Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[Constance]

Front. Hum. Neurosci., 27 January 2014 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00017

A call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness
Etzel Cardeña*

• Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Science thrives when there is an open, informed discussion of all evidence, and recognition that scientific knowledge is provisional and subject to revision. This attitude is in stark contrast with reaching conclusions based solely on a previous set of beliefs or on the assertions of authority figures. Indeed, the search for knowledge wherever it may lead inspired a group of notable scientists and philosophers to found in 1882 the Society for Psychical Research in London. Its purpose was “to investigate that large body of debatable phenomena… without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems.” Some of the areas in consciousness they investigated such as psychological dissociation, hypnosis, and preconscious cognition are now well integrated into mainstream science. That has not been the case with research on phenomena such as purported telepathy or precognition, which some scientists (a clear minority according to the surveys conducted http://en.wikademia.org/Surveys_of_academic_opinion_regarding_parapsychology) dismiss a priori as pseudoscience or illegitimate. Contrary to the negative impression given by some critics, we would like to stress the following:

(1) Research on parapsychological phenomena (psi) is being carried out in various accredited universities and research centers throughout the world by academics in different disciplines trained in the scientific method (e.g., circa 80 Ph.D.s have been awarded in psi-related topics in the UK in recent years). This research has continued for over a century despite the taboo against investigating the topic, almost complete lack of funding, and professional and personal attacks (Cardeña, 201). The Parapsychological Association has been an affiliate of the AAAS since 1969, and more than 20 Nobel prizewinners and many other eminent scientists have supported the study of psi or even conducted research themselves (Cardeña, 2013).

(2) Despite a negative attitude by some editors and reviewers, results supporting the validity of psi phenomena continue to be published in peer-reviewed, academic journals in relevant fields, from psychology to neuroscience to physics e.g., (Storm et al., 2010; Bem, 2011; Hameroff, 2012; Radin et al., 2012).

(3) Increased experimental controls have not eliminated or even decreased significant support for the existence of psi phenomena, as suggested by various recent meta-analyses (Sherwood and Roe, 2003; Schmidt et al., 2004; Bösch et al., 2006; Radin et al., 2006; Storm et al., 2010, 2012, 2013; Tressoldi, 2011; Mossbridge et al., 2012; Schmidt, 2012).

(4) These meta-analyses and other studies (Blackmore, 1980)suggest that data supportive of psi phenomena cannot reasonably be accounted for by chance or by a “file drawer” effect. Indeed, contrary to most disciplines, parapsychology journals have for decades encouraged publication of null results and of papers critical of a psi explanation (Wiseman et al., 1996; Schönwetter et al., 2011). A psi trial registry has been established to improve research practice http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/TrialRegistryDetails.html.

(5) The effect sizes reported in most meta-analyses are relatively small and the phenomena cannot be produced on demand, but this also characterizes various phenomena found in other disciplines that focus on complex human behavior and performance such as psychology and medicine (Utts, 1991; Richard and Bond, 2003).

(6) Although more conclusive explanations for psi phenomena await further theoretical and research developments, they do not prima facie violate known laws of nature given modern theories in physics that transcend classical restrictions of time and space, combined with growing evidence for quantum effects in biological systems (Sheehan, 2011; Lambert et al., 2013).

With respect to the proposal that “exceptional claims require exceptional evidence,” the original intention of the phrase is typically misunderstood (Truzzi, 1978). Even in its inaccurate interpretation what counts as an “exceptional claim” is far from clear. For instance, many phenomena now accepted in science such as the existence of meteorites, the germ theory of disease, or, more recently, adult neurogenesis, were originally considered so exceptional that evidence for their existence was ignored or dismissed by contemporaneous scientists. It is also far from clear what would count as “exceptional evidence” or who would set that threshold. Dismissing empirical observations a priori, based solely on biases or theoretical assumptions, underlies a distrust of the ability of the scientific process to discuss and evaluate evidence on its own merits. The undersigned differ in the extent to which we are convinced that the case for psi phenomena has already been made, but not in our view of science as a non-dogmatic, open, critical but respectful process that requires thorough consideration of all evidence as well as skepticism toward both the assumptions we already hold and those that challenge them.

Daryl Bem, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Cornell University, USA
Etzel Cardeña, Thorsen Professor of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden
Bernard Carr, Professor in Mathematics and Astronomy, University of London, UK
C. Robert Cloninger, Renard Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics, and Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Robert G. Jahn, Past Dean of Engineering, Princeton University, USA
Brian Josephson, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Cambridge, UK (Nobel prizewinner in physics, 1973)
Menas C. Kafatos, Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics, Chapman University, USA
Irving Kirsch, Professor of Psychology, University of Plymouth, Lecturer in Medicine, Harvard Medical School, USA, UK
Mark Leary, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, USA
Dean Radin, Chief Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Adjunct Faculty in Psychology, Sonoma State University, USA
Robert Rosenthal, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Riverside, Edgar Pierce Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, USA
Lothar Schäfer, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Physical Chemistry, University of Arkansas, USA
Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, UK
Charles T. Tart, Professor in Psychology Emeritus, University of California, Davis, USA
Simon Thorpe, Director of Research CNRS (Brain and Cognition), University of Toulouse, France
Patrizio Tressoldi, Researcher in Psychology, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy
Jessica Utts, Professor and Chair of Statistics, University of California, Irvine, USA
Max Velmans, Professor Emeritus in Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Caroline Watt, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Edinburgh University, UK
Phil Zimbardo, Professor in Psychology Emeritus, Stanford University, USA
And…
P. Baseilhac, Researcher in Theoretical Physics, University of Tours, France
Eberhard Bauer, Dept. Head, Institute of Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg, Germany
Julie Beischel, Adjunct Faculty in Psychology and Integrated Inquity, Saybrook University, USA
Hans Bengtsson, Professor of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden
Michael Bloch, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of San Francisco, USA
Stephen Braude, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
Richard Broughton, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, University of Northampton, UK
Antonio Capafons, Professor of Psychology, University of Valencia, Spain
James C. Carpenter, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA
Allan Leslie Combs, Doshi Professor of Consciousness Studies, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA
Deborah Delanoy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Northampton, UK
Arnaud Delorme, Professor of Neuroscience, Paul Sabatier University, France
Vilfredo De Pascalis, Professor of General Psychology, “La Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy
Kurt Dressler, Professor in Molecular Spectroscopy Emeritus, Eidg. Techn. Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland
Hoyt Edge, Hugh H. and Jeannette G. McKean Professor of Philosophy, Rollins College, USA
Suitbert Ertel, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Göttingen, Germany
Franco Fabbro, Professor in Child Neuropsychiatry, University of Udine, Italy
Enrico Facco, Professor of Anesthesia and Intensive Care, University of Padua, Italy
Wolfgang Fach, Researcher, Institute of Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg, Germany
Harris L. Friedman, Former Research Professor of Psychology, University of Florida, USA
Alan Gauld, Former Reader in Psychology, University of Nottingham, UK
Antoon Geels, Professor in the Psychology of Religion Emeritus, Lund University, Sweden
Bruce Greyson, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Erlendur Haraldsson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Iceland, Iceland
Richard Conn Henry, Academy Professor (Physics and Astronomy), The Johns Hopkins University, USA
David J. Hufford, University Professor Emeritus, Penn State College of Medicine, USA
Oscar Iborra, Researcher, Department of Experimental Psychology, Granada University, Spain
Harvey Irwin, former Associate Professor, University of New England, Australia
Graham Jamieson, Lecturer in Human Neuropsychology, University of New England, Australia
Erick Janssen, Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychology, Indiana University, USA
Per Johnsson, Head, Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden
Edward F. Kelly, Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Emily Williams Kelly, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA
Hideyuki Kokubo, Researcher, Institute for Informatics of Consciousness, Meiji University, Japan
Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies, Rice University, USA
Stanley Krippner, Professor of Psychology and Integrated Inquiry, Saybrook University, USA
David Luke, Senior Lecturer, Department of Psychology and Counselling, University of Greenwich, UK
Fatima Regina Machado, Researcher, Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil
Markus Maier, Professor in Psychology, University of Munich, Germany
Gerhard Mayer, Researcher, Institute of Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg, Germany
Antonia Mills, Professor First Nations Studies, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada
Garret Moddel, Professor in Electrical, Computer, & Energy Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Professor of Psychiatry, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brasil
Andrew Moskowitz, Professor in Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark
Julia Mossbridge, Fellow in Psychology, Northwestern University, USA
Judi Neal, Professor Emeritus of Management, University of New Haven, USA
Roger Nelson, Retired Research Staff, Princeton University, USA
Fotini Pallikari, Professor of Physics, University of Athens, Greece
Alejandro Parra, Researcher in Psychology, Universidad Abierta Interamericana, Argentina
José Miguel Pérez Navarro, Lecturer in Education, International University of La Rioja, Spain
Gerald H. Pollack, Professor in Bioengineering. University of Washington, Seattle, USA
John Poynton, Professor Emeritus in Biology, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
David Presti, Senior Lecturer, Neurobiology and Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Thomas Rabeyron, Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Nantes University, France
Inmaculada Ramos Lerate, Researcher in Physics, Alba Synchrotron Light Source, Barcelona, Spain.
Chris Roe, Professor of Psychology, University of Northampton, UK
Stefan Schmidt, Professor, Europa Universität Viadrina, Germany
Gary E. Schwartz, Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery, University of Arizona, USA
Daniel P. Sheehan, Professor of Physics, University of San Diego, USA
Simon Sherwood, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Greenwich, UK
Christine Simmonds-Moore, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of West Georgia, USA
Mário Simões, Professor in Psychiatry. University of Lisbon, Portugal
Huston Smith, Prof. of Philosophy Emeritus, Syracuse University, USA
Jerry Solfvin, Associate Professor in Indic Studies, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA
Lance Storm, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Adelaide, Australia
Jeffrey Allan Sugar, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA
Neil Theise, Professor of Pathology and Medicine, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA
Jim Tucker, Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia, USA
Yulia Ustinova, Associate Professor in History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Walter von Lucadou, Senior Lecturer at the Furtwangen Technical University, Germany
Maurits van den Noort, Senior Researcher, Free University of Brussels, Belgium
David Vernon, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Harald Walach, Professor, Europa Universität Viadrina, Germany
Helmut Wautischer, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Sonoma State University, USA
Donald West, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK
N.C. Wickramasinghe, Professor in Astrobiology, Cardiff University, UK
Fred Alan Wolf, formerly Professor in physics at San Diego State University, the Universities of Paris, London, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Robin Wooffitt, Professor of Sociology, University of York, UK
Wellington Zangari, Professor in Psychology, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Aldo Zucco, Professor, Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova, Italy

