# Consciousness (subjective experience), the mind-body problem and physics



## Kon

I think consciousness (subjective experience/qualia) is one of the most bizarre things. We know it exists. In fact, it's the only thing that one knows exists and yet one can envision a similar universe without consciousness. A universe of "consciousless zombies". Also, there seems to be a huge gap/divide between consciousness (the mental) and neurons/bio-chemical processes (the physical): 


> The specific problem I want to discuss concerns consciousness, the hard nut of the mind-body problem. How is it possible for conscious states to depend upon brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter? What makes the bodily organ we call the brain so radically different from other bodily organs, say the kidneys-the body parts without a trace of consciousness?





> Thus we quickly find ourselves resorting to invitations to look inward, instead of specifying precisely what it is about consciousness that makes it inexplicable in terms of ordinary physical properties. And this can make it seem that the problem is spurious. A creature without consciousness would not properly appreciate the problem (assuming such a creature could appreciate other problems).





> The mind-body problem is the problem of understanding how the miracle is wrought, thus removing the sense of deep mystery. We want to take the magic out of the link between consciousness and the brain.


http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving.pdf



> Yet the problem here is much more serious, for an obvious reason: Identifying sounds with waves in the air does not require that we ascribe phenomenological qualities and subjectivity to anything physical, because those are features of the perception of sound, not of sound itself. By contrast, the identification of mental events with physical events requires the unification of these two types of properties in a single thing, and that remains resistant to understanding.





> The search for the possible form of a theory of the relation between mind and brain has to continue, and if there can be no such theory, that too requires explanation. I believe that the explanatory gap in its present form cannot be closed -- that so long as we work with our present mental and physical concepts no transparently necessary connection will ever be revealed, between physically described brain processes and sensory experience, of the logical type familiar from the explanation of other natural processes by analysis into their physico-chemical constituents.





> The subjectivity of consciousness seems to block all reductionist proposals because, given any physicalist or functionalist description, however sophisticated, it seems logically possible that there should be an organism or system satisfying those conditions but nevertheless lacking any subjective point of view -- a zombie, in current jargon.





> The following things seem prima facie conceivable which are pretty certainly impossible in a very strong sense, namely:
> (1) a living, behaving, physiologically and functionally perfect human organism that is nevertheless completely lacking in consciousness, i.e. a zombie;
> (2) a conscious subject with an inner life just like ours that behaves and looks just like a human being but has electronic circuitry instead of brains.


http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/.../conceiving.pdf

Does this stuff suggest to anyone that there has to be something radical in physics that we're missing. Something that can explain this gap between the mental (consciousnes) and the material (at least, as currently understood). A number of physicists argue that quantum theory is beginning to offer such a possibility, since it may have some very primitive properties that allow for the poosibility of the mental (e.g. non-locality, etc,). Well, you might say this is not likely but think about gravity. General relativistic effects would totally escaped attention had that attention been confined to the study of the behaviour of tiny particles. Or is this just more philosophical hogwash.


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## huh

I cringe when I read people trying to explain it with quantum physics :/ To me it seems unnecessary and unlikely that quantum physics will be part of the answer to the problem.


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## Kon

Yep, I've read some physicists trying to get physics into it (Penrose, Bohm, etc.):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind

But this never made sense to me. But I found this interesting:

N. Chomsky: 
"The familiar slogan about the mental and the neurophysiological has the matter backwards: it should not be taken as a characterization of the mental, but rather as a hypothesis about neurophysiology: perhaps the neurophysiological is the mental at a "lower' level, perhaps not. As of now, we have more reason to feel secure about the mental than about the neurophysiological."

"[The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences . . . If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated."

W. G. Lycan: 
"I have heard at least one respected physicist avert that "physics is finished," meaning that even microphysics is already empirically adequate and its physical ontology, its ontology of substances, is reasonably well understood; the remaining projects of microphysics - positing superstrings, constructing a unified field theory and the like - are only matters of interpreting and mathematizing the physical ontology. If that is so, then there is no reason to think that physics will expand its ontology in so fundamental a way as to afford a reduction of the mental that was not already available."

"For example, one apparently basic property of matter recognized by modern science is the so-called spin angular momentum of certain elementary particles. This property has certain functional analogies with the angular momentum we are familiar with in the behavior of macroscopic objects. For example, the spin of a proton explains its magnetic properties and hence the observed fine splitting of certain spectroscopic lines. But in other respects spin is quite unlike ordinary angular momentum. Only certain discrete values are allowed, for instance, and these values appear no matter what 'spin axis' we measure. The point here is that 'spin' is defined solely in dispositional terms. What 'spin' actually is remains quite mysterious (save for the aura of often misleading meaning drawn from the analogy with the everyday world). Whitehead describes this purely dispositional analysis as a matter of regarding the basic elements of material reality "in abstraction from everything except what concerns their mutual interplay in determining each other's historical routes of life-history". This picture leaves the laws of physics as exhausted by "the laws declaring how the entities mutually react amongst themselves", an impoverished outlook resulting from the way "science has abstracted from what the entities are in themselves".

Such abstraction is problematic because it is arguable that any disposition must be grounded in some intrinsic nature, and our failure to take this into account leaves us in irredeemable ignorance about the most fundamental features of the world. Whitehead described the predicament thus: "all modern ... cosmologies wrestle with this problem. There is, for their doctrine, a mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable by any direct intercourse". Whitehead, following Leibniz in certain respects, asserts both that matter must indeed possess an intrinsic nature, and that there is only one such nature with which we are familiar: experience. Whitehead praises Leibniz, in a phrase reminiscent of Nagel's worry about consciousness, for explaining "what it must be like to be an atom".

http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~seager/whitehead.htm


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## mindsanitizer

i'm not even going to pretend that i understand all that stuff but i do understand the word consciousness (i think). so regarding awareness i don't really find it complicated to understand. i mean i am not a scientists but if i just stop for a second and think about it, there is no big difference between a human awareness than an animals or plants.

if you get a paper cut, the nerves send signal to the brain letting you know this... and the skin starts healing itself right away. this is the cells knowing that something went wrong and needs repairing... in a sense, they become aware. they are aware that something went wrong and needs fixing. you didn't do anything to start the healing process. your awareness only makes you avoid another cut. the awareness of the cells are to repair. 

the brain is just more complicated than just a single cell but the basic awareness is there... so feelings are nothing more than memories. memories that are combined with sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. i don't know the science to explain how memories are retain but i'm guessing some type of code like 0's and 1's for computers. 

then again, i may totally be way off the subject.

what i really don't understand is how cells decide to combine and make organism. for that matter why are there any cells in the first place? that is my beef. 

so awareness is not human. it is the basics of life. 

humans are just modern animals. burp!!


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## Belshazzar

huh said:


> I cringe when I read people trying to explain it with quantum physics :/ To me it seems unnecessary and unlikely that quantum physics will be part of the answer to the problem.


Quantum physics is the new "god did it" for the New Age set.

I think Victor Stenger wrote the definitive takedown of Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness theory:
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/QuantumConsciousness.pdf

Of course, there's a possibility that something we can't even comprehend is going on there. That happens quite often. I just don't think the quantum consciousness stuff is anything more than what Murray Gell-mann would call "quantum flapdoodle."


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## Belshazzar

mindsanitizer said:


> i'm not even going to pretend that i understand all that stuff but i do understand the word consciousness (i think). so regarding awareness i don't really find it complicated to understand. i mean i am not a scientists but if i just stop for a second and think about it, there is no big difference between a human awareness than an animals or plants.
> 
> if you get a paper cut, the nerves send signal to the brain letting you know this... and the skin starts healing itself right away. this is the cells knowing that something went wrong and needs repairing... in a sense, they become aware. they are aware that something went wrong and needs fixing. you didn't do anything to start the healing process. your awareness only makes you avoid another cut. the awareness of the cells are to repair.
> 
> the brain is just more complicated than just a single cell but the basic awareness is there... so feelings are nothing more than memories. memories that are combined with sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. i don't know the science to explain how memories are retain but i'm guessing some type of code like 0's and 1's for computers.
> 
> then again, i may totally be way off the subject.
> 
> what i really don't understand is how cells decide to combine and make organism. for that matter why are there any cells in the first place? that is my beef.
> 
> so awareness is not human. it is the basics of life.
> 
> humans are just modern animals. burp!!


Theoretically, consciousness is related to the size and complexity of the nervous system. So plants are not conscious. Animals are to a varying extent. Neurons are like bits (1s and 0s) in that they are only on or off (all-or-nothing principle). Memories are formed through various neurological pathways using Hebbian learning ("neurons that fire together wire together," in short) depending on the type of memory (e.g., implicit or explicit). There's still a lot to be learned about that, but we have some basic principles down. So overall, you are pretty close to how it works.


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## Kon

I disagree. We have no clue and some opinions argue that we probably will never understand because of the way our minds are structured (cognitive closure). Listen to Dawkins in this short flic:






Problem of consciousness and cognitive closure:


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## mindsanitizer

kon... from the videos i just watched about consciousness on you tube, including the ones you referenced to, no one knows what consciousness is LOL. in all respect, they seem to me like zombies themselves talking about something that has no real importance other then for just entertainment supposes. now physics... that can change the world it has more importance to understand.


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## mindsanitizer

> Theoretically, consciousness is related to the size and complexity of the nervous system.


 ah, i see. so bigger is better lol i understand plants have a basic nervous system. they are aware of the environment.


> Neurons are like bits (1s and 0s) in that they are only on or off (all-or-nothing principle). Memories are formed through various neurological pathways using Hebbian learning ("neurons that fire together wire together," in short) depending on the type of memory (e.g., implicit or explicit). There's still a lot to be learned about that, but we have some basic principles down.


 interesting.


