Empirical observations of consciousness demand a new understanding of physics

[TheVat]

 

@exchemist

Fantastic paper.  Plus one.  I like Pigliucci.  The Hard Problem does seem like a category error, and it's one called to our attention nearly a century ago by Gilbert Ryle.

Quote

Of course an explanation isn’t the same as an experience, but that’s because the two are completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you. To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word ‘explanation’.

This is a good response, also, to Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment Mary in the black and white room.  Which causes some philosophers of mind to go off on a mystical tangent over qualia (aka "raw feels") and their seeming mystery.  Perhaps we can say that qualia are simply how brains appear from the inside.  Just as green is how my wife's eyes look from the outside when viewed by a terrestrial hominin with color vision where there is sufficient ambient light.  Someone deprived of mirrors isn't going to lecture us on The Hard Problem of My Eye Color.

Edited July 30, 2022 by TheVat
Page break woes

[exchemist]

17 minutes ago, TheVat said:

 

@exchemist

Fantastic paper.  Plus one.  I like Pigliucci.  The Hard Problem does seem like a category error, and it's one called to our attention nearly a century ago by Gilbert Ryle.

This is a good response, also, to Frank Jackson's famous thought experiment Mary in the black and white room.  Which causes some philosophers of mind to go off on a mystical tangent over qualia (aka "raw feels") and their seeming mystery.  Perhaps we can say that qualia are simply how brains appear from the inside.  Just as green is how my wife's eyes look from the outside when viewed by a terrestrial hominin with color vision where there is sufficient ambient light.  Someone deprived of mirrors isn't going to lecture us on The Hard Problem of My Eye Color.

Yes, Pigliucci and Peter Woit are the people I often go to when I feel I smell bullshit: they are good at cutting through opacity and pretentiousness and seem to have their feet firmly on the ground. Good point about Ryle, though I can't pretend to have studied him.

 

[Michael1991]

5 hours ago, TheVat said:

Kind of a sticking point with "instantaneous" awareness in this chat, given that there's zero evidence of quantum processing in brains (Hameroff claims notwithstanding) and much evidence that human responses take a little time, as do nerve impulses.  Things that feel instant, when tested, prove not to be.  Our minds paper over time lags and provide an illusion of "instant."

Subjective impressions can be deceiving.  Emergent phenomena like consciousness may feel holistic and irreducible, but that's not evidence that they are.  But that feeling of unity provides a useful narrative for a biological organism that has to survive a challenging environment.

As is often noted, the brain is "too hot, noisy, and wet" for quantum processing.  Penrose's OR remains hypothetical at this point.

No no not instantaneous awareness, simultaneous. Big difference! I'm talking about the perceptual experience that arises post-processing of the nerve-impulses. Think of a co-ordinate graph. My head is at (x0,y5) my left hand is at (x-5,y1) and my right hand is at (x5,y1) I am the whole thus I'm at all three points simultaneously and sensation at those 3 locations is simultaneously experienced. Though it does seem that knowledge of perception implies an instantaneous feed-back loop between the brain and the location of perception, and remember perception is post-processing.

As for "quantum processing", I'm not sure what I said even counts. These are classical scale phenomenon as such I say non-local and hidden variable not entanglement. This is the coordinated motion of large scale structures of trillions of atoms. Also, I didn't say irreducible, I said irreducible to the known building blocks as they are currently understood. And yes the continuous and unified nature of consciousness demands explanation, if you're theory of nature lacks explanatory power you have two options, accept its wrong or assume away reality because its too inconvenient to have to explain.

It's not a useful narrative man, that's the non-sense eliminativists have been pushing. Being, is not a narrative you either are or you aren't. It is the certain foundation of knowledge "Cogito, ergo sum. I think therefore I am" "Experencio, ergo sum. I experience, therefore I am". When experiencing cognitive dissonance from the fact that experience doesn't match up with theory they prefer to reject reality in favor of their toy models. Just because a bunch of smart people think something is the case doesn't make it so, they've given up their reason and they try to convince you to do the same. Hence their rejection of empirically obvious truth, is called the sleep of the dust of the Earth. Sense your being and ask yourself, is that a narrative or am I really a unified whole? If you answered narrative you're either a philosophical zombie or a post-modernist. If it's the latter God help ya.

10 hours ago, mistermack said:

Michael1991 , you respond as if I'm a bit thick, but even though that's true, the problem was made by you. 

Your OP was far too long and wordy, and consequently, people will skim it to try and get the essence of it, so don't blame others for not immediately getting what you are getting at. If you had produced a more compact summary, that wouldn't happen.

I am aware of the entangled pair phenomenon, although very much not expert in it's intricate details. However, your proposition doesn't explain how those entangled paired particles end up in the same human being. They could end up anywhere in the universe. The matter in my brain will be from a totally different source to the matter in my foot. While my body might contain particles that have entangled pairs, the chances of one of them being in my body are absolutely tiny. And yet you seem to be talking as if every particle in my body has it's entangled pair somewhere else in my body. 

What possible process could make that happen? 