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Wiseman, R., Smith, M., and Kornbrot, D. (1996). Exploring possible sender-to-experimenter acoustic leakage in the PRL autoganzfeld experiments. J. Parapsychol. 60, 97–128.

Frontiers | A call for an open, informed study of all aspects of consciousness | Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

 

[Constance]

CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES AND THE SCIENTIFIC TASKS AT HAND

Measuring consciousness: relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches


Papers citing the above article,
Cited by ...


What Explains Consciousness? Or…What Consciousness Explains?

 

[Soupie]

Artificial Intelligence, Really, Is Pseudo-Intelligence : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

"Alva Noë

One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence.

This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeapordy! with Watson. We used "it" the way we use clocks.

Philosophers and biologists like to compare the living organism to a machine. And once that's on the table, we are lead to wonder whether various kinds of human-made machines could have minds like ours, too.

But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value. It seeks nourishment. It makes itself — and in making itself it introduces meaning into the universe.

Now, admittedly, unicellular organisms are not very bright — but they are smarter than clocks and supercomputers. For they possess the rudimentary beginnings of that driven, active, compelling engagement that we call life and that we call mind. Machines don't have information. We process information with them. But the amoeba does have information — it gathers it, it manufactures it.

I'll start worrying about the singularity when IBM has made machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba.

There is another sense, though, in which we hit the singularity long ago. We don't make smart machines and we don't make machines likely to be smarter than us. But we do make ourselves smarter and more flexible and more capable through our machines and other technologies. Clothing, language, pictures, writing, the abacus and so on. Each of these has not only expanded us but has altered us, making us into something we were not before. And this process of making and remaking, or extending and transforming, is as old as our species.

In a sense, then, we've always been trans-human, more than human, or more than merely biological. Or rather, our biology as always been technology-enriched and more than merely flesh and blood.

We carry on the process that begins with the amoeba. Watson is our achievement. Its pseudo-intelligence is our genuine, 100 percent novel intelligence."

Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California at Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe​

 

[Constance]

Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere
Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch
(Submitted on 27 May 2014)

The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in cases where we would like to know if consciousness is present: patients with a few remaining islands of functioning cortex, pre-term infants, non-mammalian species, and machines that are rapidly outperforming people at driving, recognizing faces and objects, and answering difficult questions. To address these issues, we need a theory of consciousness that specifies what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) does so by starting from conscious experience via five phenomenological axioms of existence, composition, information, integration, and exclusion. From these it derives five postulates about the properties required of physical mechanisms to support consciousness. The theory provides a principled account of both the quantity and the quality of an individual experience, and a calculus to evaluate whether or not a particular system of mechanisms is conscious and of what. IIT explains a range of clinical and laboratory findings, makes testable predictions, and extrapolates to unusual conditions. The theory vindicates some panpsychist intuitions - consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental property, is graded, is common among biological organisms, and even some very simple systems have some. However, unlike panpsychism, IIT implies that not everything is conscious, for example group of individuals or feed forward networks. In sharp contrast with widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behavior were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing.

Downloadable pdf at the link ~~~ [1405.7089] Consciousness: Here, There but Not Everywhere

 

[Soupie]

Here is a blog post which does an excellent job outlining -- what I would call -- the Information Philosophy of Mind model. (To be clear, the author doesn't use that label.) I'm hopeful that this essay can clarify any questions @Constance or others might have about the distinction between the IPM, Information Theory, and the computational theory of mind. Interestingly, like Bob from the IPM website, this author also argues for the existence of free will using essentially the same argument as Bob. There are also shades of @Pharoah 's HCT present.

In the comments section, the author's argument for free will is quickly challenged, of course.

Wiring the Brain: Top-down causation and the emergence of agency

There is a paradox at the heart of modern neuroscience. As we succeed in explaining more and more cognitive operations in terms of patterns of electrical activity of specific neural circuits, it seems we move ever farther from bridging the gap between the physical and the mental. Indeed, each advance seems to further relegate mental activity to the status of epiphenomenon – something that emerges from the physical activity of the brain but that plays no part in controlling it. It seems difficult to reconcile the reductionist, reverse-engineering approach to brain function with the idea that we human beings have thoughts, desires, goals and beliefs that influence our actions. If actions are driven by the physical flow of ions through networks of neurons, then is there any room or even any need for psychological explanations of behaviour? ...

Causes of behaviour can be described both at the level of mechanisms and at the level of reasons. There is no conflict between those two levels of explanation nor is one privileged over the other – both are active at the same time. Discussion of meaning does not imply some mystical or supernatural force that over-rides physical causation. It’s not that non-physical stuff pushes physical stuff around in some dualist dance. (After all, “non-physical stuff” is a contradiction in terms). It’s that the higher-order organisation of physical stuff – which has both informational content and meaningfor the organism – constrains and directs how physical stuff moves, because it is directed towards a purpose. ...

I could explain how [a machine] works in purely physical terms relating to the activity and interactions of all its components, but the reason it behaves that way would be missing from such a description – the components are arranged the way they are so that the machine can carry out its designed function. In living things, purpose is not designed but is cumulatively incorporated in hindsight by natural selection. The over-arching goals of survival and reproduction, and the subsidiary goals of feeding, mating, avoiding predators, nurturing young, etc., come pre-wired in the system through millions of years of evolution. ...

To me, this deterministic model of the brain falls at the first hurdle, for one simple reason – we know that the universe is not deterministic. If it were, then everything that happened since the Big Bang and everything that will happen in the future would have been predestined by the specific arrangements and states of all the molecules in the universe at that moment. Thankfully, the universe doesn’t work that way – there is substantial randomness at all levels, from quantum uncertainty to thermal fluctuations to emergent noise in complex systems, such as living organisms. ...

In the nervous system, information is physically carried in the arrangements of molecules at the cellular level and in the patterns of electrical activity of neurons. For sensory information, this pattern is imposed by physical objects or forces from the environment (e.g., photons, sound waves, odor molecules) impinging on sensory neurons and directly inducing molecular changes and neuronal activity. The resultant patterns of activity thus form a representationof something in the world and therefore have information – order is enforced on the system, driving one particular pattern of activity from an enormous possible set of microstates. This is true not just for information about sensory stimuli but also for representations of internal states, emotions, goals, actions, etc. All of these are physically encoded in patterns of nerve cell activity.

These patterns carry information in different ways: in gradients of electrical potential in dendrites (an analog signal), in the firing of action potentials (a digital signal), in the temporal sequence of spikes from individual neurons (a temporally integrated signal), in the spatial patterns of coincident firing across an ensemble (a spatially integrated signal), and even in the trajectory of a network through state-space over some period of time (a spatiotemporally integrated signal!). The operations that carry out the spatial and temporal integration occur in the process of transmitting the information from one set of neurons to another. It is thus the higher-order patterns that encode information rather than the lower-order details of the arrangements of all the molecules in the relevant neurons at any given time-point. ...