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## broseph

The problem with explaining what consciousness is is that a scientific explanation would have to be completely objective. That's not really possible because consciousness is the result of a complex set of interactions between neurons, atoms, sub-atomic particles, strings, and whatever comes after that. In order to explain what consciousness is we'd have to figure out a way to observe it from outside our current perspective. It's kind of like a camera taking a picture of itself. You could use a mirror, but the mirror would further distort the picture. Or imagine a character in a video game trying to understand how the video game world works. The character could get pretty far, but eventually it'd have to get out of the game and look at the source code from the outside.


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## huh

Belshazzar said:


> Quantum physics is the new "god did it" for the New Age set.
> 
> I think Victor Stenger wrote the definitive takedown of Roger Penrose's quantum consciousness theory:
> http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Quantum/QuantumConsciousness.pdf
> 
> Of course, there's a possibility that something we can't even comprehend is going on there. That happens quite often. I just don't think the quantum consciousness stuff is anything more than what Murray Gell-mann would call "quantum flapdoodle."


Very interesting article to read. I didn't even realize that quantum explanations of consciousness have been an issue for so long, seeing as that was written in 1992! Also, it was written in *Jume* according to that PDF. That must be the month after Smarch :teeth


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## Kon

broseph said:


> The problem with explaining what consciousness is is that a scientific explanation would have to be completely objective. That's not really possible because consciousness is the result of a complex set of interactions between neurons, atoms, sub-atomic particles, strings, and whatever comes after that. In order to explain what consciousness is we'd have to figure out a way to observe it from outside our current perspective. It's kind of like a camera taking a picture of itself. You could use a mirror, but the mirror would further distort the picture. Or imagine a character in a video game trying to understand how the video game world works. The character could get pretty far, but eventually it'd have to get out of the game and look at the source code from the outside.


Is it possible to "observe" any proto-mental/conscious property of what we consider part of the "material" world that can if it reaches some level of complexity lead to consciousness/subjectivity. Assume we could somehow "see" or at least suspect that this property seems like a very basic proto-subjective element of nature. What would it look like? I can't literally know what it is like to be a bat, an atom, a rock, etc. but is it possible to know that when basic matter has this particular property, I can now understand why it's possible for something we call matter to be conscious/have subjective experience and not just be a human being lacking consciousness (zombie). What are some of these basic elements of subjectivity/consciousness? I found this interesting;

"I am now in a position to state the main thesis of this paper: in order to solve the mind-body problem we need, at a minimum, a new conception of space. We need a conceptual breakthrough in the way we think about the medium in which material objects exist, and hence in our conception of material objects themselves. That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness. Things in space can generate consciousness only because those things are not, at some level, just how we conceive them to be; they harbour some hidden aspect or principle."

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html


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## huh

Kon said:


> Is it possible to "observe" any proto-mental/conscious property of what we consider part of the "material" world that can if it reaches some level of complexity lead to consciousness/subjectivity. Assume we could somehow "see" or at least suspect that this property seems like a very basic proto-subjective element of nature. What would it look like? I can't literally know what it is like to be a bat, an atom, a rock, etc. but is it possible to know that when basic matter has this particular property, I can now understand why it's possible for something we call matter to be conscious/have subjective experience and not just be a human being lacking consciousness (zombie). What are some of these basic elements of subjectivity/consciousness?


What it would look like is, I think, an unintelligible question. What constructs consciousness is not a specific property but a collection of several complex systems of the brain working together. Consciousness itself has varying degrees depending on the animal in question.


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## Kon

huh said:


> What constructs consciousness is not a specific property but a collection of several complex systems of the brain working together. Consciousness itself has varying degrees depending on the animal in question.


I think it's a lot more than that. I think the "medium" from which consciousness is derived exists as a fundamental component of reality. I'm not saying that the brain isn't involved but the brain itself is composed of neurons, molecules, atoms, etc. but at the bottom level we still don't know what matter really is. Physics hasn't ended. And we may never have a complete picture of all there is even with future revisions of physics and it might be that this completeness is absolutely necessary to fully understand how qualia/consciousness/subjective experience can appear from matter.

"As microphysics continues to get weirder and weirder, it would indeed be idiotic to insist on a nineteenth-, twentieth-, or even twenty-first-century conception of ultimate matter; it is hardly our place to second-guess the physicist. For that reason, we have no compelling reason to expect that the mental will ever be reduced to the "physical" _as currently conceived _since by the time the mental is actually reduced to anything (if ever), physics may well be other than physics as conceived in the 2000s." (Lycan)


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## Recipe For Disaster

i agree with kon. "complex systems of the brain working together" does nothing to shed light on the hard problem of consciousness. this is one of my favorite topics to think about. 

i actually think that deferring to neurophysiology as explanation for subjective experience is similar to saying that the answer must lie in quantum physics. it's essentially just saying "the brain did it" but with no explanation for how. increased understanding of how the brain functions physiologically doesn't necessarily lead to increased understanding of subjective experience either, as shown by the zombie example.


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## huh

Kon said:


> I think it's a lot more than that. I think the "medium" from which consciousness is derived exists as a fundamental component of reality. I'm not saying that the brain isn't involved but the brain itself is composed of neurons, molecules, atoms, etc. but at the bottom level we still don't know what matter really is. Physics hasn't ended. And we may never have a complete picture of all there is even with future revisions of physics and it might be that this completeness is absolutely necessary to fully understand how qualia/consciousness/subjective experience can appear from matter.


In that view, I guess only time will tell. What exactly do you mean by "medium" though? This sounds quite reminiscent of ether. Physics indeed hasn't ended, but I'm not sure I see any good reason to resort to future physics for an explanation of a biological phenomenon. Consciousness, when you get down to it, is still the product of an evolutionary process. So this unknown medium must be interacting with evolution but has so far avoided detection?


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## huh

Recipe For Disaster said:


> i agree with kon. "complex systems of the brain working together" does nothing to shed light on the hard problem of consciousness. this is one of my favorite topics to think about.


My only real point with that statement was to make it clear that I don't think there is a specific property, where if said organism had it, we could say that is what makes it conscious. I didn't expect my statement to help actually explain the hard problem of consciousness, only why I didn't think his question made sense due to how the brain works.



Recipe For Disaster said:


> i actually think that deferring to neurophysiology as explanation for subjective experience is similar to saying that the answer must lie in quantum physics. it's essentially just saying "the brain did it" but with no explanation for how.


I don't think neurophysiology holds all the answers to the problem and did not mean to imply that from my response. However, I still think it's more likely to hold answers than quantum physics as stated in my response to kon. I obviously don't know what the answer to the issue of consciousness is, and I don't think the "brain did it" is acceptable. I still think we can limit the possibilities of what could be the answer though.



Recipe For Disaster said:


> increased understanding of how the brain functions physiologically doesn't necessarily lead to increased understanding of subjective experience either, as shown by the zombie example.


I agree. I view consciousness as an emergent property, and I don't think an explanation reduced to neurophysiology will produce an adequate answer to the problem.


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## Recipe For Disaster

huh said:


> My only real point with that statement was to make it clear that I don't think there is a specific property, where if said organism had it, we could say that is what makes it conscious. I didn't expect my statement to help actually explain the hard problem of consciousness, only why I didn't think his question made sense due to how the brain works.


i would agree with this. i think it's quite possible that plants are conscious for instance, but likely in a way that is so different from the way in which we are conscious that we cannot conceive of it.



> I don't think neurophysiology holds all the answers to the problem and did not mean to imply that from my response. However, I still think it's more likely to hold answers than quantum physics as stated in my response to kon. I obviously don't know what the answer to the issue of consciousness is, and I don't think the "brain did it" is acceptable. I still think we can limit the possibilities of what could be the answer though.


not all my comments were necessarily directed at you. i feel like in general a lot of people, even neuro-scientists (or should i say especially neuro-scientists?) use "the brain did it" as their explanation for consciousness without even realizing why it is not a satisfactory explanation. they don't see how much of a true mystery consciousness is to modern science. of course there are some scientists (and many philosophers) who get it and understand that in order to explain consciousness, they are going to have to do something other than come up with a more detailed description of how the brain functions physiologically.



> I agree. I view consciousness as an emergent property, and I don't think an explanation reduced to neurophysiology will produce an adequate answer to the problem.


i agree, although i'm not sure about it being an emergent property. i think further confusion is generated by the fact that it's unclear what we mean by "consciousness". there is consciousness in the sense of being aware of one's surroundings, but there are also other types, for example in a dream you are having subjective experience even if you appear unconscious to an observer. i would agree that both of those states are emergent properties in the sense that they are dependent on brain states. however, i think that the "seed" of consciousness, which is pure awareness/energy, may be fundamental and not dependent on any brain state. so in that sense, the brain is like a manipulator of consciousness rather than a creator.


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## Kon

huh said:


> What exactly do you mean by "medium" though? This sounds quite reminiscent of ether. Physics indeed hasn't ended, but I'm not sure I see any good reason to resort to future physics for an explanation of a biological phenomenon. Consciousness, when you get down to it, is still the product of an evolutionary process. So this unknown medium must be interacting with evolution but has so far avoided detection?


Medium is the "stuff" that gives rise to space/time, matter (particles, virtual particles, etc.) and everything in the universe. Assume the big bang or multi-verse model is accurate. Where did this come from? So I guess, it's the foundations of the fabric of the universe.

To me it seems that no matter how much we study the "brain", neural networks, etc. we still miss something major: the subjective, first person, experience. And I don't think it's just the higher-order/emergent property of the brain or complexity. I think science will always miss the internal aspect of what it is to be what we call one object a human being, another a rock , another an atom, etc. even though it seems pretty obvious it exists since I experience it. It seems that objects are more than just a complex system of particles (or "material" objects as currently conceived).

When you read about the history of physics/chemistry you can read about how physicists at one time (before quantum mechanics) viewed a lot of chemistry with a lot of skepticism because the then chemistry could not be explained by the then physics. In fact, unification of chemistry and physics did not occur until physics changed. The so-called chemical fictions/metaphysical twaddles (chemical bonds, etc.) ridiculed by physicists of the past turned out be much more than useful fictions once quantum mechanics replaced the older physics. It wasn't chemistry that was the problem.

