• 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 10

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013; 7: 611.
Published online 2013 Sep 30. Prepublished online 2013 Jun 25. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00611
PMCID: PMC3786226

The embodied transcendental: a Kantian perspective on neurophenomenology

Omar T. Khachouf,1,* Stefano Poletti,2 and Giuseppe Pagnoni1
1Department of Neural, Biomedical, and Metabolic Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy
2Department of Applied Cognitive Psychology, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Edited by: Wendy Hasenkamp, Mind and Life Institute, USA
Reviewed by: Antoine Lutz, Waisman Lab for Brain Imaging and Behavior, USA; Rajesh Kasturirangan, National Institute of Advanced Studies, India

This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Abstract: Neurophenomenology is a research programme aimed at bridging the explanatory gap between first-person subjective experience and neurophysiological third-person data, through an embodied and enactive approach to the biology of consciousness. The present proposal attempts to further characterize the bodily basis of the mind by adopting a naturalistic view of the phenomenological concept of intentionality as the a priori invariant character of any lived experience. Building on the Kantian definition of transcendentality as “what concerns the a priori formal structures of the subject's mind” and as a precondition for the very possibility of human knowledge, we will suggest that this transcendental core may in fact be rooted in biology and can be examined within an extension of the theory of autopoiesis. The argument will be first clarified by examining its application to previously proposed elementary autopoietic models, to the bacterium, and to the immune system; it will be then further substantiated and illustrated by examining the mirror-neuron system and the default mode network as biological instances exemplifying the enactive nature of knowledge, and by discussing the phenomenological aspects of selected neurological conditions (neglect, schizophrenia). In this context, the free-energy principle proposed recently by Karl Friston will be briefly introduced as a rigorous, neurally-plausible framework that seems to accomodate optimally these ideas. While our approach is biologically-inspired, we will maintain that lived first-person experience is still critical for a better understanding of brain function, based on our argument that the former and the latter share the same transcendental structure. Finally, the role that disciplined contemplative practices can play to this aim, and an interpretation of the cognitive processes taking place during meditation under this perspective, will be also discussed.

Keywords: neurophenomenology, Kant, a priori, prereflective awareness, default mode network, ongoing activity, free-energy, meditation


Introduction

Neurophenomenology, a programmatic endeavour to integrate the basic principles of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, was originally proposed within the theoretical framework of autopoiesis and enactive cognition (Maturana and Varela, 1980; Varela et al., 1991) as “a methodological remedy for the hard problem” (Varela, 1996). While its aim of bridging the explanatory gap between first-person witnessing of life and third-person scientific accounts of experience has yet to be fulfilled, there is currently a renewed interest not only in better defining the theoretical project itself, but also in identifying a pragmatic implementation of the neurophenomenological method (Lutz, 2002; Lutz et al., 2002; Lutz and Thompson, 2003; Cosmelli et al., 2004; Thompson, 2007).

Within the dialectic field spanned by the first- and third-person epistemological poles, many phenomenology-oriented authors have recently argued for at least a methodological, if not an ontological primacy of consciousness over its neuroscientific correlates (Wallace, 2000; Bitbol, 2008). Bitbol (2008), in particular, uses a number of arguments from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and physics to demonstrate the inconsistency of a reductionist approach to consciousness, where mental states are ontologically dependent on physical states; neurophenomenology is then viewed as a novel scientific method building on a corpus of intersubjectively-invariant first-person reports that may broaden the horizon of objective science.

In this paper, we would like to take a closer look at and build on one of the key features of the enactive approach, namely the natural roots of intentionality, a phenomenological notion indicating that experience is always “about something” (Thompson, 2007, p. 27, pp. 157–162). To this aim, we will argue that for the environment to become meaningful for an organism, the latter must be endowed with a hierarchical set of a priori (albeit malleable) structures that somehow mirror selected aspects of it—in line with Kant's notion of transcendental. Since the transcendental is also at the very basis of phenomenology, we hope that underscoring its embodied roots can provide a useful inspiration for future interdisciplinary research into the mind-brain problem.

This article is structured as follows. After introducing the philosophical background to our thesis (Section 1), we will discuss a naturalized account of intentionality, whereby the transcendental is interpreted as the defining character of autopoietic agents (Section 2); the bacterium and the immune system will be used as elementary examples of embodied transcendentality. In Section 3, we will propose that the activity of selected neural networks in the human brain can be interpreted as displaying the functionality of the transcendental structure at multiple levels, suggesting potential implications for clinical conditions; the free-energy principle proposed by Karl Friston (Friston and Stephan, 2007) will be introduced as a neurobiologically-plausible theoretical framework that seems particularly fitting for the ideas presented here. We will conclude (Section 4) with some considerations on the role that contemplative practices may play in neurophenomenology. Figure Figure11 illustrates synoptically the relationships among the themes discussed in the present paper.


