Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[Pharoah]

What my earlier work focuses on, is that increasing complexity happens accidentally at each level. Most examples of greater complexity (for example, most mutations) are not advantageous and do not perpetuate. But a small proportion do make a difference, which is why, however slow the process, complexity at each hierarchical level tends to increase. This is not to say however, that less complex forms count for nothing because less complexity can mean improved efficiencies. The former does not discount the latter...
@smcder what do you mean by "a fixed progression" #995

#998 "I would say the knowledge of disparate disciplines (including empirical knowledge) is implicit in the scientists' knowledge and technology" "I am not sure that no matter how sophisticated a knowledge of DNA one has, that all of this could be pulled out of only a sample of DNA? I'm not sure everything is coded in DNA - there is lots of information in the environment - and species move into novel environments - if you were given the DNA of an ancient mammal with a wide range (say a hominid) would you be able to tell everything about it? I don't think you would be able to say where it lived in that wide range?"
A reviewer made a similar point... but I am not saying that everything is coded in DNA. All I am proposing is that details about an organism and its environment will be coded for in some way and to some degree, and, therefore, that eDNA (and DNA) will bear a meaningful correspondence with its environment (courtesy of discourse through replication)
You are right... the term 'knowledge' need not be used. But I think the argument is very relevant to Jackson 1986 Knowledge Argument (which is where this paper started its life). And it is important to understand the different discourse levels and how they determine a unique class of meaningful correspondence. But... I agree that the term 'knowledge' is not vital.

#999 "Again, I am not sure that's important to your argument."
Don't get what you are saying

#1000 "1. that is a phrase that will be used in cases of ambiguity "did he means this or that" and the reviewer will go back to this and say "remember he said that .... so ..." because, if I read it write, it's radical ...
2. parsimony the standard theory would say something like human language came out of the (physiological) variability of various ways of communicating and some kind of mutation - or the physiology was there at some point and there was a new understand of how to use it ... now the physiology may have been there and continued to evolve and that may be what you are saying (?) - but to say that the physiology evolved as a result of the "compulsive desire" qua "compulsive desire" ... would be a departure, something more like Lamarckism ... but also we would need a "how" and would need to see if this is a parsimonious explanation ... at the species level would there be only one "compulsive desire"? Does it make sense in the light of what you may mean by this statement to ask "why didn't we evolve the physiology to fly?" as that also seem a compulsive desire ... or, since we have the compulsive desire to communicate directly with another person, why did we not develop ESP? (maybe we did!) ... why does language seem to have so much in common with the "languages" or "communications" of other animals - why aren't more and more species evolving it?"
Good points. Animals communicate and so would have early hominid. Let's say that at some early stage, hominid communication was not 'language'.
The question is, did a mechanism of language (a language acquisition device) arise due to some kind of mutation and language evolved from that? I say no. I say, that the early hominids started developing proto-concepts (as described in my paper) and that when an individual has a realisation of its own existential being, conceived thus, the individual then wants to relate that world-view... because it is revelatory. Proto-language then functions to inform about objects and subjects and their relation to one another and to the individual... and that ultimately requires a grammatical structure. Initially the language-specific physiology would not have been there... but the demand for new and novel sounds and expressions would have led to brain expansion and the evolution of physiologies. That's my argument. Perhaps "compulsive desire" is not the best term.
The problem with flying, is that our bones and brains are too heavy. You have to trade one for the other and then you don't end up with humans anymore. So perhaps some hominids did develop wings, but they ended up as crows.

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah right... but don't we know what ended up as what?

...e.g. birds and mammals diverged about 300,000,000 years ago?

 

[Pharoah]

@Pharoah right... but don't we know what ended up as what?

...e.g. birds and mammals diverged about 300,000,000 years ago?