A similar argument can be given with respect to certain mental phenomena like consciousness, etc. One interesting and bizarre view/solution is panpsychism. I'm not sure if it makes sense but it's certainly possible:

"For example, we say that an electron has a negative charge of about 1.6 x 10-19 coulombs, but what this means is that the electron is disposed to move in such-and-such a way in an electric field of such-and-such a strength. The intrinsic nature of electric charge remains utterly mysterious. And yet it seems reasonable to think that every dispositional property stems from underlying intrinsic properties. Of these, with respect to the fundamental physical constituents of the world, we know absolutely nothing, since physics deals only with the dispositional properties of matter. This is a long standing position. Both Eddington and Russell, among others, agree that 'science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom' (Russell called the dispositional properties of matter 'mathematical properties'). This led Eddington to assert further that we know nothing of atoms which 'renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object' and to adopt a panpsychist understanding of matter."

"The simplest, and for most quite compelling, argument against panpsychism is that it is intuitively absurd to suggest that electrons, atoms, rocks, planets etc. have minds or any kind of consciousness. Our experience with everyday physical objects gives no hint that they might possess hidden psychological depths. But panpsychism is by no means obliged to grant mind or experience to all such things. As we have seen, even if the fundamental entities that constitute the world (which are physical) have a mentalistic aspect, it does not follow that every composite made from them is similarly endowed."

"But what of the fundamental features themselves? They do not show any very noticeable signs of a mental life. In reply to this, the panpsychist can note that the sort of primitive and extremely simple sort of consciousness which the fundamental entities presumably enjoy is something of which we have little understanding, so it is not clear what would count as revealing their mental aspects. More important, why should we expect that the fundamental entities should show any sign at all of a mental attribute? Gravitation is taken to be a fundamental feature of all physical things and yet we do not expect that an individual electron will provide the slightest evidence that it generates a gravitational field."

http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~seager/pan_seager.pdf


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## mindsanitizer

> I think it's a lot more than that. I think the "medium" from which consciousness is derived exists as a fundamental component of reality. I'm not saying that the brain isn't involved but the brain itself is composed of neurons, molecules, atoms, etc. but at the bottom level we still don't know what matter really is. Physics hasn't ended. And we may never have a complete picture of all there is even with future revisions of physics and it might be that this completeness is absolutely necessary to fully understand how qualia/consciousness/subjective experience can appear from matter.


i believe you just answered your own question/curiosity. just by this statement alone. the answer to everything could be said it derived from this "medium". like love, or feelings, empathy.... like our DNA.. though it is there, we cannot explain.

i believe we are centuries away from understanding how the universe works. so all of these occurrences are in the same place as consciousness... so there is no way to explain them with out understanding the "medium".

what i believe humans mean when they wonder about consciousness is only their own. and not the "seed" of consciousness. i mean, am i just to believe that modern humans are the only one's who are aware... the only one's who have a conscious? the only reason we exists is due to evolving. so surely our consciousness is just evolved consciousness. i mean, are we somehow separated from the rest of the living? so with that in mind, leaving out the "medium", our consciousness can be explained.

not understanding the "medium" it's like saying explain god, explain the pyramids, or explain stone henge. these are not the only unanswered monuments/things about the past but one cannot explain them, yet... though they are right under our noses. though they are interesting things to ponder about, they are not doing anything for modern humans benefit JUST to explain them. again, leaving all that "medium" out of the question (until modern humans understand the medium) we can only speculate. the consciousness is there though... like rocks are. but we cannot explain their purpose.. "seed".

so there you go, modern humans consciousness is more advance than any other animal. whatever advance means.

having said that, i believe if programmers and robotic engineers where to build a robot with all the human feelings, emotions, and what's right from wrong...etc. a robot would have a higher *consciousness *than a human. humans are forgetful and easy to manipulate... but a computer is blunt and not forgetful. if you write code for the computer to be aware of danger (death) the computer will know how to be aware of danger all the time... and not just danger... aware of not getting manipulated...aware of not getting abused..etc. we are just advanced flesh robots. computers would be so evolved that they would easily find the solution to time travel... to figure out the universe. computers have more powerful "CPUs" than a humans brain. still, there would be a point where the robots would stagnate... and humans don't. humans evolve and will continue to evolve cus those are the laws of the universe. so again, i get back to the "medium" which is not modern humans, it's evolution.

this is entertaining to me though. so there is my opinion.


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## mindsanitizer

> To me it seems that no matter how much we study the "brain", neural networks, etc. we still miss something major: the subjective, first person, experience. And I don't think it's just the higher-order/emergent property of the brain or complexity. *I think science will always miss the internal aspect of what it is to be what we call one object a human being, another a rock , another an atom, etc. even though it seems pretty obvious it exists since I experience it.* It seems that objects are more than just a complex system of particles (or "material" objects as currently conceived).


what exactly are you talking about? surely those people who study the brain are the same people who have consciousness. unless you are talking about aliens (even them having it doesn't sound too far fetched).

you have experience how it is to be a rock? you can only speculate so what are you talking about? if having consciousness only means to speculate well, there is your answer. not one will know 100% how to be a rock only a rock would... or how to be an atom only an atom would.

oh yeah, and studying the brain is part of the circle of understanding...even consciousness. to understand is to be modern. which is what we are at present time.


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## Kon

mindsanitizer said:


> i believe if programmers and robotic engineers where to build a robot with all the human feelings, emotions, and what's right from wrong...etc. a robot would have a higher *consciousness *than a human. humans are forgetful and easy to manipulate... but a computer is blunt and not forgetful.


I think a computer is about as conscious as a thermostat/tv or a rock but I can never prove it. It just seems obvious to me even leaving aside such arguments as Searle's Chinese room argument. I think that even the simplest life form is more conscious than any robot/computer we have built so far. I'm not sure why I feel this way?


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## Kon

mindsanitizer said:


> what exactly are you talking about? surely those people who study the brain are the same people who have consciousness. unless you are talking about aliens (even them having it doesn't sound too far fetched).
> 
> you have experience how it is to be a rock? you can only speculate so what are you talking about? if having consciousness only means to speculate well, there is your answer. not one will know 100% how to be a rock only a rock would... or how to be an atom only an atom would.
> 
> oh yeah, and studying the brain is part of the circle of understanding...even consciousness. to understand is to be modern. which is what we are at present time.


When a scientist looks at your brain he doesn't "see" your thoughts, pain, colours, etc. He can infer them by asking you and perhaps correlating them with some brain states and his own (in a future science) but that's not the same thing. Something seems to be missing. That's the argument anyway. Many scientists feel the same way.

I don't have to speculate about consciousness/qualia. I have it. But I can never "see" them directly by any scientific method (now or in the future) or so goes the argument. So a big part of what makes me, the person I am, seems missing, in some sense. There seems to be this gap. I could envision someone in the future making a perfect replica of myself that imitates my behaviour completely but is totally devoid of consciousness. I'm not sure if this makes sense?


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## mindsanitizer

> I think a computer is about as conscious as a thermostat/tv or a rock I can never prove it. It just seems obvious to me even leaving aside such arguments as Searle's Chinese room argument. I think that even the simplest life form is more conscious than any robot/computer we have built so far. I'm not sure why I feel this way?


well a rock can not do anything, it has no memory or if it does have memory... it has memory to just be a rock and nothing less or nothing more.... static/permanent memory! if you will. the rock is nature though...while a computers (even a thermostat/tv) can have permanent memory and virtual memory... even artificial intelligence to some extent. modern thermostats can be programed to be more efficient... while a rock can never be more than a rock. a tv can be built to display 1080p high definition plus capable of displaying 3D... while a rock will always remain a rock.

i'm sure there are cells/atoms that function in a similar way.

present computers are your basic atoms.

so are rocks the same as your a computer? i think not. computers run the show in modern society... or at least... are very important.

just look at heuristic or zero-day threats anti virus software. they detect well known virus "behavior"... they don't just detect known viruses (black and white). this is just your basic artificial intelligence.

though i feel (and am correct) that my lack of vocabulary skills is preventing me from explaining how BIG modern technology really is.

i mean, if there is an anticrist among us who is waiting to come out... there is the atomic bomb to split the earth in half. leterally! no animal is capable of doing that other than modern humans. aside from huge meteors though. laws of whatever. of something though. the sun is not made to burn for iternity... it will take millions or even billions of years before it losses it's "fuel" to burn... extinguishing none the less way before the universe "dies."

the atomic bomb is nothing more than finding out part of the "medium" and using it for evil. is not like that HUGE energy is man made. it is just a modern discovery/understanding.

i'm not an expert in viruses, but i believe they are just programmed to multiply. same as computer viruses. understanding the way the viruses work is how to prevent them... i don't know what is you point with this?


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## mindsanitizer

> When a scientist looks at your brain he doesn't "see" your thoughts, pain, colours, etc. He can infer them by asking you and perhaps correlating them with some brain states and his own (in a future science) but that's not the same thing. Something seems to be missing. That's the argument anyway. Many scientists feel the same way.
> 
> I don't have to speculate about consciousness/qualia. I have it. But I can never "see" them directly by any scientific method (now or in the future) or so goes the argument. So a big part of what makes me, the person I am, seems missing, in some sense. There seems to be this gap. I could envision someone in the future making a perfect replica of myself that imitates my behaviour completely but is totally devoid of consciousness. I'm not sure if this makes sense?


i would first ask... what is the scientists looking for when looking at your brain.

there is always a reason to look at your brain i believe. fear, sexual arousal, anger, anxiety... they always try to match the feeling/emotion to the brain scans i believe. so no, no one knows at present time where exactly love, anxiety, ego comes from in the brain. so let alone, they don't know, where consciousness comes from in the brain.

i can assure you that a lot of people have an idea how the brain interprets pain or anger or sexual arousal.... so yeah, they are way too behind from explaining the actual patterns.

so is this something new that no one understands? pardon my ignorance.


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## huh

Recipe For Disaster said:


> i would agree with this. i think it's quite possible that plants are conscious for instance, but likely in a way that is so different from the way in which we are conscious that we cannot conceive of it.


