Western Materialism

[RestlessSoul]

I too struggled to get anything useful out of that interview. To me, treating consciousness as an emergent phenomenon of brain activity seems the obvious way to look at it.

Massimo Pigliucci has a critique of the "hard problem" of consciousness here: What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now I find myself sympathetic towards that.

It get the feeling that a great deal of the discussion about consciousness is conditioned by our tradition of Cartesian dualism, whereby people think of the mind as an entity, distinct from the body. I suspect that too is a category error and that the mind is an activity, not an entity: the activity of the brain.

The mind might be the activity of the brain, but that does mean the mind and it’s wonders are the brain, nor reducible to it’s processes. The activity of the eyes is seeing, but the vision is surely more than the organs which perceive it.

 

[exchemist]

The mind might be the activity of the brain, but that does mean the mind and it’s wonders are the brain, nor reducible to it’s processes. The activity of the eyes is seeing, but the vision is surely more than the organs which perceive it.

Surely the relationship is a bit like that of the operating system of a computer to its hardware, isn't it? No one would say the operating system IS the hardware. It is part of the definition of any emergent phenomenon that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, is it not?

When you use the term "reducible" I think you need to be clear what you mean by that. In an emergent phenomenon, the whole is certainly explicable as arising from its parts, but the whole exhibits phenomena of its own, which only arise collectively from the parts.

Liquid water is explicable in terms of the interactions of its constituent molecules, but also has properties of its own that don't apply to any one molecule, e.g. occupying a container but not the space above, temperature, density, compressibility, and so on.

 

[PureX]

The brain did not just accidentally invent cognition. The brain simply evolved to fulfill a function that was already both possible and desirable. This is what the philosophical materialists here cannot let themselves comprehend or allow. Because it means that physicality is following the dictates to something greater and beyond itself.

 

[exchemist]

The brain did not just accidentally invent cognition. The brain simply evolved to fulfill a function that was already both possible and desirable. This is what the philosophical materialists here cannot let themselves comprehend or allow. Because it means that physicality is following the dictates to something greater and beyond itself.

Like with legs, you mean?

 

[1137]

So your examples are things not known to exist? This isn't a serious answer.

Why do you not believe these things exist?

If consciousness is present it is because there is a living brain being observed.

It is becoming clear you will do nothing but repeat the claim, unfortunately.

How is consciousness detected outside of living brains.

With consciousness...

So you think it is faith that we only can sense a nature that is physical?

Oh that specifically wouldn't be faith but full blown fideism, since the most direct and only certain thing we know is immaterial consciousness.

Do you have special powers to detect non-physical anything?

Yeah, it is called being conscious.

Notice your position is without logic and evidence.

Man this is funny!

Well you can't defend your position, so I guess you concede you can't show us you are correct. So we throw out your claims.

We are in agreement with this logic. You have no evidence, logic, or refutations, and are clearly a troll. Enjoy the ignore list!

 

[Ostronomos]

So you have no examples of a mind existing outside of a living brain. OK.

YES!

I have seen consciousness in the external world. The universal consciousness.

 

[F1fan]

YES!

I have seen consciousness in the external world. The universal consciousness.

That’s vague. No specifics that makes you credible?

 

[F1fan]

Why do you not believe these things exist?

Because not only isn’t there adequate evidence that ghosts exist, there’s none to suggest they are conscious like living beings.

It is becoming clear you will do nothing but repeat the claim, unfortunately.

I’m repeating factual information. Why would it change?

With consciousness...

Oh that specifically wouldn't be faith but full blown fideism, since the most direct and only certain thing we know is immaterial consciousness.

Consciousness isn’t a thing that is material since it is an observed state of living beings. Consciousness is certainly a result of living brains processing through its neural network.

We are in agreement with this logic. You have no evidence, logic, or refutations, and are clearly a troll. Enjoy the ignore list!