Figure 1

A schematic depiction of the articulation of the main themes of the article. The brain pictures are toy-representations of the default mode network (red stars) and the putative human analog of the mirror-neuron circuit (green stars). On the lower left ...

1. The transcendental in philosophy

We will begin by introducing a few fundamental concepts from Husserl's philosophy (Husserl, 1960, 1970), with an emphasis on their Kantian roots, in order to characterize the role of the transcendental in our own proposal.

Husserl's transcendental phenomenology

Husserl refuses to accept what he calls “the natural attitude,” the naive and non-reflexive everyday consciousness of the world leading to the common belief that reality as it appears exists in itself, that is, has an ontological value. Husserl's operation, called epoché, consists in the attempt of “bracketing out” unexamined preconceptions from statements about reality (including those on which natural science relies), and finds the manifestation of consciousness itself as the only residual of this rigorous examination. This gnoseological praxis led Husserl to the characterization of subjectivity as transcendental, a term denoting the a priori1 determination of the form and quality of experience. According to Husserl, the fundamental character of experience does not consist in its phenomenal content, but rather in the pre-given “horizon” (a term with a deliberate connotation of “illusory” or “apparent”) that is the condition for the perception of each object or phenomenon: this background primary consciousness is what enables the transcendentally-constructed world.

Intentionality and prereflective awareness

We will use the term “intentionality” here to indicate the mind's innate tension toward its object, a definition underscoring the relationship between act and content of experience. Mental acts or processes (e.g., focusing one's attention, recalling memories, experiencing surprise to unexpected events, etc.) are referred to by Husserl as noesis; mental contents, such as objects of perception, thought, memory, imagery, emotion and so on, are called noema. In order to understand the forthcoming sections, it is useful to see noesis as an a priori dimension of experience, and noema as an a posteriori, although such distinction may not correspond exactly to Husserl's original position. Moreover—since to see an object is indissolubly tied to the subjective experience of seeing, to recall a memory cannot be separated from the subjective quality of recalling, and so on—intentionality is coessential with prereflective self-awareness (Lutz and Thompson, 2003), the self-manifesting awareness of experience that does not require a voluntary act of introspection or reflection (Depraz et al., 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Prereflective self-awareness is considered by a long philosophical tradition as the very mode of experience (“any conscious existence exists qua conscious of existing,” Sartre, 1943; Zahavi, 2003), and there has been recently a keen interest in the search for its bodily roots (Wider, 1997; Zahavi, 2002). Notably, prereflective self-awareness can be seen as the most basic form of noesis, i.e., the fundamental a priori form within whose limits all experience arises. It is in this sense that we can view intentionality as a manifestation of the transcendental: to use a metaphor, it can be likened to the founding act of the fisherman casting his net out into the sea to begin his catch; without this initial lighting up of consciousness, which embeds an essential predictive component, nothing could be perceived at all.

It is important to distinguish this notion of intentionality from its functionalist-cognitivist acceptation (Fodor, 1975), the latter indicating the semantic link between a mental representation and its object in the external world that often assumes a one-to-one mapping. Concerning the validity of this assumption, it is useful to briefly recall here Freeman and Skarda (1990)'s argument about the widespread use of the notion of representation in cognitive science. In a cogent critique, the authors point to a consistent body of experimental evidence that the search for specific EEG patterns coding for different olfactory stimuli had been misleading: odor-specific neural activity in the olfactory bulb is in fact more influenced by the ongoing neural, behavioral, and environmental context than by the sheer physical characteristics of the external stimuli (Freeman and Skarda, 1985), a finding that is difficult to reconcile with a purely representationalist view of cognition.

