This webpage title poses the question: Can Mind Arise from Plain Matter?

[Pythagorean]

If so, then holding a cell phone to your head ought to screw your mental state. It actually takes a big jolt of EMF to impact the brain.

I was under the impression they did. Just not in a significant or harmful way:

from the journal you keep name dropping:

Physics and biology of mobile telephony
The Lancet, Volume 356, Issue 9244, Pages 1833-1836
G.Hyland

from the International Journal of Neuroscience:
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207450390220330

Do you think electric current flows through the brain?

Are you serious? Of course current flows through the brain! I am seriously beginning to doubt your credibility now:
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/ulnessd/neuroscience/neuronotes.pdf

What job? Cite the literature.

London or Van Der Waals force. I really don't see the point in citing the literature. Do some research on London forces in the context of chemistry, it's fairly common knowledge.

Of course, I wouldn't support Penrose after his "quantum consciousness" theory and I have no idea who Hameroff is.

 

[apeiron]

I was under the impression they did. Just not in a significant or harmful way:

That's so lame its sad.

If you are conjecturing consciousness is an organised EM field, then you have to deal with the fact that waving magnets around isn't a big problem for consciousness. Brain cancer is a different subject.

London or Van Der Waals force. I really don't see the point in citing the literature. Do some research on London forces in the context of chemistry, it's fairly common knowledge.

Chemistry? I thought we were talking neuroscience. Now show me who else apart from cranks like Hameroff think London forces hold the key to brain function?

Are you seriously planning to study neuroscience next year?

 

[pftest]

There is a discussion about a conscious EM field in the brain here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=100320

McFadden himself answers the phone question on his site:

Why don't external fields (from power lines, mobile phones etc.) affect our thoughts?

The head acts as a pretty effective Faraday cage that screens out most static electric external fields. Static magnetic fields (from eg. MRI scanners) will penetrate the head but don't induce currents so are unlikely to change neuron firing patterns and thereby produce a reportable effect. High frequency fields (eg. from mobile phones) may penetrate the head but are unlikely to interact with low frequency brain waves. Low frequency magnetic fields may penetrate the head and interact with the cemi field - and there is plenty of evidence for this in Transcranial Magnetic stimulation (TMS) that induces lots of behavioural effects - see my first JCS paper for more details.
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/cemi.htm
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/pdfs/cemi_theory_paper.pdf

 

[Pythagorean]

That's so lame its sad.

If you are conjecturing consciousness is an organised EM field, then you have to deal with the fact that waving magnets around isn't a big problem for consciousness. Brain cancer is a different subject.

Waving a magnetic around would be an extremely low frequency electromagnetic wave, it would be like hearing atmospheric pressure changes. You don't hear them! They're too low of a frequency. Humans can't below 20 Hz, it doesn't interfere with you're hearing at all when a 10 Hz signal comes through, or even a complicated 1-10Hz bandwidth signal. This would be analogous to waving a magnet around.

Nobody said anything about brain cancer. Cell phones have been suggested in stimulating alpha waves, which can keep make it more difficult to go to sleep. But remember that cell phones are extremely low power at the source, but the time they make it to your neurons they are extremely attenuated, given 1/R^2 and dielectric materials they must pass through.

Chemistry? I thought we were talking neuroscience. Now show me who else apart from cranks like Hameroff think London forces hold the key to brain function?

Are you seriously planning to study neuroscience next year?

Have you ever heard of neurophysics? Chemistry and electrical engineering are required as background for neurophysics. It's also called molecular neuroscience:
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/ulnessd/neuroscience/neuronotes.pdf

You really don't have a clue, do you? You're coming at this from a completely philosophical angle. That's fine in itself, but you're also refuting the physical evidence!

Maybe you should do a little research into it before refuting the reductionist view. I didn't say anything about London forces "holding the key" to brain function, but they are definitely part of the process of electrochemical interactions! I have no idea what holds the key, that's the path of discovery I am on! You are the one claiming to have superior knowledge.

Let's address this, for instance:

Do you think electric current flows through the brain?

Do you think that current doesn't flow through the brain?

Are you seriously going to insist that you have any kind of credible background in neuroscience?

 

[apeiron]

Are you serious? Of course current flows through the brain! I am seriously beginning to doubt your credibility now:
http://www.cord.edu/faculty/ulnessd/neuroscience/neuronotes.pdf

Do you read your sources? Tell me again, what flows around the nervous system? Is it ions (bobbing sideways across membranes to produce action potentials)? Or is it electrons?

What cross synaptic junctions? Is it neurotransmitters (and ions again in the rare electrical junction)? Or is it electrons?

Your textbook clearly states...

There are two sources of current that we must consider in a
neuroscience problem
1. Natural
• flow of ions, (K+, Na+, Ca2+, Cl−)
2. Experimental
• injection by a electronic current source.

 

[Pythagorean]

Do you read your sources? Tell me again, what flows around the nervous system? Is it ions (bobbing sideways across membranes to produce action potentials)? Or is it electrons?

What cross synaptic junctions? Is it neurotransmitters (and ions again in the rare electrical junction)? Or is it electrons?

Your textbook clearly states...

That's still electric current! It's still called an electric force even if a positive ion is causing it! We don't call it the positronic field, we still call it the electric field!

