• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
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

http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/resolveuid/b7064fff1f7ea7a347a8cf1b7a73edd4

Big claims ... we'll see if they make good ...
 
Empirical Challenges to Conventional Mind-Brain Theory written by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly.

CLAIMS

1. Nearly all contemporary psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers subscribe – explicitly or implicitly – to some version of physicalism
2. Physicalist conceptions of human mind and personality are contrary to traditional and everyday notions

3. 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.

Outline of Physicalism

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.

Arguments against
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.
 
The first claim is

Extreme Psychophsyiological Influence
  • involvement of direct mental agency in the production of physiological effects
not fully explainable in terms of physiological mechanisms alone.
Placebo effects and related kinds of psychosomatic phenomena

the adequacy of psychoneuroimmunological explanations is in question and other related phenomena pose greater challenges to such explanations

hysterical “glove anesthesias,”

  • loss of sensation in complete disregard of the underlying anatomical organization - the anesthesia occurs only in accordance with the patient's idea
  • under hypnosis, a person can imagine a burn and produce a closely analogous physical response, like a blister, and the correspondence of the image to the effect produced (minute details of geometric shape) may be too specific to account for in terms of known brain/body interactions

The conventional hope, of course, is that even the most extreme of the phenomena just mentioned might ultimately be explained in terms of brain processes.

Greater explanatory challenges are posed by cases in which one person’s mental state seems to have directly influenced another person’s body.
  • maternal impressions (birthmarks or birth defects on a newborn that correspond to an unusual and intense experience of the mother during the pregnancy)
  • distant healing
  • psychokinesis (PK) which by definition involves direct mental influence on the physical environment
 
EXTREMES OF INFORMATIONAL CAPACITY AND PRECISION
A number of well-documented psychological phenomena involve levels of detail and precision difficult to account for in terms of a brain operating in statistical fashion with neural components of low intrinsic precision and reliability.

1. automatic writing
The subject wrote with his extended right arm on large sheets of paper, his face meanwhile buried in the crook of his left elbow.

(two or three times in one evening) "... after covering a sheet with writing (the pencil never being raised, so that the words ran into each other), he returned to the top of the sheet and proceeded downwards, dotting each i and crossing each t with absolute precision and great rapidity.” - William James

this indicates an extremely detailed memory record

2. eidetic imagery
Charles Stromeyer using Julesz stereograms - one subject succeeded under double-blind conditions with arrays as large as 1000 x 1000, or a million “bits,” viewed up to 4 hours apart. (replicated)
Other examples:
  • Luria’s famous mnemonist S
  • “Shass Pollaks,” who memorized all 12 volumes of the Babylonian Talmud
  • Oliver Sacks has reported a similar case of a person who among other things knew by heart all 9 volumes and 6000 pages of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
3. calculating prodigies
  • hard to explain in terms of brain processes.
The most serious attempt to do so known to us is in fact devoid of specific neural mechanisms. Its central argument is rather that early-stage brain processes like those subserving visual perception, for example, must also be savant-like in terms of their speed, precision, and informational capacity; what is unusual about savants, therefore, may consist merely in their access to these mechanisms. This explanation of course presupposes a positive answer to the fundamental question at issue, whether the brain alone can accomplish any of these things including perceptual synthesis itself.
  • John von Neumann claimed the only practical way to get increased arithmetical precision out of individually unreliable neurons is to use more of them. This biocomputational perspective clearly implies that calculating prodigies must use large portions of their brains in very abnormal ways to achieve the observed effects. The cognitive deficits that often accompany savant-type skills could conceivably reflect such substitutions, but we must remember that comparable skills sometimes also occur in geniuses such as the mathematicians Gauss and Ampére.
 
