Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[Randall]

Actually, it seems to me that this entire materialistic paradigm is mostly a working hypothesis with far less evidence than what could be called convincing.

big bang – This concept is essentially the backwards extrapolation of currently observed characteristics of the universe, probably leaning heaviest on the so-called cosmological red-shift phenomenon. In any case, no one has any idea how all so-called originating matter and energy was accumulated into that conjectured tiny little dot that erupted, or fizzed, and that produced all that there is. No one knows why all the conjectured anti-matter and matter didn’t completely annihilate, but instead left a surplus of matter. Don’t even mention dark matter and dark energy. All in all, materialistic “best evidence” for the “big bang” is copiously speculative.

That's fine. Maybe there was no Big Bang. Or maybe there have been multiple Big Bangs. How all the initial materials got here in the first place is largely irrelevant to the point, but it seems to me that it's the best hypothesis we've got so far for the observable universe.

> stars > planets – I wonder if somehow materialist scientists deny that Boyles Law was operating when they speculate on the origin of stars and planets. Not to mention that multitudes of the so-called “oldest” galaxies still look “young” with spiral arms in place. The only directly observed planets so far are in our solar system, and they all exhibit highly unexpected characteristics. Earth’s size, structure, accumulation of water, location from the sun, accompanying moon, magnetic field, etc., etc., etc., are just a few of the “goldilocks” parameters that are required to make it hospitable. Evidently the sun is tilted 7 degrees to the orbital ecliptic of the planets, which is a bit of a sticky wicket considering the conservation of momentum.

Again that's fine, but the alternatives to going with the accepted astrophysical theories of stellar and planetary formation don't stand up very well. Are we to suppose that everything just popped into existence completely formed? I suppose it could have, but I personally think that's nonsense, and if any sort of formation is involved, regardless of the process, once again it's irrelevant to the point because that still equates to emergence.

> life on planets – At this stage, no materialist scientist has figured out a viable pathway for abiogenesis even here on earth where there is plenty to study and test. The postulated transformation of inert material to even the simplest life forms by materialistic-demanded “random events” has not even a glimmer of evidence. No one knows if the suggested protein world, DNA world, or RNA world is the best materialistic model for the alleged random emergence of biological life. The current requirement of the actual living entities that we know about to use only one hand of proteins, rather than both right or left-handed proteins that occur naturally, is another significant hurdle for mindless, inert randomness demanded by materialistic views.

Although science isn't certain exactly how life formed here on Earth, it's a virtual certainty that it did, and that before the Earth existed no life could have existed on it. Therefore we're once again, the alternative is to suppose it just popped into existence along with everything else, which is pure nonsense given the scientific evidence used to extrapolate Earth's history. And again it's also beside the point. Regardless of how life came into existence here on Earth, the overwhelming evidence is that it did, and that it evolved. So we're still on track with emergence.

> complex life – The internal workings of cells are now known to depend on many exceedingly complex protein machines. As far as I know, complex machines are not readily produced by mindless random bombardment of inert particles and blasts of energy. DNA is not “like” a code, rather it is a code. How can materialist-demanded random events produce a highly constrained and complex life code? Beats me. Too, it’s interesting that more and more dinosaur fossils dated to tens and hundreds of millions of years by the materialist worldview are producing various kinds of soft tissue remains, including still-elastic tissues. The half-life for the degradation of such tissues is far, far below the proposed dates of the fossils.

Again you're focusing on explanations, and explanations are irrelevant to the point. Regardless of how complex life here came into being, somehow it did ( obviously ), which means we're still dealing with emergence.

> Intelligent life – > life with consciousness – In short, it doesn’t seem reasonable to me that supposed mindless random mutations managed to produce greater and greater ordering of the DNA life code from merely fairly complex, going to the enormously complex.

Again you're focusing on explanations, and explanations are irrelevant to the point. Regardless of how intelligent life here came into being, somehow it did ( obviously ), which means we're still dealing with emergence.

So, unless there actually is much more convincing “best evidence” for exclusive random materialism, then it seems there is plenty of room to conjecture that what we perceive in reality actually originates from a directing Mind, not merely inert materialistic randomness. In that case, then instead of emergence of consciousness, one might suggest imputation of consciousness to us individual conscious beings from the originating conscious Source. I have no idea why there should be an originating conscious Source, but it seems to me that a fair accounting of the current “best evidence” points to one.

Even if we suppose that there is a "directing mind" behind all the processes, we're still dealing with time and processes, which still amounts to emergence. The alternative is once again to suppose that everything, including the "directing mind" simply popped into existence whenever existence itself happened, which is about as nonsensical as supposing some "directing mind" caused the observable universe to simply pop into existence all at once with everything and every kind of creature, including intelligent ones with consciousness already fully formed.