I think you may have misinterpreted my response. I definitely think there are prerequisites for an organism to be considered conscious. A lack of a nervous system disqualifies a plant from being conscious in any degree.



Recipe For Disaster said:


> however, i think that the "seed" of consciousness, which is pure awareness/energy, may be fundamental and not dependent on any brain state. so in that sense, the brain is like a manipulator of consciousness rather than a creator.


What do you mean by pure awareness/energy? I think the formation of consciousness and the subjective experiences we have are so intricately linked with the multitude of functions of our brain that it plays both manipulator and creator.


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## Kon

mindsanitizer said:


> so is this something new that no one understands? pardon my ignorance.


It's not really new. It's a very old "problem". Even if I could somehow match an MRI scan of your brain with your subjective experience of red, anxiety, anger, pain, etc. it's still not the same thing as your subjective experience of red, anxiety, etc. Nobody has access to that except you. I assume you have it because I have it. It might not be identical but there's enough agreement, so we can communicate about it. And so on.

Nagel's stuff is pretty good for discussing this stuff. Here's an interesting quote:

"The characteristic mistake in the study of consciousness is to ignore its essential subjectivity and to try to treat it as if it were an objective third person phenomenon. Instead of recognizing that consciousness is essentially a subjective, qualitative phenomenon, many people mistakenly suppose that its essence is that of a control mechanism or a certain kind of set of dispositions to behavior or a computer program. The two most common mistakes about consciousness are to suppose that it can be analysed behavioristically or computationally. The Turing test disposes us to make precisely these two mistakes, the mistake of behaviorism and the mistake of computationalism. It leads us to suppose that for a system to be conscious, it is both necessary and sufficient that it has the right computer program or set of programs with the right inputs and outputs. I think you have only to state this position clearly to enable you to see that it must be mistaken. A traditional objection to behaviorism was that behaviorism could not be right because a system could behave as if it were conscious without actually being conscious. There is no logical connection, no necessary connection between inner, subjective, qualitative mental states and external, publicly observable behavior. Of course, in actual fact, conscious states characteristically cause behavior. But the behavior that they cause has to be distinguished from the states themselves. The same mistake is repeated by computational accounts of consciousness. Just as behavior by itself is not sufficient for consciousness, so computational models of consciousness are not sufficient by themselves for consciousness. The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both cases."

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/searle.prob.html


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## huh

Kon said:


> Medium is the "stuff" that gives rise to space/time, matter (particles, virtual particles, etc.) and everything in the universe. Assume the big bang or multi-verse model is accurate. Where did this come from? So I guess, it's the foundations of the fabric of the universe.


This definition seems really vague. Exactly what role does this medium play in the formation of consciousness?



Kon said:


> To me it seems that no matter how much we study the "brain", neural networks, etc. we still miss something major: the subjective, first person, experience. And I don't think it's just the higher-order/emergent property of the brain or complexity. I think science will always miss the internal aspect of what it is to be what we call one object a human being, another a rock , another an atom, etc. even though it seems pretty obvious it exists since I experience it. It seems that objects are more than just a complex system of particles (or "material" objects as currently conceived).


We will miss the subjective first person experience because you cannot easily put it in a test-tube, dissect it, or look at it under a microscope. This is not because it exists as a different sort of property separate from the material world, but because of the way in which our first person experience of things is dependent on so many different components of the brain to be constructed which are they themselves the product of variations in our environment, up-bringing, experience, memories, feelings, etc. Unfortunately it's not a simple system and a solution like a single property or abstract "medium" that explains the mystery of consciousness is more than likely non-existent.


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## Kon

huh said:


> This is not because it exists as a different sort of property separate from the material world.


What's your definition of "material" world/matter?


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## mindsanitizer

> It's not really new. It's a very old "problem". Even if I could somehow match an MRI scan of your brain with your subjective experience of red, anxiety, anger, pain, etc. it's still not the same thing as your subjective experience of red, anxiety, etc. Nobody has access to that except you. I assume you have it because I have it. It might not be identical but there's enough agreement, so we can communicate about it. And so on.


i was actually being sarcastic.

and why is not explaining what consciousness is a "problem"?

also, how is my red subjective? everyone knows blood is red out side of the body. how is that subjective?



> Nagel's stuff is pretty good for discussing this stuff. Here's an interesting quote:
> 
> "The *characteristic mistake* in the study of consciousness *is to ignore its essential subjectivity* and to try to treat it as if it were an objective third person phenomenon. Instead of recognizing that consciousness is essentially a subjective, qualitative phenomenon, *many people mistakenly* suppose that its essence is that of a control mechanism or a certain kind of set of dispositions to behavior or a computer program. The *two most common mistakes* about consciousness are to suppose that it can be analysed behavioristically or computationally. The Turing test disposes us to make precisely *these two mistakes, the mistake* of behaviorism and *the mistake* of computationalism. *It leads us to suppose* that for a system to be conscious, it is both necessary and sufficient that it has the right computer program or set of programs with the right inputs and outputs. I think you have only to state this position clearly to enable you to see that it *must be mistaken*. A traditional objection to behaviorism was that behaviorism *could not be right* because a system could behave as if it were conscious without actually being conscious. *There is no logical connection*, no necessary connection between inner, subjective, qualitative mental states and external, publicly observable behavior. Of course, in actual fact, conscious states characteristically cause behavior. But the behavior that they cause has to be distinguished from the states themselves. *The same mistake is repeated* by computational accounts of consciousness. Just as behavior by itself is not sufficient for consciousness, so computational models of consciousness are not sufficient by themselves for consciousness. The computational model of consciousness stands to consciousness in the same way the computational model of anything stands to the domain being modelled. Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. *But they make the mistake* of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. *It is the same mistake* in both cases."


 looks like he knows a lot about what is not consciousness, so i'm assuming he knows how to explain what it is. i wish he would be a nice person and explain it...and avoid what he doesn't like about how the rest who go about it explaining it.

i've always been a straight shooter... and like to look past what my eyes can see.

what i am really trying to say is that there is such a definition to consciousness at present time. we can define it with the present human knowledge... further down the line it will be more clear though. but it can be defined none the less.

what i believe, from my very limited knowledge in this subject, is that humans are trying to put consciousness this deep feeling. like if it is something out of this world. like what they try to do with love. love is just modern. but at it's "seed" is just nothing more than to procreate like a virus. if it was not, you could fall in love with even a rock... or dirt.

edit: for emphasis.


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## Kon

mindsanitizer, How old are you?


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## mindsanitizer

that's OT.


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## Kon

mindsanitizer said:


> also, how is my red subjective? everyone knows blood is red out side of the body. how is that subjective?


Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia


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## Slogger

huh said:


> Unfortunately it's not a simple system and a solution like a single property or abstract "medium" that explains the mystery of consciousness is more than likely non-existent.


Exactly. As soon as we form an idea of "this is it", then we have a relative something. Relativity is separation. In reality, how could anything be separate, how could anything be left out?


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## Kon

Slogger said:


> Exactly. As soon as we form an idea of "this is it", then we have a relative something. Relativity is separation. In reality, how could anything be separate, how could anything be left out?


It's not necessarily left out. It just doesn't fit in with what we know today about the so-called "material" world as presently conceived and perhaps even with future revisions of biology, physics, etc. maybe because of the way are brains/minds are structured:

Consider an ape, which is arguably over 95% genetically similar to us. Consider what their understanding of the universe is compared to ours. They could never understand what we are capable of: science, biology, physics, abstract algebra, etc. We are qualitatively different, so we think. Assume that even our cognitive abilities are only slightly more advanced than an ape's. Of course, from our perspective it doesn't appear that way.

Assume reality is extremely complex. The ape's mind might be able to understand/pick up .001% of it. The human mind may have access to about .01% of it. Big improvement but still a miniscule part of all of reality/totality of "true" theories. C. McGinn writes:

"Let me introduce the idea of cognitive closure. A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. Representational power is not all or nothing. Minds are biological products like bodies, and like bodies they come in different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to certain cognitive tasks. This is particularly clear for perceptual faculties, of course: perceptual closure is hardly to be denied. Different species are capable of perceiving different properties of the world, and no species can perceive every property things may instantiate (without artificial instrumentation anyway). But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind. The invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are just as real as the visible parts, and whether a specific kind of creature can form conceptual representations of these imperceptible parts does not determine whether they exist. Thus cognitive closure with respect to P does not imply irrealism about P."

http://art-mind.org/review/IMG/pdf/McGinn_1989_Mind-body-problem_M.pdf

To believe that we don't have such cognitive limitations is to believe that we are Gods, in some sense, I think. The argument is that consciousness may be one of those things that we may never truly understand or be able to see how it fits in with the so-called "material" world of today or of the future (i.e. advancement in biology, neuroscience, physics).


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## mindsanitizer

> *Qualia* (pronounced /ˈkwɑːliə/ or ˈkweɪliə), singular "*quale*" (Latin pronunciation: /ˈkwaːle/), from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience


yes the conscious experience is subjective in some things but not in all. a male is not something subjective nor is a female. the color red is not subjective. while attraction is subjective as is beauty.

with this is mind consciousness is subjective just as long as there is not true definition of consciousness itself. what is it? is it love or is it a gender? well, if consciousness can be compared to love, in it that love is subjective, then i would say love and consciousness are both the same in being subjective.

though i could say that consciousness is not subjective in it's own definition of consciousness. while comparing it to a different definition of consciousness, it is subjective as long as it is being compared. we can say that to die is to loose consciousness, for example. i am not wrong in this cus is it true. though to loose consciousness does not really mean to die. i could be self conscious about appearance... to loose it would just to stop putting importance in appearance.

i truly believe that "humanity has not reached the pinnacle of it's development" to quote eckhart tolle. a "newbie" all just needs to do is catch up and SURPASS.... but i believe that we are all after the same thing: enlightenment.

so with that in mind is hard for be to believe that consciousness is really that hard to explain... not matter who you keep on quoting.

do you even know what type of consciousness you are talking about? and can you define it?


