Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Philosophy Now series. Hegel's Phenomenology by Richard Norman
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
I am reading the posts...
When I refer to "the Hard Problem of consciousness", I am referring to David Chalmers' paper. Namely, "the hard problem is the problem of experience" - phenomenal experience.
If HCT is a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience, then phen exp is not a hard problem. i.e. Chalmers is wrong. Furthermore, I reject the conclusion of Jackson's knowledge argument with my critique of it (an argument that is vigorously defended by Chalmers, though now rejected by Jackson himself).
I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience. The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. The first-person perspective is explainable - namely why first-persons exist and why they possess this qualitative conscious perspective. The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
The reason why Chalmers thinks phen exp is the hard problem, is because he attaches the concept of phen exp to the concept of the specifics of his own conscious self, and he does that because he is an anti-physicalist. HCT separates the two issues of one's own conscious and the general characteristics of consciousnesses.
@smcder Why did I need to read that article, "The Secrets of Consciousness and the Problem of God"?
I'll do a quick book search for something better.
Good.
Yes, I'd followed that in your previous posts and writings.
Yes, I remember your expressing that viewpoint earlier as well. As you'd guess, I think phenomenal experience grounds consciousness, but as you can see from what I wrote earlier today I think you, and Tononi surprisingly, identify a second hard problem that is even harder. I think we need to understand consciousness and subjectivity as positions of awareness and reflectivity/reflection evolving in biological evolution, becoming the capability of thought in our species. I don't think consciousness can be accounted for by physics without life/lived experience, but it may well be that the germinal core of the possibility of awareness is planted deep in nature in quantum interaction and entanglement, evolving to autopoetic organisms and thence to increasingly complex, dialectical capacities of self-reference and open-ended world reference in the evolution of species. .
I think we all pre-conceptually sense that our phenomenological experience is involved in, even instrumental in, the development of our conscious selves. This is a question we could explore on the basis of re-membering the ways in which we each began, in the passages of childhood, to put together parts of the world including our own positional awareness of them.
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Speaking of Thaddius Roberts, he just retweeted this image:
philosophy in figures : Photo
Where/how does natural teleology relate to metaphysical reductionism?
philosophy in figures : Photo
Where/how does natural teleology relate to metaphysical reductionism?
S
smcder
Guest
Why would I decline?
I did a search by my userid against "determined" and "reductive" - I didn't do all variations/synonyms but in most cases from that search it appears to be a quote from someone else or used in the sense of someone being determined to do something ... I'm not aware of using determined / reductive a lot or in an unclear manner but if you can show me some examples, I will try to clear this up!
The way I think of it is:
reductive - "it's just" - as in "she says she loves me, but it's just mouth sounds causes by neurons firing"
determined - causal chain all the way back to the Big Bang (if there wasn't a Big Bang, I guess things were just always going, so you can trace things back in time as far as you like, if time isn't linear ... I'm not sure)
There's lots to think about with determined, like Maxwell's Demon. I read a long time ago about the computing power needed to simulate three perfectly elastic billiard balls without friction and it seems you could maybe simulare a little over a minute and then it got so complex that the computer would be bigger than the universe ... I can't find this now, so I may have something wrong ... but in discussions of Maxwell's Demon, computational power comes up. It may have been EO Wilson in Conscilience who said that even quantum interactions are in principle predictable, but limits on computing power mean we can't predict them.
So I would make some assumptions in the example above about physics, gravity, amount of elasticity of collisions, marbles don't break, box is infinite, etc etc but basically my answer in a deterministic universe would be that the marbles would bounce around and occasionally collide and I think that's about it. Since they aren't subject to friction or gravity and don't have any way of adhering, they might form some patterns, say spelling out the first Act of Hamlet for an instant but that's probably it. I suppose in an infinite amoung of time they would assume all possible configurations.
Natural teleolgy? I'm not sure how it would apply to marbles in a box, but the simplicity of it (elastic collisions, no way to adhere or form complex arrangements) actually may make it a useful example, but right off my head, I'm not sure it would/could be any different from the determined universe? It wouldn't mean that Shakespeare got spelled out every time within a certain time, would it? Spelling out Shakespeare stands in for any given configuration. (What could every time mean without a Big Bang?) So I guess Shakespeare and Bacon and Moliere would get spelled out eventually just like in a deterministic universe - I'm not sure there is enough here for teleology to work with, is there? A very interesting example! What are your visualizations?