But I think there are still a couple elements missing to really give significance to information. The first is salience – some things are more important for the organism to pay attention to at any given moment than others. The brain has systems to attribute salience to various stimuli, based on things like novelty, relevance to a current goal (food is more salient when you are hungry, for example), current threat sensitivity and recent experience (e.g., a loud noise is less salient if it has been preceded by several quieter ones).

The second is value – our brains assign positive or negative value to things, in a way that reflects our goals and our evolutionary imperatives. Painful things are bad; things that smell of bacteria are bad; things that taste of bitter/likely poisonous compounds are bad; social defeat is bad; missing Breaking Bad is bad. Food is good; unless you’re dieting in which case not eating is good; an opportunity to mate is (very) good; a pay raise is good; finally finishing a blogpost is good.

The value of these things is not intrinsic to them – it is a response of the organism, which reflects both evolutionary imperatives and current states and goals (i.e., purpose). This isn’t done by magic – salience and value are attributed by neuromodulatory systems that help set the responsiveness of other circuits to various types of stimuli. They effectively change the weights of synaptic connections and reconfigure neuronal networks, but they do it on the fly, like a sound engineer increasing or decreasing the volume through different channels. ...

To reiterate, the meaning of any pattern of neural activity is given not just by the information it carries but by the implications of that information for the organism. Those implications arise from the experiences of the individual, from the associations it has made, the contingencies it has learned from and the values it has assigned to past or predicted outcomes. This is what the brain is for – learning from past experience and abstracting the most general possible principles in order to assign value to predicted outcomes of various possible actions across the widest possible range of new situations.

This is how true agency can emerge. The organism escapes from a passive, deterministic stimulus-response mode and ceases to be an automaton. Instead, it becomes an active and autonomous entity. It chooses actions based on the meaning of the available information, for that organism, weighted by values based on its ownexperiences and its own goals and motives. In short, it ceases to be pushed around, offering no resistance to every causal force, and becomes a cause in its own right.

This kind of emergence doesn’t violate physical law. The system is still built of atoms and molecules and cells and circuits. And changes to those components will still affect how the system works. But that’s not all the system is. ...​

 

[Constance]

. . . Here is a blog post which does an excellent job outlining -- what I would call -- the Information Philosophy of Mind model. (To be clear, the author doesn't use that label.) I'm hopeful that this essay can clarify any questions @Constance or others might have about the distinction between the IPM, Information Theory, and the computational theory of mind.

Thank you for posting this insightful essay. I think it can inspire some further development of our discussion of consciousness and mind in this thread. I'm sorry to say that, for me at least, the essay itself does not distinguish among "IPM, Information Theory, and the computational theory of mind." Can you flesh out what you see as "the distinction" or distinctions between and among these theories as you see them expressed in the essay? If you do that, with or without reference to this essay, it would enable us to move forward with some clarity.

Here are quotations from that essay that I found especially significant:

"Causes of behaviour can be described both at the level of mechanisms and at the level of reasons. There is no conflict between those two levels of explanation nor is one privileged over the other – both are active at the same time. Discussion of meaning does not imply some mystical or supernatural force that over-rides physical causation. It’s not that non-physical stuff pushes physical stuff around in some dualist dance. (After all, “non-physical stuff” is a contradiction in terms). It’s that the higher-order organisation of physical stuff – which has both informational content and meaning for the organism – constrains and directs how physical stuff moves, because it is directed towards a purpose."

". . . the meaning of any pattern of neural activity is given not just by the information it carries but by the implications of that information for the organism. Those implications arise from the experiences of the individual, from the associations it has made, the contingencies it has learned from and the values it has assigned to past or predicted outcomes. This is what the brain is for – learning from past experience and abstracting the most general possible principles in order to assign value to predicted outcomes of various possible actions across the widest possible range of new situations."

"This is how true agency can emerge. The organism escapes from a passive, deterministic stimulus-response mode and ceases to be an automaton. Instead, it becomes an active and autonomous entity. It chooses actions based on the meaning of the available information, for that organism, weighted by values based on its ownexperiences and its own goals and motives. In short, it ceases to be pushed around, offering no resistance to every causal force, and becomes a cause in its own right."

 

[Constance]

This paper (and the special issue of Consciousness and Cognition in which it appeared) indicates that some neuroscientific research is addressing temporality as a major component of consciousness. I hope to be able to find links to free online sources for this paper and others from that issue.

Neural correlates of temporality: Default mode variability and temporal awareness ☆

• Dan Lloyd

Abstract

The continual background awareness of duration is an essential structure of consciousness, conferring temporal extension to the many objects of awareness within the evanescent sensory present. Seeking the possible neural correlates of ubiquitous temporal awareness, this article reexamines fMRI data from off-task “default mode” (DM) periods in 25 healthy subjects studied by Grady et al. (“Age-related Changes in Brain Activity across the Adult Lifespan,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18(2), 2005). “Brain reading” using support vector machines detected information specifying elapsed time, and further analysis specified distributed networks encoding implicit time. These networks fluctuate; none are continuously active during DM. However, the aggregate regions of greatest variability closely resemble the default mode network. It appears that the default mode network has an important role as a state-dependent monitor of temporality.

Referred to by

• Geoffrey Lee
• Commentary on Dan Lloyd: “Neural correlates of Temporality”
• Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 21, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 707-710
• • PDF (132 K)

Neural correlates of temporality: Default mode variability and temporal awareness

 

[Soupie]

@Constance

My sense is that computationalists equate the brain with a computer and the mind with software. They might believe that the human mind is simply a program like Windows 8 that can be reduced to a finite algorithm.

I think the IPM differs in that while it views mind as essentially information – as might the computation theory of mind — the IPM recognizes the fundamental role of the physical body and environment in the realization of mind. Also, the IPM does not suggest that a human mind can be reduced to a finite algorithm.

The IPM differs from information theory in that the latter is concerned only with quantities of information, whereas the IPM is concerned with the quality of information.

 

[Constance]

@Constance

My sense is that computationalists equate the brain with a computer and the mind with software. They might believe that the human mind is simply a program like Windows 8 that can be reduced to a finite algorithm.

I think the IPM differs in that while it views mind as essentially information – as might the computation theory of mind — the IPM recognizes the fundamental role of the physical body and environment in the realization of mind. Also, the IPM does not suggest that a human mind can be reduced to a finite algorithm.

The IPM differs from information theory in that the latter is concerned only with quantities of information, whereas the IPM is concerned with the quality of information.

Thank you. Do you see, as I do, a significant difference between 'information theory' and the IPM? And do you agree that this difference should be explored here for better understanding of its meaning regarding consciousness and mind? It seems to me that Tononi-Koch, in their most recent paper (linked above), have now recognized this difference as well. How would you define or describe this difference? Do you think, as I do, that it is then necessary that we (and those whose research we cite in supporting our thinking about consciousness and mind) identify more clearly what we mean by 'information'?

 

[Constance]

Here is a blog post which does an excellent job outlining -- what I would call -- the Information Philosophy of Mind model. (To be clear, the author doesn't use that label.) I'm hopeful that this essay can clarify any questions @Constance or others might have about the distinction between the IPM, Information Theory, and the computational theory of mind. Interestingly, like Bob from the IPM website, this author also argues for the existence of free will using essentially the same argument as Bob. There are also shades of @Pharoah 's HCT present.

In the comments section, the author's argument for free will is quickly challenged, of course.

Wiring the Brain: Top-down causation and the emergence of agency

There is a paradox at the heart of modern neuroscience. As we succeed in explaining more and more cognitive operations in terms of patterns of electrical activity of specific neural circuits, it seems we move ever farther from bridging the gap between the physical and the mental. Indeed, each advance seems to further relegate mental activity to the status of epiphenomenon – something that emerges from the physical activity of the brain but that plays no part in controlling it. It seems difficult to reconcile the reductionist, reverse-engineering approach to brain function with the idea that we human beings have thoughts, desires, goals and beliefs that influence our actions. If actions are driven by the physical flow of ions through networks of neurons, then is there any room or even any need for psychological explanations of behaviour? ...

Causes of behaviour can be described both at the level of mechanisms and at the level of reasons. There is no conflict between those two levels of explanation nor is one privileged over the other – both are active at the same time. Discussion of meaning does not imply some mystical or supernatural force that over-rides physical causation. It’s not that non-physical stuff pushes physical stuff around in some dualist dance. (After all, “non-physical stuff” is a contradiction in terms). It’s that the higher-order organisation of physical stuff – which has both informational content and meaningfor the organism – constrains and directs how physical stuff moves, because it is directed towards a purpose. ...

I could explain how [a machine] works in purely physical terms relating to the activity and interactions of all its components, but the reason it behaves that way would be missing from such a description – the components are arranged the way they are so that the machine can carry out its designed function. In living things, purpose is not designed but is cumulatively incorporated in hindsight by natural selection. The over-arching goals of survival and reproduction, and the subsidiary goals of feeding, mating, avoiding predators, nurturing young, etc., come pre-wired in the system through millions of years of evolution. ...