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

Electric current can mean, depending on the context, a flow of electric charge (a phenomenon) or the rate of flow of electric charge (a quantity). This flowing electric charge is typically carried by moving electrons, in a conductor such as wire; in an electrolyte, it is instead carried by ions, and, in a plasma, by both.

You obviously have a serious lack of understanding in the physical sciences!

 

[Pythagorean]

The word electric pertains to the phenomena of the electric field. It's annoying that one of the flavors of charge involved is also called an electron, but this shouldn't be confusing to anyone who has taken just one semester of electrodynamics or electrical engineering (ok, maybe the EE's would be confused, but not the ones working in neuroscience!)

 

[apeiron]

The word electric pertains to the phenomena of the electric field. It's annoying that one of the flavors of charge involved is also called an electron, but this shouldn't be confusing to anyone who has taken just one semester of electrodynamics or electrical engineering (ok, maybe the EE's would be confused, but not the ones working in neuroscience!)

I can see you're rather worked up. But it would help if you focused on the question rather than making random slurs.

This thread has strayed into plain crankology once people start citing EM fields as being the putative cause of consciousness. And you are making a fool of yourself for supporting this nonsense.

As I said, saying the mind is composed of its electrical fields is as vacuous as saying it is composed of its atoms. There is zilch evidence that the brain is a loom designed to weave electrical patterns that are then somehow, magically, conscious.

 

[apeiron]

There is a discussion about a conscious EM field in the brain here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=100320

McFadden himself answers the phone question on his site:

Sadly this is more well-known nonsense. (I think I did speak to McFadden about his theories at the time, I definitely had some to and fro with Pockett).

Microwaves can do this...via thermal effects on the cochlea...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

Fortunately pigeon skulls don't seem to act as faraday cages...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception

And essential wearing for those who still believe in EM consciousness...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_foil_hat

 

[Q_Goest]

Could you be a bit more specific about how these involve downward causation? Let's take phase transition or turbulence as an example. I am not saying DC doesn't exist, I am just looking for examples and to understand how it works and what it means for mind.

I'd disagree that Benard cells, vortexes or turbulence has anything to do with downward causation, pftest. These phenomena are studied by engineers and scientists using standard FEA and CFD multiphysics packages using the Navier Stokes equations. There's nothing in any computational modeling package that includes downward causes - these phenomena have always been assumed to follow local, causal laws.

 

[Q_Goest]

Sadly [E/M field theories are] more well-known nonsense. (I think I did speak to McFadden about his theories at the time, I definitely had some to and fro with Pockett).

McFadden came on PF to discuss this with us here per the link provided by pftest. EM field theories are essentially no different than any other computational theory of mind, so saying they are nonsense is a personal choice.

 

[atyy]

Read some phase transition literature. Ising models, Benard cells, etc. Check out vortexes and turbulence.

The point of the systems approach is that it ends up not being "all just material". Yes, it should all be "physical" in the widest sense, but that involves the dichotomy of substance and form.

If you prefer to identify mind with form and brain with substance, then that does work as an approximate ontology. But I have to keep reminding you that this is a dichotomistic rather than a dualistic ontic framework that I am using here.

All systems require both substance and form to be physically real. They can never be reduced completely to either one or other axis of being. Though for modelling reasons, we may chose to emphasise one or other aspect.

And the big mistake you and so many others here are making is to think of "mind" as a simple state - just experiencing, as some put it. Qualia. Raw awareness. Whatever. Mental experience in fact does not have that raw simplicity.

Anyway, I was chucking out a lot of old references and came across a couple that a little randomly illustrate the variety of systems thinking out there.

Ok, so what is the order parameter an experimentalist should measure to determine whether a given system is in a conscious phase or not? Incidentally, I've always found the critical point fascinating - liquid and gas are truly different only if one passes through the phase boundary but not round the critical point.

Or is the definition of consciousness still embryonic, like the definition of long range entanglement, where we have a vague idea of some things to measure like the entanglement entropy and efference copy, but no definitive test.

 

[Pythagorean]

I can see you're rather worked up. But it would help if you focused on the question rather than making random slurs.

This thread has strayed into plain crankology once people start citing EM fields as being the putative cause of consciousness. And you are making a fool of yourself for supporting this nonsense.

As I said, saying the mind is composed of its electrical fields is as vacuous as saying it is composed of its atoms. There is zilch evidence that the brain is a loom designed to weave electrical patterns that are then somehow, magically, conscious.

Do you see the way you're arguing? You're relying extremely on pathos. You've been shown wrong over the last several posts and now you want to change the subject to get the focus back. The focus isn't even about a theory of consciousness, it's about mental causation.

All of the arguments you lost were in trying to attack the EM theory on the basis of their premises being true (to which your counter was that it was silly or ridiculous, which adds no value to your argument) and you were wrong.

It's not my theory (I don't have one) but it's a viable reductionist theory. This is a philosophy forum, we can only see whether an argument is valid, not sound (https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=39367).

I only have access to understanding reductionist-type theories given my background in physics, but I'm also a pluralist (I see no reason to think that a systems approach should conflict with a reductionist approach, just because of how we label them, for instance).

