Lets try this another way: if you have faith the brain creates the mind, and that mind depends on brain, can we please see your logic and evidence?

[Kelly of the Phoenix]

The existence of gods, ghosts, spirits, etc contest this

How

 

[soulsurvivor]

I was adding telekinesis to the powers of your unconscious mind.




John

You have convinced me. I will try to bend some spoons.

 

[John D. Brey]

You have convinced me. I will try to bend some spoons.

Don't try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Try to realize the truth, there is no spoon.



John

 

[soulsurvivor]

Don't try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Try to realize the truth, there is no spoon.



John

Quite right, physicalists will never realize the truth.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Don't try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Try to realize the truth, there is no spoon.



John

But, but, so many are spoon fed from birth! But different food depending upon where they are born all too often.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Seems utterly bonkers that mainstream scientists and philosophers are proposing consciousness is fundamental. But here we are and I'm loving it.

Btw, Philip Goff's book and talks are worth a listen, and Galen Strawson never disappoints.

No more bonkers, perhaps, than the proposal that every probable outcome to every possible history is unfolding simultaneously in a higher dimensional reality, or that every time a random event occurs, the universe splits between the various options. But those have their share of proponents who are well respected in their fields.

 

[John D. Brey]

Don't try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Try to realize the truth, there is no spoon.

But, but, so many are spoon fed from birth! But different food depending upon where they are born all too often.

Oooh. What's really gonna bake your noodle later on is if, since there's no spoon, there's a noodle to be spoon-fed in the first place?



John

 

[Fool]

Claim: the brain creates the mind. The mind depends on the brain. When the brain dies mind dies. Etc.

Evidence: ?????

mind/consciousness depends on electrical impulses and a neural type pathway. obviously a dead body can have a brain but a brain doesn't necessarily have a higher mind.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Oooh. What's really gonna bake your noodle later on is if, since there's no spoon, there's a noodle to be spoon-fed in the first place?



John

What if there is an underlying reality which manifests as spoon, as noodle, as feeder and as fed, but it’s the arbitrary distinction between these things which is the illusion here?

 

[John D. Brey]

What if there is an underlying reality which manifests as spoon, as noodle, as feeder and as fed, but it’s the arbitrary distinction between these things which is the illusion here?

I think you have it arse backward when you speak of an arbitrary distinction as the problem. It seems to be precisely the opposite that's the problem: the idea that the spoon and the noodle, even the noodle thinking about the spoon and the noodle, is/are "real" in a less than arbitrary sense.

Jesus spent his life (so to say) trying to teach that water isn't fundamentally different than wine, and that it's just as possible to walk on water as it is on a rock if you know that those who take the distinction as less than arbitrary have rocks in their heads and are thus using watered down logic. They're using their noodle in the way they've been spoon-fed to use it all their life. Their logic isn't a limpid as is the noodle that's been soaking in it too long.



John

 

[RestlessSoul]

I think you have it arse backward when you speak of an arbitrary distinction as the problem. It seems to be precisely the opposite that's the problem: the idea that the spoon and the noodle, even the noodle thinking about the spoon and the noodle, is/are "real" in a less than arbitrary sense.

Jesus spent his life (so to say) trying to teach that water isn't fundamentally different than wine, and that it's just as possible to walk on water as it is on a rock if you know that those who take the distinction as less than arbitrary have rocks in their heads and are thus using watered down logic. They're using their noodle in the way they've been spoon-fed to use it all their life. Their logic isn't a limpid as is the noodle that's been soaking in it too long.



John

Well that was my point, that it's all the same underlying reality. The noodle and the spoon are formed from the same shimmering molecular soup.

 

[John D. Brey]

Well that was my point, that it's all the same underlying reality. The noodle and the spoon are formed from the same shimmering molecular soup.

. . . Fwiw, the "molecule" in the soup is like an inedible bone in chicken soup. It should be put in an immaterial napkin and thrown in an invisible garbage pail. There's not a modicum or molecule of materiality in reality.



John

 

[RestlessSoul]

. . . Fwiw, the "molecule" in the soup is like an inedible bone in chicken soup. It should be put in an immaterial napkin and thrown in an invisible garbage pail. There's not a modicum or molecule of materiality in reality.



John

All that is solid melts into air, indeed

 

[Yerda]

No more bonkers, perhaps, than the proposal that every probable outcome to every possible history is unfolding simultaneously in a higher dimensional reality, or that every time a random event occurs, the universe splits between the various options. But those have their share of proponents who are well respected in their fields.

This is a fair point. I really like bonkers ideas that have a bit of reasoning behind them - whether the source is physics, panpsycism, trancendental idealism, or Advaita Vedanta.

The multiverse theories are great, and as you say, utterly bonkers.