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## Slogger

Kon said:


> Assume reality is extremely complex. The ape's mind might be able to understand/pick up .001% of it. The human mind may have access to about .01% of it. Big improvement but still a miniscule part of all of reality/totality of "true" theories.


Miniscule for sure!! Consider a DNA molecule that does not have a brain as we know it. What percentage of reality does it understand? Not only does cognitive closure not imply irrealism, as McGinn says, but the capacity for comprehension is not dependent on the structure we call a brain.



Kon said:


> To believe that we don't have such cognitive limitations is to believe that we are Gods, in some sense, I think. The argument is that consciousness may be one of those things that we may never truly understand or be able to see how it fits in with the so-called "material" world of today or of the future (i.e. advancement in biology, neuroscience, physics).


I don't think we can comprehend reality in the same way we understand a calculus equation or how DNA works because nothing is truly independent; the ultimate truth about anything cannot be grasped out of the context of everything else. There is infinite interpenetration among all things, and the "material" world represents the limitations imposed by our cognition.

I don't see why we can't get beyond cognitive limitations. It's not a matter of IQ or of gathering enough knowledge, but of technique.


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## mindsanitizer

this guy explains the origin of consciousness in a nutshell... which is life = unified field.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ConsciousChiro#p/u/3/bQ31qkK4NoE

here he explains human consciousness... so modern human consciousness is just modern consciousness.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ConsciousChiro#p/u/0/IxRJBEUNbTI
http://www.youtube.com/user/ConsciousChiro#p/u/2/AE9AbrvOg7Y

so believe hes is correct. but like i said in another post here somewhere... modern humans still have a long way before understanding the whole universe. to put it in perspective.... or at least i will try by quoting eckhart tolle *"how can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch across contain instructions within it's DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? the more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know.* aks yourself, how many cells is the brain made off. a quick google says around the 100,000,000,000 mark. the best, i believe, humans can do now to understand the brain is to brain scan activity. in addition, what a poster posted here "Memories are formed through various neurological pathways using Hebbian learning ("neurons that fire together wire together," in short) depending on the type of memory (e.g., implicit or explicit). There's still a lot to be learned about that, but we have some basic principles down." though my point is we know very little if we look at the big picture.

well this was an interesting lesson. but i think i've been enlighten enough... well at least found someone to explain in scientific language. my root belief is similar and that's why i agree with the expert.

consciousness can be explain.


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## Slogger

Nice talks that guy gives, thanks for posting them.

Now let's work on that nasty crust.


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## Kon

mindsanitizer said:


> this guy explains the origin of consciousness in a nutshell... which is life = unified field.
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/user/ConsciousChiro#p/u/3/bQ31qkK4NoE


I found that video useless. Here's a much better one with interviews with some of the world's best known philosophers/scientists (Dawkins, Searle, Chalmers, Block, etc.):

http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/06/16/mind-video-1-david-chalmers/


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## iuseings

Well... this is an heated discussion. It sounds like Kon is trying to find the source of life and mindsanitizer is just antagonizing. 
When I think of researching consciousness I believe there are steps to be taken before trying to decode if there is underlying matter in all organisms/elements which is responsible for consciousness. In neurology a good way of trying to figure out what the source of consciousness is has been by studying people with Blind Sight, stroke damage and other neurological damage, which leads perception intact but consciousness diminished. 
I think you can find endless theories on what consciousness is but since it's very much like theorizing the purpose for life (since our life is our conscious) don't expect to arise on any answers soon.


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## Slogger

I don't think that any answer derived from a search can be the correct answer, although such searches certainly reveal what the source of consciousness is _not_.


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## Kon

Very interesting quote:

"We might be reminded at this point of the big bang. That notable occurrence can be regarded as presenting an inverse space problem. *For, on received views, it was at the moment of the big bang that space itself came into existence, there being nothing spatial antecedently to that.* But how does space come from non-space? What kind of 'explosion' could create space ab initio? And this problem offers an even closer structural parallel to the consciousness problem if we assume, as I would argue is plausible, that the big bang was not the beginning (temporally or explanatorily) of all existence. Some prior independent state of things must have led to that early cataclysm, and this sequence of events itself must have some intelligible explanation - just as there must be an explanation for the sequence that led from matter-in-space to consciousness.

*The brain puts into reverse, as it were, what the big bang initiated: it erases spatial dimensions rather than creating them.* It undoes the work of creating space, swallowing down matter and spitting out consciousness. So, taking the very long view, the universe has gone through phases of space generation and (local) space annihilation; or at least, with respect to the latter, there have been operations on space that have generated a non-spatial being. This suggests the following heady speculation: that the origin of consciousness somehow draws upon those properties of the universe that antedate and explain the occurrence of the big bang. If we need a pre-spatial level of reality in order to account for the big bang, then it may be this very level that is exploited in the generation of consciousness. *That is, assuming that remnants of the pre-big bang universe have persisted, it may be that these features of the universe are somehow involved in engineering the non-spatial phenomenon of consciousness. If so, consciousness turns out to be older than matter in space, at least as to its raw materials*."

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html


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## iuseings

Kon said:


> Very interesting quote:
> 
> "We might be reminded at this point of the big bang. That notable occurrence can be regarded as presenting an inverse space problem. *For, on received views, it was at the moment of the big bang that space itself came into existence, there being nothing spatial antecedently to that.* But how does space come from non-space? What kind of 'explosion' could create space ab initio? And this problem offers an even closer structural parallel to the consciousness problem if we assume, as I would argue is plausible, that the big bang was not the beginning (temporally or explanatorily) of all existence. Some prior independent state of things must have led to that early cataclysm, and this sequence of events itself must have some intelligible explanation - just as there must be an explanation for the sequence that led from matter-in-space to consciousness.
> 
> *The brain puts into reverse, as it were, what the big bang initiated: it erases spatial dimensions rather than creating them.* It undoes the work of creating space, swallowing down matter and spitting out consciousness. So, taking the very long view, the universe has gone through phases of space generation and (local) space annihilation; or at least, with respect to the latter, there have been operations on space that have generated a non-spatial being. This suggests the following heady speculation: that the origin of consciousness somehow draws upon those properties of the universe that antedate and explain the occurrence of the big bang. If we need a pre-spatial level of reality in order to account for the big bang, then it may be this very level that is exploited in the generation of consciousness. *That is, assuming that remnants of the pre-big bang universe have persisted, it may be that these features of the universe are somehow involved in engineering the non-spatial phenomenon of consciousness. If so, consciousness turns out to be older than matter in space, at least as to its raw materials*."
> 
> http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html


Oh ok, I see where you are coming from on this physics theory of conciousness. That's some pretty mad stuff. I can see how this can tie into the big bang theory but I'm not sold on conciousness being the precursor to space and matter. I guess if conciousness does not have any physical grounds then that could be the case but it has yet to be proven that it doesn't. I mean conciousness is due to certain neural circuitry (at least that is what I believe)... it can't exist outside matter, I think we only perceive that it does due to our internal dialogues. 
Is it just me or does that theory almost sound like belief in spirituality? 
Kon, do you believe in the dualist or monistic theory of mind and body?


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## Kon

I think McGinn is arguing that the "raw materials" of the mental/consciousness are part of the proto-universe, not that consciousness, itself led to the birth of matter. I agee with this. Yes, consciousness may be due to neural circuitry but neural circuitry is itself is made of more basic stuff on the lower level (atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, etc.) and yet if we continue down the microscopic level, at some level we really don't know what matter is because physics hasn't ended. It's not so much that consciousness exists outside matter as much as it is that we simply don't know what matter is since physics is open and evolving so we don't really have a definite and fixed definition of matter. Neural circutry is made up of more basic stuff whose properties, we still do not fully understand. We can't say matter is simply spatial because there are some stuff in microphysics that to defy that definition and yet can be considered "matter".

It's not really spirituality so much as a belief that our understanding of all matter in terms of something spatio-temporal is probably flawed (that's the argument). I'm not sure if I'm a dualist or a monist. It's interesting that many physicists believe that unification of QM and general relativity is unlikely because of somewhat related problems:

Unification Problem in Physics: Quantum Gravity

At a fundamental level, general relativity and quantum theory are thus seen to be contradictory, and mutually incompatible, which becomes evident in situations where both of these aspects of nature become equally important, for instance near the Big Bang or black hole sigularities. This is the reason why we are not yet satisfied with the enormous achievements of the relativity and quantum theories, and is why the revolution they started remains unfinished. It is necessary to combine these two ways of thinking into a single, even more fundamental theoretical framework that has been called quantum gravity.
Indeed, they must be unified if we are to have any hope of answering a host of interesting and profound questions, including: Can we travel backwards in time? Is information lost when something falls into a black hole? What is the nature of the matter-spacetime singularity inside a black hole? Finally, perhaps the biggest of all: What is the origin of our universe? How did it come into existence? Was there something before the Big Bang? How might there not have been?

The history of physics has taught us again and again that successful unifications of seemingly disparate theories result in great leaps of progress, invariably leading to deeper insights into - and more profound questions about - the workings of our mysterious universe. Because the search for a theory of quantum gravity strongly challenges the entire foundation of our current understanding of the universe, it is not very likely to be a simple mix of quantum and relativity ideas, but rather a significant paradigm shift. It might be as completely alien to our current mindsets as the quantum and relativity theories once were. This is exciting.