To me, this deterministic model of the brain falls at the first hurdle, for one simple reason – we know that the universe is not deterministic. If it were, then everything that happened since the Big Bang and everything that will happen in the future would have been predestined by the specific arrangements and states of all the molecules in the universe at that moment. Thankfully, the universe doesn’t work that way – there is substantial randomness at all levels, from quantum uncertainty to thermal fluctuations to emergent noise in complex systems, such as living organisms. ...

In the nervous system, information is physically carried in the arrangements of molecules at the cellular level and in the patterns of electrical activity of neurons. For sensory information, this pattern is imposed by physical objects or forces from the environment (e.g., photons, sound waves, odor molecules) impinging on sensory neurons and directly inducing molecular changes and neuronal activity. The resultant patterns of activity thus form a representationof something in the world and therefore have information – order is enforced on the system, driving one particular pattern of activity from an enormous possible set of microstates. This is true not just for information about sensory stimuli but also for representations of internal states, emotions, goals, actions, etc. All of these are physically encoded in patterns of nerve cell activity.

These patterns carry information in different ways: in gradients of electrical potential in dendrites (an analog signal), in the firing of action potentials (a digital signal), in the temporal sequence of spikes from individual neurons (a temporally integrated signal), in the spatial patterns of coincident firing across an ensemble (a spatially integrated signal), and even in the trajectory of a network through state-space over some period of time (a spatiotemporally integrated signal!). The operations that carry out the spatial and temporal integration occur in the process of transmitting the information from one set of neurons to another. It is thus the higher-order patterns that encode information rather than the lower-order details of the arrangements of all the molecules in the relevant neurons at any given time-point. ...

But I think there are still a couple elements missing to really give significance to information. The first is salience – some things are more important for the organism to pay attention to at any given moment than others. The brain has systems to attribute salience to various stimuli, based on things like novelty, relevance to a current goal (food is more salient when you are hungry, for example), current threat sensitivity and recent experience (e.g., a loud noise is less salient if it has been preceded by several quieter ones).

The second is value – our brains assign positive or negative value to things, in a way that reflects our goals and our evolutionary imperatives. Painful things are bad; things that smell of bacteria are bad; things that taste of bitter/likely poisonous compounds are bad; social defeat is bad; missing Breaking Bad is bad. Food is good; unless you’re dieting in which case not eating is good; an opportunity to mate is (very) good; a pay raise is good; finally finishing a blogpost is good.

The value of these things is not intrinsic to them – it is a response of the organism, which reflects both evolutionary imperatives and current states and goals (i.e., purpose). This isn’t done by magic – salience and value are attributed by neuromodulatory systems that help set the responsiveness of other circuits to various types of stimuli. They effectively change the weights of synaptic connections and reconfigure neuronal networks, but they do it on the fly, like a sound engineer increasing or decreasing the volume through different channels. ...

To reiterate, the meaning of any pattern of neural activity is given not just by the information it carries but by the implications of that information for the organism. Those implications arise from the experiences of the individual, from the associations it has made, the contingencies it has learned from and the values it has assigned to past or predicted outcomes. This is what the brain is for – learning from past experience and abstracting the most general possible principles in order to assign value to predicted outcomes of various possible actions across the widest possible range of new situations.

This is how true agency can emerge. The organism escapes from a passive, deterministic stimulus-response mode and ceases to be an automaton. Instead, it becomes an active and autonomous entity. It chooses actions based on the meaning of the available information, for that organism, weighted by values based on its ownexperiences and its own goals and motives. In short, it ceases to be pushed around, offering no resistance to every causal force, and becomes a cause in its own right.

This kind of emergence doesn’t violate physical law. The system is still built of atoms and molecules and cells and circuits. And changes to those components will still affect how the system works. But that’s not all the system is. ...​

Soupie, I would like to read the comments following the essay you linked but am having trouble linking to the page that contains these. Do you have another more direct link? Thanks.

 

[Constance]

Empirical Challenges to Conventional Mind-Brain Theory
Edward F. Kelly
Emily Williams Kelly
Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences
University of Virginia

Synopsis: Despite many significant accomplishments, mainstream scientific psychology has not provided a satisfactory theory of mind, or solved the mind-body problem, and physicalist accounts of the mind are approaching their limits without fully accounting for its properties. The computational theory of mind has collapsed, forcing physicalism to retreat into what necessarily constitutes its final frontier, the unique biology of the brain, but this biological naturalism seems destined to fare little better. Some critical properties of human mental life can already be recognized as irreconcilable in principle with physical operations of the brain, and others appear likely to prove so as well.

I. Introduction
II. Extreme Psychophysiological Influence
III. Extremes of Informational Capacity and Precision
IV. Memory
V. Psychological Automatisms and Secondary Centers of Consciousness
VI. Psi Phenomena
VII. Genius-Level Creativity
VIII. Mystical Experience
IX. The Unity of Conscious Experience
X. The Heart of the Mind
XI. Conclusion: Toward an Expanded Scientific Psychology

I. INTRODUCTION
Nearly all contemporary psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers subscribe – explicitly or implicitly – to some version of physicalism [see Mind-Body Problem]. Physicalist conceptions of human mind and personality, contrary to traditional and everyday notions, run along roughly the following lines: We human beings are nothing but extremely complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle causally explainable from the bottom up in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics – ultimately, that is, in terms of local contact interactions among bits of matter moving in accordance with mechanical laws under the influence of fields of force.

Some of what we know, and the substrate of our general capacities to learn more, are built-in genetically as complex resultants of biological evolution. Everything else comes to us directly or indirectly by way of our sensory systems, through energetic exchanges with the environment of types already largely understood. Mind and consciousness are generated by – or in some mysterious way identical with – neurophysiological events and processes in the brain. Mental causation, free will, and the “self” do not really exist; they are mere illusions, ineffectual by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And since mind and personality are entirely products of our bodily machinery, they are necessarily extinguished, totally and finally, by the demise and dissolution of that body.

Views of this sort unquestionably hold sway over the vast majority of contemporary scientists, and they have also percolated widely through the public at large. We believe, however, that they are at best seriously incomplete, and at certain critical points demonstrably false, empirically. In this article, we will briefly catalogue a variety of interrelated empirical phenomena that appear difficult or impossible to explain in conventional physicalist terms. We emphasize from the outset that these phenomena must be considered collectively, not piecemeal; they not only challenge the conventional physicalist picture individually, but converge in pointing to the need for a radically novel way of understanding the intimate relationship of mind and brain. We also emphasize that we are presenting here only a skeletal outline of the kinds of phenomena to which we wish to direct readers’ attention. Much fuller treatments of relevant empirical evidence and the issues raised can be found through works cited in the Bibliography. . . . .

http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/cl.../cspp/dops/Ramachandran EHB article FINAL.pdf

 

[Constance]

The last three sections from the above paper:

IX. THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

Under this heading we will briefly address two interrelated problems. The first and narrower is the so-called “binding” problem, which emerged as a consequence of the success of contemporary neuroscientists in analyzing sensory mechanisms, particularly in the visual system [see Visual Perception]. It turns out that different properties of a visual object such as its form, color, and motion in depth are handled individually by largely separate regions or mechanisms within the brain. But once the stimulus has been thus dismembered, so to speak, how does it get back together again as a unit of visual experience?

Only one thing is certain: The unification of experience is not achieved anatomically. There are no privileged places or structures in the brain where everything comes together, either for the visual system itself or for the sensory systems altogether. Some early theorists such as James and McDougall argued that the evident disparity between the multiplicity of physiological processes in the brain and the felt unity of conscious experience could only be resolved in materialist terms by anatomical convergence, and since there is no such convergence, materialism must be false. This argument, although ingenious, relied upon the faulty premise that the only possible physical means of unification must be anatomical in nature. All current neurophysiological proposals for solving the binding problem are instead functional in nature; the essential concept common to all of them is that oscillatory electrical activity in widely distributed neural populations can be rapidly and reversibly synchronized, particularly in the “gamma” band of EEG frequencies (roughly 30-70 Hz), thereby providing a possible mechanistic solution to the binding problem [see Electroencephalography].

A great deal of sophisticated experimental and theoretical work over the past 20 years has demonstrated that such mechanisms do in fact exist in the nervous system, and that they are active in conjunction with normal perceptual synthesis. Indeed, contemporary physicalism has crystallized neurophysiologically in the form of a family of “global workspace” theories, all of which make the central claim that conscious experience occurs specifically – and only – in conjunction with large-scale patterns of gamma-band oscillatory activity linking widely separated regions of the brain [see Consciousness].

The neurophysiological global workspace, however, cannot be the whole story, because a large body of recent evidence demonstrates that elaborate, vivid, and life-transforming conscious experience sometimes occurs under extreme physiological conditions, such as deep general anesthesia and cardiac arrest, that categorically preclude workspace operation. In short, it appears to us that the early theorists were right after all, albeit for the wrong reason. In effect, we believe, recent progress in theoretical neuroscience, coupled with advances in our capacity to retrieve patients from the borderland of death, has provided new means for the falsification of physicalist theories of mind-brain relations [see Near-Death Experiences].