There is nothing to say that mammals can not evolve wings... bats... squirrel and lemma that glide are halfway there... mammals came ut of water but some went back in it. Apparently, whales most closely related to hippos.
some people have webbed feet and others are flabby under the arms, but these things haven't so far proved of much help in the office environment. although the forked tongue is increasingly common

 

[smcder]

There is nothing to say that mammals can not evolve wings... bats... squirrel and lemma that glide are halfway there... mammals came ut of water but some went back in it. Apparently, whales most closely related to hippos.
some people have webbed feet and others are flabby under the arms, but these things haven't so far proved of much help in the office environment. although the forked tongue is increasingly common

Here you say "can". Yes.

But above you say:

"So perhaps some hominids did develop wings, but they ended up as crows."

And I'm thinking "don't we know that no hominids (in fact) became crows?)

 

[Pharoah]

Here you say "can". Yes.

But above you say:

"So perhaps some hominids did develop wings, but they ended up as crows."

And I'm thinking "don't we know that no hominids (in fact) became crows?)

yep... the crows thing was a bit daft. I'm just saying the evolution is happening in all directions, but inevitably also in the increasing complexity direction where it proves to make a difference.

 

[Randall]

I puzzle over this quite a bit. I once thought that HCT indicated that artificial consciousness was possible, and with it, sentience..

I'd say there's no such thing as artificial consciousness. there's either Consciousness or no consciousness. I think engineered consciousness would be a better term.

Certainly, HCT indicates you have to go deeper than the artificial neural level. That being said, the artificial neural level will be able to produce behaviours that pass the Turing test imo.
If I came face to face with an AC robot that appeared as if it had sentience, I would apply the Intentional Stance in my attitidue to it because the dangers of assuming no sentience has worse consequences than assuming sentience... or maybe assuming sentience has significantly more dangers than assuming otherwise?... "so... you actually have a mind... how quaint!" [robot to human in the bar] "don't let that spoil the fun" [human to robot]

It's reasonable to think that we can engineer a conscious being using biotechnology. The question is whether or not it can be done in other ways that don't involve biology. It's currently my position that it's not simply the shape and position of the cells, or even their ability to transmit signals between each other, but that there's also something about their physical structure and composition that facilitates the emergence of consciousness. Chips and wires therefore may never be able to do the job. Maybe ( just maybe ) we're the only way it can be done, and that's why the aliens find us so interesting to study. Maybe they aren't conscious, but they are intelligent, and they're trying to figure out what this extra thing is that we have that they don't. I just thought I'd add that last bit in because this thread is supposed to be about the paranormal too right ( although I don't think aliens rightly fall under the category of paranormal ). But why quibble over tiny details?

 

[Constance]

Maybe they aren't conscious, but they are intelligent, and they're trying to figure out what this extra thing is that we have that they don't.

If they're AGIs, they'd have been constructed by conscious, organically evolved beings. If they are AGIs, these 'beings' we see might never have known consciousness, and that might be one very good reason for their explorations of planets like ours and species like earth's. For humanity is a very mixed bag of positive and negative emotions, values, activities, and behaviors. Many of which are dangerous and potentially fatal.

Generally it feels like there is room for this within the parameters of the arguments of evolution of complexity as outlined above - but in some cases: e.g.

• The increase in sophistication in each class inevitably leads to the emergence of the novel mechanism particular to the next class in the hierarchy.

I'm not so sure ... That may be one of the more radical things HCT contends - but if we balance that against what I understand @Constance to be saying in MP's work on animality and recent articles I've read on bacterial and plant intelligence - then I question the inevitability - particularly the idea that there is a fixed progression of hierarchies as some of the imagery seems to indicate:

'Inevitably' might be too strong a word, but I think @Pharoah's main point is valid -- that in general reproduction of species enables evolving complexity, and proliferating variety, in species and subspecies populating earth.

I am not sure that no matter how sophisticated a knowledge of DNA one has, that all of this could be pulled out of only a sample of DNA? I'm not sure everything is coded in DNA - there is lots of information in the environment - and species move into novel environments - if you were given the DNA of an ancient mammal with a wide range (say a hominid) would you be able to tell everything about it? I don't think you would be able to say where it lived in that wide range?