The a priori determination of knowledge: Kant's legacy

Before delving further into the matter, we would like to consider briefly the Kantian legacy in phenomenology. Kant aimed at providing a theoretical justification for the objectiveness of the newborn Galileian-Newtonian physics. The 18th century debate about the legitimacy of a mathematical formalization of nature, i.e., about whether nature could conform to a merely-human logic, led the skeptic philosophers (Hume, Berkeley) to claim that the only value that can be attributed to science is practical and nothing can be stated about its connection with reality. In order to overcome such impasse, Kant proposed a revolutionary (albeit influenced by Aristotle) reconceptualization of the process of human knowledge, which he illustrated in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant begins by examining perceptions (called “sensory intuitions”) as the result of the encounter between the external world and the subject's senses, where every perception is necessarily framed within a specific space and time. However, the categories of space and time are now considered neither absolute and objective, i.e., existing in the world (as Newton held), nor totally subjective and existentially private (as Leibnitz claimed). Space and time are for the first time defined as “transcendental,” that is, formal and empty a priori structures of the subject. The external world can be sensorily perceived only inasmuch as it “fits” such predetermined forms. The thus obtained sensory intuition is then passed onto a higher level of cognitive elaboration where a different and more abstract set of categories (including quantity, quality, reciprocity, cause-effect, etc.) mediates the production of scientific claims—propositions that are by definition true both per se and intersubjectively. But how can the link between these intellectual categories and the outer world—and therefore the objectivity of science—be guaranteed? Intellectual categories must be transcendental forms as well, which thanks to a direct connection to the empirical senses via the basic space and time categories, can predetermine the kind of external material that can be sensorily perceived. To put it succintly, we can only perceive what we can elaborate into concepts.

The Critique of Pure Reason indeed overturns the relationship between knowing subject and experienced object, arguing that the properties that we can assign to the object are nothing but the very preconditions for knowing the object itself: we do not know the object per se, and our world is populated by objects only inasmuch as they fit our predetermined sensory and intellective apparatus2. It is not difficult to extend such notion to living beings in general, within the perspective of enactive cognition: each organism brings forth a predetermined (but malleable) structure to face the world, thus creating its own umwelt or “inner world” (Uexkull, 2010). To use a common illustration, a bacterium sensible to three chemicals (e.g., sucrose, lactose and an isomer of lactose) lives in a world whose cardinal features consist only of these three objects fitting the bacterium's predetermined sensory apparatus (receptors and metabolic networks): the rest of the physicochemical world for the bacterium is the “the object per se,” i.e., Kant's noumenon, which is utterly opaque to cognition. From such a point of view, the transcendental can in fact be appreciated as the very mode of both subjectivity and life.

Go to:
2. Embodying the transcendental

A number of different nuances about the notion of autopoiesis were highlighted already in Varela et al. (1974); Maturana and Varela (1980). A simple yet precise definition, taken from Varela's later writings and adopted by Thompson (2007) as a cornerstone for his argument, is that a system can be considered autopoietic if 1) it consists of a network of chemical reactions which regenerate at least some of the components of the system, 2) the system has a semipermeable boundary, and 3) this boundary is the result of reactions taking place necessarily within the boundary. The term “operational closure” is used in Varela et al. (1991) to indicate the intrinsically recursive nature of the reactions the system consists of. Since such a system is immersed in the environment it generated from and continually exchanges energy and matter with it, the identity singled out by the autocatalytic production3 of the system's membrane is far from representing a disconnection from the external world. Indeed, its identity emerges from bringing forth selected relations with the environment, such as the intake of external chemicals that will take part in the system's reactions: these chemicals become nutrients, acquiring that “surplus of significance” that points to the difference between external environment and world under the organism's perspective (Varela et al., 1991; Varela, 1997). Operational closure and the environment-linked thermodynamic openness of autopoietic systems can be described as a continuous change within a struggle for the re-affirmation of an invariant form. Such relationship between autopoietic agents and the environment (enaction) is what characterizes, in Varela and Maturana's view, the minimal form of cognition, as synthesized by the formula “living is sense-making” (Varela et al., 1991).

Our contribution to this view focuses on the examination of what enables the organism to make sense of the environment (however unconsciously). We propose that an embodied analog of Kant's a priori structures may be at work. This change of accent, within the same perspective, is based on an extension of the notion of the Kantian transcendental consisting in rooting an a priori formal structure at the biological level. We acknowledge here a strong affinity with Thompson (2004), who links intentionality as a self-organizing openness to the world with biology, arguing that autopoiesis is “the minimal form this type of self-organization can take” (Thompson, 2007, pp. 157–165). This sentence contains indeed, in a nutshell, a formulation of an embodiment of the transcendental similar to ours, with an explicit reference to dynamic systems theory (Thompson, 2007, p. 27). However, Thompson's claim that experience is “irreducible” due to its “ineliminable transcendental character”(Thompson, 2004) seems to favor a usage of the transcendental in a purely-phenomenological way: the transcendental is our own lived experience, which alone renders an epistemology of living organisms possible (Thompson, 2007, pp. 162–165). Our analysis of the autopoietic analogs of Kantian categories, on the other hand, aspires to trace the “ineliminable transcendental character” of phenomenology within biology (and the brain) itself. In order to clarify this important point, we discuss briefly some relevant issues highlighted by Thompson (2007).