Availability of this emerging evidence emboldens us to make some further and more speculative remarks regarding the larger problem of perceptual synthesis, and the direction in which things seem to us to be moving.
It is an historical fact that mainstream psychology has always tended on the whole to try to solve its problems in minimalist fashion and with as little reference as possible to what all of us experience every day as central features of our conscious mental life. The early workers in “mechanical translation,” for example, imagined that they could do a decent job simply by constructing a large dictionary that would enable substitution of words in one language for words in the other. This approach failed miserably, and we were slowly driven, failed step by failed step, to the recognition that truly adequate translation presupposes understanding, or in short a full appreciation of the capacities underlying the human use of language.

A similar evolution is underway in regard to perceptual theory [see Perceptual Systems (Overview)]. Most of the work to date has taken a strongly “bottom-up” approach, which views perceptual synthesis as a kind of exhaustive calculation from the totality of input currently present at our sensory surfaces. Machine vision and robotics, for example, necessarily took this approach, and even in neuroscience it seemed to make sense to start with the most accessible parts of the perceptual systems – the end organs and their peripheral connections – and work our way inward. The great sensory systems themselves – vision, audition, somatosensation, and so on – were also presumed to operate more or less independently, and were in fact typically studied in isolation.

A separate tradition dating back at least to Kant and the early Gestalt theorists, and carried forward into the modern era by psychologists such as Ulric Neisser and Jerome Bruner, has been sensitive to the presence of “top-down” influences, both within and between sensory modalities. Although a few perceptual subsystems (such as those that produce incorrigible visual illusions) may be truly autonomous or “cognitively impenetrable,” these seem to be isolated and special cases. A very different overall picture of perceptual synthesis is currently emerging in which top-down influences predominate. On this view perceptual synthesis is achieved not from the input, but with its aid. This is necessarily the case for example in regard to ambiguous figures such as the Necker cube, where the stimulus information itself is insufficient to determine a uniquely correct interpretation. More generally, we routinely ignore information that is present in the input and supply information that is not, speed-reading providing a characteristic example. Something within us, a sort of world-generating or virtual-reality system, is continuously updating and projecting an overall model of the perceptual environment and our position within it, guided by limited samplings of the available sensory information.

As in the case of understanding spoken or written language, an enormous amount of general knowledge is constantly mobilized in service of this projective activity, which freely utilizes whatever information it finds relevant. Top-down and cross-modal sensory interactions have recently been recognized as the rule rather than the exception in perception, and neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás and his co-workers have advanced the view, which we believe is profoundly correct, that dreaming, far from being an odd and incidental part of our mental life, represents the fundamental form of this world-creating activity. Ordinary perceptual synthesis, on this inverted view of things, amounts to oneiric (dreamlike) activity constrained by sensory input. Psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann has proposed similar ideas in regard to hallucinatory activity more generally, with dreaming included. On his view such activity is again a ubiquitous and fundamental feature of our mental life, and the critical question is not “why do we sometimes hallucinate?” but rather “what keeps us from hallucinating most of the time?” The answer, he suggests, lies in inhibitory influences exerted by the brain activity that accompanies ongoing perceptual and cognitive functions of the ordinary waking sorts.

So far so good, but where exactly is the “top,” the ultimate source of this top-down world-creating activity? The mainstream neuroscientists who have already recognized its existence invariably presume that it arises entirely within the brain itself, but evidence such as that of near-death experiences occurring under extreme physiological conditions, and the more direct evidence of post-mortem survival, suggests that it may originate outside the brain as conventionally understood.

X. THE HEART OF THE MIND

In this section we will comment briefly on a hornet’s nest of issues lying at the core of mental life as all of us routinely experience it, every day. These issues have been the focus of extensive recent debates, especially in the philosophical literature, precisely because of their resistance to understanding in conventional physicalist terms. The issues are deep, individually complex, and densely interconnected, and what we can say here will necessarily amount to little more than a summary of our own opinions. Our central point is that the prevailing a priori commitment to physicalism has rendered us systematically incapable of dealing adequately with the mind’s most central and characteristic properties. We should rethink that commitment.

Consider first the issue of semantic content, the “meaning” of words and other forms of representation. Throughout our history, we have tried unsuccessfully to deal with this by “naturalizing” it, reducing it to something else that seems potentially more tractable. An old favorite among psychologists was that representations work by resembling what they represent, by virtue of some sort of built-in similarity or structural isomorphism, but any hope along these lines was long ago exploded by philosophical arguments. The central move subsequently made by classical cognitive psychology is essentially the semantic counterpart of the prevailing “functionalist” doctrine in philosophy of mind: Meanings are not to be conceived as intrinsic to words or concepts, but rather as deriving from and defined by the functional role those words or concepts play in the overall linguistic system. Currently there is great interest in “externalist” causal accounts of this functionalist type; in connectionism, dynamic systems theory, and neuroscience, for example, the “meaning” of a given response, such as the settling of a network into one of its “attractors” or the firing off a volley of spikes by a neuron in visual cortex, is typically identified with whatever it is in the organism’s environment that produces that response. But this simply cannot be right: How can such an account deal with abstract things, for example, or non-existent things? Responses do not qualify ipso facto as representations, nor signs as symbols. Something essential is being left out. That something, as John Searle has so effectively argued, is precisely what matters, the semantic or mental content.

Closely related to this is the more general and abstract philosophical problem of intentionality, the ability of any and all representational forms to be “about” things, events, and states of affairs in the world. Mainstream psychologists and philosophers have struggled to find ways of making intentionality intrinsic to the representations themselves, but again it just does not and cannot work, because something essential is left out. That something is the user of the representations. Intentionality is inherently a three-way relation involving users, symbols, and things symbolized, and the user cannot be eliminated. As Searle puts it in various places, the intentionality of language is secondary and derives from the intrinsic intentionality of the mind. Searle thus agrees in part with 19th-century philosopher Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality was the primary distinguishing mark of the mental. At the same time, however, Searle ignores the other and more fundamental part of Brentano’s thesis, which is that intentionality cannot be obtained from any kind of purely physical system, including brains.

Talk of “users” and the like raises for many contemporary psychologists and philosophers the terrifying specter of the self as a homunculus, a little being within who embodies all the capacities we sought to explain in the first place. Such a result would clearly be disastrous, because that being would evidently need a similar though smaller being within itself, and so on without end. Cognitive modelers seeking to provide strictly physicalist accounts of mental functions must therefore do so without invoking a homunculus, but in attempting this they routinely fail. Often the homuncular aspect is hidden, slipped into a model by its designers or builders and covertly enlisting the semantic and intentional capacities of its users or observers. Much contemporary work on computational modeling of memory, metaphor, and semantics harbors subtle problems of this sort. Sometimes, however, the homunculus is more brazenly evident. One example is David Marr’s account of vision, which applies computations to the two-dimensional array of retinal input in order to generate a “description” of the three-dimensional world that provided that input, but then needs someone to interpret the description. Another is Stephen Kosslyn’s model of visual imagery, which essentially puts up an image on a sort of internal TV screen, but then needs somebody else to view the image.

Cognitive models cannot function without a homunculus, we believe, precisely because they lack what we have – minds, with their capacities for semantics, intentionality, and all the rest built in. No homunculus problem, however, is posed by the structure of our conscious experience itself. The efforts of Daniel Dennett and other physicalists to claim that there is such a problem, and use that to ridicule any residue of dualism, rely upon the deeply flawed metaphor of the “Cartesian theater,” a place where mental contents get displayed and we pop in separately to view them. Descartes himself, James, and Searle, among others, all have this right; conscious experience comes to us whole and undivided, with the qualitative feels, phenomenological content, unity, and subjective point of view all built-in, intrinsic features. We and our experience cannot be separated in this way.
Finally, we wish simply to record our own deepest intuition as to where these issues lead. All of the great unsolved mysteries of the mind – semantics, intentionality, volition, the self, and consciousness – seem to us inextricably interconnected, with consciousness somehow at the root of all.

The consciousness we have in mind, however, is emphatically not that of people such as David Chalmers, irreducible but ineffectual, consisting merely of phenomenological properties or “qualia” arbitrarily tacked on to some sort of computational intelligence that supposedly does all the cognitive work. Ordinary perception, memory, and action are saturated with conceptual understanding, and conceptual understanding is saturated with phenomenological content. Volition too has an intentionality aspect, for as Nietzsche somewhere remarked, one cannot just will, one must will something. And as William James so forcibly argued at the dawn of our science, all of this perceptual, cognitive, and volitional activity somehow emanates from a mysterious and elusive “spiritual self,” which can often be sensed at the innermost subjective pole of our ongoing conscious experience.

