Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[Constance]

Yes, the 'weak' in this case referred to weak emergence as opposed to strong emergence, wherein phenomenal consciousness makes a loud popping sound as it pops into existence from non-existence.

I like the metaphor too, but how many stages on the way to what we understand as 'consciousness' have existed in nature as we experience it and attempt to investigate it on this planet (our only laboratory at present)? How much digging do we still have to do, accompanied by how much adequate thinking, in order to comprehend the roots and rhizomes of awareness as 'self-awareness' in species of life? It seems to me that examples of 'weak emergence' merely scratch the surface of the archaeological projects that lie before us in our attempt to comprehend what protoconsciousness in the panorama of evolving species of life and consciousness as we experience it signify about being and Being.

It is phenomenological philosophy, of course, that has addressed the question about Being and the ways in which our experienced being is related to the outlines of Being as a whole within which life has emerged. We cannot reduce consciousness as we experience it to a relation between 'subject' and 'object', as if consciousness does not express the confluence of the subjective and the objective visible and inescapable in what we feel and think as natives of this planet evolved within the Being of What-Is as a Whole, whose origins we cannot examine from here. What we, endowed by now with serviceable 'minds' as grounded in existential experience, can come to understand is that what we can come closer to understanding is the phenomenal nature of what we experience, never reducible to things in themselves. But what we sense is always a partial sensing of What-Is, dependent on where we are and how we have and become capable of thinking about the nature of our own being. Physics must be understood as territory gained to date in our attempts to penetrate the Metaphysics that is always implied beneath, behind, and surrounding the 'world' that has led to our own evolution. Does metaphysics always present us with an 'Abyss'? If we cannot understand Everything, does that signify that we can understand Nothing? I don't think so. And so I suggest that we find another way of describing consciousness than as 'phenomenal consciousness'. Or if we want to use that term, I suggest we identify what we mean by it.

A challenging but helpful text we could examine and discuss in this regard is Renaud Barbaras's The Being of the Phenomenon.

 

[Randall]

whoops... emergence
@USI Calgary ok... not theory but position or stance. Yea... so you are agreeing with me? All positions cannot kick the emergence can down the line indefinitely.

Right. Even if we go with subjective idealism and claim that consciousness was primordial, we still end up with the emergence of what we experience as the material. I suppose one could say that the material is in that case only an illusion, which returns it to the status of some sort of manifestation of consciousness. Saying consciousness is emergent just turns the whole situation around. That's why I look at the term "physical" as being synonymous with "natural" in a scientific sense e.g. everything that exists is a part of nature, and therefore because consciousness exists, it must be a part of nature. In our universe the best evidence is that it evolved into existence e.g. big bang >stars > planets > life on planets > complex life > Intelligent life > life with consciousness. This is the path of emergence that all the best evidence indicates that consciousness has taken.

 

[Constance]

@Constance, this may help clarify my post above:

"The assumption is that it is not, but what you describe is a bunch of physical stuff with a lot missing in between."

I would just say, that's all we ever have, but that doesn't mean we can't make some decisions about or have intuitions about what's a better or worse explanation or if there is a difference in explanations in the case of consciousness (when we say we can't see how you get from matter to phenomena) ... we kicked around the question of what is an explanation a while back.... and that's why I posted above that what I think @Soupie is posing, the challenge he presents, what he wants from a physicalist (which is fair, I think) is a step wise, physical explanation of consciousness from matter - of the kind we have for other phenomena that we are more satisfied with - or even of the kind of bird to flock, ant to colony, Hs and Os to water. In other words, explain it like you explain everything/anything else.

Me ... I don't really believe in explanations.

". . . Me ... I don't really believe in explanations."

My impression was that you followed Colin McGinn 'new mysterianism', which I think was his term and a misnomer from what I understood about his thinking from your earlier posting about it. Would or did McGinn say that we are not equipped to comprehend the whole within which we are contained in our existence? Or did he say that what-is/What-Is is itself inexplicable, beyond rational thought?

 

[Pharoah]

Dualism can avoid emergence in two ways:

1) emergence from matter

2) emergence from anything. Minds are fundamental on this view. How they become paired with bodies is anyone's guess.

Yes, the 'weak' in this case referred to weak emergence as opposed to strong emergence, wherein phenomenal consciousness makes a loud popping sound as it pops into existence from non-existence.

In the case of weak emergence, we can back trace it via the causal chain that gave rise to it.

Ufology likes to point to electromagnetism as a phenomenon that seems to defy our normal conception of matter. And he's not wrong. However, it's still apples to oranges when it comes to mind and body.

For example as I've noted in the past, there are very mundane although certainly not perfect models of how electromagnetic fields might be physical/material.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.4611.pdf

We have no such models of phenomenal consciousness.