 

[Constance]

 

[smcder]

The Big Bang
- a big poem by smcder

I. BANG

BANG ... BANG

II. pop

... pop ... pop

smcder, Sept. 21st, 2018

QED

 

[smcder]

I'm not being liberal. I'm just pointing out that whatever position thee hold, thee must include an account which , in some way, includes emerging (how do we ever get by these days without the plural term for you ... or is it yea? perhaps thee is plural of your...)

So yes... I'm saying everything emerges and your answer is "surely it can't... nature must be stranger than that! our intuition must be wrong" Is that right or have I misunderstood?

1. You all

Y'all

Youse guys

2. Is mind a flock or a colony of neurons? Or, more generally, can/do you (YOU...pop)/distinguish the "emerge"(s) of:

1. Everything
2. Flocks and colonies
3. Mind

?

 

[Pharoah]

@smcder
love the poem
is mind a flock? no
second question... no
it could be like a wavefunction collapse of an infinite number of possible mind... just throw that one out there

 

[Soupie]

1. You all

Y'all

Youse guys

2. Is mind a flock or a colony of neurons? Or, more generally, can/do you (YOU...pop)/distinguish the "emerge"(s) of:

1. Everything
2. Flocks and colonies
3. Mind

?

Central Pennsylvania yins

 

[Soupie]

Central Pennsylvania yins

Correction: Apparently western pa via Pittsburg, not central.

 

[smcder]

@smcder
love the poem
is mind a flock? no
second question... no
it could be like a wavefunction collapse of an infinite number of possible mind... just throw that one out there

Second question "no" means:

you say "emergence" for all of the following?

1. Everything
2. Flocks and colonies
3. Mind

?

How is a waveform collapse of an infinite number of possible minds a case of emergence?

 

[smcder]

A nice little s a on "humation" at the conscious entities blog.

Conscious Entities

In part, the author opines:

"Computation has come on by leaps and bounds, but with humation we’ve got nothing. Very recent efforts in deep learning might just point the way towards something that could eventually resemble humation, but honestly, we haven’t even started and don’t really know how."

nothing, we got nothing...

"Even when we do get started, there’s no particular reason to think that humation scales or grows the way computation does.

What do I even mean by humation? The thing that matters for this argument is intentionality, the ability to mean things and understand meanings or ‘aboutness’. In spite of many efforts, this capacity remains beyond computation, and although various theories about it have been sketched out, there’s no accepted analysis. It is, though, at the root of human cognition, or so I believe. In particular, our ability to think ‘about’ future or imagined events allows us to generate new forward-looking plans and goals in a way that no other creature or machine can do. The way these plans address the future seems to invert the usual order of cause and effect – our behaviour now is being shaped by events that haven’t occurred yet – and generates the impression we have of free will, of being able to bring uncaused projects and desires out of nowhere. In my opinion, this is the important part of human motivation ... "

 

[Constance]

From Thomas Szanto & Hilge Landweer (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, Forthcoming 2019, London & New York: Routledge:

Gerhard Thonhauser, "Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow"

"Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s essential contribution to the phenomenology of emotions is their discovery of the primordial role of Stimmung (attunement) for human intentionality and the intelligibility of the world. In his characterization of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, Heidegger introduces Befindlichkeit (the ontological condition of being attuned) together with understanding and discourse as three equiprimordial existentiale of Dasein. Bollnow builds on Heidegger in developing his main contribution to philosophical anthropology: the introduction of attunement as the most primordial level of human life.1
I will begin by introducing Heidegger’s account of Befindlichkeit and attunement in Being and Time. Heidegger’s conception of Befindlichkeit has served as the kernel of a productive philosophical perspective on affectivity (Ratcliffe 2008, 2013; Slaby and Stephan 2008; Withy 2014, 2015). In contrast, the work of Bollnow has not received much attention. I will use the second section to discuss his seminal work Das Wesen der Stimmungen (The Nature of Attunements). In the third section, I will come back to Heidegger and discuss his idiosyncratic understanding of fundamental attunements, which shows the close link between Befindlichkeit and the core of his overall philosophical project. . . ."

Martin Heidegger and Otto Friedrich Bollnow (The Routlegde Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions)

Note: replying to author's question at the academia site facilitates immediate opening of the paper's text. Even if you choose not to reply to his question you can still download the paper by pressing the download button.