Autopoiesis, life, and cognition: one and the same? . . . ."

The embodied transcendental: a Kantian perspective on neurophenomenology
 
Steve [@smcder] can you do your internet search magic and help me find an online copy of this paper:

Stern D. "Pre-reflexive experience and its passage to reflexive experience: A developmental view." Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2009;16( 10–12):307–331.

Thanks.

I will keep searching - but no luck so far ... :-(
 
If it's all mind ... what does it seem to matter so much?
Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.

Ergo the mental—whatever it's origin and nature—must differentiate and self-interact. I don't currently see how these properties could emerge from sentience.

Thus I (cheat) by saying the noumenon (what-is) has three properties:

Sentience, self-interaction, and differentiation.
 
Anesthesia & Self Awareness

Consciousness is not secondary to physical processes (Bitbol). Ergo, the brain does not generate consciousness. Why is it that consciousness seems to cease or "go away" when we undergo anesthesia?

I suggest that rather than consciousness going away, it is the brain's constitution of self-representation that goes away.

We can use a submarine and its sonar system as a very rough example.

Imagine that a submarine is interacting with the environment--including its own body--and these interactions are represented on its sonar screen as red blotches of various sizes, shapes, and movements.

Now imagine that the submarine undergoes some circumstance that is akin to anesthesia and while the general structure of the submarine remains intact several processes within the sub are disrupted, including the sonar system. When the sonar system is down, the screen goes blank. Dark. The submarine's representation of world, others, and self ceases.

When the submarine emerges from the anesthesia-like condition, everything comes back online, including the sonar system. The sonar screen is gradually populated with representational red blobs, including the one representing the submarine itself.

From the submarine's point of view, when its sonar system went down, everything ceased to exist--but we understand that this isn't the case. Nothing ceased to exist except the submarine's capacity to represent the world, which promptly returned when the sub was functioning normally again.

However, in order to fully understand this analogy, one has to understand that reality (the noumenon*) and our perception of the noumenon are analogous to the environment and the submarine's sonar system and screen with red blotches.

Life does not generate consciousness, rather life constitutes a process by which consciousness perceives itself.

*nou·me·non


ˈno͞oməˌnän/

noun

(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.
 
Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.

Ergo the mental—whatever it's origin and nature—must differentiate and self-interact. I don't currently see how these properties could emerge from sentience.

Thus I (cheat) by saying the noumenon (what-is) has three properties:

Sentience, self-interaction, and differentiation.

That does not necessarily follow from:
  • I don't currently see how these properties could emerge from sentience.
Many other things could follow from that. Did you read the article on UAL and minimal consicousness (sentience)?

We can also look at the premise:
  • Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.
 
Anesthesia & Self Awareness

Consciousness is not secondary to physical processes (Bitbol). Ergo, the brain does not generate consciousness. Why is it that consciousness seems to cease or "go away" when we undergo anesthesia?

I suggest that rather than consciousness going away, it is the brain's constitution of self-representation that goes away.

We can use a submarine and its sonar system as a very rough example.

Imagine that a submarine is interacting with the environment--including its own body--and these interactions are represented on its sonar screen as red blotches of various sizes, shapes, and movements.

Now imagine that the submarine undergoes some circumstance that is akin to anesthesia and while the general structure of the submarine remains intact several processes within the sub are disrupted, including the sonar system. When the sonar system is down, the screen goes blank. Dark. The submarine's representation of world, others, and self ceases.

When the submarine emerges from the anesthesia-like condition, everything comes back online, including the sonar system. The sonar screen is gradually populated with representational red blobs, including the one representing the submarine itself.

From the submarine's point of view, when its sonar system went down, everything ceased to exist--but we understand that this isn't the case. Nothing ceased to exist except the submarine's capacity to represent the world, which promptly returned when the sub was functioning normally again.

However, in order to fully understand this analogy, one has to understand that reality (the noumenon*) and our perception of the noumenon are analogous to the environment and the submarine's sonar system and screen with red blotches.

Life does not generate consciousness, rather life constitutes a process by which consciousness perceives itself.