Memory
  • problems with trace trace theory to account for human semantic (general knowledge) and autobiographical (past experience) memory
  • recent functional neuroimaging studies have yielded little if any progress toward a comprehensive and coherent account of memory based on trace theory
conceptual problems in trace theory

For example, autobiographical memory clearly involves something more than mere revival of traces of experiences past, something that allows us to interpret what is experienced now as a representation of our own past rather than a contemporary perception, dream, or hallucination.

Traces as such, that is, only provide memory-aids rather than memories per se, and it has proven extremely difficult to specify in conventional physicalist terms what that extra something is, without falling into regressive forms of explanation that presuppose and hence cannot explain the phenomenon of memory itself.

Similarly, the content of a concept or semantic memory typically transcends any finite set of experienced circumstances that can plausibly be imagined as having deposited corresponding "traces" in a form capable of explaining its effective deployment in an unlimited variety of novel contexts.
 
So far then:
  • placebo and other phenomena of direct mental agency in the production of physiological effects and PK, direct mental influence on the physical environment are supported by good evidence but are not well explained by physicalist theories
  • extremes of informational capacity and precision are supported by good evidence but are not well explained by physicalist theories
  • basic properties of human memory, semantic and autobiographical are not well explained by physicalist theories
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOMATISMS AND SECONDARY CENTERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
  • Phenomena catalogued under this heading involve what looks like multiple concurrent engagement, in potentially incompatible ways, of major cognitive skills (linguistic skills, for example) and the corresponding brain systems.

This contrasts with a picture of the mind as a hierarchically ordered network of subprocessors or "modules," each specialized for some particular task and corresponding to some particular brain region or regions. This correspondes to our every day sense of our basic way of consciously doing things, that is, is essentially one at a time in serial fashion - this generalization applies mainly to relatively divergent things, and conspicuously fails as the simultaneous tasks become more complex and more similar.

However
  • there is a large body of credible evidence that additional "cognitive systems," dissociated psychological entities indistinguishable from full-fledged conscious minds or personalities as we normally understand these terms, can sometimes occupy the same organism simultaneously, carrying on their varied existences as it were in parallel, and largely outside the awareness of the primary, everyday consciousness.
@Soupie - does this address the idea of possession?

  • In essence, the structure that cognitive psychology conventionally pictures as unitary, as instantiated within and identified with a particular organization of brain systems, can be functionally divided – divided, moreover, not "side-to-side", leading to isolation of the normal cognitive capacities from each other, but "top-to-bottom", leading to the appearance and concurrent – not alternating – operation of what seem to be two or more complete cognitive systems each of which includes all of the relevant capacities.
  • Emergent "multiple" or "alter" personalities also can differ widely, not only in demeanor, interests, and knowledge but even in regard to non-voluntary physiological characteristics such as visual defects and susceptibilities to allergies. Even worse, it sometimes happens that one of these personalities appears to have direct access to the conscious mental activity of one or more others, but not vice-versa.
 
Psi Phenomena - correlations occurring across physical barriers that should be sufficient, on presently accepted physicalist principles, to prevent their formation.

The authors claim over a thousand detailed, carefully documented cases published in peer review literature.
They also cite experimental work evaluated using rigorous statistical procedures.

And so claim – "extrasensory perception" (ESP) and "psychokinesis" (PK) in the popular vocabulary, or in more theory-neutral terminology, "psi" – as a fact of nature with which we must somehow come to scientific terms.
 
Why Psi is important

  • Psi phenomena in general are important because they provide examples of human behavioral capacities that appear impossible to account for in terms of presently recognized computational, biological, or classical-physics principles.

  • post-mortem survival, the persistence of elements of mind and personality following bodily death
The authors claim that we have evidence for this, a lot of evidence
  • much of it of very high quality, deriving for example from studies of veridical apparitions, trance mediumship, and "cases of the reincarnation type", in which young children spontaneously report verifiable events from the lives of distant and ordinary persons now deceased.
  • Ironically, the primary threat to a survivalist interpretation of this accumulated evidence arises not from considerations of evidential quality, but from the difficulty of excluding alternative explanations based upon psi interactions involving only living persons.
IF post-mortem survival occurs, it demonstrates dramatically the limitations of present-day reductive physicalism. If it is the case, for example, as much evidence indicates, that autobiographical, semantic, and procedural (skill) memories can survive bodily death, then memory in living persons must presumably exist at least in part outside the brain and body as conventionally understood.