 

[Constance]

Here is a link to another new paper at academia.edu that is ramifying for our continuing efforts to understand the nature of consciousness:

Beyond the REM-NREM dichotomy: A multi-dimensional approach to understanding dreaming

Beyond the REM-NREM dichotomy: A multi-dimensional approach to understanding dreaming
Georgina Nemeth1 & Peter Fazekas2,3,✧
1Behavioural Psychology Doctoral Programme, Eötvös University, Hungary 2Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Belgium 3 Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, CFIN, Aarhus University, Denmark ✧corresponding author, email:
[email protected]

Summary: Traditionally, dream research focuses on accounting for typical psychological features of dream experiences characteristic of different sleep stages in terms of the global physiological features of the sleep stages in question. However, as subtle differences got into the forefront of enquiry, as, for example, in questions concerning between stage similarities and within stage differences of mentations, this methodology became insufficient. What recent findings and theoretical developments suggest is that understanding mental activity during sleep requires studying the fine-grained characteristics of the phenomenal features of individual dreams, which, in turn, demands identifying specific neural processes that might underlie different characteristics of the experiences, and tracking their changes not just between, but also within standard sleep stages. The paper argues that such a shift of focus from describing global stages to understanding the significance of local changes results in a true paradigm shift in dream research that can break away from the tradition of thinking about sleep mentation in terms of discrete categories (e.g. REM/NREM, or high/low global activity level), and offers a novel way of looking at dreams (and other conscious experiences) as forming a multi-dimensional continuum.

Keywords: dream; mentation; REM; NREM; sleep stages; mind wandering; neural correlate; global states of consciousness.

 

[smcder]

@Constance Dermott Moran also has a new paper at Academia:

Conscious thinking and cognitive phenomenology: topics, views and future developments

"This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy (analytic and phenomenological traditions), cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal..."

 

[smcder]

How Your Brain Is Like the Cosmic Web

 

[smcder]

What’s Wrong with Dualism?

A bedtime story from CE with a little something for everyone
...but a bit misleadingly titled...better to say:

"what's wrong and what's right about dualism"

 

[Randall]

What’s Wrong with Dualism?

A bedtime story from CE with a little something for everyone
...but a bit misleadingly titled...better to say:

"what's wrong and what's right about dualism"

How about, "What's wrong with the question of what's wrong with dualism?"

 

[Soupie]

@smcder

Sci-fi plot:

Engineer creates an android clone of himself. Due to complications that arise bc of its perfect likeness to him, he decides to destroy it.

However the community comes to believe that it was actually the android that destroyed its creator. In the end, the community (nor the reader) can't determine whether the remaining individual is the engineer or the android. Out of an abundance of caution, the community decides to destroy the individual.

 

[smcder]

@smcder

Sci-fi plot:

Engineer creates an android clone of himself. Due to complications that arise bc of its perfect likeness to him, he decides to destroy it.

However the community comes to believe that it was actually the android that destroyed its creator. In the end, the community (nor the reader) can't determine whether the remaining individual is the engineer or the android. Out of an abundance of caution, the community decides to destroy the individual.

If I had a dime for every

"engineer creates an android clone of himself. Due to complications that arise bc of its perfect likeness to him, he decides to destroy it.However the community comes to believe that it was actually the android that destroyed its creator. In the end, the community (nor the reader) can't determine whether the remaining individual is the engineer or the android. Out of an abundance of caution, the community decides to destroy the individual." story that came before me....




Lol.

No, no - it sounds good. Reminds me a bit of Asimov's robot stories...and another more recent one....Mike Reznick maybe, I heard it on a podcast a few years back and will try to find it.

 

[Soupie]

If I had a dime for every

"engineer creates an android clone of himself. Due to complications that arise bc of its perfect likeness to him, he decides to destroy it.However the community comes to believe that it was actually the android that destroyed its creator. In the end, the community (nor the reader) can't determine whether the remaining individual is the engineer or the android. Out of an abundance of caution, the community decides to destroy the individual." story that came before me....




Lol.

No, no - it sounds good. Reminds me a bit of Asimov's robot stories...and another more recent one....Mike Reznick maybe, I heard it on a podcast a few years back and will try to find it.

Yeah creator ruined by creation heavily trodden ground. Nevertheless the emphasis of my story as revealed by the title: the trouble with p zombies.

 

[smcder]

Yeah creator ruined by creation heavily trodden ground. Nevertheless the emphasis of my story as revealed by the title: the trouble with p zombies.

EP193: Article of Faith - Escape Pod

Not the same plot, but might be helpful.

 

[smcder]

Yeah creator ruined by creation heavily trodden ground. Nevertheless the emphasis of my story as revealed by the title: the trouble with p zombies.

No I wasn't thinking that...plotwise, it's all heavily trodden ground.

You could play with it a bit...to reveal who is and isn't conscious, an unconscious creator might have created a conscious android, right? You'd need a gods eye view or other mechanism or something subtle so that this just occurs to the reader at some point...see PK Dick...if you find a good way to do this, then you have a whole series of tales that almost write themselves.

Other ideas:

1. To "prove" he is the engineer, he offers to build another duplicate or a duplicate of someone else, but perhaps the first creation was conscious only by a fluke ...

2. At the last minute, the engineer reveals a "watermark" or a flaw in the creation which might resolve the mystery one way or the other, which might be to do with p consciousness...

3. In a Twilight Zone reversal, the community reveals they are all the androids...

Etc
Etc

QED