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Outreach/What_We_Research/quantum_gravity/


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## infamous

> http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/06/16/mind-video-1-david-chalmers/


i don't believe anyone is disagreeing that consciousness is not real. furthermore, i don't believe that there is no one philosopher here who says that consciousness is an illusion. so the only reasonable explanation for you referencing to this video is that you are still close minded talking about qualia. so qualia is a philosopher word so i guess you are talking about something else than the philosophers say and the physicists say, which is what this video tries to explain.

so this guy only says that consciousness is fundamental. that it is not an illusion. the problem i see with the explanation with this guy is that he is trying to imply that consciousness is eye sight alone, for example. what do i mean by that? he is saying "you have to experience it for yourself" (what i believe you mean by qualia) which i believe is nonsense. nonsense in regards to defining consciousness. with that in ming i say that i am not conscious at the present time, cus i have not experienced death. i don't know how it feels to be bead. the thin is that consciousness lives in all the 5 human senses. and i believe he is only talking about one sense. i cannot experience death, but i can know what death means and how my body will feel right before it. so i am conscious of death yet i am still alive.

so he talks about the blind female who later on can see and she finds out what it is to see the color red..meh.. so she was unconscious before? if she was, then how come she learned all of this about the color red? wait... she was conscious cus she could touch and hear...really!? yes, she had experienced what it felt to touch and to hear. there is no difference than to experience vision... like bats see with their ears.

so this guy does not explain anything more clear that someone saying.... i am the king of the world.



>


again, no one is saying that consciousness is an illusion, so why refer to this video.

this does not say anything eye opening from what has already been posted already. A

so these videos are more useless than the rest.


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## infamous

one more thing regarding the first video... if consciousness means "to experience the color red".. what about when one forgets? if i forget am i still conscious? everyone knows that people are forgetful...i'm sure your experience of color red at age 10 is different than at age 60 yrs old. the experience of seeing color red at age 10 is not the same as seeing it at age 50... so how can just experiencing be consciousness when it is just s feeling that changes. now, pain is no different at age 10 than it is at age 50. it does not change...so this means to me that consciousness is not just experiencing something. 

so if one will forget what one experiences at age 10...at age 50..how are we conscious if we forget what we experience at age 10? 

there are many scientific reasons that one does not remember exactly the same twice. or for that matter, what one person experiences in the same scenario the other will experience the same thing. but then we go back to the part where consciousness is "i can't never know what you "feel" when you see the color red" yara yara. 

the videos on post #38 speak the truth.


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## Kon

infamous said:


> the videos on post #38 speak the truth


Okay mindsanitizer...err..I mean infamous.


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## infamous

^lies compound lies. stay on topic.


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## fredbloggs02

I'm in my first year of philosophy still, I make no pretenses to understand the complex terms before me. Science by it's own logic is flawed to me and goes on to build on a flawed base. Very broad sweeping statement I realise but I'm about to fall asleep through sleep deprivation and I thought I'd write as much on this as I could before I did. I think words are a flawed basis for understanding to further an understanding of consciousness. A third party consciousness is to me the best anyone could possibly hope to describe anway which is why I won't be reading whatever article suggests they have the answer to my mind. I couldn't conceive of not being or being through words though that is the basis for this discussion to me. To relate by reason a creature of exactly the same proportions trying to eat itself is the discussion of the nature of consciousness to me not of proportions interlocking parts of it, that is jumping the gun to assume ourselves that far and an infinite jump into infinity at that. Language would have to eat itself too as would every concept that exists to me which to me spells a faulty foundation for furthering our understanding of this world or our limitation. How does one puzzle through that which it is using to puzzle through with? I'd do better trying to exlain how to see my own eyes with my own eyes. Then comes the third party and so on into infinity. So where exactly does one encompass consciousness? I'd suggest it can't be perloined and stuffed under a microscope only that which we'd call "parts of it" and the sum total would not be consciousness only an incomplete centre at best. But then I'm only one of those which we'd be stuffing loll, I am one consciousness after all. Who's to say they are the same to exist on the same plane at all? Who's to say that the man wo felt he'd solved the problem only found the answer to his own simple concepts and language? Levels of consciousness hmm. Dreams, prenatal memories, forming of it. I'll be back here soon.... I'm sorry. I know this isn't new but as I said before I'm very tired and precious and must sleep. Goodnight interesting people and pardon the grammar if this did end up being read.


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## Kon

fredbloggs02 said:


> I'd do better trying to exlain how to see my own eyes with my own eyes.


I think McGinn is arguing along the same lines, if I'm interpreting your sentence correctly. It's really a Kantian-type argument. Though we may be innately forced by our biologically-given mental structures to describe "empirical reality" (the subject-matter of physics proper) as if it evolves in a space-time manifold, "independent reality" may not evolve in such an arena:

"To represent consciousness as it is in itself - neat, as it were - we would need to let go of the spatial skeleton of our thought. But, according to the Strawsonian thesis, that would be to let go of the very notion of a proposition, leaving us nothing to think with. So there is no real prospect of our achieving a spatially nonderivative style of thought about consciousness. But then, there is no prospect of our developing a set of concepts that is truly adequate to the intrinsic nature of consciousness; we will always be haunted by the ill-fitting spatial scheme. No doubt this lies behind the sense of total theoretical blankness that attends our attempts to fathom the nature of consciousness; we stare agape in a vacuum of incomprehension.

Our conceptual lens is optically out of focus, skewed and myopic, with too much space in the field of view. We can form thoughts about consciousness states, but we cannot articulate the natural constitution of what we are thinking about. It is the spatial bias of our thinking that stands in our way (along perhaps with other impediments). And without a more adequate articulation of consciousness we are not going to be in a position to come up with the unifying theory that must link consciousness to the world of matter in space. We are not going to discover what space must be like such that consciousness can have its origin in that sphere. Clearly, the space of perception and action is no place to find the roots of consciousness! In that sense of 'space' consciousness is not spatial; but we seem unable to develop a new conception of space that can overcome the impossibility of finding a place for consciousness in it.

In saying this I am presupposing a robust form of realism about the natural world. That we are constrained to form our concepts in a certain way does not entail that reality must match that way. Our knowledge constitutes a kind of 'best fit' between our cognitive structure and the objective world; and it fits better in some domains than others. The mind is an area of relatively poor fit. Consciousness occurs in objective reality in a perfectly naturalistic way; it is just that we have no access to its real inner constitution. Perhaps surprisingly, consciousness is one of the more knowledge-transcendent constituents of reality. It must not be forgotten that knowledge is the product of a biological organ whose architecture is fashioned by evolution for brutely pragmatic purposes. Since our bodies are extended objects in space, and since the fate of these bodies is crucial to our reproductive prospects, we need a guidance system in our heads that will enable us to navigate the right trajectory through space, avoiding some objects (predators, poisons, precipices) while steering us close to others (friends, food, feather beds).

Thus our space- representing faculties have a quite specific set of goals that by no means coincide with solving the deep ontological problems surrounding consciousness and space. Many animals are expert navigators without having the faintest idea about the true objective structure of space. (The eagle, for one, still awaits its sharp-beaked Newton.) There is simply no good reason to expect that our basic forms of spatial representation are going to lead smoothly to the ideal theory of the universe. What we need from space, practically speaking, is by no means the same as how space is structured in itself.

I suspect that the very depth of embeddedness of space in our cognitive system produces in us the illusion that we understand it much better than we do. After all, we see it whenever we open our eyes and we feel it in our bodies as we move. (Time has a similar status.) Hence the large cognitive shocks brought about by the changes in our view of space required by systematic science. We are prone to think that we can't be all that wrong about space. I have been arguing that consciousness tests the adequacy of our spatial understanding. It marks the place of a deep lack of knowledge about space, which is hard even to get into focus. No doubt it is difficult to accept that two of the things with which we are most familiar might harbour such intractable obscurities. Irony being a mark of truth, however, we should take seriously the possibility that what we tend to think completely transparent should turn out to transcend altogether our powers of comprehension."

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html


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## fredbloggs02

No, you won't lump me in with a materialits view I appreciate the possibility the familiar interpretaton could be all that seperates us from the eyes of a different nature. I've spoken about dreams being that anti-matter you describe in a previous arguement relating to te big bang in reverse. However these are relatable thoughts in the same sort of way that god could be relatable to more. Who knows? Maybe all we are capable of is to put our own consciousness in a test tube and people profess to have done that already through meditation, near death experinces so on and so forth. The limitation of our own beliefs could bridge something. People who presume because they are lost we empathize with their mystery or that analytical mystery as they appreciate it is as mystery to us all would be as spurious as keeping an open mind only to god or a being of that nature in my view but then god also falls withn the parameters of such supposition to me. A different nature of consciousness if that which sees all collective consciousnesses together and that could be gods job which is maybe all people mean by god, that third party created incoherently of themselves which behests the name god for want of better. Prayer being a form of mantra medtation it wouldn't surprise me if philosophers were the only ones in the dark as to the nature of the analytical mire they resign themselves simply because of vehement resolution the answers are best reached in this way


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## Curmudgeon64

iuseings said:


> conciousness is due to certain neural circuitry (at least that is what I believe)... it can't exist outside matter, I think we only perceive that it does due to our internal dialogues.


Suppose that conciousness, or awareness, really were an 'emergent property.' Then it would be a feature of the entire system (organism + environment), and difficult - if not impossible - to demonstrate from an understanding of the nature of their underlying components.

As an analogy, consider the thousands of genes that code for the proteins of a cell. They are only meaningful in the context of the transfer RNAs that interpret them. But those can only be manufactured if the proteins are present. Taken as a whole, the system becomes beautifully meaningful, but alone DNA or any other component _by itself_ cannot explain genetics.

Mendelian genetics was a legitimate, self contained branch of biology that knew nothing of chromosomes or DNA; but once the former was elucidated, it helped make sense of the latter and showed how they were the hardware of genetics.

So maybe conciousness is indeed best studied by looking at high-level phenomena; and eventually we might show how neurology could be the hardware for the phenomenon of awareness which neurons by themselves do not explain.

To speculate on what constitutes a "concious thought" --- might it be a model of reality, attached to some labels, with associations of various and changing strength to various related models, along with an emotional state, links to memory, attachments to sensations, and an idea of what that model urges the thinker to do? If awareness is that dynamic and labile -- which I think it is -- then couldn't it merely _seem_ to reside outside of ordinary neural mechanisms?

After all, a webpage is not a server.