Considering the evidence and its interpretations, either

  1. postmortem survival
  2. psi among the living

– is lethal to current physicalist orthodoxy, which undoubtedly explains the widespread scientific resistance to both.

What's important to recognize that these are not isolated phenomena - similarly difficult explanatory challenges are posed by other psychlogical phenomena as we have already seen.

@Soupie you asked if evidence for psi, NDEs etc should be taken into account, here is how Kelly answers that question

Evidence for the occurrence of psi phenomena in general and post-mortem survival in particular must, we believe, play an important role in the formulation of an empirically adequate mind/brain theory

and our efforts here will be amply rewarded if they lead scientifically-minded readers to examine these subjects more seriously than they otherwise might.
 
GENIUS/CREATIVITY

All of the challenging phenomena catalogued in this article –

  • extreme psychophysiological influence
  • psychological automatisms and secondary centers of consciousness
  • flashes of inspiration involving unusual forms of thinking and symbolism
  • prodigious memory
  • spontaneous psi phenomena
  • altered states of consciousness verging on the mystical realm –
are inescapably bound up with genius in its fullest expressions, but these connections go virtually unmentioned in contemporary mainstream discussions.

A particularly dramatic case which exemplifies our central point is that of the Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan, rated by his distinguished discoverer Hardy as standing alone at 100 atop a scale of mathematical ability on which most of us lie at or near zero, while the magnificent David Hilbert rated 80 and Hardy himself a mere 25.

Replete with examples of prodigious memory, psychological automatisms, mathematical discoveries presented in the form of dreams, and profound and beautiful intuitions of hidden but ultimately verifiable properties of the physical world, this astonishing case fairly beggars the theoretical apparatus currently available to cognitive science and hence could well serve as a kind of reality check and navigational aid for further investigations of genius.
 
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
Kelly claims
  • mystical experiences lie at the core of the world’s major religious traditions
  • occurs across history and culture
  • generations of clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists have tended with few exceptions to devalue and pathologize them, treating them as products of malfunctioning brains
  • the historically standard epistemological approaches treat them as purely subjective events having authority only for those who experience them, and thus deny their objective significance and the testability of the associated truth-claims
  • However, a large though scattered literature testifies to the common occurrence in connection with such experiences, or in individuals who have them, of genius-level creativity, spontaneous psi-type events, and many other unusual but verifiable empirical phenomena of the sorts described in this article.
  • Mystical-type states of consciousness are also at least partially reproducible by pharmacological (psychedelic) means
  • can be induced by protracted self-discipline involving transformative practices such as the various forms of meditation
 
THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
1. the "binding problem" - 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?

the author claims:

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.
  • an early argument against materialism failed on 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 functional
  • all involve 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
neurophysiology has "crystallized" on "global workspace" theories

  • conscious experience occurs specifically – and only – in conjunction with large-scale patterns of gamma-band oscillatory activity linking widely separated regions of the brain

However


  • 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
 
The Unity of Conscious Experience

Part 2 Top down organization and inhibition

mainstream psychology has always tended 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

over time however, we are slowly driven back to a full appreciation of the human capacities of understanding ...
a similar evolution is underway in regard to perceptual theory
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
  • neuroscience started with the most accessible parts of the perceptual systems – the end organs and their peripheral connections – and work our way inward.
  • so the great sensory systems themselves – vision, audition, somatosensation, and so on – were also presumed to operate more or less independently, and were studied in isolation
However

A separate tradition has been sensitive to the presence of "top down" influences, both within and between sensory modalities, this leads to

  • a different picture of perceptual synthesis in which top-down influences predominate.
  • On this view perceptual synthesis is achieved not from the input, but with its aid.
  • Necker cube: stimulus information 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
Top-down and cross-modal sensory interactions have recently been recognized as the rule rather than the exception in perception

  • 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. ... 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
 
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.