With natural teleology I think it means that given a set of pre-conditions that make life possible, then life will move inevitably toward more complexity and toward certain configurations, ie intelligence, self awareness.
Nagel's version is put very succinctly (by Nagel) here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=0
S
smcder
Guest
If I remember correctly, I posted this relevant excerpt (below) and you responded that it was almost exactly like what HCT says and that surprised me because the author attributes it to Nagel's original formulation of the Hard Problem (WIILTBAB 1978) - what you are calling the noumenal problem - if so, you wouldn't be able to claim to have solved Nagel's hard problem, because it and your problem of the noumenal are the same:
Tononi’s fictional Galileo meets Nagel in a purgatorial region of his dream, complete with a scared (and scary) bat; as Nagel famously argued in his seminal essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” it is like something to be one. Tononi doesn’t think it much matters that we don’t know what it’s like to be a bat: bats have their qualia and we have ours.
But he misses, or nearly misses, the force of Nagel’s critique.
Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
Objectively speaking, we could accept that there are many different conscious beings. But we don’t have the ghost of an idea of how there could be an objective explanation for the distribution of subjectivities among them. Why is my consciousness mine? Why isn’t your consciousness mine? The hard question of consciousness is less this question, “How can consciousness exist?” than the question of how there can be more than one. What is the principle of discrimination between them?
S
smcder
Guest
Facing Up To The Problem of Consciousness?
In this paper, Chalmers refers to WIILTBAB and "what it is like" so that seems to tie him to Nagel and the author above ties Nagel to this idea:
Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
compare that to your quote above:
I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience. The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. The first-person perspective is explainable - namely why first-persons exist and why they possess this qualitative conscious perspective. The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
Breaking it out piece by piece:
article: Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience.
Pharoah: I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience.
article: It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
Pharoah: The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. ...
Pharoah: The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
article: No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
How do @Constance and @Soupie read these comparisons?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Okay, so maybe intentionless inevitability wasn't too far off?
I was thinking we could take a little more license with the box and marbles.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between current orthodoxy and natural teleology, is that the "shape of the box" ie the natural laws, lead to, not just life, but complex life (perhaps possessing consciousness?).
Current orthodoxy, if I understand correctly, says our universe is "eerily" tuned for the emergence of life. Natural teleology simply says its tuned for the inevitable emergence of complex life.
What do you think?
S
smcder
Guest
Who is Thaddius Roberts? I searched this thread and it's the first time he's mentioned, I think.
This image looks like it will work - no mental causation then, correct?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
It's ole Thad! Yeah, no mental causation, not to mention consciousness is not fundamental. I suppose things at the bottom will be "fundamental."Who is Thaddius Roberts? I searched this thread and it's the first time he's mentioned, I think.
This image looks like it will work - no mental causation then, correct?
S
smcder
Guest
I was curious as to what you made of the texts I laid out above - between @Pharoah's ideas of the noumenal and Nagel's formulation as reported in the article?
I don't know if Tononi is a physicalist, but the next paragraph of that same article may be helpful (note that the references to God are as a type of consciousness, a thought experiment but I don't get the impression that the author's argument turns on the existence of such a mind)
Tononi, like a lot of other neurologically influenced scientists, from William James to Oliver Sacks, is fascinated by neural deficits and accidents that fracture consciousness into independent and plural consciousness. Most notoriously, people whose corpus callosum has been cut (often to control epilepsy), so that the two sides of their brains can no longer communicate with each other, thenceforth have two consciousnesses, each as separate from the other as “the breach from one mind to another,” which William James notably described as “perhaps the greatest breach in nature.” In such cases, it seems that either one consciousness can be turned into two, or that it’s a mistake to talk of a single consciousness. I think Tononi must be right to interpret this disturbing phenomenon by showing that consciousness doesn’t correspond to some Platonic soul. But that only makes consciousness, if possible, still more mysterious, still harder to imagine understanding, since once again we’re confronted not with a single phenomenon — consciousness itself — but the irreducible plurality of different consciousnesses.
Tononi offers a weak answer to this question: qualia belong to me if they’re sort of me-shaped. That seems right but woefully insufficient. It still doesn’t give us a way of understanding not that objects are different from each other but rather that subjects are. Nothing explains why I’m me, just as nothing could explain to the monster — not even his creator Frankenstein— why he is who he is, just as nothing could explain to God why God is God.