*nou·me·non


ˈno͞oməˌnän/

noun

(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.

Slow down a bit ...
  • Consciousness is not secondary to physical processes (Bitbol). Ergo, the brain does not generate consciousness.
Three things to look at:

1. Bitbol presents six arguments
2.
I wonder if it's fair to re-phrase as: It turns out that any attempt (so far) at proving ...
2a. If not, we still need to look at whether "the brain" does not generate consciousness follows from "...any attempt at proving that experience is ontologically secondary to material objects fails" - it does not, inability to prove something doesn't mean its not true, and at any rate Bitbol only claims methodological and existential primacy​
3. Bitbol does not espouse an alternative view

Abstract 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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.


1.Why is it that consciousness seems to cease or "go away" when we undergo anesthesia?

2. I suggest that rather than consciousness going away, it is the brain's constitution of self-representation that goes away.


Here you move from seeming to assuming that it does go away. First, we might look at whether the seeming ... is!

Finally ... no ... more ... submarine ... examples!


shatner.jpg

;-)
 
Anesthesia & Self Awareness

Consciousness is not secondary to physical processes (Bitbol). Ergo, the brain does not generate consciousness. Why is it that consciousness seems to cease or "go away" when we undergo anesthesia?

I suggest that rather than consciousness going away, it is the brain's constitution of self-representation that goes away.

We can use a submarine and its sonar system as a very rough example.

Imagine that a submarine is interacting with the environment--including its own body--and these interactions are represented on its sonar screen as red blotches of various sizes, shapes, and movements.

Now imagine that the submarine undergoes some circumstance that is akin to anesthesia and while the general structure of the submarine remains intact several processes within the sub are disrupted, including the sonar system. When the sonar system is down, the screen goes blank. Dark. The submarine's representation of world, others, and self ceases.

When the submarine emerges from the anesthesia-like condition, everything comes back online, including the sonar system. The sonar screen is gradually populated with representational red blobs, including the one representing the submarine itself.

From the submarine's point of view, when its sonar system went down, everything ceased to exist--but we understand that this isn't the case. Nothing ceased to exist except the submarine's capacity to represent the world, which promptly returned when the sub was functioning normally again.

However, in order to fully understand this analogy, one has to understand that reality (the noumenon*) and our perception of the noumenon are analogous to the environment and the submarine's sonar system and screen with red blotches.

Life does not generate consciousness, rather life constitutes a process by which consciousness perceives itself.

*nou·me·non


ˈno͞oməˌnän/

noun

(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.

How does the submarine represent itself by sonar?

The submarine's systems are physical, presumably it is not sentient (and so has no POV) everything comes back online because the memory in the computers is "permanent". Some date, would however, be lost.

I also made some notes about this on the Fodor blog post above, did you read that?

Again, we need to know if consciousness actually "goes away" and/or what the role of memory is. It seems very plausible to me that you could come back (as I seem to have experienced) from anesthesia practically in mid-sentence, the consciousness having gone nowhere. On the other hand, my guess is, no matter how it seems, you do lose some memory from anesthesia - did I count down to 87 or 86? In my last anesthesia experience (have you been anesthetized? what was your experience?) I have patchy memories of coming to the recovery room, patchy but not complete and patchy memories of coming to full consciousness - I am sure I "lost" some of these experiences.

In general, your argument is as supportive of a physicalist claim as a CR claim. Maybe more so - consciousness is physical, anesthesia is a physical intervention - so we should expect an alteration or apparent elimination of consciousness.

Under CR, what happens to consciousness at (or slightly after) death?
 
Anesthesia & Self Awareness

Consciousness is not secondary to physical processes (Bitbol). Ergo, the brain does not generate consciousness. Why is it that consciousness seems to cease or "go away" when we undergo anesthesia?

I suggest that rather than consciousness going away, it is the brain's constitution of self-representation that goes away.

We can use a submarine and its sonar system as a very rough example.

Imagine that a submarine is interacting with the environment--including its own body--and these interactions are represented on its sonar screen as red blotches of various sizes, shapes, and movements.

Now imagine that the submarine undergoes some circumstance that is akin to anesthesia and while the general structure of the submarine remains intact several processes within the sub are disrupted, including the sonar system. When the sonar system is down, the screen goes blank. Dark. The submarine's representation of world, others, and self ceases.

When the submarine emerges from the anesthesia-like condition, everything comes back online, including the sonar system. The sonar screen is gradually populated with representational red blobs, including the one representing the submarine itself.