  • semantic content, the "meaning" of words and other forms of representation
  • intentionality - the ability of any and all representational forms to be "about" things, events, and states of affairs in the world.
"Intentionality is inherently a three-way relation involving users, symbols, and things symbolized, and the user cannot be eliminated."

homonculus
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.
 
Soupie you say:
1. "From what I can gather, IIT says that the phenomenal feel arises from the way in which neurons interact (integrate) with one another to create internal physical representations of external physical events. They have several lines of empirical data to support their model; not least of which is that integrated neurons appear to be vastly more effecient to non-integrated neurons."

It's neurons what does it.
Well, I'm glad IIT ticked that box and sorted the problem of phenomenal experience. Next problem please...
IIT isn't a model something cobbled together in the basement. It's based on neurology and phenomenology. Neurons might not be the only thing what does it, but IIT may a great case for how they're involved. Sure, it needs to be critically evaluated, but you've not done that.

2. However, ive been reading several recent hints that internal representations may acquire their feel upon introspection
Introspection does require representation, but representation most certainly does not require introspection. But many would argue otherwise.
The point is not that representations can't exist in the absence of introspection, but that representations may lack phenomenal feel in the absence of introspection.

3. At this point, Im not clear how internal physical representation (organisms) acquire their feel in HTC? How/why do the internal physical representations of the external physical environment/landscape give rise to a corresponding (?) phenomenal landscape?

Is that a question for me and HCT?
That is the question. And if the question itself is erroneous, as some believe, an explanation would be great.
 
@Soupie in response to your question

What better models are there?

----------------------------

The Division of Perceptual Studies — School of Medicine at the University of Virginia


6:50 less hostility from clinicians than neuro-scientists re: challenges to materialist assumptions, doctors are "more like engineers" than scientists, they care about what works

*if there's not theory, the scientist won't pay attention
animosity if you don't come in with a theory ... what is that about?

doctor's say "if it helps the patient, I'll use it, whether I understand it or not"

... this is exactly how Kuhn says science advances ... from noticing things that don't fit the pattern, not from squeezing in or cutting out what does not ...

Both are important and it's only when too much doesn't fit the pattern that a new model begins to emerge ... until then we patch it up.

Look at the Panksepp situation ... more than one researcher is beginning to notice the untidy state of things and proposing a solution. This is exactly how it's supposed to go.

The other predictable part is the degree of personal commitment people will make to a particular model. I like the analogy here of doctors as engineers who are interested in what works.

So, a smart theorist is among other things, an opportunist - and looks at what works and what doesn't work, who is sweeping what bits under the rug - and I think there are lots of opportunities right now in consciousness research.

At a little past 9:00 the speaker says we have enough data now to go looking for a theory

So who is going to be smart?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
What's wrong with continuing to explore IIT and HTC? Do you no longer want to discuss potential solutions to the hard problem, or have you already decided or determined that they don't answer the hard problem? What better models are there?[/QUOTE]

Embodied Mind>Enactive Cognition>Neurophenomenology.

You have only to read the paper on Varela that I cited on page 1 of this thread and the paper by Thompson that Pharoah linked overnight in order to understand this model. From the grounds provided in this model, you will be enabled to evaluate the information model critically rather than arguing for it as an advocate. My preference for the immediate future of this thread is that we make an informed comparison of the two.
 
Last edited:
What's wrong with continuing to explore IIT and HTC? Do you no longer want to discuss potential solutions to the hard problem?

The hard problem, the explanatory gap, must be first be understood before solutions or explanations resolving it can be developed. The conversation today, which I'm just catching up on, indicates that for several of us neither IIT or HTC seems to deal adequately with the hard problem. It's time to fish or cut bait.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top