Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

[smcder]

More terminology ... ladies and gentlemen ... choose sides!

A Short Defense of Heidegger | Minds and Brains

"Let me start by saying that I primarily deal with philosophy of mind. Let me also say that there is a quiet storm brewing in philosophy of mind circles, with essentially two competing philosophical paradigms standing at odds:

one inspired by Descartes/Locke/Kant

and the other by Heidegger/Merleau-Ponty/Gibson.

The former trio is foundational in respect to the cognitivism still very much in vogue today; the latter with respect to the less established but quickly growing 4E paradigm (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted). The 4E paradigm is a direct reaction to the perceived failures of classic cognitivism in respect to understanding perception, action, intentionality, emotion, reasoning, etc.

Accordingly, there are many overlapping ways to cash out the distinction between the two paradigms:

• Cartesian vs. Heideggerian philosophy of mind
• indirect representationalism vs. direct nonrepresentationalism
• strict primary/secondary qualities distinction vs. skepticism of distinction
• atomism vs. holism
• computationalist vs. Gibsonian theories of information processing
• disembodied vs. embodied theories of mind
• social atomism vs. social embeddedness/contextualism
• emphasis on the theoretical vs. emphasis on the instrumental
• theory-theory vs. the Narrative Practice Hypothesis
• reductionist vs. social constructivist approaches to higher-order cognition
• computer metaphor vs. “bundle of habits” metaphor
• literal view of language vs. figurative-metaphorical view of language
• analytic vs. hermeneutic approach to interpretation and understanding
• internalist vs. externalist approaches to perception
• dualist ontology vs. affordance ontology"
• robust vs. minimalist conceptions of selfhood
• subject-as-against-objects vs. subject-as-“amidst”-objects
• Those who believe in the Myth of the Given vs. those who don’t
• good guys vs. bad guys
• etc.

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

Homunculus alert!

His ideas are so influential and so far reaching that, in my opinion, anyone working with Descartes and Kant is obliged to understand Heidegger’s alternative model of human existence. This is especially important when engaging with the cognitivism debate in philosophy of mind.

While many excellent books and articles have been inspired by Heidegger’s ideas, many philosophers not well-versed in the history of philosophy lose sight of Heidegger’s larger metaphilosophical goal of overcoming the deficiencies in Cartesian and Kantian philosophy. Without understanding the historical context in which Heidegger overcame traditional views of subjectivity, his philosophical achievements are difficult to fully recognize. Conversely, traditional Heideggerians get so wrapped up in the system and the terminology that they overlook the wider context of what people like Dreyfus and Andy Clark are doing with Heidegger, namely, trying to overcome the deficiencies of the Cartesian homunculus theory.


...

There is much more to say on this issue of Heidegger’s intellectual lineage. One could write ten volumes tracing his thought through the work of people like Merleau-Ponty and Gibson up and through the developments of 4E philosophy in the early 90s. The intersection between Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science is rich. For this reason, Heidegger has much to say to us in the 21st century.

 

[Constance]

I would like to add the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Irreducible Mind, available in whole at the Google Books link, as recommended texts for those who seek a comprehension of consciousness and mind.

Chapter 1, "A View from the Mainstream: Contemporary Cognitive Neuroscience and the Consciousness Debates," is most serviceable for the present stage of discussion in this thread. It surveys and critiques the major positions regarding consciousness at present.

Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century - Michael Grosso, Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld - Google Books

 

[Constance]

The position I've been trying represent is summarized well by Edward Kelly in that first chapter (on page 45):

“All of the great unsolved mysteries of the mind – semantics, intentionality, volition, the self, and consciousness – seem to me inextricably interconnected, with consciousness somehow at the root of it all. The consciousness I have in mind is emphatically not that of Chalmers (1996), irreducible but ineffectual, consisting merely of phenomenological properties or ‘qualia’ arbitrarily tacked on to a strong artificial intelligence that does all the cognitive work. Ordinary perception 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. Each individual word is in effect “a microcosm of human consciousness” (Vygotsky, 1986/2000, p. 256), and “all meaning is in some way ultimately grounded in being” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 94). 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 or behind the innermost subjective pole of our ongoing conscious experience.”

 

[Constance]

Soupie wrote: "On the other hand, when swimming in a pool, I do not experience it to be made of millions of molecules. This is why, in my opinion, phenomenology is limited in what it can tell us. How something feels and what something is are separate things, in my opinion."