Careful of breaking the forum rules.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Surely the relationship is a bit like that of the operating system of a computer to its hardware, isn't it? No one would say the operating system IS the hardware. It is part of the definition of any emergent phenomenon that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, is it not?

When you use the term "reducible" I think you need to be clear what you mean by that. In an emergent phenomenon, the whole is certainly explicable as arising from its parts, but the whole exhibits phenomena of its own, which only arise collectively from the parts.

Liquid water is explicable in terms of the interactions of its constituent molecules, but also has properties of its own that don't apply to any one molecule, e.g. occupying a container but not the space above, temperature, density, compressibility, and so on.

I’m not convinced consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Certainly Tononi’s suggestion, articulated also by David Chalmers, is that consciousness is fundamental, in the same way that time and space are fundamental; it’s one of the dimensions in which the material universe exists and unfolds.

If consciousness originates in the brain, the former merely a product of the latter, how do we account for the fact that our thoughts, our state of mind, and our beliefs, can influence our biology, just as much as the other way round? Mens sana in corpore sano implies mutual influence, does it not?

 

[RestlessSoul]

I don't think it is worth trying to take such a top-down perspective of consciousness and figure out what its relationship is to physics. Rather, I would start with simple physical interactions and work my way up. Conscious experience is an interaction between a mind and a physical context. That is, the mind is conscious of something--its physical environment. An iron filing reacts to a magnetic field, but can it be said to be conscious of that field or the magnet that generates it? Certainly, they are not conscious of the magnet, but there is a sense in which they directly detect the magnetic field and interact with it. Just like humans detect their environment and interact with it.

Human bodies and iron filings are both physical objects. They both interact with their environment. What is it about physical human bodies that makes them interact differently with their environment than iron filings react with theirs? Both humans and iron filings feel forces of attraction and repulsion, but the human interactions are vastly more complex. We can proceed with such a bottom-up methodology to look at physical interactions between more complex physical objects than magnets and iron filings, but I think at some point it will become clear that the physical fields involving less complex objects are similar to the physical fields involving human behavior, only vastly different in scope. Iron filings obviously don't have brains. They don't build mental models to interpret the sensation of a magnetic attraction, nor do they have associative memories of their interactions. But we can build physical machines--robots--that have some of those more human-like interactions with their physical environments. So we have a means of investigating the relationship between brain activity in human bodies and the reality that those bodies interact with. I wouldn't say that an iron filing has a mind, but I would say that it has some rudimentary component of one.




An interesting property of human thinking is that it can take different perspectives--first person, second person, third person, etc. What can be described from each of those different perspectives is different from descriptions based on the others. So it is wrong to say that one cannot see the world from a neutral or different perspective. One can imagine it from those perspectives. One of the problems with trying to wrestle with these problems as a scientist is that the models one comes up with to describe measured results are somewhat different perspectives on those results, and not all models are useful is solving real world problems. For example, quantum mechanics tells us lots of interesting things about the behavior of a baseball that a pitcher throws, but classical mechanics is a lot more useful in describing it from the perspective of the pitcher. And there is more than one way to interpret fact of the measurement problem, as the physicist Sean M Carroll has been at pains to explain in his popular book Something Deeply Hidden. You don't need to buy into Everett's MWI model of quantum mechanics to understand his point, but I think he makes it very well. Sometimes scientists get the science right and the metaphors wrong. and scientists have come up with a lot of metaphors while trying to explain the measurement problem.



See what I mean about scientists and metaphors? Why would we want to decouple ourselves from our theories? That doesn't make any sense at all. What we want to do is develop theories that provide us with useful ways to interact with the physical reality that we find ourselves in. Why suffer so much angst over the fact that we will never stop learning new and useful things about that reality?

It’s possible - maybe even most efficient - to do physics without an ontology. To “shut up and calculate”, in the phrase attributed to David Mermin. And it’s certainly possible to do Newtonian physics without any reference to the observer.