In fact, I think a helpful and useful systems approach should be proven in the limit of the reduced theory. (I.e. QM reduces to classical physics in the limit, and to chemistry as well, chemistry and physics make up biology, astronomy (classical physics) and chemistry make up the geology, biology and geology make the ecosystem and of course:

biology + chemistry + physics --> neuroscience

(in the future)
neuroscience --> psychology

(this is not some strict hierarchy, it's meant mostly as an example)

My argument on mental causation is that the sense of "me" that we feel is an illusion brought on by a combination of systems that have found a sustainable energy balance (following the laws of physics)

The first time this happened was with single-celled organisms. Cells are amazing things little machines. The cell, one day takes in another kind of cell, but instead of completely digesting it, it forms a symbiotic relationship with it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory
(this is a valid theory that has suggestive evidence, but some objections. Note that the objections don't invalidate it.)

Now the cell has adopted the other cell as its organelle and is now a more complex system (really a set of two subsystems).

I posted the article about the slime mold in which, a colony of single-celled organisms form a multi-cellular organism for a task, then break apart back into single-celled organisms.

In this way you can see how the more cells involved, the more complex the system becomes. Now we can talk about organs (made up of cells) such as the brain. (Of course, consciousness could very well exist everywhere in the body too, for all I know).

Either way, the conclusion that you arrive at from the reductionist view is that the phenomena of consciousness is the effect that arises from the human body, of who's components are the cause.

The qualia of consciousness are not true representations of reality, but stereotypes laid by a sophisticated categorization system (a network of neurons in your brain, for instance) that uses these stereotypes to predict (within a tolerable accuracy) how the world around him is behaving, or will be behaving sometime in the future. It's not always accurate, but it does a lot for the survivability of its species.

We're only made individuals by the concept of the boundary layer between our organs and the environment (another helpful category). Even that boundary is somewhat loose; we mix with our environment in many ways. We depend on many cultures of bacteria that we would die without (namely, the ones in our digestive system). We're pretty much a bunch of interacting molecules that have stabilized a pattern of mass and energy given the environment and the rules of the universe.

aside:

There's also the matter of the nucleus of each cell to consider. They contain your base DNA. In some respect, they have a lot of say in how you respond to the environment, especially holding the DNA code that has allowed your strain to survive all these years.

As an aside, it would be an interesting argument that consciousness somehow arose from your cells, as a long-term process, that utilizes your brain in the short term and that consciousness is somehow linked with your DNA.

 

[atyy]

biology + chemistry + physics --> neuroscience

(in the future)
neuroscience --> psychology

If psychology has an operationally definition of something, we should be able to find the neuronal counterpart. Does psychology have an operational definition of "consciousness perception" as opposed to "unconscious perception"?

 

[atyy]

If "mental events" is a meaningful term, ie. operationally defined, then yes, mental events can cause.

What is an "epiphenomenon"? Are there any known epiphenomena?

 

[atyy]

Yes, of course someone's mood can affect physical processes. Mood is in part determined by serotonin levels which affects neuron's membrane conductances which affects membrane time constants.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi all. Let's stay on topic. This thread is about mental causation. Thanks.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi atyy,

Yes, of course someone's mood can affect physical processes. Mood is in part determined by serotonin levels which affects neuron's membrane conductances which affects membrane time constants.

This conflates physical phenomena and mental phenomena. If one wants to suggest these two phenomena are identical, and some such as Dennett will try to do so, then there's no reason to go on. There's no difference between the behavior and the phenomenal experience and there's no explanation needed. Qualia don't exist as distinct phenomena. Per this line of reasoning, qualia are essentially the same as pressure is to the statistical mechanical description of it's constituent parts (ie: the motions of molecules or atoms).

However, this is extremely difficult to make stick for many reasons. First and foremost, we don't need to postulate mental phenomena to explain physical phenomena. There's an explanatory gap in our understanding of consciousness because we will never need to use such things as mood or qualia to explain the physical comings and goings of material particles or portions of physical systems.

This is an important distinction if one wishes to address the issues around mental causation since folks such as Dennett would suggest there is no causal efficacy for mental events and as I've pointed out, this leads to a very serious paradox.

 

[atyy]

Hi atyy,

This conflates physical phenomena and mental phenomena. If one wants to suggest these two phenomena are identical, and some such as Dennett will try to do so, then there's no reason to go on. There's no difference between the behavior and the phenomenal experience and there's no explanation needed. Qualia don't exist as distinct phenomena. Per this line of reasoning, qualia are essentially the same as pressure is to the statistical mechanical description of it's constituent parts (ie: the motions of molecules or atoms).

However, this is extremely difficult to make stick for many reasons. First and foremost, we don't need to postulate mental phenomena to explain physical phenomena. There's an explanatory gap in our understanding of consciousness because we will never need to use such things as mood or qualia to explain the physical comings and goings of material particles or portions of physical systems.

This is an important distinction if one wishes to address the issues around mental causation since folks such as Dennett would suggest there is no causal efficacy for mental events and as I've pointed out, this leads to a very serious paradox.