Again, emergence in itself is not the issue. It's emergence of the mind (particularly phenomenal consciousness I would argue) from the body that is the problem.

If one wants to make an argument about phenomenal consciousness emerging from some other substrate than non-phenomenally conscious quarks, molecules, cells, organs, etc. than that's a different argument.

Dualism can avoid emergence in two ways:

1) emergence from matter

2) emergence from anything. Minds are fundamental on this view. How they become paired with bodies is anyone's guess.

Yes, the 'weak' in this case referred to weak emergence as opposed to strong emergence, wherein phenomenal consciousness makes a loud popping sound as it pops into existence from non-existence.

In the case of weak emergence, we can back trace it via the causal chain that gave rise to it.

Ufology likes to point to electromagnetism as a phenomenon that seems to defy our normal conception of matter. And he's not wrong. However, it's still apples to oranges when it comes to mind and body.

For example as I've noted in the past, there are very mundane although certainly not perfect models of how electromagnetic fields might be physical/material.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.4611.pdf

We have no such models of phenomenal consciousness.


Again, emergence in itself is not the issue. It's emergence of the mind (particularly phenomenal consciousness I would argue) from the body that is the problem.

If one wants to make an argument about phenomenal consciousness emerging from some other substrate than non-phenomenally conscious quarks, molecules, cells, organs, etc. than that's a different argument.

There are a limited number of ways you can say that mind didn't emerge
1. You can say it always existed. For it to come into existence is for it to emerge.
2. You can say time does not exist. So there is no emerging because emerging requirers time.
3. mind does not exist.
Another consideration is that you might have only one mind, a finite plurality of minds or an infinite plurality of minds.

1. Accepting 1. my mind always existed... And I just became conscious of it back in the 90s. So the consciousness bit emerged then. emerged being the offending word!. So the only case where option 1 applies is in all the instances of minds out there where they have never actualised consciousness... which begins to sound a bit like option 3, but isn't the same as! But to all those absent souls out there, it's my popping into existence that grabs my interest first.

 

[Pharoah]

@Constance, this may help clarify my post above:

"The assumption is that it is not, but what you describe is a bunch of physical stuff with a lot missing in between."

I would just say, that's all we ever have, but that doesn't mean we can't make some decisions about or have intuitions about what's a better or worse explanation or if there is a difference in explanations in the case of consciousness (when we say we can't see how you get from matter to phenomena) ... we kicked around the question of what is an explanation a while back.... and that's why I posted above that what I think @Soupie is posing, the challenge he presents, what he wants from a physicalist (which is fair, I think) is a step wise, physical explanation of consciousness from matter - of the kind we have for other phenomena that we are more satisfied with - or even of the kind of bird to flock, ant to colony, Hs and Os to water. In other words, explain it like you explain everything/anything else.

Me ... I don't really believe in explanations.

.

Most philosophers abhor to their core explanations. they are like goal keepers: they live to have the ball shot at them, hate it when the striker scores and have way too much energy for more when the whistle goes

 

[Farlig Gulstein]

In our universe the best evidence is that it evolved into existence e.g. big bang >stars > planets > life on planets > complex life > Intelligent life > life with consciousness. This is the path of emergence that all the best evidence indicates that consciousness has taken.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

 

[Pharoah]

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Imputation at Source by a directing Mind? When was your consciousness imputed?

 

[Farlig Gulstein]

When was your consciousness imputed?

When did yours emerge?

 

[smcder]

Most philosophers abhor to their core explanations. they are like goal keepers: they live to have the ball shot at them, hate it when the striker scores and have way too much energy for more when the whistle goes

Abhor ... or adhere?

 

[smcder]

". . . Me ... I don't really believe in explanations."

My impression was that you followed Colin McGinn 'new mysterianism', which I think was his term and a misnomer from what I understood about his thinking from your earlier posting about it. Would or did McGinn say that we are not equipped to comprehend the whole within which we are contained in our existence? Or did he say that what-is/What-Is is itself inexplicable, beyond rational thought?

I should have put in a as I was joking about not believing in explanations....

I don't follow McGinn in the sense of taking his position. I do like his writing and ideas.

Dan Dennett, I think, labelled McGinn a New Mysterian for his idea of
"cognitive closure".

 

[smcder]

". . . Me ... I don't really believe in explanations."

My impression was that you followed Colin McGinn 'new mysterianism', which I think was his term and a misnomer from what I understood about his thinking from your earlier posting about it. Would or did McGinn say that we are not equipped to comprehend the whole within which we are contained in our existence? Or did he say that what-is/What-Is is itself inexplicable, beyond rational thought?

"Would or did McGinn say that we are not equipped to comprehend the whole within which we are contained in our existence? Or did he say that what-is/What-Is is itself inexplicable, beyond rational thought?"