But if science is to achieve the ambition of the likes of Einstein and Stephen Hawking, to provide a full description of the universe, it needs an ontology; physics needs a metaphysics, if it is to do more than predict outcomes based on observed regularities. And a theory of everything must necessarily include an account of the consciousness of the observer, or the theory will be incomplete. David Bohm, John Wheeler, Christopher Fuchs, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose are among the physicists who seem to have reached this conclusion, in one way or another.

Certainly we can use our imagination to consider perspectives other than our own, but what is imagination if not a function of consciousness?

Incidentally, integrated information theory (IIT) would assign a tiny degree of consciousness even to an iron filing, on the grounds that the filing carries information about the electro magnetic field, and that wherever there is information, there is a quantum of consciousness.

 

[exchemist]

I’m not convinced consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Certainly Tononi’s suggestion, articulated also by David Chalmers, is that consciousness is fundamental, in the same way that time and space are fundamental; it’s one of the dimensions in which the material universe exists and unfolds.

If consciousness originates in the brain, the former merely a product of the latter, how do we account for the fact that our thoughts, our state of mind, and our beliefs, can influence our biology, just as much as the other way round? Mens sana in corpore sano implies mutual influence, does it not?

Yes but that just means a healthy body is likely to lead to a sense of wellbeing. It does not signify a distinction between mind and body. It’s just a saying, dreamt up by someone from our dominant Cartesian dualist tradition.

Chalmers’s view is dismissed by Pigliucci.

 

[Yerda]

That is all well explained. Are you focusing on the "correlate" part of that title?

Yeah, the studies/framework look at the correlation between neural activity and phenomenal experience.

Yes we are having fun. But some are having fun by understanding what is true, or at least what is likely true about how things are. Others are looking to prop up their religious or political beliefs with ideas that are unlikely true or even implausible. Those claiming the mind is independent of brains are doing so for some motive that isn't trying to understand what is objectively true, and to my mind it is part of debate to expose these flaws of thinking to them so they can learn, if they want to. Some just get upset, and even insulting. They aren't having fun.

Whatever the motives, it is possible to consider a statement on its own merits. This is all I'm saying. The motives don't matter too much to me.

Follow the facts. With a lack of facts we follow what we understand of reality thus far. If you see a light in the night sky, is it a UFO, or satelite? If you hear a noise in your house while you were sleeping, is it a ghost or one of your cats? UFOs and ghosts are more fun, but is there evidence over the more likely explanation? With a lack of evidence we defer to the most likely explanations.

If we take the light in the sky example, we can imagine a set of facts that would help us determine which explanation is more likely to be true.

What I was getting at is that it seems difficult (to my not particularly enlightened self) for us to imagine a set of facts that would help us decide whether it is more likely that the brain gives rise to consciousness or it picks it up like a radio.

Why is it even a consideration? Our imaginations could go anywhere. Look at those who believe we are living sims. Did anyone come up with that before videogames? Not to my understanding, but some are running with the idea due to social expeirence, not evidence.

It's a consideration because a member of the forum put it up for consideration. I find it interesting that I can't think of how to rule it out.

I also find it interesting to consider what evidence @1137 would consider valid in differentiating, as it would seem that no fact about the world that we could discover would change someone's mind once they've set it in this particular direction. Every experiment we could run would depend upon material facts and be seemingly insufficient to demarcate between correlation and causation.

Gravity is a mystery too, but is there any reason to believe gravity is some supernatural, or non-material, phenomenon? No. We didn't understand infections before germ theory. We work towards understanding nature by following the evidence. We shold be wary of those trying to find "God of the gaps" speculation that derails science. It's distraction, not sincere investigation.

I don't think anyone is derailing science here. I would stick my neck out and suggest you could take the position put forward here without disputing a single finding or study.

People deny evolution on here, but you can't do that without throwing out a lot of biology, imo. Genetics, biochemistry, etc, would have to be wrong for it to be the case that lineages don't change over time.