It is just so. As we've known since Kant, we are unable to know the ding an sich -- 'things in themselves'. We know things through their phenomenal appearances. We approach things (and the nature of what-is) through studying these appearances and multiplying our perspectives on them in order to gain increasing knowledge. That means that we likewise have to study embodied consciousness and mind, the instruments through which we receive all our knowledge of things in the world and make progress in our theoretical comprehension of the nature of reality.

This situation may be lamentable for most physical scientists and for others who desire a purely objective understanding of reality (which can't be had by us while thinking from our situation within it), but it is what it is.

 

[smcder]

The position I've been trying represent is summarized well by Edward Kelly in that first chapter (on page 45):

“All of the great unsolved mysteries of the mind – semantics, intentionality, volition, the self, and consciousness – seem to me inextricably interconnected, with consciousness somehow at the root of it all. The consciousness I have in mind is emphatically not that of Chalmers (1996), irreducible but ineffectual, consisting merely of phenomenological properties or ‘qualia’ arbitrarily tacked on to a strong artificial intelligence that does all the cognitive work. Ordinary perception 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. Each individual word is in effect “a microcosm of human consciousness” (Vygotsky, 1986/2000, p. 256), and “all meaning is in some way ultimately grounded in being” (Cassirer, 1957, p. 94). 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 or behind the innermost subjective pole of our ongoing conscious experience.”

So if we take this concept of consciousness as irreducible and fundamental - we can take intentionality, volition, the self and meaning at face value ... and grounded in being.

I think this is what human beings tend to do, whether they know it or not, in fact I'd say more so when they don't know it ... it's only when we extend a rather esoteric epistemology beyond it's reaches that we don't.

@Soupie can you provide a similar, succinct position statement?

 

[Constance]

So if we take this concept of consciousness as irreducible and fundamental - we can take intentionality, volition, the self and meaning at face value ... and grounded in being.

Yes, but 'meaning' not in terms of a final, fixed meaning laid upon us from outside the world we live in. We don't 'generate' consciousness and mind, but we can't avoid generating meaning in our words, behaviors, and actions insofar as these affect others. We have innate obligations to others, and our behaviors and actions (even our total failure to respond to others) are subject to interpretation by those others, even by all others. This is why Sartre said in the late 1930s that "hell is other people." We possess a radical freedom assessed in detail by Sartre in Being and Nothingness and in later works, a "situated freedom" within which we can always behave authentically, sometimes at great cost. As Sartre put it, we are "condemned" to this existential freedom.

 

[Constance]

Can you "edit" then highlight everything and hit ctrl "i" or use the toolbar with the "I" button?

Thanks. I'll try this.

 

[Constance]

Thanks. I'll try this.

Unfortunately didn't work. I'll ask Gene Steinberg for help tomorrow.

 

[Constance]

I love this. I'd like to read more from this author. (@Constance do you know who the author is?)

Yes, that's John Merryman of the FQXi community. I copied here another post by him yesterday. Since you are interested in and responsive to what Merryman writes, perhaps you'd be the best one to respond to @marduk's request for clarification of his point of view.

I think this incredible paragraph speaks to the difference between the Information Philosophy of Mind and the Computation Theory of Mind.

The IPoM would agree that "Information and energy are two sides of the same coin, as information defines the energy which manifests it, so it would be impossible to have one without the other. ... Therefore laws are only a description of complex interactions as they expand. ... We are intellectual complexity imbedded in that elemental energy."

Whereas the Computation Theory of Mind posits that the brain is a static computer and the mind is a static program.

While I believe that consciousness/mind may be information, I am not suggesting it can be reduced to a static informational code that can be run by a computer.

 

[smcder]

I think it can account for "mind/brain correlation without identity" only for those who wish to believe that the human being and its 'mind' are machines.

Right ... I just used it as an example of a theory that can correlate the mind and the brain without identifying the two, without the brain generating the mind ... not as an example I endorse.

 

[Constance]

and we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant

@Soupie

Does this address your ideas about the man whose foot is hit by a rock and then is distracted ... ? Experience as radically abundant?

Perplexities of Consciousness - Ch. 6 - Do You Have Constant Tactile
Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? - Eric Schwitzgebel

Do we have a constant, complex flow of conscious experience in many sensory modalities simultaneously? Or is experience limited to one or a few modalities, regions, or objects at a time?

Philosophers and psychologists disagree, running the spectrum from saying that experience is radically sparse (e.g., Julian Jaynes) to saying it's radically abundant (e.g., William James).