Yes, I think you've have my point of view largely right, even though I'm not a Dennett fan, ie. my heuristic is that mood is to neurons as pressure is to molecules, and the main problem for me is that some terms like "consciousness" are not operationally well-defined. However, this doesn't mean that mental phenomena are not useful to explain physical phenomena. After all, pressure is a useful concept, even though strictly speaking it is not necessary if we can measure all the positions and velocities of the molecules in a gas. In practice we only have access to macroscopic variables like pressure, similarly sometimes we only have access to macroscopic variables like mood. In the same way, mood is predictive of physical behaviour, eg. being depressed increases the tendency for suicidal behaviour, which is an observable behaviour of a system of particles.

Let me elaborate a bit on why I am not a Dennett fan. Dennett seems to think there is nothing to explain about why we have qualia, and other things such as thermostats presumably don't, at least not to the same degree. I do think it is interesting - just as it is interesting trying to derive for which systems it is meaningful to describe using "pressure", "temperature", "solid", "liquid" or "gas". I think the situation in theoretical neuroscience is that we have a vague definition of many concepts like "conscious perception", but not a sharp enough definition to tell an experimentalist what quantities to measure to determine if an entity has " conscious percepts". It's similar to condensed matter theory, where they have a vague notion of long-range entanglement, but not a sharp or complete enough definition to tell an experimentalist what to measure to determine whether and what sort of "long-range entanglement" is present (http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.1016). In other words, I believe that it is interesting to derive phase diagrams for mental states.

 

[Pythagorean]

Yes, of course someone's mood can affect physical processes. Mood is in part determined by serotonin levels which affects neuron's membrane conductances which affects membrane time constants.

but if that mood can be explained as the result of the physical state/inputs that caused it, then it's ultimately a matter of physical phenomena causing physical phenomena.

If one wants to suggest these two phenomena are identical, and some such as Dennett will try to do so, then there's no reason to go on. There's no difference between the behavior and the phenomenal experience and there's no explanation needed.

This is where I would disagree with Dennet if this is what he actually claims. The two phenomena are not identical. One (consciousness) is a byproduct of the other (the physical phenomena).

However, this is extremely difficult to make stick for many reasons. First and foremost, we don't need to postulate mental phenomena to explain physical phenomena. There's an explanatory gap in our understanding of consciousness because we will never need to use such things as mood or qualia to explain the physical comings and goings of material particles or portions of physical systems.

But 1) we don't directly arrive at the conclusions for the laws of physical phenomena, and on the other side of that same coin, 2) we do postulate mental phenomena to model physical phenomena.

My argument for 1) is that we arrive at physical laws through a very long process of statistical significance. We do not have a complete grasp of the laws. We also don't know whether a ball will go down the 99999 time we drop it (but we would probably make money in a bet that it did).

My argument for 2) is that the formulation of the scientific method itself and the development of science required us to postulate mental phenomena in terms of what we are capable of discovering in a fashion that satisfies us.

We do need a certain degree of qualia to describe the mathematics that the physics is talking about. We can't model anything that we observe without qualifying the quantities.

 

[Ferris_bg]

Hi Q_Goest,

I don't see why this paradox troubles you:

This is an important distinction if one wishes to address the issues around mental causation since folks such as Dennett would suggest there is no causal efficacy for mental events and as I've pointed out, this leads to a very serious paradox.

You either accept the dualistic view that mental can interact with physical or you remove the qualia and welcome the materialism. As you stated in post 39, you can't escape the paradox, "mental states enter the causal chain" when qualia exists. But why this should be any problem at all?

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi apeiron,
Thanks for your comments, I tried to respond in parentheses {}.

I would say it is better to think of x as the basic process of awareness - the brain~mind activity that animals have too. So really the story is y~x.
{I'd say that x is the physically measurable state and is objectively measurable.}

Then the extra x* issue is self-awareness. The ability to introspect "objectively" on conscious states.
{yes, x* includes self-awareness, but it also includes all the mental phenomena that we associate with consciousness that some call qualia, some call experience or phenomenal experience, and some call feeling}

Introspection is of course a learned socialised habit, not an innate "hardware" feature.
{Partly true, but introspection could equally arise without socialization as it would seem to follow from consciousness, so I wouldn't say that introspection is strictly something learned. I suspect someone growing up on an island with no one around would discover introspection independently and very quickly}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead
{not sure why you referenced these. when providing references, it would be nice to provide your thoughts about a topic, and if those thoughts would benefit from further reading, then providing references would be wonderful, and well accepted.}

And also x* would not be epiphenomenal. Except in a certain sense.

The socialisation of the human brain through the self-regulatory mechanism of language is in fact a good example of downward causation - constraint exerted from a cultural level to the individual level.
{I think this is an excellent example of how we differ in our views and why I've said earlier that we are in 'different camps'. I don't see this example as being one of causation, except in a very loose sense. It's similar to the statement in economics that says, "The cost of goods and services increases with increasing demand." This confuses physical causes (such as the conservation of energy, mass and momentum laws) with very generalized causes that have meaning to us as humans. Human meaning provides us with a wonderful, meaningful and comprehensive understanding of the world around us, but we must resist the temptation of thinking of these concepts as physical causes. They are not physical causes. This is actually nicely explored in Bedau's paper where he talks about "gliders" and the game of life. These things we see as gliders are weakly emergent, but it helps us as humans to understand their behavior. There is no downward causation in the behavior of a glider.}

Society teaches you to mind your manners, pursue certain goals, think in particular ways. The causality is from the global scale to the local so that you in your own head are negotating your needs vs the social needs.