We find it astonishing, and predict that it will be found so as well by our intellectual descendants, that so much of 20th-century psychology and philosophy sought – consciously! – to slight or ignore these first-person realities of the mind, and sometimes even to deny their existence. There is perhaps no better example of the power of pre-existing theoretical commitments to blind able persons to countervailing facts. The gloomy and counterintuitive modern conclusions summarized in Section I about mind, consciousness, free will, and the self really do follow – inexorably – from the physicalism that prevails today. But as we will next briefly explain, that kind of physicalism is itself incompatible with our deepest physical science.

XI. CONCLUSION: TOWARD AN EXPANDED SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that these unresolved explanatory problems concerning consciousness, the heart of the mind, and the other empirical phenomena surveyed in this article all have a common source in the narrow physicalist consensus which undergirds practically everything now going on in mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. But that consensus rests ultimately upon a classical-physics-based conception of nature, deriving from people such as Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, and Kelvin, that began its career by deliberately banishing conscious human minds from its purview! Given that historical background, it should occasion little surprise that William James – like Newton and Leibniz before him, and like increasing numbers of philosophers and scientists today – clearly recognized the inherent impossibility of explaining consciousness and allied phenomena within that Procrustean framework. James himself cautioned that the physical-science concepts underlying classical physicalism were “provisional and revisable things,” but he had no good alternatives in sight. As he correctly anticipated, however, that conception of nature was soon radically undermined by a tectonic shift in the foundations of physics itself, associated especially with the rise of quantum mechanics.

The founders of quantum mechanics discovered to their horror that the fundamental ideas of classical physics were not just limited but wrong, leading repeatedly to predictions falsified by experiment. The theory they were driven to in response, quantum theory, is a more fundamental and better physical theory that explains everything explainable in classical terms and a host of additional things as well, often to extraordinary levels of accuracy. No outcome predicted by it has ever been experimentally falsified. Furthermore, in at least some of its various interpretations quantum mechanics appears able to accommodate phenomena of the sorts surveyed here. Mathematical physicist Henry Stapp in particular has shown that a strictly orthodox interpretation derived from the mathematical formalization achieved by von Neumann leads naturally to a non-Cartesian form of dualism in which the human mind with its powers of attention and decision-making plays a necessary and fundamental role in completing the quantum dynamics. As a corollary, the classical doctrine of “causal closure of the physical”, which underlies most contemporary physicalist denials of free will, is specifically rejected [see Free Will]. And although details remain to be supplied, many of the challenging behavioral phenomena cited above, from stigmata and hypnotic blisters to psi phenomena and even post-mortem survival, seem potentially understandable within this broader framework.

The empirical challenges briefly surveyed here should be sufficient in themselves, we believe, to compel and to some extent foreshadow a radical reworking of central parts of our science of the mind. But it is also important to recognize that a scientific psychology enlarged in these ways will likely prove more compatible than present-day physicalist psychology both with everyday human experience and with our most fundamental physical science.

 

[Soupie]

Thank you. Do you see, as I do, a significant difference between 'information theory' and the IPM? And do you agree that this difference should be explored here for better understanding of its meaning regarding consciousness and mind? It seems to me that Tononi-Koch, in their most recent paper (linked above), have now recognized this difference as well. How would you define or describe this difference? Do you think, as I do, that it is then necessary that we (and those whose research we cite in supporting our thinking about consciousness and mind) identify more clearly what we mean by 'information'?

Yes, I think we should be clear about what we mean when we use the term "information." For me, information is meaningful data. I believe that meaningful data arises from the intimate relationship between the environment and the organisms which have evolved within it over billions of years.

I think a clearer understaning of how IPM differs from standard information theory would be nice. I'm not able to provide one however, haha.

Information theory seems to be mostly concerned with measuring the data and information of physical systems; and using these measures to make predications about the future states of physical systems.

The IPM seems to be specifically about the relationship between the systems of the environment, body, and brain and the quality of the data and information the arises from this relationship. In the IPM, the information that arises from the relationship between the environment and the body-brain is the mind. Whether this is a tenable hypothesis or a complete hypothesis remains to be seen.

Regarding the IIT and whether it's conception of information has changed in this most recent paper. I'm not sure. I'm going to guess it has not; however, maybe responses to this most recent paper will suggest otherwise.

I'm reading through the paper now. I'm curious to see how they address the problem of the "user" or "reader" of the data. That is, how does data become meaningful data (information).

Searle has critiqued IIT and that was his issue: how does the brain give meaning to data?

We seem to have a chicken and egg problem. If the mind is meaningful data, but a mind is needed for data to become meaningful, then what?

Can physical systems give rise to meaningful data or not?

@Pharoah 's HCT and IPM say they can. It remains to be seen in practice.

 

[Constance]

I think a clearer understaning of how IPM differs from standard information theory would be nice. I'm not able to provide one however, haha.

Information theory seems to be mostly concerned with measuring the data and information of physical systems; and using these measures to make predications about the future states of physical systems.

The IPM seems to be specifically about the relationship between the systems of the environment, body, and brain and the quality of the data and information the arises from this relationship. In the IPM, the information that arises from the relationship between the environment and the body-brain is the mind.

That statement doesn't capture the more complex impression I have from reading sections of the IPM website, especially this section under the heading 'Mind':

"Mind

Of all the problems that information philosophy may help to solve, few are more important than the question of Mind. There is little in philosophy that is more dehumanizing than the logic chopping and sophistical word juggling that denies the existence of Mind and Consciousness.

Some of the earliest philosophers saw immaterial Mind as the source of eternal Truths about Reality that could not be based on mere phenomena - unreliable sensations emanating from material bodies.

Descartes' dualism reduced the bodies of all animals to living machines, but left room for a non-mechanistic, immaterial, and indeterministic Mind above and beyond the deterministic limits set by the laws of nature. Kant renamed the ancient division of sensible and intelligible worlds, locating God, freedom, and immortality in his noumenal world.

Information philosophy hopes to show that information is itself that immaterial “substance” above and beyond matter and energy that the ancients, Descartes, and Kant were looking for.

Mind as Immaterial Information in a Biological Information Processor

Information philosophy views the mind as the immaterial information in the brain. The brain is seen as a biological information processor. Mind is software in the brain’s hardware, although it is altogether different from the logic gates, bit storage, algorithms, computations, and input/output systems of the type of digital computer used as a "computational model of mind" by today's cognitive scientists.

The “stuff” of thought is pure information, neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the soul in the body, the ghost in the machine.
In ancient philosophy, mind/soul versus body was one of the classic dualisms, such as idealism versus materialism, the problem of the one (monism) or the many (pluralism), the distinction between essence and existence, between universals and particulars, between necessity and contingency, between eternal and ephemeral, but most important, the difference between the intelligible world of the noumena and the sensible world of mere appearances or phenomena.

When mind and body are viewed today as a dualism, it is because the mind is considered to be fundamentally different from the material brain, though perhaps not another “substance.” We propose an easily understandable and critically important physical difference between matter and immaterial information. Whereas the total amount of matter is conserved, the universe is continuously creating new information - by rearranging existing matter into new information structures. The total amount of information (a kind of order) in the universe is increasing, despite the second law of thermodynamics, which - counterintuitively - says that the total amount of disorder (entropy) is also increasing.

Matter, along with energy (mc2), cannot increase. It is conserved, a constant of the universe. Information is not conserved. As information grows, it is the source of genuine novelty in the universe. The future is not determined by the past and present, because the future contains unpredictable new information. New information is continuously created.

The Evolution of Information to Become Mind

How did material substances come to be able to think? Ancient philosophers assumed that mind and thought must be primordial, perhaps even prior to the creation of matter. But we can now outline the creation and evolution of information from an initial state of the universe (with minimal, essentially zero information and no material at all) to the “information age” of today. Information philosophy makes the straightforward claim that human beings, especially their minds, are the most highly evolved form of information generation and processing system in the known universe. Recognizing this simple fact provides a radically new perspective on the central problems of psychology and philosophy of mind.

In a very deep sense, we are information.

The story of evolution from a matter-free universe origin to the information-processing brain/mind can be told in three major emergences:

1. the first appearance of matter, some of it organized into information structures,
2. the first appearance of life, information structures that create and transmit information by natural selection, variation, and heredity,
3. the appearance of human minds, which create, store, and transmit information external to their bodies.

With the appearance of life, purpose entered the universe. The fundamental purpose of all life is to survive, at least long enough to replicate. For most species, all of the information needed to survive is transmitted in the genes and the biological machinery of the cell. To benefit from the experiences of an ancestor, those experiences must somehow be encoded genetically, so they show up as a priori, built-in capabilities of the offspring. Konrad Lorenz said that what is a priori for an individual (ontogeny) was a posteriori for its ancestors (phylogeny).