Existing introspective and empirical arguments (including arguments from "inattentional blindness") generally beg the question. I describe the results of an experiment in which I gave subjects beepers to wear during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they were to note the last conscious experience they were having immediately before the beep. I asked some participants to report any experience they could remember. I asked others to report simply whether they had visual experience or not. Still others I asked if they had tactile experience or not, or visual experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience in the left foot.

Interpreted at face value, the data suggest a moderate view according to which experience broadly outruns attentional focus but does not occur anything like 100% of the time through the whole field of each sensory modality. However, I offer a number of reasons not to take the reports at face value.

I suggest that the issue may, in fact, prove utterly intractable. And if so, it may prove impossible to reach justifiable scientific consensus on a theory of consciousness.

Even though we don't/can't attend fully to everything in our surroundings at any point in our temporal phenomenal experience, it appears that we store in subconscious memory many details we haven't attended to at the time of a given experience. This seems to be borne out by the experiments of a neuroscientist who probed random areas of the brain of an unanaesthetized patient and found that by doing so he triggered abundant recollections of particular days in the patient's childhood. These memories were apparently so richly detailed that the patient felt as if he were living those days again. And if I'm remembering the account correctly, these memories included noticing things he hadn't noticed at the time.

By comparison, numerous NDE survivors report experiencing detailed 'life reviews' during which they remember in quick succession occasions when they injured someone else with their words or reactions or deeds and this time they also experience the injury as it was experienced by the other person. The mind is obviously vastly expanded in NDEs. So is vision: NDE survivors of violent deaths (for example on battlefields) frequently report being able to see not just what is in front of them as they walk away but can see 360 degrees around themselves, as if they have eyes in the back and at the sides of their heads.

 

[Constance]

@Soupie, you might appreciate this paper by Atmanspacher re: Jung and Pauli.

http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/dualaspect.pdf

 

[Soupie]

So if you agree with all this, when do you start showing how your theory explains Psi phenomena? You could start here:

@Soupie For example, if the mind is an information structure, can this information structure survive the death of the physical body? I think it is theoretically possible.

How?

I think the first step is to see if the phenomena fit within that framework ...

In my view, the divide between body/mind and the surrounding reality is not hard; that is, our perceived separation from the surrounding physical/informational not-us is illusory.

My guess - if Psi turns out to be a legit phenomena - is that the pathway is through this direct physical/informational connection with the rest of reality. What the physical mechanism is, I don't know.

Regarding the "survival" of an information structure:

Said information structure would need to be embodied physically. Thus, in order for a mind to survive the death of its body, it would need to be embodied in another physical body. The only requirement is that the body be physical.

Interestingly, Langan believes that the (conscious) universe does this very thing. That is, when a human dies, it's "cogito" is preserved by the universe. Where and in what physical substrate it is preserved, idk.

 

[Soupie]

What is "the structure of a mind"? Do you mean the neurological structure of the brain?

No, I don't mean the neurological structure of the brain, but the structure of the mind has a correlative - if not causal - relationship with the brain (in my opinion).

For example, a shark and human both have minds, but the structure of their minds will be very different. I submit that the difference in the structures of their minds is related to - or even due - to the structure of their body-brains and their environment.

(1) Do you submit that the mind of a shark and the mind of a human are the same, and (2) if so, how do you account for that?

If all members of our species think and act out of a structure of information inherent in physicality and out of the reception of which our neural nets organize themselves, how is that human behavior and thinking are so various in expression at any point in our history and in the present moment?

Because we all have different body-brains, environments, and experiences.

Also, we don't think "out of a structure of information," rather, our thoughts are part of a (dynamic) structure of information.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie

if you replied to this, let me know but I didn't see it:

Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)

Isn't this what you are talking about?

we don’t know whether conscious experience is confined to what we are paying attention to or more abundant

You would say "more abundant"? The terms seem to be sparseness and abundance ... Wiliam James says "radically abundant", Julian Jaynes says "radically sparse" ... Pauley Shore says "radical, dude" if so, at least we'd have some vocabulary and key words to research.

Yes,that is indeed what I'm referring to, and what I believe panexperientialism implies.

As I've said many times, I think our universe is awash with many physical systems "generating" phenomenal experience. (At the same time, I do not think our universe is awash with self-aware physical systems; however, I do believe there are non-terrestrial, self-aware physical systems.)

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie ... OK, here we go:

The Mind/Brain Identity Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

... There is no suggestion of ineffability in this sense of ‘consciousness’, for which I shall reserve the term ‘awareness’.

Yes, what he is referring to as "awareness" I have termed body-awareness. We both consider this to be awareness.