Here's a recent post by @mike in another Paracast thread filled with amazing recent developments in the understanding of DNA and its capacities for storage and exchange of information, including historical information. I meant to copy this post here as soon as I read it:

Reframing the Debate: A Path Forward or Backward?

. . . but I don't think you have to base your argument that there is a physiological kind of "knowledge" ... in fact, I'm not sure you need the whole line of arguing for it being a kind of knowledge, or that you couldn't simply say "knowledge" (in quotes) anytime you need to.

I think @Pharoah's concept of physiological 'knowledge' is consistent with Merleau-Ponty's insight into human consciousness as "embodied consciousness." In the evolution of species many kinds and levels of 'knowing' or 'understanding' arise from the sensing (even at the level of prereflective experience) of the situatedness of an animal's lived experience, the context within which it acts in its 'seeking behavior', as Panksepp pointed out. That which becomes gradually 'known', understood, in prereflective bodily experience funds the development of prereflective consciousness in animals, which itself further enables, in humans and likely some other 'higher' animals, the development of capabilities for reflective consciousness and thinking. I also agree with Pharoah that these developmental capacities [formations of neural nets] arise in part out of the creature's need and desire for further comprehension of its encompassing 'worldly' environment. We see it all repeated in the first few years of our children's lives.

 

[Constance]

Before I forget to post it, here's an interesting paper:

Le Bihan, Baptiste (2018) Priority Monism Beyond Spacetime.

Priority Monism Beyond Spacetime - Philsci-Archive

 

[Constance]

“Space is blue and birds fly through it”

Carlo Rovelli CPT, Aix-Marseille Universit´e, Universit´e de Toulon,
CNRS, F-13288 Marseille, France.

Abstract: Quantum mechanics is not about ‘quantum states’: it is about values of physical variables. I give a short fresh presentation and update on the relational perspective on the theory, and a comment on its philosophical implications. [Paper presented to meeting on “Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society”, held at The Royal Society in London on 11–12 December 2017; submitted to Philosophical Transactions A.]

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14180/1/Royal2017.pdf

 

[Pharoah]

“Space is blue and birds fly through it”

Carlo Rovelli CPT, Aix-Marseille Universit´e, Universit´e de Toulon,
CNRS, F-13288 Marseille, France.

Abstract: Quantum mechanics is not about ‘quantum states’: it is about values of physical variables. I give a short fresh presentation and update on the relational perspective on the theory, and a comment on its philosophical implications. [Paper presented to meeting on “Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society”, held at The Royal Society in London on 11–12 December 2017; submitted to Philosophical Transactions A.]

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14180/1/Royal2017.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.0132.pdf
Dorato on rovelli - QM support for HCT re. RQM

 

[smcder]

If they're AGIs, they'd have been constructed by conscious, organically evolved beings. If they are AGIs, these 'beings' we see might never have known consciousness, and that might be one very good reason for their explorations of planets like ours and species like earth's. For humanity is a very mixed bag of positive and negative emotions, values, activities, and behaviors. Many of which are dangerous and potentially fatal.




'Inevitably' might be too strong a word, but I think @Pharoah's main point is valid -- that in general reproduction of species enables evolving complexity, and proliferating variety, in species and subspecies populating earth.




Here's a recent post by @mike in another Paracast thread filled with amazing recent developments in the understanding of DNA and its capacities for storage and exchange of information, including historical information. I meant to copy this post here as soon as I read it:

Reframing the Debate: A Path Forward or Backward?



