled organisms) are qualitatively different. They are animate, for one thing, and classical physics was developed to explain the inanimate. Our models of their dynamics involve constant appeals to processes that we use to explain the dynamics of the "parts" of the system, only somehow these parts are also causing the functional processes.
Concepts, however they relate to the physical brain (and not just those of humans), are perhaps the greatest challenge to the fundamental ideas that drove the development of classical physics for centuries. Concepts involved in awareness, the sense of "I/me" that is self-awareness/consciousness, even those of desires appear fundamentally different kinds of "forces" than those that motivated most of physics up-to and including today: ethereal, seemingly non-corporeal abstractions that some how act upon a physical system causally. Moreover, the brain is in some ways the most complex system known (trivially speaking, it clearly must not be as the body contains the brain and much else, and therefore is necessarily more complex). We can not only model to a high degree of accuracy the kind of "learning" or reactions to environment that most living systems are capable of, but many of the methods used in AI, soft computing, computational intelligence, etc., are based off of how living systems of this type "learn" (non-conceptually). We are not remotely close to understanding or creating models of living systems capable of conceptual processing. So we have a physics that is particularly inadequate when it comes to understanding even the simplest life that we wish to use to understand something that runs counter to the foundations for classical physics and in most ways physics itself. Meanwhile, just what it means to be "physical" has becoming increasingly less clear.
When the most successful theory of all time tells you that a thing can be both A & ~A and that everything is made up of nonlocal, indiscrete components (there are no "particles", just things that are wave-like but whose wave-like properties become infinitesimal as the the size of the system exceeds its de Broglie wavelength), there's reason to think deeply about what it means to describe something as "material" or "physical. And as this theory didn't develop like the (mostly) progressive successes of classical physics but was born out of the catastrophic realization that the entire framework of physics was fundamentally flawed, are we really so justified in relying on that framework except where it failed so spectacularly before?
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Excaljnur
Green String
I only quoted this paragraph to show the context of the sentence, "Nothing is stored." Where did you learn this?