From the submarine's point of view, when its sonar system went down, everything ceased to exist--but we understand that this isn't the case. Nothing ceased to exist except the submarine's capacity to represent the world, which promptly returned when the sub was functioning normally again.

However, in order to fully understand this analogy, one has to understand that reality (the noumenon*) and our perception of the noumenon are analogous to the environment and the submarine's sonar system and screen with red blotches.

Life does not generate consciousness, rather life constitutes a process by which consciousness perceives itself.

*nou·me·non


ˈno͞oməˌnän/

noun

(in Kantian philosophy) a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes.

Can you think of a way to show that conscious reality is true? From what I can tell, it's ultimately a skeptical theory (epistemologically) in that the world looks the same whether there is a physical reality or not ... under CR there is no Red Pill.
 
Soupie writes
  • Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.
The Transition to Minimal Consciousness through the Evolution of Associative Learning

"In a previous work, we followed Gánti’s example by presenting a list of properties deemed individually necessary and jointly sufficient for characterizing minimal consciousness. We identified a putative evolutionary transition marker to minimal consciousness and characterized it at the behavioral level (Bronfman et al., 2016). Here, we build on our previous work, and further develop our theory regarding the evolution of consciousness. We begin by briefly summarizing our approach and setting the theoretical background for our proposal. Next, we characterize the suggested transition marker at the functional level, showing that the system underlying it has all the properties that jointly characterize consciousness. We then compare our approach to other leading theories of consciousness. Next, we review the distribution of the suggested transition marker in the animal kingdom, and conclude that it has emerged independently in three animal phyla. Finally, we point to the conceptual and ethical implications of our proposal."

a list of properties deemed individually necessary and jointly sufficient for characterizing minimal consciousness.

Even at this level, I argue that you can see why the mind seems to be:

Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.

The next step is to have you provide an explanation for the above under CR. Meaning to give an account (CR) for why we should expect to see:

"... a putative evolutionary transition marker to minimal consciousness and characterized it at the behavioral level"
...
"Next, we characterize the suggested transition marker at the functional level, showing that the system underlying it has all the properties that jointly characterize consciousness. We then compare our approach to other leading theories of consciousness. Next, we review the distribution of the suggested transition marker in the animal kingdom, and conclude that it has emerged independently in three animal phyla. Finally, we point to the conceptual and ethical implications of our proposal."

Why we can do all of that and CR still be true. It's not a trick question, I think you can do it - the next step follows then from that.
 
How does the submarine represent itself by sonar?

The submarine's systems are physical, presumably it is not sentient (and so has no POV) everything comes back online because the memory in the computers is "permanent". Some date, would however, be lost.

I also made some notes about this on the Fodor blog post above, did you read that?

Again, we need to know if consciousness actually "goes away" and/or what the role of memory is. It seems very plausible to me that you could come back (as I seem to have experienced) from anesthesia practically in mid-sentence, the consciousness having gone nowhere. On the other hand, my guess is, no matter how it seems, you do lose some memory from anesthesia - did I count down to 87 or 86? In my last anesthesia experience (have you been anesthetized? what was your experience?) I have patchy memories of coming to the recovery room, patchy but not complete and patchy memories of coming to full consciousness - I am sure I "lost" some of these experiences.

In general, your argument is as supportive of a physicalist claim as a CR claim. Maybe more so - consciousness is physical, anesthesia is a physical intervention - so we should expect an alteration or apparent elimination of consciousness.

Under CR, what happens to consciousness at (or slightly after) death?
As I've noted before, the approach to the emergence of mind would be the same via a physicalist approach and a CR approach.

But whereas the physicalist would assume that phenomenal consciousness strongly emerges with representational mind, the CR would say—no, the representational mind is constituted of phenomenal consciousness! What the mind is representing is the world, i.e. Phenomenal consciousness!

What happens at death is the same thing that happens under anesthesia: the representations of the world (noumenon) constituted by brain processes cease to exist, but the noumenon does not.

I have been under twice. In both instances it was complete and utter "black" out. No memories. Counting backward and then waking up in a cot.

The submarine analogy is solid. It is of course an analogy. No, the sub is not really sentient not self-aware.

However, the analogy captures the way in which we have to be careful about making claims about that which we perceive (noumenon) based on our perceptions (phenomenon).
 
Steve [@smcder] can you do your internet search magic and help me find an online copy of this paper:

Stern D. "Pre-reflexive experience and its passage to reflexive experience: A developmental view." Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2009;16( 10–12):307–331.