The appearance of human minds marks the beginning of significant amounts of knowledge stored extra-biologically. Externally stored information (the "Sum") needed for human survival can be transmitted culturally between the generations. The development of the highest forms of philosophical and scientific thought would have been impossible without the externally stored information we call the Sum. Arguably, even language itself could not have developed. A child deprived of its senses for access to human culture would never speak. According to Merlin Donald, human culture did not develop because humans had acquired language to communicate. We developed language to improve on the primitive communication capabilities (miming, pointing, signing) of pre-linguistic humans.

Humans are conscious of our experiences because they are recorded in (and reproduced on demand from) the information structures in our brains. We call it the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR). Mental information houses the content of an individual character - the fabric of values, desires, and reasons used to evaluate alternatives for action and thus to make choices. The information in a human brain vastly exceeds our genetic information. Because it can be stored and retrieved externally, it has allowed human beings to dominate the planet. Animals may exceed us in strength and speed, but we have experience, memory, wisdom, and skill (Anaxagoras DK B 21b) that has accumulated over thousands of generations.

Mind-body as a dualism coincides with Plato’s “Ideas” or “Forms” as pure form, with an ontology different from that of matter. The immaterial Forms, seen by the intellect (nous), allow us to understand the world. On the other hand, mind-body as a monism can picture both sides of the mind-body distinction as pure physicalism, since information embodied in matter corresponds simply to a reorganization of the matter. This was Aristotle’s more practical view. For him, Plato’s Ideas were mere abstractions generalized from many existent particulars. Form without matter is empty, matter without form is inconceivable, unimaginable. Kant rewrote this pre-Socratic observation somewhat obscurely as “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

But there are other characteristic differences between the mental and the physical that modern science, even neuroscience, may never fully explain. The most important is the internal and private first-person point of view, the essential subjectivity, the “I” and the “eye” of the mind, its capability of introspection and reflection, its intentionality, its purposiveness, its consciousness. The mind records an individual’s experiences as internal information structures and then can play back these recordings to compare them to new perceptions, new external events. The recordings include an individual’s emotional reactions to past experiences, our feelings. The reproduction of recorded personal experiences, stimulated by similarities in current experience, provide the core of “what it’s like to be” an individual.

The external and public physical world, by contrast, is studied from the third-person point of view. Although putatively “objective,” science in fact is the composite “intersubjective” view of the “community of inquirers,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it. Although this shared subjectivity can never directly experience what goes on in the mind of an individual member of the community, science is in some sense the collective mind of the physical world.

It is a pale record of the world’s experiences, because it lacks the emotional aspect of personal experience. The physical world itself has no sense of its history. It does not introspect or reflect. It lacks consciousness, that problem in philosophy of mind second only to the basic mind-body problem itself. We see consciousness as based on a highly evolved Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR) that even the lowest organisms may have in the form of experiences recorded in their DNA .

Aristotle, in his Book III, Parts IV and V, of De Anima (On the Soul), perhaps the most controversial and confusing part of his entire corpus, says that the soul (psyche) or mind is immaterial. He was right. For Aristotle, Intellect (nous) is that part of the soul whose active thinking gives it a causal (aition) power (dynamis) over the material (hyle) body (soma). This claim appears to anticipate the mind-body problem of René Descartes - how exactly does an immaterial thing (substance) or property exert a causal force on the material body?

It is important to note that Descartes made the mind the locus of undetermined freedom. For him, the body is a deterministic mechanical system of tiny fibres causing movements in the brain (the afferent sensations), which then can pull on other fibres to activate the muscles (the efferent nerve impulses). This is the basis of stimulus and response theory in modern physiology (reflexology). It is also the basis behind connectionist theories of mind. An appropriate network need only connect the afferent to the efferent signals. No thinking mind is needed for animals (or computers where inputs completely determine outputs).

The popular idea of animals as machines included the notion that man too is in part a machine - the human body obeys strictly deterministic causal laws. But for Descartes man also has a soul or spirit that is exempt from determinism and thus from what is known today as “causal closure.” But how, we must ask, can the mind both cause something physical to happen and yet itself be acausal, exempt from causal chains? This is the problem of mental causation.

Since Immanuel Kant, this problem has become even more severe. The freedom in Kant’s noumenal world - outside space and time - has no apparent connection with the deterministic phenomenal world. For Kant, causality is a category of understanding applicable only to the phenomenal world. In the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle called the concept of Mind a “category mistake.”

Information philosophy hopes to solve the mind/body problem, the problem of mental causation, the “hard problem” of consciousness, and the problem of other minds, not by postulating a non-physical world, but instead a world that answers to the ancient description of metaphysical, because it is non-material. This world is the locus of everything Aristotle included in his first philosophy, the laws of thought and today the laws of physics.

The world of information is abstract, not concrete, intangible, yet with causal power as Aristotle thought. The material world is made up in part of information structures. (We shall see that most of the matter in the universe is chaotic and contains little or no information.) Material information structures can be perceived and their abstract information content represented as information structures in the mind/brain. To the extent that the information in the mind is isomorphic with the information in the object, we can say that the subject has knowledge of the external world. To the extent that information in other minds is isomorphic, we have intersubjective shared knowledge, something impossible to show with words or even logic alone.

Information philosophy goes “beyond logic and language.”

Information Philosopher - Mind

 

[Soupie]

That statement doesn't capture the more complex impression I have from reading sections of the IPM website, especially this section under the heading 'Mind':

"Mind

Of all the problems that information philosophy may help to solve, few are more important than the question of Mind. There is little in philosophy that is more dehumanizing than the logic chopping and sophistical word juggling that denies the existence of Mind and Consciousness.

Some of the earliest philosophers saw immaterial Mind as the source of eternal Truths about Reality that could not be based on mere phenomena - unreliable sensations emanating from material bodies.

Descartes' dualism reduced the bodies of all animals to living machines, but left room for a non-mechanistic, immaterial, and indeterministic Mind above and beyond the deterministic limits set by the laws of nature. Kant renamed the ancient division of sensible and intelligible worlds, locating God, freedom, and immortality in his noumenal world.

Information philosophy hopes to show that information is itself that immaterial “substance” above and beyond matter and energy that the ancients, Descartes, and Kant were looking for.

Mind as Immaterial Information in a Biological Information Processor

Information philosophy views the mind as the immaterial information in the brain. The brain is seen as a biological information processor. Mind is software in the brain’s hardware, although it is altogether different from the logic gates, bit storage, algorithms, computations, and input/output systems of the type of digital computer used as a "computational model of mind" by today's cognitive scientists.

The “stuff” of thought is pure information, neither matter nor energy, though it needs matter for its embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is the modern spirit, the soul in the body, the ghost in the machine.
In ancient philosophy, mind/soul versus body was one of the classic dualisms, such as idealism versus materialism, the problem of the one (monism) or the many (pluralism), the distinction between essence and existence, between universals and particulars, between necessity and contingency, between eternal and ephemeral, but most important, the difference between the intelligible world of the noumena and the sensible world of mere appearances or phenomena.

When mind and body are viewed today as a dualism, it is because the mind is considered to be fundamentally different from the material brain, though perhaps not another “substance.” We propose an easily understandable and critically important physical difference between matter and immaterial information. Whereas the total amount of matter is conserved, the universe is continuously creating new information - by rearranging existing matter into new information structures. The total amount of information (a kind of order) in the universe is increasing, despite the second law of thermodynamics, which - counterintuitively - says that the total amount of disorder (entropy) is also increasing.

Matter, along with energy (mc2), cannot increase. It is conserved, a constant of the universe. Information is not conserved. As information grows, it is the source of genuine novelty in the universe. The future is not determined by the past and present, because the future contains unpredictable new information. New information is continuously created.

The Evolution of Information to Become Mind

How did material substances come to be able to think? Ancient philosophers assumed that mind and thought must be primordial, perhaps even prior to the creation of matter. But we can now outline the creation and evolution of information from an initial state of the universe (with minimal, essentially zero information and no material at all) to the “information age” of today. Information philosophy makes the straightforward claim that human beings, especially their minds, are the most highly evolved form of information generation and processing system in the known universe. Recognizing this simple fact provides a radically new perspective on the central problems of psychology and philosophy of mind.

In a very deep sense, we are information.

The story of evolution from a matter-free universe origin to the information-processing brain/mind can be told in three major emergences:

1. the first appearance of matter, some of it organized into information structures,
2. the first appearance of life, information structures that create and transmit information by natural selection, variation, and heredity,
3. the appearance of human minds, which create, store, and transmit information external to their bodies.

With the appearance of life, purpose entered the universe. The fundamental purpose of all life is to survive, at least long enough to replicate. For most species, all of the information needed to survive is transmitted in the genes and the biological machinery of the cell. To benefit from the experiences of an ancestor, those experiences must somehow be encoded genetically, so they show up as a priori, built-in capabilities of the offspring. Konrad Lorenz said that what is a priori for an individual (ontogeny) was a posteriori for its ancestors (phylogeny).