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## Kon

Here's an interesting quote from one of the philosophy of physics papers I read trying to decipher the philosophical interpretations of Bell's inequality:

This aspect of non-locality is especially problematic for microphysical reductionists (and epiphenomenalists) who,

"...often argue that only the most basic physical properties possessed by individual parts of systems can be truly causally efficacious. There can be no higher level or ontologically emergent properties-for, if there were such properties, they would either be powerless epiphenomena or, if causally empowered, they would somehow violate the microphysical laws governing the smallest parts.

But, if microphysical systems can have properties not possessed by individual parts, then so might any system composed of such parts. Were the physical world completely governed by local processes, the reductionist might well argue that each biological system is made up of the microphysical parts that interact, perhaps stochastically, but with things that exist in microscopic local regions; so the biological (or mental?) can only be epiphenomena of local microphysical processes occurring in tiny regions. Biology reduces to molecular biology, which reduces in turn to microphysics. But the Bell arguments completely overturn this conception."

http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/H/James.A.Hawthorne-1/Hawthorne--For_Whom_the_Bell_Arguments_Toll.pdf


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## Curmudgeon64

Kon said:


> When a scientist looks at your brain he doesn't "see" your thoughts, pain, colours, etc. He can infer them by asking you and perhaps correlating them with some brain states and his own (in a future science) but that's not the same thing. Something seems to be missing. That's the argument anyway. Many scientists feel the same way.
> 
> I don't have to speculate about consciousness/qualia. I have it. But I can never "see" them directly by any scientific method (now or in the future) or so goes the argument. So a big part of what makes me, the person I am, seems missing, in some sense. There seems to be this gap. I could envision someone in the future making a perfect replica of myself that imitates my behaviour completely but is totally devoid of consciousness. I'm not sure if this makes sense?


This is very cool. Thank you, Kon, for introducing such an interesting thread! I do agree that experiencing something is very different from studying what is going on in the brain of someone experiencing that 'something'. And I agree it seems very likely that no amount of such studies _by themselves_ will shed much light on the nature of experience, or in other words of awareness or conciousness.

However -- here it comes -- might not that zombie idea be a red herring? Just because we can envision a thing, that doesn't mean that thing represents nature as it truly is. We can imagine a replica that looks and acts like a human being but is not concious. But another staple of science fiction is that if a replica were good enough to fool everyone, it would have had to aquire conciousness to do so! Now that's weird. How can an artifact be concious? It flies in the fact of common sense. But don't a lot of things in physics seem to defy common sense? What if conciousness evolved as the most efficient way to survive in a complex world? What if simulating concious behavior _without_ conciousness would require a far greater number of "chinese cards" or circuits than having concious thought would? (If you like this sort of notion, a fun book is Frank Herbert's Destination Void). Anyone ever thought about trying to program a computer to answer questions and have conversations (by text) as if it were a human? I know attempts have been made, and they haven't produced good results. Nor have we yet learned how to make computers that could guide a car through traffic. Nature has done better.

Okay, I realize I'm a bit off topic. None of that tells us what conciousness _is_. I'm just inclined to think it can appear if all the right parts are put together, just as a living cell is made of things that are not alive (1) as individual atoms, nor (2) if they ever reach equilibrium. A cell is a dynamic system, and if it ever comes to rest, it is dead. But if someone could put that system together and all in motion, it would indeed be alive in every sense without the imparting of any other hypothetical "vital force."

Does that sound right, or am I missing some reason to insist on a mind/body dichotomy that I think is artificial?


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## Kon

Curmudgeon64 said:


> However -- here it comes -- might not that zombie idea be a red herring? Just because we can envision a thing, that doesn't mean that thing represents nature as it truly is. We can imagine a replica that looks and acts like a human being but is not concious. But another staple of science fiction is that if a replica were good enough to fool everyone, it would have had to aquire conciousness to do so! Now that's weird.


That may be true. Chalmers, however, would argue that the even if that's true, the mere fact that zombies are _logically_ possible and because a zombie and its human counterpart would be physically identical, just knowing all of the physical information about a person is not enough to infer the existence of consciousness. Therefore, one cannot explain consciousness physically. I'm not sure I explained his argument well but does this make sense?


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## Curmudgeon64

Kon said:


> because a zombie and its human counterpart would be physically identical, just knowing all of the physical information about a person is not enough to infer the existence of consciousness. Therefore, one cannot explain consciousness physically.


That makes sense in that it is a clear and valid argument, but why would a zombie and its human counterpart be physically identical? I've always imagined they would not (perhaps because I'm thinking "since everything can be explained physically, if a zombie is not concious, then it must bear some small physcial difference.  ).

I don't understand the cogency of the '_logically_ possible' argument.' If we are trying to explain the phenomenon of conciousness that _is_, ... where can I read Chalmers?


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## Kon

Curmudgeon64 said:


> I've always imagined they would not (perhaps because I'm thinking "since everything can be explained physically, if a zombie is not concious, then it must bear some small physcial difference.  ). If we are trying to explain the phenomenon of conciousness that _is_, ... where can I read Chalmers?


I'm not sure if you read this but here's some basic stuff on the zombie argument and it includes criticism of it (similar to your own). Here's his basic argument:

The simplest version of the conceivability argument:
(1) Zombies are conceivable.
(2) Whatever is conceivable is possible.
(3) Therefore zombies are possible.

If no reasonable analysis of the terms in question points toward a contradiction, or even makes the existence of a contradiction plausible, then there is a natural assumption in favor of logical possibility.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Here's more detailed Chalmer's papers:

http://consc.net/consc-papers.html
http://consc.net/chalmers/


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## Curmudgeon64

This looks very interesting, thanks! I'll give it a read.


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## Kon

Steven Pinker on the Hard Problem of Consciousness

"Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580394,00.html


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## Curmudgeon64

Kon said:


> Steven Pinker on the Hard Problem of Consciousness
> 
> "... few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices..."
> 
> http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580394,00.html


It depends on what our identities really are, the nature of a person's identity. In "Call Me Joe" Pohl Anderson speculates that in some respects a man is the sum of his experiences. Now that's rather odd, eh? Would that mean that a man with advanced Alzheimer's Disease is no longer himself? Yet there is something to this -- we do make our choices based on our experiences, for example. No one holds a newborn responsible for its own actions.

If we are no more completely defined by our qualia than by our memories and patterns of information processing and decision making, then perhaps our very identity is, at least in part, a collection of causative physical agents. In such case, the contradiction between causation and free will is an illusion; and we remain responsible for our actions no matter what science asserts.


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## LostPancake

Kon said:


> Steven Pinker on the Hard Problem of Consciousness


That was good. And I liked the idea of consciousness existing before the big bang.

It's really mind-boggling that patterns of chemicals moving around in the brain can give rise to such intense experiences - euphoria, or suicidal despair. I've often thought the goal of the universe should be to turn itself inside out, and just exist as patterns of euphoria, whatever those may be.

It's like it's taken evolution to work matter into sufficient complexity to become self-aware (by focusing the dim consciousness of matter somehow?). Though at the moment, we're very much stuck with a brain that is geared towards survival and reproduction, not happiness. Hence all these rewards and punishments, to keep us in line, and keep our genes going. But could you produce a brain (computer-based or otherwise) that did not have those limitations? I certainly hope so, eventually.

And hopefully they'll have a better grip on the problem when we understand the brain in more detail - ie comparing what is going on in different states of consciousness.

Maybe it's something to do with information flow - I vaguely remember reading some theories that information may be fundamental to the structure of the universe.


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## Kon

LostPancake said:


> It's really mind-boggling that patterns of chemicals moving around in the brain can give rise to such intense experiences - euphoria, or suicidal despair.
> 
> Maybe it's something to do with information flow - I vaguely remember reading some theories that information may be fundamental to the structure of the universe.


I think it's mind-boggling too but only if one assumes that we really have a complete understanding of what constitutes "chemicals moving around in the brain". When you really think about it we really don't know what these most "fundamental" particles are really like. Consider the double-slit experiment of shooting electrons. Even things as simple as electrons may have a far more complex structure than is usually appreciated.

A number of physicists including Wheeler and Bohm have talked about this. Here's an interesting paragraph from Bohm's stuff discussing one interpretation of the double-slit experiment with electrons/photons (De-Broglie/Bohm's pilot wave interpretation of QM):

"There are many analogies to the notion of active information in our general experience. Thus, consider a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. The ship is not pushed and pulled mechanically by these waves. Rather, the form of the waves is picked up, and with the aid of the whole system, this gives a corresponding shape and form to the movement of the ship under its own power. Similarly, the form of radio waves as broadcast from a station can carry the form of music or speech. The energy of the sound that we hear comes from the relatively unformed energy in the power plug, but its form comes from the activity of the form of the radio wave; a similar process occurs with a computer which is guiding machinery. The 'information' is in the program, but its activity gives shape and form to the movement of the machinery. Likewise, in a living cell, current theories say that the form of the DNA molecule acts to give shape and form to the synthesis of proteins (by being transferred to molecules of RNA).

Our proposal is then to extend this notion of active information to matter at the quantum level. The information in the quantum level is potentially active everywhere, but actually active only where the particle is (as, for example, the radio wave is active where the receiver is). *Such a notion suggests, however, that the electron may be much more complex than we thought (having a structure of a complexity that is perhaps comparable, for example, to that of a simple guidance mechanism such as an automatic pilot). *This suggestion goes against the whole tradition of physics over the past few centuries which is committed to the assumption that as we analyze matter into smaller and smaller parts, their behaviour grows simpler and simpler. Yet, assumptions of this kind need not always be correct. Thus, for example, large crowds of human beings can often exhibit a much simpler behaviour than that of the individuals who make it up."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/bohmphysics.htm


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## SchranzMeister

I know this isn't about consciousness but it really puts our place and size in perspective.