Thanks.

Stern was apparently a big deal looks like he passed away in 2012 and they have all his stuff locked up for the time being ... I did find The Interpersonal World of the Infant 1985 on archive.org. You can request the paper on ResearchGate but I tried signing up and they have to have an institutional email address to let you be a member.

You could try searching the citations of his paper:

Pre-Reflexive Experience and its Passage to Reflexive Experience: A Developmental... | Request PDF

And then see if any of these papers are available - that's a hard road, but sometimes you can find out quite a bit about the original paper by looking at the citations to it.

If nothing else, it's $18 online or you may be able to get it from your local library?
 
As I've noted before, the approach to the emergence of mind would be the same via a physicalist approach and a CR approach.

But whereas the physicalist would assume that phenomenal consciousness strongly emerges with representational mind, the CR would say—no, the representational mind is constituted of phenomenal consciousness! What the mind is representing is the world, i.e. Phenomenal consciousness!

What happens at death is the same thing that happens under anesthesia: the representations of the world (noumenon) constituted by brain processes cease to exist, but the noumenon does not.

I have been under twice. In both instances it was complete and utter "black" out. No memories. Counting backward and then waking up in a cot.

The submarine analogy is solid. It is of course an analogy. No, the sub is not really sentient not self-aware.

However, the analogy captures the way in which we have to be careful about making claims about that which we perceive (noumenon) based on our perceptions (phenomenon).

I'll wait to see how you answer the rest of the questions.
 
As I've noted before, the approach to the emergence of mind would be the same via a physicalist approach and a CR approach.

But whereas the physicalist would assume that phenomenal consciousness strongly emerges with representational mind, the CR would say—no, the representational mind is constituted of phenomenal consciousness! What the mind is representing is the world, i.e. Phenomenal consciousness!

What happens at death is the same thing that happens under anesthesia: the representations of the world (noumenon) constituted by brain processes cease to exist, but the noumenon does not.

I have been under twice. In both instances it was complete and utter "black" out. No memories. Counting backward and then waking up in a cot.

The submarine analogy is solid. It is of course an analogy. No, the sub is not really sentient not self-aware.

However, the analogy captures the way in which we have to be careful about making claims about that which we perceive (noumenon) based on our perceptions (phenomenon).

OK - so I am not going to wait, but I'll hope you answer the other questions!

What happens at death is the same thing that happens under anesthesia: the representations of the world (noumenon) constituted by brain processes cease to exist, but the noumenon does not.

OK - so how does that work? HOW HOW HOWL!!!!

So this noumenon can differentiate and self-interact and form representations and then at some moment - pfffffft! it goes back to being plain old undifferentiated noumena?

This used to bother me about the physicalist perspective, my dad is a mathematician and he had some ideas about information being conserved at death - some times more mystical some times more mathematical ... but it made sense to me, especially thinking - wow, it's a lot of effort to make a mind and store all this information for it just to disappear at death - but in many ways it doesn't just disappear and there's a lot of "extraneous" information in a mind anyway - and the cost of the human mind is spread out over evolutionary time, it runs on about 20 watts, which is expensive in terms of the bodies overall energy uptake (about 1/3 for 3 lbs of "stuff") but not really very much in the grand scheme of things. I do think the evolutionary cost is something of an argument for a causal role of consciousness, but one of the articles @Constance linked above talks about the structures of UAL being conserved and along with them the structures for consciousness, so consciousness was not conserved by evolution directly ...

But if all is noumenon anyway - why does it differentiate and then just undifferentiate? I mean, if exactly the same story about physics and biology and chemistry are told by CR - then all you are doing is saying, well, it's really only consciousness doing all of these things but consciousness is some thing that can do all of these things! i.e. the Magic Playdoh theory. And that's the most serious charge I can think of - do you have any response to that other than "the hard problem"? Again, what about Strawson/Russell's argument? What do we know about matter that it can't be conscious?

P.S. I still don't see how the submarine can see itself on sonar ... maybe it has a sonar selfie stick?
 