See http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_JCS%20freewill%20article.html

That is of course why Sautoy was reacting with such feigned horror to the notion he had no freewill and his brain was deciding up to 10 seconds ahead of time. Society demands we be in control of our bodies. That is society's need - even if it is a fiction and leads to naive statements about the nature of consciousness.
{let's leave free will and the Leibniz delay out of this thread.}

Thanks,
Q.

 

[apeiron]

If psychology has an operationally definition of something, we should be able to find the neuronal counterpart. Does psychology have an operational definition of "consciousness perception" as opposed to "unconscious perception"?

Traditionally, the literature relies on self-report. The subject tells you what they saw. Or if you are a lab animal, you press a response key or make some other overt action.

In consciousness studies, there has been the call to identify the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). Crick and Koch promoted this effort in a series of Nature papers. The effort was generally a bust. Though thalamo-cortical synchrony does correlate well with attentive awareness. There are some reasonable global neuronal measures.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Pythagorean, I tried to respond in paren's {}

I must admit, I only remember the experiments itself, not the introductory or commentary of the videos. I don't agree with the statement that consciousness IS brain activity. I'll go more into that later.

I wouldn't say x* = x. I would say, instead that x* is a different frame of reference of x (which means there would be a transform operation involved: x* = T(x). This fits the analogy of the shadow in that way. One may argue that a shadow is somehow causal, but we generally put the blame on the owner of the shadow as being the cause and the shadow itself being the effect (the owner is blocking the sun's photons from hitting the concrete sidewalk, what we call a shadow isn't a substance, it's a lack of 'substance': namely, photons.)
{as I'd mentioned to apeiron, x* represents mental states and x represents physical states. The concept of a transform operation is interesting, but I'd urge you to read more on the topic if it interests you. I haven't seen such an analogy in the literature, but there's probably good reasons for that. Here's my unofficial argument: If there is a transform, then it would very likely violate any kind of multiple realizability argument, at least from the perspective of computationalism. That is, computationalism requires and multiple realization suggests that the mental state x*, can be had by not just any human, such that there are essentially an infinite number of physical states that could correspond to the experience of pain for example, but also by any animal or other life form whatsoever. So if there is a mathematical transform, it needs to be flexible enough to show how every potential experience of a given quale, of which there are essentially an infinite number, equates to that quale. (quale being the singular of qualia) Further, we can't say what limits there are for different quale, it could be infinite. So now you have to have a transform that takes an infinite number of quale and converts them in an infinite number of different ways. }

in 1), did you mean to include "what is spoken" as x? You had elsewhere defined it as y, which I would have agreed more with.
{x and y are physical states. I didn't mean to be that specific as to which state had the physical report and which one led up to that report, but generally the physical state that has the report is labeled as y}

Subjective experience may by far be the most difficult thing to figure out how to measure , but is it truly impossible? I can't find the paper right now (I will look harder after this post, or maybe somebody else knows the study that I'm referring to) that showed how dogs stored smells was very similar to how we stored notes. In the way we can detect octaves, the dog can detect an extra enzyme on an aroma.
{remember that how dogs store smells requires a physical explanation. don't conflate physical and mental phenomena. our experience of the smell is the mental phenomena. what physically happens in creating that smell requires physical states.

Between humans, we can share the experience of red, and neurologists can measure brain activity in several test subjects imagining or observing red.

The more qualia we begin to map out in terms of neurological activity, the more chances we have of discovering emergent properties, and explaining (which we already can in terms of core physics) why some members of our species don't experience red like we do.

If you were a neuroscientist and a musician, wouldn't it be enriching for you to play different kinds of music on many different types of subjects while using something like an fMRI? Or even to do experiments in the qualia, red (given that you're not colorblind).

If we get a firm physical grasp of how we can experience the color red, and then we can physically altar someone who is colorblind to be able to experience red (using what we've discovered) have we not made the case?
{not sure what you mean by this. I disagree we can figure out how a given experience emerges given the computational paradigm. It will require something different, but that explanation is outside the scope of this tread.}

What if we observed physically similar phenomena. Could we make a particular kind of weather pattern experience the color red? No probably not, but that's not suprising because it's not the same physical phenomena, it's just similar (hypothetically of course). It can never be the same physical phenomena without actually having the components of the brain.
{The concept of 'physically similar phenomena' experiencing something the same as a person has been done to death in the literature. Hinckfuss pail for example. That's a whole other thread}


I find no reason to believe the transform x* = T(x) has a 1 to 1 correlation with x. The transform could map n-dimensional space to m-dimensional space for all we know. You'd also have to define "reliable". We can report emotions to each other in a way that's vaguely consistent using language. In the same we, most of us agree on what the color red is (and the failure of a colorblind person to do so can be explained physically). There's always some confidence less than 100% in our report, but that goes with any observation. Of course, when reporting emotions, our confidence is considerably lower than when reporting something like length.
{are you suggesting that the transform requires an additional dimension? I don't disagree, but this violates the causal closure of the physical domain.}