You can deny the brain creates consciousness without contradicting anything we know about the world.

Well we see all sorts of questions that we can't answer, like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It's asking a question that we can't answer, so to my mind it is more interesting to ask why a mortal would need to ask questions they know they can't answer. What is their intention other than some confusion and uncertainty? Look at those who think materialism is false, what is their basis for that judgment? We are material beings. The universe is material. There is no indication of there being "immaterial" anything, whatever than means. So what gives, except to justify beliefs that have evolved from religion?

I don't disregard religious views on this matter. I would say that I've learned to look at consciousness through lots of different frames and some of these I've acquired from buddhist and hindu schools of thought.

Also, some apparently unanswerable questions are still interesting to ask.

 

[F1fan]

Yeah, the studies/framework look at the correlation between neural activity and phenomenal experience.

There is no experience without the neural activity, yes?

Whatever the motives, it is possible to consider a statement on its own merits. This is all I'm saying. The motives don't matter too much to me.

The problem is their statements aren't fact-based, where's their evidence? So that means what is their motive to post untrue claims. They are so upset they are making insults.

If we take the light in the sky example, we can imagine a set of facts that would help us determine which explanation is more likely to be true.

How does imagining facts help answer a mystery? To use Occam's Razor we apply actual facts and conclude the most likley probability.

What I was getting at is that it seems difficult (to my not particularly enlightened self) for us to imagine a set of facts that would help us decide whether it is more likely that the brain gives rise to consciousness or it picks it up like a radio.

You struggling with this is a problem you seem to have, but not others. I get the impression that there has been so much specialness assigned to consciousness that many have adopted this unconsciously and now feel cognitive dissonance at the suggestion that consciousness is quite common among many animals, and an emergent phenomenon through evolution. To my mind consciousness is quite simple and practical. I think some humans really want to see humans as special, and conscousness and thinking is a sign of superiority.

It's a consideration because a member of the forum put it up for consideration. I find it interesting that I can't think of how to rule it out.

I also find it interesting to consider what evidence @1137 would consider valid in differentiating, as it would seem that no fact about the world that we could discover would change someone's mind once they've set it in this particular direction. Every experiment we could run would depend upon material facts and be seemingly insufficient to demarcate between correlation and causation.

Several of these memebrs have gotten a bit upset at being rebutted and questioned. They have their beliefs, which are related to religion, and that means they likely lack evidence, and even contrary to science and reason.

You can deny the brain creates consciousness without contradicting anything we know about the world.

I don't like this wording. To say the brain "creates" consciousness suggests it is a deliberate action. I think this is waht the wording is that consciousness correlates to experience. Consciousness seems to be much like the nervous system which just does it's thing.

I don't disregard religious views on this matter. I would say that I've learned to look at consciousness through lots of different frames and some of these I've acquired from buddhist and hindu schools of thought.

Eastern religions have always been more naturalistic than Western religions. Even the Hindu creation story is not to far removed from science.

Also, some apparently unanswerable questions are still interesting to ask.

I would say they can tell us something about our own minds while thinking and feeling.

 

[Yerda]

There is no experience without the neural activity, yes?

I believe so.

The problem is their statements aren't fact-based, where's their evidence? So that means what is their motive to post untrue claims. They are so upset they are making insults.

I guess they are as convinced of the truth of their position as you are of yours.

How does imagining facts help answer a mystery? To use Occam's Razor we apply actual facts and conclude the most likley probability.

We're imagining a scenario: lights in the sky. We can also imagine which facts would help us decide if it was little green men or something more mundane.

For example, were there military manoeuvres, or a meteor shower, a local traffic helicopter in the sky at that time.? Etc. You see what I mean?

You struggling with this is a problem you seem to have, but not others.

Maybe. Can you think of evidence we could find, in principle, that would help decide?