Soupie writes



    • Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.
The Transition to Minimal Consciousness through the Evolution of Associative Learning

"In a previous work, we followed Gánti’s example by presenting a list of properties deemed individually necessary and jointly sufficient for characterizing minimal consciousness. We identified a putative evolutionary transition marker to minimal consciousness and characterized it at the behavioral level (Bronfman et al., 2016). Here, we build on our previous work, and further develop our theory regarding the evolution of consciousness. We begin by briefly summarizing our approach and setting the theoretical background for our proposal. Next, we characterize the suggested transition marker at the functional level, showing that the system underlying it has all the properties that jointly characterize consciousness. We then compare our approach to other leading theories of consciousness. Next, we review the distribution of the suggested transition marker in the animal kingdom, and conclude that it has emerged independently in three animal phyla. Finally, we point to the conceptual and ethical implications of our proposal."

a list of properties deemed individually necessary and jointly sufficient for characterizing minimal consciousness.

Even at this level, I argue that you can see why the mind seems to be:

Mind [the mental] is not uniform, identical, unvaried, consistent, indistinguishable, homologous, etc.

The next step is to have you provide an explanation for the above under CR. Meaning to give an account (CR) for why we should expect to see:

"... a putative evolutionary transition marker to minimal consciousness and characterized it at the behavioral level"
...
"Next, we characterize the suggested transition marker at the functional level, showing that the system underlying it has all the properties that jointly characterize consciousness. We then compare our approach to other leading theories of consciousness. Next, we review the distribution of the suggested transition marker in the animal kingdom, and conclude that it has emerged independently in three animal phyla. Finally, we point to the conceptual and ethical implications of our proposal."

Why we can do all of that and CR still be true. It's not a trick question, I think you can do it - the next step follows then from that.
The above is very rigorous and I look forward to reading it. I'm especially interested in #2 but all 6 and the underlying physical processes are fascinating.

However none of the six addresses phenomenality itself, the felt quality of mind.

The mind is differentiated and self-interactive because the noumena is differentiated and self-interactive. The mind is phenomenal because the noumenon is phenomenal.

No, this is not explanatory. If the phenomenal "Mark of mind" does not emerge from physical processes from whence does it come? I don't know.
 
The above is very rigorous and I look forward to reading it. I'm especially interested in #2 but all 6 and the underlying physical processes are fascinating.

However none of the six addresses phenomenality itself, the felt quality of mind.

The mind is differentiated and self-interactive because the noumena is differentiated and self-interactive. The mind is phenomenal because the noumenon is phenomenal.

No, this is not explanatory. If the phenomenal "Mark of mind" does not emerge from physical processes from whence does it come? I don't know.

Right - it's circular. And we don't yet know that it does not emerge or that it is not the intrinsic nature of mind. As I've said, it's good to pursue many options - but the problem with CR as you present it, is there is never going to be a way to show that it is true? Do you see that? You can always just say, no you are seeing the mental because everything is mental.

Again, again ... what is it that we know about matter that it can't be conscious?
 
P.S. I still don't see how the submarine can see itself on sonar ... maybe it has a sonar selfie stick?
You would have to imagine (1) a giant underwater mirro and (2) sonar that extends into the bowels of the sub in the way that our interoceptive and proprioceptive sensory systems work.

Re strawson and russel

i don't see a strong difference between saying p-consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter/energy and saying that matter/energy are the physical (i.e. extrinsic) properties of p-consciousness.
 
But if all is noumenon anyway - why does it differentiate and then just undifferentiate? I mean, if exactly the same story about physics and biology and chemistry are told by CR - then all you are doing is saying, well, it's really only consciousness doing all of these things but consciousness is some thing that can do all of these things! i.e. the Magic Playdoh theory. And that's the most serious charge I can think of - do you have any response to that other than "the hard problem"? Again, what about Strawson/Russell's argument? What do we know about matter that it can't be conscious?
No, I don't have any other response. I think chasing the origin of p-consciousness in physical processes is a red herring. Note that I am not saying trying to understand how mind emerges with life is a red herring. Apples to oranges. I do think mind emerges with life—indeed is life—and we are and will continue to make progress on understanding this.

No, I do not have any better response than the HP.

"The triumph of the Standard Model suggests the world can exhaustively be described by the equations of mathematical physics. Physicalism is true. With two big complications, no “element of reality” is lacking of from the formalism of quantum field theory, or more strictly, its M-theoretic extension.

And the two complications?

First, consciousness. Why aren’t we p-zombies?

Second, the intrinsic nature of the physical. We don’t know what “breathes fire into” the equations of physics and makes a universe for them to describe. Stephen Hawking doesn’t know. Ed Witten doesn’t know.
Despite our ignorance, “materialist” physicalists make a seemingly modest metaphysical assumption. The unknown essence of the physical is non-experiential. Quantum field theory is about fields of insentience. It’s an intuition I share." - Pearce
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top