Unlike many of his neuroscientist colleagues, Tononi doesn’t really think he’s solved the problem of consciousness. He knows that his suggestions are jury-rigged. As his book progresses, he confronts the feebleness of science in the face of the phenomena it discovers. One reads this book with a kind of burgeoning terror at the complex vulnerabilities of the brain, the only place in the universe that the mind assuredly exists. Tononi seems just as grimly clear-sighted about this as any philosopher or poet. Science wants to know all, to be omniscient. But the study of the brain and its relation to consciousness seems to prove that even if scientists could play God (“the Brain is just the weight of God,” Dickinson concludes), even if they did achieve divine omniscience, they could never know how any other consciousnesses could exist, nor whether they did exist, nor how there could be a plurality of them. Gibson’s Dixie Flatline and Tononi’s Galileo don’t, in fact, have sentience. They’re fictional characters. How could any science, any omniscience, know that we were more real than they?
S
smcder
Guest
In the graphic, the fundament reads "the bottom of physics, if it exists?" below that I believe is a turtle.
Steve wrote: "Breaking it out piece by piece:
article: Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience.
Pharoah: I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience.
article: It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
Pharoah: The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. ...
Pharoah: The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
article: No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
How do @Constance and @Soupie read these comparisons?"
I'm not sure what you're looking for. I now see the hard problem on two levels, the first being the standard hard problem of qualitative experience expressed by Chalmers, and the second focused on the 'harder problem'* of the plurality and distinctiveness of individual consciousnesses. I think this plurality and distinctiveness of consciousness also exists among the higher animals. We humans are simply the most radical extension of consciousness on this planet, to our knowledge. I think it's clear that subjectivity and consciousness have evolved in the history of living organisms. Whether we can locate a fundamental 'physical origin' of consciousness somewhere deep in nature is an interesting question, but not the focus of my own interest in what consciousness is and what it enables. What it enables wherever it exists is awareness of the world, realization of parts and aspects of the world, cognizing of the world as a whole and our relationship in and toward it, and as MP wrote a "singing of the world." It is the world brought to numberless partial and various forms of light and appreciation that life produces in it.
* re 'the harder problem': I'm not sure yet that this is actually a separate problem or a problem at another level, or a single problem with degrees of intensity. But I think that what I've been calling 'the harder problem' as focused by Tononi and Pharoah (and also evidently Nagel) is extremely important. I can't believe I've never thought about it before.
article: Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience.
Pharoah: I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience.
article: It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
Pharoah: The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. ...
Pharoah: The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
article: No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
How do @Constance and @Soupie read these comparisons?"
I'm not sure what you're looking for. I now see the hard problem on two levels, the first being the standard hard problem of qualitative experience expressed by Chalmers, and the second focused on the 'harder problem'* of the plurality and distinctiveness of individual consciousnesses. I think this plurality and distinctiveness of consciousness also exists among the higher animals. We humans are simply the most radical extension of consciousness on this planet, to our knowledge. I think it's clear that subjectivity and consciousness have evolved in the history of living organisms. Whether we can locate a fundamental 'physical origin' of consciousness somewhere deep in nature is an interesting question, but not the focus of my own interest in what consciousness is and what it enables. What it enables wherever it exists is awareness of the world, realization of parts and aspects of the world, cognizing of the world as a whole and our relationship in and toward it, and as MP wrote a "singing of the world." It is the world brought to numberless partial and various forms of light and appreciation that life produces in it.
* re 'the harder problem': I'm not sure yet that this is actually a separate problem or a problem at another level, or a single problem with degrees of intensity. But I think that what I've been calling 'the harder problem' as focused by Tononi and Pharoah (and also evidently Nagel) is extremely important. I can't believe I've never thought about it before.
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S
smcder
Guest
Right now I'm thinking about inevitability with and without a Bang. With Bang and collapse or other finitude, I'm wondering if we can tak about inevitability without some intentionality, without stacking the deck - otherwise mightn't we run out of time (see reqinding the tape below)?
Without Bang, then it seems any possible configuration is inevitable so intentionality isn't needed?
SJ Gould's point was that if you rewound the evolutionary tape and started it off under just ever so slightly different conditions, then we might never have evolved.
short interview here:
Stephen Jay Gould Interview -- Academy of Achievement
What sort of license? Do we need something more capable than marbles?