For the full consciousness, the one that puzzles us and suggests ineffability...

This would be what I have referred to as "awareness of awareness," or self awareness, or meta-awareness.

Thus the proprioception which constitutes consciousness, as distinguished from mere awareness, is a higher order awareness, a perception of one part of (or configuration in) our brain by the brain itself. Some may sense circularity here. If so let them suppose that the proprioception occurs in an in practice negligible time after the process propriocepted. Then perhaps there can be proprioceptions of proprioceptions, proprioceptions of proprioceptions of proprioceptions, and so on up, though in fact the sequence will probably not go up more than two or three steps. The last proprioception in the sequence will not be propriocepted, and this may help to explain our sense of the ineffability of consciousness. Compare Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind on the systematic elusiveness of ‘I’ (Ryle 1949, pp. 195–8).

I was going to post something here similar to that, but refrained.

I was going to say: If the mind is information, and this information can be reduced to physical states in the brain, then self-awareness would be physical states of the brain representing physical states in the brain. As noted by @marduk and I, this would involve a recursive loop, but likely a special kind of recursive loop know as a strange loop.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie, you might appreciate this paper by Atmanspacher re: Jung and Pauli.

http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/pdf/dualaspect.pdf

Yes, this is the paper I just read. Immensely helpful, but too short! I hope to comment on it soon.

 

[smcder]

No, I don't mean the neurological structure of the brain, but the informational structure of the mind has a correlative - if not causal - relationship with the brain (in my opinion).

For example, a shark and human both have minds, but the structure of their minds will be very different. I submit that the difference in the structures of their minds is related to - or even due - to the structure of their body-brains and their environment.

(1) Do you submit that the mind of a shark and the mind of a human are the same, and (2) if so, how do you account for that?


Because we all have different body-brains, environments, and experiences.

Also, we don't think "out of a structure of information," rather, our thoughts are part of a (dynamic) structure of information.

(1) Do you submit that the mind of a shark and the mind of a human are the same, and (2) if so, how do you account for that?

I've known some attorneys where the overlap is almost 100% ...

Q. What's the difference between a shark and an attorney?

A. One is a cold blooded carnivore with dead eyes and a mouth full of pearly whites hiding a ruthless nature ... and the other is a fish.

 

[smcder]

@Soupie, here is another relevant and penetrating paper concerning the difference between information and consciousness/mind:

How Not To Be A Reductivist*
William Hasker

Abstract: Some current positions in the philosophy of mind, while ostensibly non-reductive, are in fact reductivist in ways that are seriously problematic. An example is found in the “naturalistic dualism” of David
Chalmers: by maintaining the causal closure of the physical domain, Chalmers makes the rationality of conscious experience inexplicable. This can only be remedied by abandoning causal closure and acknowledging that micro processes in the brain go differently in the presence of conscious experience than they would without it. But this move has startling consequences: once it has been made, major objections to mind-body dualism disappear, and determinism is seen to be a theory that is completely lacking in empirical support. Thomas Nagel and John Searle are cited as examples of philosophers who make a serious effort to face up to the consequences of not being reductivists.

Link: link

The first part of this paper is a good explanation of how causal closure of the physical domain guarantees that the conscious state of the organism, as such, can have no influence whatever on the organism’s behavior and thus on its propensity to survive. Conscious experience is invisible to the forces of natural selection but this undermines the central contention of evolutionary epistemology.

Rationality can't be treated merely in functional terms because the only evidence for the truth of anything we believe derives ultimately from that conscious experience.

We could assert that it is simply a fact that the psychophysical laws correlate conscious experiences with physical states in a way that is appropriate and generally truth-conducive, but any pre-arrangement or pre-established harmony in these laws places one immediately outside the naturalist camp.
What's left is to affirm that conscious experience is explanatorily relevant - then consciousness is no longer invisible to evolutionary selection; conscious experiences that correspond appropriately to the external environment can indeed be selected for, and brain structure and consciousness can co-evolve in response to environmental pressures. This may or may not be sufficient to enable an explanation of human rationality (I suspect it is not), but it is certainly necessary for any such explanation.

However, making this step breaches the causal closure of the physical domain, a basic problem for physicalists.

And here is another way to look at the problem of conscious experience being causal, it means that processes in the brain will go differently, in the presence of conscious experience, than they would if governed merely by the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry. We will have a species of emergent causation, in which there are causal principles at
work in situations involving consciousness which are different from those operative in simpler physical situations.

The universal sway of the fundamental physical laws no longer obtains.

And that right there is where it gets interesting ...