I personally don't agree that consciousness is brain activity. I only demand that consciousness results from brain activity. If you can stop all brain activity, you stop consciousness. I don't mean to say that consciousness exists in all brain activity; just that if you shut the whole thing down, you'll be sure to nail it.
{that's fine, and i agree. in philosophical terms, consciousness doesn't just result from brain activity, it is supervenient on it. Everyone should agree with such statements, and also that stopping brain activity thus stops the mental states.}

In physics, we have lots of things that aren't the physical movements themselves. They are a summation or a statistical abstract of the system. We chose such parameters, not because they're inherent to the system (though they may be) but because they're relevant to the way in which we view the system and our process of understanding it in a categorical way (because stereotyping makes learning faster, if flawed).
{yes, good point. we discussed this briefly in pftest's thread regarding supervenience. pressure of a gas is supervenient on the movement of the molecules, so there are an infinite number of physical microstates that can lead to a physical macrostate. Problem is that mental states (macrostates) aren't objectively measurable.}

What if qualia are classification schemes that our brain uses to integrate and store sensory data? The definition of mind is vague, of course. If you would include all of the brain's activities and function as mind, then I'd think you'd be taking it too far. I was always under the impression that "mind" was only the part that you're aware of.

For instance, we don't notice that the floor is pushing up on our feet as we sit here reading posts. That stimulus isn't being directed the the higher functions of the brain that we associate with mind. It's being handled by lower function until the point where you begin to ponder "hey... the floor is pushing up on my feet".

In the same way, short of us pondering it, the color red isn't brought to our mind's attention when we observe it. One of our memory functions classifies light (with a particular range of frequencies) and files it away and compares it to similar observations in the future. We can view the resulting discussion, later some day, on physics forums, as a result of many different brain functions all fulfilling their "duties" in exactly the way the neurons allow them to.

That is, there may be no single decision-making process in the brain that we can wrap together in a tidy bow and call "mind". And there's no reason for me to believe our experience as an individual encompasses a significant fraction of all the things our brain is doing at once.
{I don't disagree that many things our bodies do, never enter our conscious world. The issue we have to wrestle with regards the mind-body problem - Why should ANY (or why should only SOME) of the physical processes that occur result in mental states? That's the problem in a nutshell.}

Thanks,
Q.

 

[apeiron]

I suspect someone growing up on an island with no one around would discover introspection independently and very quickly

Well you suspect wrong. This is why the conversations here are so half-arsed. Everyone talks off the top of their heads without doing their basic research.

http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_feral%20children.html

 

[Math Is Hard]

Well you suspect wrong. This is why the conversations here are so half-arsed. Everyone talks off the top of their heads without doing their basic research.

http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_feral%20children.html

How do we know that these feral children were developmentally normal? That seems to be a confound in the case of a more recent feral child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)" , who was possibly mildly mentally retarded, and received this diagnosis before her imprisonment. She had a strange walk and never learned to speak normally, despite intense efforts at rehabilitation after her rescue. In that case there doesn't seem to be a way to tease apart the effects of the abuse and retardation from the effects of social isolation.

Genie's diagnosis of a mental disability seems to have led to her cruel circumstances. It is just speculation on my part, but it seems that there's the possibility that these wild children may have been abandoned because of their developmental abnormalities. In other words, the abnormalities could have caused the isolation rather than the isolation causing the abnormalities.

 

[apeiron]

Genie's diagnosis of a mental disability seems to have led to her cruel circumstances. It is just speculation on my part, but it seems that there's the possibility that these wild children may have been abandoned because of their developmental abnormalities. In other words, the abnormalities could have caused the isolation rather than the isolation causing the abnormalities.

Correct. That is an alternative explanation. That was my reading of Genie's case (of which there is quite a literature). And it is of course possible that two separate indian babies were abandoned near birth because their developmental abnormalities were already apparent. Then picked up by wolves.

But having read the source materials in full, it seems more probable they were normal babies stolen rather than defective babies abandoned.

Did you also read?
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html

 

[Math Is Hard]

Did you also read?
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html

I haven't, but I will. Thanks!

 

[apeiron]

How can we know what a computer experiences since everything a computer does can be FULLY explained in physical terms? This argument can be extended to the mind given the present computational paradigm.

I realize some folks feel a system approach and some form of downward causation are instructive. The paper "Physicalism, Emergence and Downward causation" by Campbell and Bickhard for example, is right up your ally. They discuss mental causation and reference Kim. To me, it's all mere handwaving.
I'm on the other side of the fence. Craver and Bechtel2 I think do a nice job of getting in between the two camps and provide an argument that you might find interesting.

Getting back to the OP, which is an interesting issue, I do take a radical position on downward causation in believing it really exists as a fundamental variety of causation.

I would call it constraint and I would call it global. In dichotomistic contrast (ie: asymetric but mutual) to local causality, which is constructive or additive and, of course, local.

This sounds dualistic to some, perhaps, but it is not as both causalities develop out of a prior shared state of vagueness and they interact to form an equilibrium hierarchy state. So it is a systems view. Again, a dichotomistic story, not dualistic.

It is a hard story to get your head around for sure as it is completely dynamic. Everything is moving and developing. Nothing is securely nailed down as the prime mover that moves everything else. But who said deep truths had to be easy .