Fair enough. Russell's writings have inspired a lot of people, even if the inspiration took them far from the source.

Not all that far in this case I reckon.

I'm not so sure that any component can ever be said to be irreducible, but we can certainly imagine the components of any substrate as fundamental to the components of of a supervening system.

You might be correct. Who knows if there is ground to reality?

And you believe that rocks can have experiences--subjective phenomenal states? I'm not really following how panpsychism is supposed to work. I'm pretty sure that animals can have experiences, but rocks and bricks?

I have a hard time believing that rocks have feelings, personally. The possibility that the stuff that makes up the world has an experiential component or is experiential in nature is something I'm happy to entertain, though. And I mean that, insofar as I can get my head around it all it is a pleasing thought.

Most panpsychists, as far as I can tell, don't think all objects are the subjects of experience though they seem committed to the idea that there is something experiential about all stuff.

But, if consciousness is not fundamental in the sense of irreducibility, then would you concede that it is a product of cognition?

I think the most reasonable assumption is that it is the product of what the brain does.

I'm afraid that that I couldn't turn "ways of accounting for" into a single "account" very easily. I was thinking along the lines of embodied cognition, but that's a big subject that would likely take us far afield.

That's fair enough.

When I said physics can't account for consciousness I just mean that there's nothing in the laws of physics, as we understand them, that implies that there should be subjective qualitative states. That's a startling thought, don't you think?

I don't mean that there should be field equations where the answer is "sour" or "painful" or something. Just that we start with fundamental fields or particles and the rules seem to account for all the stuff that exists - like molecules and cells and animals and rivers and planets and nebulae. But not experiences.

The relevance was that linguists are among those who provide analytic tools for deconstructing experiences into their component elements.

Do they? I had no idea.

 

[Copernicus]

I have a hard time believing that rocks have feelings, personally. The possibility that the stuff that makes up the world has an experiential component or is experiential in nature is something I'm happy to entertain, though. And I mean that, insofar as I can get my head around it all it is a pleasing thought.

Most panpsychists, as far as I can tell, don't think all objects are the subjects of experience though they seem committed to the idea that there is something experiential about all stuff.

IMO, the problem is that the term "experiential" is completely undefined, so it is easy to make claims about the nature of experiences without giving much thought to what makes something an experience. For starters, we know that there is a perceiver of something. It is time-delimited, since experiences can come before and after each other. We know that physical bodies are involved in creating the experiences. We know that the word is a count noun, so experiences are semantically "countable". But what makes something one or two experiences? What is one experience, as opposed to twenty of them? We also know that experiences can be stored in, and retrieved from, memory. If you put some thought into it, it should become obvious that inanimate objects like rocks and raindrops aren't likely to be able to experience anything at all. Brains provide the equipment necessary to create experiences, and only animals have brains.

When I said physics can't account for consciousness I just mean that there's nothing in the laws of physics, as we understand them, that implies that there should be subjective qualitative states. That's a startling thought, don't you think?

But there is a way to investigate subjective qualitative states, as I've pointed out in the past. We not only experience our environments, but we interact with them. Physical bodies come equipped with sensors and actuators, not unlike the ones we build into robots. One of the reasons that Artificial Intelligence is a component of cognitive science is that we learn a lot about how humans and other animals both experience the world and interact with it when we attempt to build machines that can do the same things. It turns out that building a walking machine means that one has to figure out how a machine can "watch its step" while walking. So there needs to be a sense of self-awareness built into it. It must be able to remember objects and events and be able to make plans about future actions. All of that has to do with making a purely mechanical object exhibit the same behaviors that a biological flesh and blood physical machine has evolved over millions of years to do. We are a long way from creating anything like animal intelligence in machines, but we are learning a lot about what brains do and how they do those things as we carry on scientific research that enables us to build intelligent machines.

I don't mean that there should be field equations where the answer is "sour" or "painful" or something. Just that we start with fundamental fields or particles and the rules seem to account for all the stuff that exists - like molecules and cells and animals and rivers and planets and nebulae. But not experiences.

That is trivially true in the sense that none of those things have brains, so we should not expect them to be relevant to an explanation of what experiences or thoughts are. For that, you need to examine the behavior of brains and the bodies that host them. At some point, low level physics can be used to explain the behavior of the components that make up the high level systemic behavior, but you are wasting your time looking for answers in our stars rather than ourselves.

 

[Mock Turtle]

Oooh. What's really gonna bake your noodle later on is if, since there's no spoon, there's a noodle to be spoon-fed in the first place?



John

When education/indoctrination isn't such please inform me - and as to such being dependent upon where one is born all too often.