You mentioned two visualizations?
I think the tuned for life argument is not considered by all to be orthodoxy. Frank J Tippler (what is it with scientists and "J"?) authored the Anthropic Cosmological Principle - one response has been the idea of infinite universes - so the one in which we find ourselves is of course the one for which the initial conditions are just right.
S
smcder
Guest
What I am saying with the comparisons above, if the article is right - then it appears to me that Chalmers' hard problem is Nagel's is @Pharoah's idea of the noumenal, they are all the same. Therefore, @Pharoah can't claim to have solved the hard problem of Chalmers because it is not a separate problem it is the same problem. What Chalmers calls the hard problem, Pharoah calls the noumenal - but Pharoah says he has solved Chalmers hard problem but that can't be because it is the same as what Pharoah says is the true hard problem - the noumenal. So there aren't even two levels - there is only one hard problem.
Below is the line of reasoning - I lay out quotes from @Pharoah and the article above, just below one another for a direct comparison. They seem to be saying something very similar if not the same thing. What I want to know is if and where the author of the article is making an error and if not, if and where I am making an error in my comparison.
article refers to quotes from this article: The Secrets of Consciousness and the Problem of God | The Los Angeles Review of Books
Pharoah is quotes from Pharoah
1) article: Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience.
Pharoah: I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience.
I read this as the author of the article saying Nagel's question is not just about the sheer fact of conscious experience and Pharoah saying that the hard problem has nothing to do with phenomenal experience - see Chalmers article that ties him to Nagel's idea of the hard problem - ie Chalmers hard problem is Nagels - and see his discussion of consciousness to make sure I am making a valid comparison of "conscious experience" (article) and "phenomenal experience" (Pharoah) - in other words to make sure they are talking about the same thing. I think they are.
So if the article is right - and I'm right then what do Nagel, Chalmers and Pharoah think is the hard problem?
article: It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
Pharoah: The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. ...
Pharoah: The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
article: No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.
It seems to me they all think the hard problem is:
article "why I am me and you are you"
Pharoah "why I am me, rather than anyone else"
Is this not the same idea of the hard problem? And is it not Chalmers and Nagels and Pharoahs? And if so, then there is only one problem the hard problem and it's not been solved?
S
smcder
Guest
@Soupie
Here is a bit on mental causation, causal closure and rationality, from:
How Not To Be a Rductivist by William Hasker
"A different but closely related objection has been stated recently by William G. Lycan:
In any case it does not seem that immaterial entities could cause motion consistently with any of
the conservation laws of physics, such as that regarding matter-energy; physical energy would
have to vanish and reappear inside human brains” (1996, p. 168). The core of this objection is
simply that, given mind-body interaction,
the fundamental laws of physics will not always be
satisfied by events in the brain
. And this is assuredly true; it’s just what interaction amounts to.
Some persons, for whatever reason, find failure of the matter-energy conservation laws
especially unpalatable, but this response is not universal. One philosopher who does not find it
9
A caveat: If we adopted Chalmers’ proposal, and attributed the novel causal powers entirely to
the physical configuration rather than to the conscious state, then a kind of supervenience might
still obtain. I judge that, once causal closure has been given up, Chalmers’ interpretation is
extremely implausible.
PCID
2.3.5, October 2003 8
compelling is W. D. Hart, who hypothesizes an exchange of energy between mind and brain:
physical energy is converted into “psychic energy,” and back again (Hart 1988; see Hasker 1999,
p. 301). If this is viewed as undesirable, it is certainly conceivable that the mind should
influence the brain without changing the total amount of energy in the brain; for instance, by
directing a nerve impulse into a different channel than it would otherwise follow. But
something
has to be different in the brain as a result of conscious thought, and some sort of conservation
law will undoubtedly be violated. Or perhaps “violated” is not the right word; what happens is
that
because of the impingement of new fundamental forces – in this case, mental forces – things
go differently in the physical brain than they would otherwise have gone. Some will find this
shocking, but it is a straightforward implication once causal closure has been abandoned. The
minimal form of “interference” would be for the mind to control indeterministic quantum events
that are then “amplified” to produce large-scale results. This would still mean, however, that
physical principles are violated; in this case, the principle that states that quantum events are
truly random and are not controlled by a hidden causality. And it requires that there be in the
brain some mechanism by which, not on rare occasions but as a regular occurrence, random or
quasi-random quantum events are amplified so as to produce macroscopic results. It is my
understanding that so far there is no evidence for such a mechanism, though the possibility can’t
be ruled out."