Now let's pick the eyes out of that Craver and Bechtel paper, if that is the view you synch with.

Many philosophers (e.g., Alexander 1927; and several authors in Andersen
et al. 2000) and scientists (e.g., Morgan 1927; Campbell 1974; Sperry 1976)
appeal to top-down causes in their explanations. Such appeals evoke concerns
that the notion of top-down causation is incoherent or that it involves spooky
forces exerted by wholes upon their components.

So there is a history of people thinking this way. And a history of (largely anglo-saxon) resistance.

In our view, the phrase ‘topdown
causation’ is often used to describe a perfectly coherent and familiar
relationship between the activities of wholes and the behaviors of their components,
but the relationship is not a causal relationship.

Likewise, the phrase
‘bottom-up causation’ does not, properly speaking, pick out a causal relationship.
Rather, in unobjectionable cases both phrases describe mechanistically
mediated effects.

Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of
constitutive and causal relations in a mechanism, where the constitutive relations
are interlevel, and the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. Appeal to
top-down causation seems spooky or incoherent when it cannot be explicated
in terms of mechanistically mediated effects.

So far this could work for me. They are identifying a basic dichotomy - interlevel constitutive relations and intralevel causal relations. That looks like what I would mean by constraint and construction.

And whereas they are taking a mechanical hierarchy approach - where scale is not dichotomised into the local and global - I would take the dichotomistic approach where scale in fact has only two fundamental levels...the local and the global. But I also say that in a system at equilibrium, the local and global are completely mixed over all scales (renormalised you might say).

So in effect, we would both look at some chosen scale of an equilibrium structure and find a "local" mix of local construction and global constraint. Or intralevel causal relations and interlevel constitutive relations as they prefer to describe it.

(Think of the self-similarity of fractals here. Same mix over all scales)

http://www.dichotomistic.com/hierarchies_fractals.html

To say that a causal relation is bottom-up or top-down is to say that things at
one level are causally related to things at another level.3 The term ‘level’ plays
many roles in science. There are levels of abstraction, being, causation,
description, explanation, function, and generality, to name a few, and these are
not the same. For each, there is a different sense in which a cause can be said to
be at the top (or bottom) and a different sense in which its influence is propagated
downward (or upward). In this discussion, we focus on levels of
mechanisms.

Fair enough. But you can see how the assumptions are now being wired into the argument. My approach sees mechanism as a subset of a wider world. Here I would refer you back to Robert Rosen and Howard Pattee especially. And of course the Peircean notion of vagueness.

So I stand for an "organic" approach in which mechanicalism is emergent. Something else (self-organising development) is fundamental.

Finally, higher levels of mechanisms are, by definition, mechanistically
explicable. One might object that we thereby exclude ‘emergent’ causes by fiat.
A defining mark of ‘strongly emergent properties’ is that they have no mechanistic
explanation. The organization of components in a mechanism may
allow the novel property to ‘emerge,’ but the property has no explanation in
terms of the operation of that mechanism. We acknowledge that there can be
no levels of mechanisms when decomposition is impossible in principle. We
draw two conclusions from this observation. First, the notion of ‘level’
involved in considering cases of emergence is not the same as the notion of level
that is so ubiquitous in biology. Levels of mechanisms are constitutive levels;
levels of strong emergence are not.

For this reason, the notion of strong
emergence can borrow no legitimacy from its loose association with the levels
of mechanisms so ubiquitous in biology and elsewhere. Second, our account
places a burden on the defender of strongly emergent properties to explain why
top-down causation from emergent to nonemergent properties is different from
mundane causation between two distinct properties.

So now we get down to it.

The global scale is just more mechanism. Mechanism is intralevel causality. Intralevel means local constructive action. So the global scale is only a construction which can exert unchallenging downward effects. Nothing spooky going on as it all reduces to the smallest scale ultimately.

And if you have emergent properties that just pop-out at the global level, then by definition they are not mechanistic. If you claim this, then you either have not really modeled the situation correctly (there are hidden local variables, you just haven't figured them out) or you are a fruit loop baby.

Sorry, I mean it is of course you who owe us an explanation of that negative finding. We know there must be hidden local variables out there in the darkness, so just keep looking and report back to reductionism central when you've found them.

[I've got to go for a bike ride so I continue this later...]

 

[pftest]

In physics, we have lots of things that aren't the physical movements themselves. They are a summation or a statistical abstract of the system. We chose such parameters, not because they're inherent to the system (though they may be) but because they're relevant to the way in which we view the system and our process of understanding it in a categorical way (because stereotyping makes learning faster, if flawed).
{yes, good point. we discussed this briefly in pftest's thread regarding supervenience. pressure of a gas is supervenient on the movement of the molecules, so there are an infinite number of physical microstates that can lead to a physical macrostate. Problem is that mental states (macrostates) aren't objectively measurable.}

Ive argued against this in my topic and will briefly do so again since its relevant here (see the argument at the bottom of my post). As is mentioned here, the supervenient phenomenon is a "summation", or an "abstract" (and atyy calls it "a useful concept"). The reason why this cannot be the case for mind, is simple: we did not invent mind. Each of the terms summation/abstract/concept are already mental activities. So to claim that mind is a summation/abstract/concept is to claim that mind = mind, or worse, that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself. Mind cannot have originated as a concept because concepts require a mind in the first place. It cannot have been invented because inventions require a mind in the first place.