He just thought that maybe the hard problem of consciousness wasn't comprehensible to our human kind of mind...maybe some other kind of mind could understand the HP but is incapable of understanding calculus. We talked about an example of this kind of thing a while back in terms of the movie Arrival.

 

[Pharoah]

When did yours emerge?

You first @Farlig Gulstein ... I wanted to get a better idea of you position. I was anticipating one of two answers.

 

[Pharoah]

Abhor ... or adhere?

I'm easy. Take your pick

 

[Pharoah]

I should have put in a as I was joking about not believing in explanations....

I don't follow McGinn in the sense of taking his position. I do like his writing and ideas.

Dan Dennett, I think, labelled McGinn a New Mysterian for his idea of
"cognitive closure".

@smcder are there any more es you have failed to declare that we should know about?

 

[Soupie]

There are a limited number of ways you can say that mind didn't emerge
1. You can say it always existed. For it to come into existence is for it to emerge.
2. You can say time does not exist. So there is no emerging because emerging requirers time.
3. mind does not exist.
Another consideration is that you might have only one mind, a finite plurality of minds or an infinite plurality of minds.

1. Accepting 1. my mind always existed... And I just became conscious of it back in the 90s. So the consciousness bit emerged then. emerged being the offending word!. So the only case where option 1 applies is in all the instances of minds out there where they have never actualised consciousness... which begins to sound a bit like option 3, but isn't the same as! But to all those absent souls out there, it's my popping into existence that grabs my interest first.

I think you are being pretty liberal with the term emergence:

"Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them."

Emergent Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

As to the point you seems to be wanting to make (if I follow correctly) that EVERYTHING emerged (using the term loosely) and that INCLUDES consciousness.

Sure. That seems pretty intuitive. But nature may be and most likely is stranger than we can intuit. It might not be turtles all the way down. There might be a monkey wrench in there somewhere.

 

[Soupie]

Not sure if we discussed this yet:

[CFP] The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

"The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we think and say there is a hard problem of consciousness. The meta-problem of consciousness is in principle one of the easy problems, but it bears a special relation to the hard problem, which suggests that finding a solution to it could shed light on the hard problem itself. Chalmers’ new paper introduces the meta-problem, lays out an interdisciplinary research program for addressing the meta-problem, and evaluates possible solutions. Chalmers also uses the meta-problem to pose a challenge for many popular scientific and philosophical theories of consciousness, and discusses whether it can be used to “debunk” our beliefs in consciousness and to support a sort of illusionism."

 

[Soupie]

There are a limited number of ways you can say that mind didn't emerge
1. You can say it always existed. For it to come into existence is for it to emerge.
2. You can say time does not exist. So there is no emerging because emerging requirers time.
3. mind does not exist.
Another consideration is that you might have only one mind, a finite plurality of minds or an infinite plurality of minds.

1. Accepting 1. my mind always existed... And I just became conscious of it back in the 90s. So the consciousness bit emerged then. emerged being the offending word!. So the only case where option 1 applies is in all the instances of minds out there where they have never actualised consciousness... which begins to sound a bit like option 3, but isn't the same as! But to all those absent souls out there, it's my popping into existence that grabs my interest first.

We also must think of mind as the complex, layered phenomenon that it is. I don't think mind has one cause, like we might say that a sound has a singular cause (and if we get detailed we would agree that sound is a multi causal phenomenon).

The "emergence" of mind imo will involve multiple underlying causal processes. And I use the term casual loosely.

 

[Pharoah]

I think you are being pretty liberal with the term emergence:

"Emergence is a notorious philosophical term of art. A variety of theorists have appropriated it for their purposes ever since George Henry Lewes gave it a philosophical sense in his 1875 Problems of Life and Mind. We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them."

Emergent Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

As to the point you seems to be wanting to make (if I follow correctly) that EVERYTHING emerged (using the term loosely) and that INCLUDES consciousness.

Sure. That seems pretty intuitive. But nature may be and most likely is stranger than we can intuit. It might not be turtles all the way down. There might be a monkey wrench in there somewhere.

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?

 

[smcder]

@smcder are there any more es you have failed to declare that we should know about?

Feel free to insert them anywhere tyou find it helps...

 

[Soupie]

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...)

Position on MBP?

No, one doesn't need to hold a position in which mind emerges. One can hold a position in which mind is fundamental.

Saying that one becomes conscious of their mind (which is all kinds of problematic) doesn't necessarily mean that emergence is involved.

Sigh. As noted there's a vast literature on this. I'll stop there.

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?

My answer is "I don't know" whether everything has emerged. My answer is that it certainly feels right to think that everything has emerged.

Finally, when referring to consciousness, and separately but relatedly mind, emerging, it depends on what one is claiming consciousness and mind have emerged from.

Again: vast literature.