The appearance of human minds marks the beginning of significant amounts of knowledge stored extra-biologically. Externally stored information (the "Sum") needed for human survival can be transmitted culturally between the generations. The development of the highest forms of philosophical and scientific thought would have been impossible without the externally stored information we call the Sum. Arguably, even language itself could not have developed. A child deprived of its senses for access to human culture would never speak. According to Merlin Donald, human culture did not develop because humans had acquired language to communicate. We developed language to improve on the primitive communication capabilities (miming, pointing, signing) of pre-linguistic humans.

Humans are conscious of our experiences because they are recorded in (and reproduced on demand from) the information structures in our brains. We call it the Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR). Mental information houses the content of an individual character - the fabric of values, desires, and reasons used to evaluate alternatives for action and thus to make choices. The information in a human brain vastly exceeds our genetic information. Because it can be stored and retrieved externally, it has allowed human beings to dominate the planet. Animals may exceed us in strength and speed, but we have experience, memory, wisdom, and skill (Anaxagoras DK B 21b) that has accumulated over thousands of generations.

Mind-body as a dualism coincides with Plato’s “Ideas” or “Forms” as pure form, with an ontology different from that of matter. The immaterial Forms, seen by the intellect (nous), allow us to understand the world. On the other hand, mind-body as a monism can picture both sides of the mind-body distinction as pure physicalism, since information embodied in matter corresponds simply to a reorganization of the matter. This was Aristotle’s more practical view. For him, Plato’s Ideas were mere abstractions generalized from many existent particulars. Form without matter is empty, matter without form is inconceivable, unimaginable. Kant rewrote this pre-Socratic observation somewhat obscurely as “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

But there are other characteristic differences between the mental and the physical that modern science, even neuroscience, may never fully explain. The most important is the internal and private first-person point of view, the essential subjectivity, the “I” and the “eye” of the mind, its capability of introspection and reflection, its intentionality, its purposiveness, its consciousness. The mind records an individual’s experiences as internal information structures and then can play back these recordings to compare them to new perceptions, new external events. The recordings include an individual’s emotional reactions to past experiences, our feelings. The reproduction of recorded personal experiences, stimulated by similarities in current experience, provide the core of “what it’s like to be” an individual.

The external and public physical world, by contrast, is studied from the third-person point of view. Although putatively “objective,” science in fact is the composite “intersubjective” view of the “community of inquirers,” as Charles Sanders Peirce put it. Although this shared subjectivity can never directly experience what goes on in the mind of an individual member of the community, science is in some sense the collective mind of the physical world.

It is a pale record of the world’s experiences, because it lacks the emotional aspect of personal experience. The physical world itself has no sense of its history. It does not introspect or reflect. It lacks consciousness, that problem in philosophy of mind second only to the basic mind-body problem itself. We see consciousness as based on a highly evolved Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR) that even the lowest organisms may have in the form of experiences recorded in their DNA .

Aristotle, in his Book III, Parts IV and V, of De Anima (On the Soul), perhaps the most controversial and confusing part of his entire corpus, says that the soul (psyche) or mind is immaterial. He was right. For Aristotle, Intellect (nous) is that part of the soul whose active thinking gives it a causal (aition) power (dynamis) over the material (hyle) body (soma). This claim appears to anticipate the mind-body problem of René Descartes - how exactly does an immaterial thing (substance) or property exert a causal force on the material body?

It is important to note that Descartes made the mind the locus of undetermined freedom. For him, the body is a deterministic mechanical system of tiny fibres causing movements in the brain (the afferent sensations), which then can pull on other fibres to activate the muscles (the efferent nerve impulses). This is the basis of stimulus and response theory in modern physiology (reflexology). It is also the basis behind connectionist theories of mind. An appropriate network need only connect the afferent to the efferent signals. No thinking mind is needed for animals (or computers where inputs completely determine outputs).

The popular idea of animals as machines included the notion that man too is in part a machine - the human body obeys strictly deterministic causal laws. But for Descartes man also has a soul or spirit that is exempt from determinism and thus from what is known today as “causal closure.” But how, we must ask, can the mind both cause something physical to happen and yet itself be acausal, exempt from causal chains? This is the problem of mental causation.

Since Immanuel Kant, this problem has become even more severe. The freedom in Kant’s noumenal world - outside space and time - has no apparent connection with the deterministic phenomenal world. For Kant, causality is a category of understanding applicable only to the phenomenal world. In the twentieth century, Gilbert Ryle called the concept of Mind a “category mistake.”

Information philosophy hopes to solve the mind/body problem, the problem of mental causation, the “hard problem” of consciousness, and the problem of other minds, not by postulating a non-physical world, but instead a world that answers to the ancient description of metaphysical, because it is non-material. This world is the locus of everything Aristotle included in his first philosophy, the laws of thought and today the laws of physics.

The world of information is abstract, not concrete, intangible, yet with causal power as Aristotle thought. The material world is made up in part of information structures. (We shall see that most of the matter in the universe is chaotic and contains little or no information.) Material information structures can be perceived and their abstract information content represented as information structures in the mind/brain. To the extent that the information in the mind is isomorphic with the information in the object, we can say that the subject has knowledge of the external world. To the extent that information in other minds is isomorphic, we have intersubjective shared knowledge, something impossible to show with words or even logic alone.

Information philosophy goes “beyond logic and language.”

Information Philosopher - Mind

Well, I won't disagree that my statement above doesn't capture the totality of the IPM haha. It was offered in the context of distinguishing IPM from mere information theory.

That human minds consist of more than the body's interaction with the environment, I don't deny, if that was your point. But I would say that mind is grounded in the body's interaction with the environment. (I feel as if this is something you yourself have shared many times throughout this discussion and which I am only now beginning to recognize.)

 

[Soupie]

Soupie, I would like to read the comments following the essay you linked but am having trouble linking to the page that contains these. Do you have another more direct link? Thanks.

Hm, no that was a direct link that I provided above. Sometimes you have to select an additional link at the end of the article to see the comments.

 

[Soupie]

Soupie, I would like to read the comments following the essay you linked but am having trouble linking to the page that contains these. Do you have another more direct link? Thanks.

Try this link: Wiring the Brain: Top-down causation and the emergence of agency

 

[Soupie]

@Constance

The following paper was referenced in the notes of the IIT paper you linked above. In it are specified the changed between this version of IIT — 3.0 — and past versions:

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article....1371/journal.pcbi.1003588&representation=PDF

There's some really interesting/challenging stuff presented in this latest iteration.

 

[Constance]

Thank you, Soupie. I'll start reading it now.

 

[Constance]

William James, "The Consciousness of Self," in Principles of Psychology, vol.1, pp.400-401:

The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as ' I ' can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew ; and 2) emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as 'me,' and appropriate to these the rest. The nucleus of the 'me' is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered- past-feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the same me with it. Whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me's experience; and of them certain ones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to be themselves constituents of the me in a larger sense, —such are the clothes, the material possessions, the friends, the honors and esteem which the person receives or may receive. This me is an empirical aggregate of things objectively known. The I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate, neither for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as 'out of time.' It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description,unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind. The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting; but by what modifications in its action, or whether ultra-cerebral conditions may intervene, are questions which cannot now be answered.

If anyone urge that I assign no reason why the successive passing thoughts should inherit each other's possessions, or why they and the brain-states should be functions (in the mathematical sense) of each other, I reply that the reason, if there be any, must lie where all real reasons lie, in the total sense or meaning of the world. If there be such a meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trust there is), it alone can make clear to us why such finite human streams of thought are called into existence in such functional dependence upon brains. This is as much as to say that the special natural science of psychology must stop with the mere functional formula. If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond. The only pathway that I can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinker would be to deny that we have any direct knowledge of the thought as such. The latter's existence would then be reduced to a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem. With the question once stated in these terms, the spiritualist and transcendentalist solutions must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own psychological one, and discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view."

The above quotation from James is highlighted at the end of one of 11 pages concerning James at the information philosopher website:

William James

The other ten pages concerning James's philosophy of consciousness are linked at the bottom, and all of those pages are essential to understanding both James's ideas and Doyle's information philosophy of mind developed over the extent of the website. Doyle writes, in introducing the two paragraphs above:

"James' notion of "pure experience" provides a philosophical basis for the experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) that is the core of the informational theory of mind and a solution to the "hard" problem of consciousness."

He also writes on that page that:

"We find that William James was the first of two dozen philosophers and scientists who have proposed a two-stage model for free will and creativity.

The first stage involves chance that generates alternative possibilities for action.
The second stage is an adequately determined choice by the will."

My impression is that we can reach an understanding of Doyle's information philosophy -- what he and others mean by 'information' and 'consciousness' -- by beginning with his pages on James and following the links to other philosophers and scientists pursuing this "two-stage model for free will and creativity" at the core of their thinking about the nature of consciousness and mind in a universe that has seemed to be deterministic.