I think @Pharoah's concept of physiological 'knowledge' is consistent with Merleau-Ponty's insight into human consciousness as "embodied consciousness." In the evolution of species many kinds and levels of 'knowing' or 'understanding' arise from the sensing (even at the level of prereflective experience) of the situatedness of an animal's lived experience, the context within which it acts in its 'seeking behavior', as Panksepp pointed out. That which becomes gradually 'known', understood, in prereflective bodily experience funds the development of prereflective consciousness in animals, which itself further enables, in humans and likely some other 'higher' animals, the development of capabilities for reflective consciousness and thinking. I also agree with Pharoah that these developmental capacities [formations of neural nets] arise in part out of the creature's need and desire for further comprehension of its encompassing 'worldly' environment. We see it all repeated in the first few years of our children's lives.

I just heard something about DNA storage - fascinating. I've read estimates, though, that the data contained in a human genome is less than one gigabyte - and there is epigenetic information not contained in the DNA itself, there would also be EDNAs relationships with the flora and fauna around her, including parasites, symbiotes, etc - and information in the environment that would not be recoverable from DNA alone ... that would go into the making of an EDNA - but I didn't think the DNA argument (or the "knowledge" argument) was crucial - and @Pharoah seemed to agree (a bit), but I understand his reasons for leaving them in.

I did misread his claim with "all" instead of "significant" information - in mind.

 

[Soupie]

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.0132.pdf
Dorato on rovelli - QM support for HCT re. RQM

Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?

Bc just to be clear, Rovelli also cites Michel Bitbol as someone who has extensively "discussed" RQM—therefore implying that Rovelli believes Bitbol has a good grip on it.

And Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

"Abstract : Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement."

 

[smcder]

Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?

Bc just to be clear, Rovelli also cites Michel Bitbol as someone who has extensively "discussed" RQM—therefore implying that Rovelli believes Bitbol has a good grip on it.

And Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

"Abstract : Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement."

Booyeah!

I especially like the pragmatic sound of the last sentence.

 

[Pharoah]

Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?

Bc just to be clear, Rovelli also cites Michel Bitbol as someone who has extensively "discussed" RQM—therefore implying that Rovelli believes Bitbol has a good grip on it.

And Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

"Abstract : Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement."

Will do... just working on it atm... for a few days...maybe

 

[Constance]

Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?

I think the reasons why Rovelli's RQM support Pharoah's HCT are clear enough in the current Rovelli paper.

Bc just to be clear, Rovelli also cites Michel Bitbol as someone who has extensively "discussed" RQM—therefore implying that Rovelli believes Bitbol has a good grip on it. And Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

Can you link back to our discussion of the Bitbol paper? I'm not remembering that discussion and would like to see what we thought we had established from reading it. In any case I think we should read and discuss both papers now in relation to Pharoah's paper and in general to focus our thinking regarding Positive Monism and also Velmans's Reflexive Monism.

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

"Could YOU explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?"

....take the HCT challenge!

 

[Constance]

@Soupie, I've done a search for earlier discussion here of Bitbol's thinking and it looks like Steve called our attention to Bitbol at the beginning of this current year, which I followed up on in February in this post quoting B. at length in a statement that incudes references to a number of relevant papers in the attached bibliography:

Post 903, Part 8

At the turn of the new year Steve linked the following statement by Michel Bitbol, "On the Primary Nature of Consciousness," in our review of key papers in the project of 'naturalizing phenomenology' or 'phenomenologizing nature'. We briefly discussed Bitbol's statement and wondered about the definition of the word 'efficience' Bitbol uses, and I said I'd ask a French friend of mine to help us understand what that term means in the French language. She has now returned and responded:

"What I could find is the word "aptitude" as synonyme of 'efficience'.
So it would mean that neurosciences are incapable of "understanding
phenomenal consciousness because they don't have the right aptitude."

I think we should confront Bitbol's challenge to reductive neuroscience again if we want to continue to reflect here on the naturalization project. It seems to me that within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies it is now clear to the majority of participants that phenomenology and neuroscience must be integrated if progress is to be made. Here is the Bitbol statement for review; the bibliography he provided with that two-page statement is included and presents papers we might be able to locate online:


"On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
Michel Bitbol
CNRS / Ecole Normale Superieure (Archives Husserl), Paris
Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi,
The Systems View of Life,
Cambridge UniversityPress, 2014, p. 266-268

Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one's own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere 'feel' of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.