So it follows that experiences or qualia cannot be to the brain like what pressure is to moving atoms. Supervenience can't be relevant to the causal powers of mind.

Then there is (from what I've read so far) the issue that only weak emergence occurs. Something simple may become very complex and appear radically different, but don't let appearances fool you: it is still just a complex version of the simple thing.

So let's take this argument:
--------------------------------------
p1. causation is upwards and happens at a fundamental (smallest) level
p2. mind causes
c: mind causes at a fundamental level and is not limited to brains
--------------------------------------

p1 could be argued against with:
- examples of non-mental supervenience
- examples of strong emergence
- examples of non-fundamental downward causation
p2 can (as far as i know) only be argued against by adopting dualism and results in an eternal realm of mind disconnected from the physical world.

 

[atyy]

that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself

That feels good to me - why do you think it's problematic?

 

[pftest]

That feels good to me - why do you think it's problematic?

For materialism this a problem, it holds that brains brought mind into existence.

 

[Pythagorean]

Ive argued against this in my topic and will briefly do so again since its relevant here (see the argument at the bottom of my post). As is mentioned here, the supervenient phenomenon is a "summation", or an "abstract" (and atyy calls it "a useful concept"). The reason why this cannot be the case for mind, is simple: we did not invent mind. Each of the terms summation/abstract/concept are already mental activities. So to claim that mind is a summation/abstract/concept is to claim that mind = mind, or worse, that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself. Mind cannot have originated as a concept because concepts require a mind in the first place. It cannot have been invented because inventions require a mind in the first place.

So it follows that experiences or qualia cannot be to the brain like what pressure is to moving atoms. Supervenience can't be relevant to the causal powers of mind.

But we did "invent" the concept of mind in the same way we "invented" the concept of pressure! We weren't somehow born knowing what a mind was and had to struggle with inventing pressure. In both cases, a lot of research and observation went into studying and labeling emergent properties of the systems.

My argument is that we really never leave the mind and safely make 100% objective observations/measurements. We're on a sliding scale where some things are more objective while others are more subjective. In this way, we can't separate the physical states from the mental states like the OP suggests. We never really leave the mental state, we only use repeatability to eliminate what's not the physical state from within our mental state.

Even the idea of qualia is fuzzy. We have to qualitatively define the values we're measuring in physics. We can't just cast rattle off numbers, they have to have qualifications attached to them. This is where subjectivity enters. The atom is a great example. The atom went through many models. None of them are completely objective, but they become more objective the more we can understand and isolate the phenomena we're interested in.

 

[pftest]

But we did "invent" the concept of mind in the same way we "invented" the concept of pressure! We weren't somehow born knowing what a mind was and had to struggle with inventing pressure. In both cases, a lot of research and observation went into studying and labeling emergent properties of the systems.

You can't invent anything without a mind in the first place. The first egg can't have been laid by an egg (unless eggs are fundamental). Sure we may have ideas about what mind is and does, and such beliefs may be an invention and may be true or false, but the invention itself is still based on our previous experiences. We were born conscious and to be conscious is to have a mind.

My argument is that we really never leave the mind and safely make 100% objective observations/measurements. We're on a sliding scale where some things are more objective while others are more subjective. In this way, we can't separate the physical states from the mental states like the OP suggests. We never really leave the mental state, we only use repeatability to eliminate what's not the physical state from within our mental state.

Even the idea of qualia is fuzzy. We have to qualitatively define the values we're measuring in physics. We can't just cast rattle off numbers, they have to have qualifications attached to them. This is where subjectivity enters. The atom is a great example. The atom went through many models. None of them are completely objective, but they become more objective the more we can understand and isolate the phenomena we're interested in.

I agree. However this is a methodological issue isn't it?

 

[Pythagorean]

You can't invent anything without a mind in the first place. An egg can't have laid itself either. Sure we may have ideas about what mind is and does, and such beliefs may be an invention and may be true or false, but the invention itself is still based on our previous experiences.

But you're basing your argument off of your conclusion. You're assuming that the mind you and I think of are exactly the mind that we possess. If it's something else happening (that we greatly simplified and come to call the mind) then we have very little idea of about.

Also, I'm not saying we completely invented pressure. There's some phenomena their that we interpret as pressure. My argument is that in the same way, there's some phenomena going on that we interpret as mind. We don't even know that the mind really exists as objectively as something like pressure does. This is why we must reserve discussions of mind for philosophy, while pressure is a scientific quantity.

We were born conscious and to be conscious is to have a mind.

Depending on your definition of consciousness, are you sure about this? Could we not argue that a newborn baby is completely a system of wired reflexes (for instance, if you stick your tongue out a newborn baby, she'll stuck her tong out back. They're hardwired to mimic, it's not something they learn. This a well known experiment, and I've done it myself with my newborn. Paul Bloom talks about it a little bit
http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/class-sessions
(see session 5)

Then, through long-term stimulation, certain mimicked behaviors are "rewarded" and "punished" (by neurotransmitters) and from this system emerges something we eventually call consciousness because the stimuli history has been completely unique to that organism.