It's almost depressing (or maybe funny?) to fathom that, once upon a time, the prevailing view was that God created the universe, life, humans in his image--everything--in just six days (alas, it still afflicts some of _them_); but what is truly, shockingly, embarrassingly mind-boggling is the agnosy whereby humankind was destructively fideistic, and the prolonged delusion it manifested, that we (our Earth, Sun, moon, God, existence, et cetera) are a significant part of the universe and God's grand scheme. It's easy to persuade oneself that outer space is full of gases, comets, planetoids, and insignificant stars with meaningless Suns in empty galaxies; while at the same time, believe that humankind's existence constitutes a divine, miraculous brane occupying a multidimensional macrocosm.

Science has shown us that the universe is stupendously more immense than we can imagine, but if you gaze at the photographs they captured, you can at least exude a faint breath over the incredible awe of the "infinite."
 
Have a gander: http://www.sendspace.com/file/t7q6in


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## LostPancake

Kon said:


> I think it's mind-boggling too but only if one assumes that we really have a complete understanding of what constitutes "chemicals moving around in the brain". When you really think about it we really don't know what these most "fundamental" particles are really like. Consider the double-slit experiment of shooting electrons. Even things as simple as electrons may have a far more complex structure than is usually appreciated.


Yeah, I don't think I ever really grasped what a particle actually is - the nature of reality at that level is just so bizarre. Why is it structured so that particles manifest according to the flow of probability waves, instead of just having solid little particles bouncing around?

If we're here and aware of ourselves because this is a universe that is able to support consciousness, what is it about the nature of this reality that supports consciousness? Presumably it's not just particles bouncing around, because if it was, it seems like that would be the universe we would find ourselves in. In other words, why all this complexity when you get down to the quantum level? I mean, does that have to do with the ability of the universe to create stable stars that last long enough for life to form, or could you have stars without quantum weirdness? If so, then it would seem that the quantum weirdness is important to consciousness, in some way. I mean, our experience of it.

I tried to read some of Bohm's stuff 20 years ago, and could not understand much of it. I eventually got a degree in physics, but social anxiety and depression made it difficult to focus on it all, so my understanding of physics is like a pyramid with all these blocks missing. I'd love to be able to read and understand that stuff, but I think that will have to be in another life. Unless the singularity happens, and we all get to have second lives somehow.


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## SchranzMeister

Hey, are you guys familiar with the Zero-Point Field? It may be the catalyst for consciousness.

Check it out.


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## Norm

.


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## Kon

LostPancake said:


> If we're here and aware of ourselves because this is a universe that is able to support consciousness, what is it about the nature of this reality that supports consciousness? Presumably it's not just particles bouncing around, because if it was, it seems like that would be the universe we would find ourselves in. In other words, why all this complexity when you get down to the quantum level?... If so, then it would seem that the quantum weirdness is important to consciousness, in some way. I mean, our experience of it.


I constantly think about this. What kinda of "stuff" would reality need to be composed of to allow for the birth of consciousness/the mental/qualia? I guess one should not be too surprised about the complexity of nature when you get down to the quantum level. It's as if such complexity (probably beyond our comprehension) is a necessary requirement for the birth of consciousness and the universe itself to exist. John Wheeler's quotes are also interesting:

"If the world "out there" is writhing like a barrel of eels, why do we detect a barrel of concrete when we look? To put the question differently, where is the boundary between the random uncertainty of the quantum world, where particles spring into and out of existence, and the orderly certainty of the classical world, where we live, see, and measure? This question&#8230;is as deep as any in modern physics. It drove the years-long debate between Bohr and Einstein...Every physical quantity derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit."

"I have been led to think of analogies between the way a computer works and the way the universe works.The computer is built on yes-no logic. So, perhaps, is the universe. Did an electron pass through slit A or did it not? Did it cause counter B to click or counter C to click? These are the iron posts of observation.Yet one enormous difference separates the computer and the universe-chance. In principle, the output of a computer is precisely determined by the input. Chance plays no role. In the universe, by contrast, chance plays a dominant role. The laws of physics tell us only what may happen. Actual measurement tells us what is happening (or what did happen). Despite this difference, it is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer."


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## Kon

I found *Stoljar's epistemic "solution" *to the "hard problem" of consciousness interesting (this is a summary of U. Kriegel's review):

1. There are phenomenal facts-these are supported by direct introspection
2. If there are phenomenal facts, they are necessitated by physical facts because
· apparently everything else is necessitated by the physical facts and 
· facts cited in the manifest image are generally necessitated by facts cited in the scientific image
3. But there are phenomenal facts, that are not necessitated by physical facts-this is supported by stuff like Chalmers' conceivability argument and Jackson's knowledge argument, etc. (i.e. conscious experience involves "non-physical" properties) 

Stoljar denies 3 above because he argues that we are ignorant of a whole class of facts about "matter". These unknown facts about matter, in combination with the known ones, do necessitate the phenomenal facts. But because

(i) we are ignorant of them and 
(ii) the facts of which we are not ignorant do not by themselves necessitate the phenomenal facts, the phenomenal facts *seem* unnecessitated by the physical facts.

Why are we ignorant of certain "physical" facts? 
· as a natural, evolved system, there is no reason to expect the human intellect to understand all the facts about our universe or its physical makeup, let alone understand them especially at this time in our history
· tremendous philosophical and empirical difficulties surrounding consciousness occur because of the *ignorance hypothesis*: physics can tell us only about the dispositional or relational properties of matter, but since dispositions ultimately require categorical properties as bases, and relations ultimately require intrinsic properties as relata, there must also be categorical or intrinsic properties about which physics is silent. Yet these are properties of physical objects and thus are physical properties in one central sense. Instantiations of such properties would therefore constitute physical facts of which we are ignorant, as per the ignorance hypothesis
· intellectual and chemical facts (respectively) that were not necessitated by physical facts in the past turned out later to be frustrated by thitherto unknown physical facts (e.g. unification of chemistry with physics didn't happen until the physics changed via quantum mechanics)
If we are ignorant of a certain class of facts about matter, then the conceivability and knowledge arguments fail. So phenomenal facts seem not necessitated by the physical facts even though they are. He then goes on to argue that in the future when we go on to discover a previously unknown but otherwise quite ordinary set of physical facts when combined together with the familiar physical facts it will necessitate the phenomenal facts. 

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25270-ignorance-and-imagination-the-epistemic-origin-of-the-problem-of-consciousness/
http://www.uriahkriegel.com/downloads/slugfest.pdf

This seems like a more detailed argument proposed by people like Russell, Edington, Chomsky, etc. Chomsky makes that point when he argues:

_It has been common in recent years to ridicule Descartes's "ghost in the machine" in postulating mind as distinct from body. Well, Newton came along and he did not exorcise the ghost in the machine: he exorcised the machine and left the ghost intact. So now the ghost is left and the machine isn't there._

Do we really need to know the intrinsic properties of matter to truly understand qualia/the experiential? Since the intrinsic properties of matter may be forever beyond scientific inquiry, is the hard problem "chronic and incontrovertible"?


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## Kon

Here's another interesting quote from Penrose that seems in tune with Eddington's/McGinn's arguments:


> (If) the phenomenon of consciousness (or mental experience) can arise only in the presence of some non-computational physical processes in the brain...(then)...one can presume...that such (putative) non-computational processes would also have to be inherent in the action of inanimate matter, since living human brains are ultimately composed of the same material, satisfying the same physical laws, as are the inaminate objects of the universe. We must therefore ask two things. First, why is it that the phenomenon of consciousness appears to occur, as far as we know, only in or relation to brains-although we should not rule out the possibility that consciousness might be present also in other appropriate physical systems? Second, we must ask how could it be that such a seemingly important (putative) ingredient as non-computational behaviour, presumed to be inherent-potentially, at least-in the actions of all material things, so far has entirely escaped the notice of physicists? No doubt the answer to the first question has something to do with the subtle and complex organization of the brain...*with regard to the second question, we must indeed expect that vestiges of such non-computability should also be present, at some indiscernible level, in inaminate matter*...For physics to be able to accomodate something as foreign to our current physical picture as is the phenomenon of consciousness, we must expect a profound change-one that alters the very underpinnings of our philosophical viewpoint as to the nature of reality.


*Shadows of the mind*
http://books.google.ca/books?id=gDbOAK89tmcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor:%22Roger+Penrose%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sOUuT7DvIILf0QGxtOm5Cg&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=inauthor%3A%22Roger%20Penrose%22&f=false​


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## Kon

I posted this elsewhere as I thought this was an interesting and pretty neat and easy to understand piece on this topic, arguing for "mind" as an intrinsic property of matter:


> The core of Strawson's argument is that since the mental cannot possibly emerge from anything non-mental, and because we know that some macroscopic modifications of the world are intrinsically mental, the intrinsic nature of the basic constituents of the material world has to be mental as well. *But now it seems that Strawson is confusing here the possibility of the emergence of mind from scientifically described properties like mass, charge, or spin, with the possibility of the emergence of mind from the intrinsic properties that correspond to these scientific properties.* It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly. It might well be that mentality is like liquidity: the intrinsic nature of mass, charge and spin might not be mental itself, just like individual H2O-molecules are not liquid themselves, but could nevertheless constitute mentality when organised properly, just like H2O-molecules can constitute liquidity when organised properly (this would be a variation of neutral monism). In short, the problem is that we just do not know enough about the intrinsic nature of the fundamental level of reality that we could say almost anything about it.
> 
> Finally, despite there is no ontological difference between the micro and macro levels of reality either on the intrinsic or extrinsic level, there is still vast difference in complexity. The difference in complexity between human mentality and mentality on the fundamental level is in one-to-one correspondence to the scientific difference in complexity between the brain and the basic particles. *Thus, even if the intrinsic nature of electrons and other fundamental particles is in fact mental, this does not mean that it should be anything like human mentality-rather, we can only say that the ontological category their intrinsic nature belongs to is the same as the one our phenomenal realm belongs to. *This category in the most general sense is perhaps best titled 'ideal'.


*Mind as an Intrinsic Property of Matter*
http://users.utu.fi/jusjyl/MIPM.pdf


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## Jcgrey

This is a great thread. I'm not smart enough to post in it other than to say thank you. and it's very fascinating!


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