On this argument, for rationality to work - for why we don't think of green velveeta when we stub our toes - for us (as a subject) to be able to (subjectively) chose rationally between two things - then thought (as subjective experience) has to cause something in the physical brain to be otherwise than it would have been physically determined and some physical law will be violated.
Here is a bit on mental causation, causal closure and rationality, from:
How Not To Be a Rductivist by William Hasker
"A different but closely related objection has been stated recently by William G. Lycan:
In any case it does not seem that immaterial entities could cause motion consistently with any of
the conservation laws of physics, such as that regarding matter-energy; physical energy would
have to vanish and reappear inside human brains” (1996, p. 168). The core of this objection is
simply that, given mind-body interaction,
the fundamental laws of physics will not always be
satisfied by events in the brain
. And this is assuredly true; it’s just what interaction amounts to.
Some persons, for whatever reason, find failure of the matter-energy conservation laws
especially unpalatable, but this response is not universal. One philosopher who does not find it
9
A caveat: If we adopted Chalmers’ proposal, and attributed the novel causal powers entirely to
the physical configuration rather than to the conscious state, then a kind of supervenience might
still obtain. I judge that, once causal closure has been given up, Chalmers’ interpretation is
extremely implausible.
PCID
2.3.5, October 2003 8
compelling is W. D. Hart, who hypothesizes an exchange of energy between mind and brain:
physical energy is converted into “psychic energy,” and back again (Hart 1988; see Hasker 1999,
p. 301). If this is viewed as undesirable, it is certainly conceivable that the mind should
influence the brain without changing the total amount of energy in the brain; for instance, by
directing a nerve impulse into a different channel than it would otherwise follow. But
something
has to be different in the brain as a result of conscious thought, and some sort of conservation
law will undoubtedly be violated. Or perhaps “violated” is not the right word; what happens is
that
because of the impingement of new fundamental forces – in this case, mental forces – things
go differently in the physical brain than they would otherwise have gone. Some will find this
shocking, but it is a straightforward implication once causal closure has been abandoned. The
minimal form of “interference” would be for the mind to control indeterministic quantum events
that are then “amplified” to produce large-scale results. This would still mean, however, that
physical principles are violated; in this case, the principle that states that quantum events are
truly random and are not controlled by a hidden causality. And it requires that there be in the
brain some mechanism by which, not on rare occasions but as a regular occurrence, random or
quasi-random quantum events are amplified so as to produce macroscopic results. It is my
understanding that so far there is no evidence for such a mechanism, though the possibility can’t
be ruled out."
On this argument, for rationality to work - for why we don't think of green velveeta when we stub our toes - for us (as a subject) to be able to (subjectively) chose rationally between two things - then thought (as subjective experience) has to cause something in the physical brain to be otherwise than it would have been physically determined and some physical law will be violated.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Yes, Ive read that article several times. I think the author and Pharaoh are describing the same problem.
I think I touched in this before (and wanted to discuss this in more depth several weeks ago) but there are at least two views of consciousness.
Pardon me while I whip out my white board (im a very visual thinker).
The ground water concept of consciousness (TM). On this view, consciousness is one phenomenon. Thats it. It is a singular something that either always was or emerged at some point in the evolution of what-is. Human minds therefore exist within this singular thing we call consciousness. (Not unlike individual wells that all tap into the same resevoir of ground water.)
The pond concept of consciousness (TM). On this view, consciousness is not one singular phenomenon, but simply a form/process that continuously emerges within what-is, not unlike a pond, or a Wendy's. While all ponds are constituted of water, the origin and features of individual ponds are independent of one another.
Does that make sense? Do we all subscribe to one or the other (or another) concept of consciousness?
Finally, while I dont think the plurality of consciousness is a problem from one who believes that consciousness is generated by the brain, it certainly is a big problem for a dualist.
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I can see the close relation of the Chalmers and Nagels viewpoints (though I don't remember Chalmers making much of the radical plurality of consciousnesses among humans). I'm not sure yet about what Pharoah is saying because I don't yet have an understanding of what he means by 'the noumenal'.
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