I get the impression that there has been so much specialness assigned to consciousness that many have adopted this unconsciously and now feel cognitive dissonance at the suggestion that consciousness is quite common among many animals, and an emergent phenomenon through evolution. To my mind consciousness is quite simple and practical. I think some humans really want to see humans as special, and conscousness and thinking is a sign of superiority.

I think a lot of atheists and people heavily interested in science overlook just how significant the gap is in our understanding of consciousness.

It is special from a scientific perspective because it is the only example of a subjective phenomenon and nothing in the sciences (yet) suggests that there should be subjective phenomena associated with matter. Once we have a better scientific grip on it we should have a different perspective but for now it is unique.

I'm sure it is common among the animals - I suspect that ants and bees and maybe even simpler creatures have experiences. Who knows, maybe even plants.

Several of these memebrs have gotten a bit upset at being rebutted and questioned. They have their beliefs, which are related to religion, and that means they likely lack evidence, and even contrary to science and reason.

Can you cite a scientific finding that contradicts the position, though?

I don't like this wording. To say the brain "creates" consciousness suggests it is a deliberate action. I think this is waht the wording is that consciousness correlates to experience. Consciousness seems to be much like the nervous system which just does it's thing.

I think you're right. I use the word cause much like you could say that low temperatures cause it to snow, or CO2 molecules cause the atmosphere to warm. The neurons do their thing and we have experiences as a result.

 

[PureX]

Like with legs, you mean?

Legs did not develope to "cause" mobility. They developed because mobility was already an idea and a possibility awaiting fulfillment. Had mobility not already been metaphysically extant, the physical legs would never have occurred. Same is true of life, and of cognition. These were possibilities awaiting fulfillment from the moment the physical universe began. They were written itnto it's 'blueprint'. Physicality simply gives physical substance to the plan.

 

[danieldemol]

Can you cite a scientific finding that contradicts the position, though?

Well I'm not sure, but I tend to think that if conciousness is transmitted such that could transfer past life memories for example then it would mean that conciousness is kind of like the cloud where memories are stored.

If only we had a means to turn the receiver off keeping it in tact then able to restore its link to its conciousness then its conciousness should be able to transmit the missing memories of our concious experiences that occurred while the receiver was turned off.

Well the good news is we can turn the brain (alleged reciever) off using anaesthetic (i have been under anaesthesic myself during a hospital procedure), the bad news is that except for where only a partial state of anaesthetic has been achieved patients will have no recollection of what happened or even of the passage of time while they were under anaesthetic.

Personally I think this may count as evidence against the idea that brains are merely the passive recipient of conciousness.

Then there is the research on how memory is actually stored in the brain;

How are memories formed?

Memories are formed by changing the connections between neurons.

qbi.uq.edu.au

It could be that brain memory is redundant, but one wonders why this redundancy evolved if there was no selection pressure in favour of it (which I wouldn't expect there to be if we could rely on transmitted memory for survival).

I'm personally open minded to the existence of concious spirits, I'm just not convinced that there is clear evidence of their existence for what its worth.

 

[exchemist]

Legs did not develope to "cause" mobility. They developed because mobility was already an idea and a possibility awaiting fulfillment. Had mobility not already been metaphysically extant, the physical legs would never have occurred. Same is true of life, and of cognition. These were possibilities awaiting fulfillment from the moment the physical universe began. They were written itnto it's 'blueprint'. Physicality simply gives physical substance to the plan.

What blueprint?

 

[PureX]

What blueprint?

The one that determines what is possible and what is not. Because without it, nothing is possible.

 

[PureX]

What blueprint?

The one that determines what is possible and what is not. Because without it, nothing is possible.

 

[exchemist]

The one that determines what is possible and what is not. Because without it, nothing is possible.

That would be what we often refer to as the "laws of physics", then, I suppose, or more generally the principles of order in the universe that we categorise in terms of "laws". Spinoza and Einstein's God, basically.