Fair enough on the fist point. As for entanglement, I say non-local and hidden variable for a reason. I don't think its entanglement, but it's something similar and the proof is in the pudding. All I can really say is every once and a while someone makes a discovery or observation that the current model can't explain and when they do science progresses by finding a new theory to account for it. We're just at the beginning of this process where the discoverer is trying to get people to take him seriously when his observation threatens strongly held beliefs.

[exchemist]

12 hours ago, Michael1991 said:

No no not instantaneous awareness, simultaneous. Big difference! I'm talking about the perceptual experience that arises post-processing of the nerve-impulses. Think of a co-ordinate graph. My head is at (x0,y5) my left hand is at (x-5,y1) and my right hand is at (x5,y1) I am the whole thus I'm at all three points simultaneously and sensation at those 3 locations is simultaneously experienced. Though it does seem that knowledge of perception implies an instantaneous feed-back loop between the brain and the location of perception, and remember perception is post-processing.

As for "quantum processing", I'm not sure what I said even counts. These are classical scale phenomenon as such I say non-local and hidden variable not entanglement. This is the coordinated motion of large scale structures of trillions of atoms. Also, I didn't say irreducible, I said irreducible to the known building blocks as they are currently understood. And yes the continuous and unified nature of consciousness demands explanation, if you're theory of nature lacks explanatory power you have two options, accept its wrong or assume away reality because its too inconvenient to have to explain.

It's not a useful narrative man, that's the non-sense eliminativists have been pushing. Being, is not a narrative you either are or you aren't. It is the certain foundation of knowledge "Cogito, ergo sum. I think therefore I am" "Experencio, ergo sum. I experience, therefore I am". When experiencing cognitive dissonance from the fact that experience doesn't match up with theory they prefer to reject reality in favor of their toy models. Just because a bunch of smart people think something is the case doesn't make it so, they've given up their reason and they try to convince you to do the same. Hence their rejection of empirically obvious truth, is called the sleep of the dust of the Earth. Sense your being and ask yourself, is that a narrative or am I really a unified whole? If you answered narrative you're either a philosophical zombie or a post-modernist. If it's the latter God help ya.

Fair enough on the fist point. As for entanglement, I say non-local and hidden variable for a reason. I don't think its entanglement, but it's something similar and the proof is in the pudding. All I can really say is every once and a while someone makes a discovery or observation that the current model can't explain and when they do science progresses by finding a new theory to account for it. We're just at the beginning of this process where the discoverer is trying to get people to take him seriously when his observation threatens strongly held beliefs.

Ah yes, the telltale "ya" makes its appearance: in my experience a sign of aggression as a substitute for rigour. Your penultimate paragraph reinforces this impression, being merely a rant against some imagined foes, rather than advancing a coherent argument.  

But the rest seems close to word salad. This stuff about 3 points on a graph is a clunky pseudo-mathematical way to say something simple, viz. that different parts of your body are at physically distinct locations. You then go on to say something that appears to be simply wrong, namely that sensation is experienced at all three parts of the body simultaneously, when it is a known fact that nerve impulses take time to travel.

(By the way, "the proof is in the pudding" is nonsense. The expression is: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating".)  

[Michael1991]

10 hours ago, exchemist said:

Ah yes, the telltale "ya" makes its appearance: in my experience a sign of aggression as a substitute for rigour. Your penultimate paragraph reinforces this impression, being merely a rant against some imagined foes, rather than advancing a coherent argument.  

But the rest seems close to word salad. This stuff about 3 points on a graph is a clunky pseudo-mathematical way to say something simple, viz. that different parts of your body are at physically distinct locations. You then go on to say something that appears to be simply wrong, namely that sensation is experienced at all three parts of the body simultaneously, when it is a known fact that nerve impulses take time to travel.

(By the way, "the proof is in the pudding" is nonsense. The expression is: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating".)  

The postmodernist bit was what some circles call a joke. A substitute for rigour? I've got a whole paper on the topic and what should one do with the absurd? Should I take the claim that my existence is merely narrative seriously? I shall not. Should I take reiki crystal healing seriously too? How about witchcraft? Oh but perhaps the shit spewed by people with PhD's should be taken more seriously because they know all the technical jargon everyone else in the field does and they have piece of paper that says "smart person"? How about Deepak Chopra? You can take eliminativists seriously and forgo reason if you people want but I shall not. As for rigour try  "It is the certain foundation of knowledge "Cogito, ergo sum. I think therefore I am" "Experencio, ergo sum. I experience, therefore I am". " Do you understand that my existence is certain? Do you understand that many in the field of epistemology take it as the foundation of knowledge, being it is one of the few things that you can know for certain and not be deceived about? That was the brilliance of Renee Descartes' Great Demon thought experiment. 

 

 

 

It may be "clunky pseudo-math" it's just suppose to bring to mind a conceptual mental model to say that experience occurs in many locations simultaneously, and if you read my paper or my responses I clearly state that perception is POST-PROCESSING of nerve-impulses by the brain yet sensation occurs where the nerve impulse began in the case of touch and externally in the case of vision and hearing.

 

the proof is in the pudding Meaning & Origin | Slang by Dictionary.com