We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein's expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one's own experience and the others' experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, o elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific statement: it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.

But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of 'having a feel'). In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to appear as irrelevant or incidental.

As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent predictors of subject's behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of [to] provide reports in clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the functions of consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like to be an organism performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the organism, integrated action planning, or self-monitoring), but not the mere fact that there is something it is like to implement these functions. Indeed, only the functions have adaptative value, not their being experienced.

Even the ability of neurophysiological inquiry to identify correlates of phenomenal consciousness can be challenged on that basis. After all, identifying such correlates rely [relies] heavily on the subject's ability to discriminate, to memorize, and to report , which is used as the ultimate experimental criterion of consciousness. Can we preclude the possibility that the large-scale synchronization of complex neural activity of the brain cortex often deemed indispensible for consciousness, is in fact only required for interconnecting a number of cognitive functions including those needed for memorizing, self-reflecting and reporting? Conversely, extrapolating Semir Zeki's suggestion, can we preclude that any (large or small) area of the brain or even of the body is associated to some sort of fleeting pure experience, although no report can be obtained from it?

Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory; but they still have 'implicit memories' of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial acknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue.

Should we content ourselves with these negative remarks ?As Francisco Varela has shown, one can overcome them by proposing a broadened definition of science. Instead of remaining stuck within the third-person attitude, the new science should include a 'dance' of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts, mediated by the second person level of social exchange. As soon as this momentous turn is taken, elementary consciousness is no longer a mystery for a truncated science, but an aknowledged datum from which a fuller kind of science can unfold.

Bibliography

Bitbol M., 'Science as if situation mattered',
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 1, 181-224, 2002

Bitbol, M., 'Is Consciousness Primary?',
NeuroQuantology, 6, 53-71, 2008

Bitbol, M. & Luisi, P.-L., 'Science and the self-referentiality of consciousness',
Journal of Cosmology, 14, 4728-4743, 2011

Varela, F.V., 'Neurophenomenology : a methodological remedy for the hard problem', in: Shear J (ed.) Explaining consciousness, the hard problem, MIT Press, 1998

Wittgenstein, L., 'Notes for lectures on private experience and sense data', Philosophical Review, 77, 275-320,1968

Zeki, S., 'The disunity of consciousness', in R. Banerjee & B.K. Chakrabarti (Eds.),
Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168, Elsevier, 2008."

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

 

[Constance]

We were having a very productive discussion back there in Part 8 of this thread at the beginning of 2017. Peter Godfrey-Smith's book on consciousness in octupuses/ocotupi is immediately relevant, linked here with extracts from reviews of it. I'm reading that book now and recommend it:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8

 

[Pharoah]

Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?

Bc just to be clear, Rovelli also cites Michel Bitbol as someone who has extensively "discussed" RQM—therefore implying that Rovelli believes Bitbol has a good grip on it.

And Bitbol has published the following (which we've discussed in the past):

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

"Abstract : Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza’s attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela’s neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement."

@Soupie "Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?"
Ok... N.B. work in progress (sorry its more of my stuff to read... RQM relates to my take on information and causation):
THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION AND THE NATURALIZATION OF MENTAL CONTENT | Philosophy of Consciousness
pw: soupie

 

[Constance]

@Soupie "Could you explain in which way(s) RQM supports HCT?"
Ok... N.B. work in progress (sorry its more of my stuff to read... RQM relates to my take on information and causation):
THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION AND THE NATURALIZATION OF MENTAL CONTENT | Philosophy of Consciousness
pw: soupie

@Pharoah, would you set a password for me connected to this paper? Thanks.