 

[Yerda]

IMO, the problem is that the term "experiential" is completely undefined, so it is easy to make claims about the nature of experiences without giving much thought to what makes something an experience. For starters, we know that there is a perceiver of something. It is time-delimited, since experiences can come before and after each other. We know that physical bodies are involved in creating the experiences. We know that the word is a count noun, so experiences are semantically "countable". But what makes something one or two experiences? What is one experience, as opposed to twenty of them?

Luckily the nature of experience is that anyone who wants to discuss it already knows what it is. No need to ever get caught up in semantics.

We also know that experiences can be stored in, and retrieved from, memory. If you put some thought into it, it should become obvious that inanimate objects like rocks and raindrops aren't likely to be able to experience anything at all.

I agree.

Brains provide the equipment necessary to create experiences..

Do they? This is the point.

But there is a way to investigate subjective qualitative states, as I've pointed out in the past. We not only experience our environments, but we interact with them. Physical bodies come equipped with sensors and actuators, not unlike the ones we build into robots. One of the reasons that Artificial Intelligence is a component of cognitive science is that we learn a lot about how humans and other animals both experience the world and interact with it when we attempt to build machines that can do the same things. It turns out that building a walking machine means that one has to figure out how a machine can "watch its step" while walking. So there needs to be a sense of self-awareness built into it. It must be able to remember objects and events and be able to make plans about future actions. All of that has to do with making a purely mechanical object exhibit the same behaviors that a biological flesh and blood physical machine has evolved over millions of years to do. We are a long way from creating anything like animal intelligence in machines, but we are learning a lot about what brains do and how they do those things as we carry on scientific research that enables us to build intelligent machines.

We know loads about brains. Just not how they might give rise to subjectivity qualitative states.

I'm not sure that machines have any more awareness than rocks or raindrops, btw.

That is trivially true in the sense that none of those things have brains, so we should not expect them to be relevant to an explanation of what experiences or thoughts are. For that, you need to examine the behavior of brains and the bodies that host them. At some point, low level physics can be used to explain the behavior of the components that make up the high level systemic behavior, but you are wasting your time looking for answers in our stars rather than ourselves.

I think you've missed the point I was making here.

Maybe it would be better for you to read a paper on panpsychism, or a book. I'm not a teacher and far from an expert and it seems like you're getting the wrong end of the stick from this chat.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Something deeper?

 

[Copernicus]

Luckily the nature of experience is that anyone who wants to discuss it already knows what it is. No need to ever get caught up in semantics.

To the extent that we use words to discuss consciousness and experiences, we must clarify what we mean by those words. Otherwise, we literally don't know what we are talking about.

Brains provide the equipment necessary to create experiences..​

Do they? This is the point.

How do you get experiences without a nervous system to create them? Don't tell me not to get caught up in the semantics. This is the point that you need to address, and you can't address it by merely handwaving at it with a claim that we know intuitively what experiences are.

We know loads about brains. Just not how they might give rise to subjectivity qualitative states.

I'm not sure that machines have any more awareness than rocks or raindrops, btw.

But I just gave you examples of how we do know about what might give rise to what you call "subjectivity qualitative states", and you simply reply by ignoring those comments. As for machines, I would claim that they have more awareness than rocks or raindrops, because they are interact with their environments nondeterministically. That is, they can be constructed to carry out tasks that mimic the way in which intelligent animals interact with their environments. That's why so many of our machines come equipped with sensors and actuators, just like biological creatures.

I think you've missed the point I was making here.

Maybe it would be better for you to read a paper on panpsychism, or a book. I'm not a teacher and far from an expert and it seems like you're getting the wrong end of the stick from this chat.

So far, I haven't read anything about panpsychism that would make me think I've been getting the wrong end of the stick on that subject. If you're saying that I need to keep reading until I am convinced to your way of thinking, my reply would be that I would prefer you to keep reading literature on emergent materialism until you are convinced to my way of thinking.

 

[Copernicus]

Something deeper?

I listened for anything in that talk which would suggest that consciousness could somehow be irreducible or "fundamental", but the speaker really did admit that very few of his colleagues agreed with him and quipped at the end "only my graduate students". It came off to me as something of a disjointed ramble grounded in the "correlation is not causation" meme. Of course, causation is always a case of correlation, just not vice versa.

So there was nothing in what he said, if you listen carefully, that actually pointed to behavior that could not be explained in terms of physical brain activity. He admitted that perception was matched against what he termed "predictive models", and that kind of behavior is essentially what we program into robotic behavior in order to get them to respond to unexpected and unpredictable events. The trick in AI these days is to get robots to integrate all of that information into a good predictive model for navigating in real world environments. Humans do that naturally, but we have about a hundred billion neurons in our brains to form vastly complex connections to world-body interactions. Neural nets in computers are nowhere near as sophisticated as the ones that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years inside our heads.