smcder
Paranormal Adept
Ok, add to the four points above your three best definitions of the mind/body problem from the literature.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 13
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
Ok, add to the four points above your three best definitions of the mind/body problem from the literature.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
A few thoughts that I may pull together later:
Tom Clark on October 8, 2018 at 10:26 pm said:
Peter, many thanks for both your sympathetic and cautionary remarks, the latter well taken. I heard the ice cracking as I skated by the many complexities concerning representation and content that are being addressed by lots of smart people these days, including Andy Clark, Anil Seth, Jesse Prinz, and Thomas Metzinger to name just a few. I’m pinning my hopes on some sort of theoretical convergence on consciousness as the science of representation develops, we shall see.
- this is a nice kind of summation of several folks you've pointed to ... not exhaustive, but puts a handle on it
Nicholas Humphrey presents his view of consciousness: according to him, consciousness should be understood as an intentional object: consciousness is how privatized ‘sentition’ (reflex motor responses to stimulation) is represented. Making consciousness an intentional object allows us to understand how it can have all kinds of properties that nothing physical could have, which is why we face the hard problem when we try (hopelessly) to locate consciousness in the physical world. Consciousness does not exist at the level of physical reality. However, says Humphrey, this does not mean that it is an illusion. Moreover, the representation of consciousness corresponds to our normal cognitive functioning, which has been fostered by natural selection.
This is a little Soupie-like to me! and goes along with Clark's paper ... I am trying to find the paper because I think he says something about what he doesn't do ... which I remember is important, even if I don't remember what it was ...
smcder
Paranormal Adept
There you go changing your post!
You'll be the first to know if we decide to move forward - or just listen for the wheels gaining traction, I'm sure it will be heard all over the internet, even unto the great white north ...
smcder
Paranormal Adept
By the way, I think it's fun to think there is a way "forward" in philosophy, a field that advances (and retreats) on all fronts (and rears) simultaneously.
Would like to read a paper by Clark that you would recommend. I've gone to his website (linked by clicking on his name in the comments) and it's clear that he has dealt with many problems essential to consciousness studies:
Consciousness | Naturalism.org
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I saw his site, he's got only the one paper on one site - Academia? maybe - the one @Soupie posted but then I found more on one of the older sites, so it looks like he maybe was active in the 90s and then put his work on the naturalism.org site and then recently published this one that @Soupie linked ... not sure ... let me look.
Or why don't we read the Clark paper that is discussed at this 'Consciousness Identities' blog? I think this is the one:
Why Consciousness Can't Be Objectified | Naturalism.org
ps, correct me if I'm wrong.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
But it's significant that Clark's title is: "
OK, part of what I wanted to point out, kind of randomly, is Clark's title:
Locating Consciousness: Why Experience Can't Be Objectified
So, right there in big, bold letters, years/decades after Wiltbab, in 2019, people still think it's important to try and explain why experience can't be objectified:
"The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. (your point, I think @Soupie) Physicalists who are realists about consciousness generally assume its objectivity: experience is something identical with physical processes or properties, perhaps the intrinsic nature of the physical, or perhaps some micro-physical, neural, or emergent property. I argue that this assumption wrongly reifies consciousness; it expects to find qualitative representational content-qualia-in the physical world as characterized using such content. Instead, we should grant that conscious experience constitutes a mind-dependent, subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, (@Soupie - the interface) and that the physical world described by science is a represented objective reality. The former, since it exists only for conscious subjects, won't be found as an entity in the latter. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the representational relation and the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behavior-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically-instantiated mind-systems. (@Soupie - this statement and the claim that consciousness isn't objective, means consciousness isn't causal - it's an accompaniment) I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness on that basis, and suggest that a mature science of representation may eventually help explain why, perhaps as a matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon."
So, not causal but a representational necessity.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
And that's the one I quote from the abstract below (I mean, above).
Clark argues that consciousness is a representational necessity accompanying "certain sorts of behavior-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically-instantiated mind-systems" not an objectifiable thingy to use a technical term...i.e. it is not identical to physical processes or properties.
Yes it is indeed. Let's look first at the Abstract for the paper, which I was about to post before seeing that you have it here.
Abstract -- "Humans are physical beings that are also conscious, but physicalism struggles to locate consciousness in the natural world described by science. The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities – qualia – but science doesn’t find qualities in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in spacetime is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won’t discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms.
Other instances of this failure are uncontroversial: we don’t expect to find concepts, numbers or propositions as locatable entities or properties in the world they participate in describing. Rather, we understand that they are mind-dependent representational terms or tools – basic elements of cognitive content – that we deploy in characterizing reality.
Philosophers sometimes suggest that mathematical entities have objective ontological status: they exist in a mind-independent abstract Platonic realm. Likewise, physicalists who are realists about consciousness generally assume its objectivity: experience must be something identical with physical processes or properties, perhaps the intrinsic nature of the physical, or perhaps some micro-physical, neural, or emergent property.
I argue that this assumption wrongly reifies consciousness; it expects to find qualitative representational content in the physical world as characterized using such content. Instead, we should grant that conscious experience constitutes a mind-dependent, subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and that the physical world given in experience and in science is a represented objective reality.
The former, since it exists only for conscious subjects, won’t be found as an entity in the latter. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the representational relation and the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behavior-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically-instantiated mind-systems.
I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness on that basis, and suggest that a science of representation could help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon."
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That's the introduction to the blog I think, and helpful. Clark writes very well and we should be able to learn a lot from his paper, to agree and disagree about and maybe come to some common ground here.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I should really use the preview feature, but have gotten in the bad habit of skipping that and posting and proofing after the fact.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I do it too!
smcder
Paranormal Adept
This the Nicholas Humphrey paper I was talking about. I think it has some similarities to Clark's paper...writing style, not being one of them. ;-)
----
"First, as to what consciousness is not. We must understand that, just as numbers are not a heap of biscuits, so consciousness is not ‘a heap of nerve cells’. And theorists, however sophisticated, who assume that the quality of conscious experience simply springs into being when there’s a sufficient accumulation of the right kind of brain activity have failed to grasp what kind of thing consciousness is. Tononi’s integrated information theory, Penrose and Hameroff’s quantum effects in microtubules, Strawson and Goff’s elemental particles of consciousness are all in their way ginger-biscuit theories, in which consciousness arises from the flavour of the brain activity. We shouldn’t even call them theories; they do not even have the merit of being wrong.
And then, as to what consciousness is. Just as numbers, in Frege’s view, are objects in the conceptual landscape of arithmetic, we must recognize that conscious qualia are properties of how we represent a certain dimension of mental life: namely, the dimension that is often characterized as ‘what it’s like’. Admittedly the phrase ‘what it’s like’ is a bit of a terminological embarrassment, which may not bear analysis. But I see no reason not to take the grammar at face value, and assume the ‘it’ of ‘what it’s like’ has a perfectly good referent, which is the state of affairs —whatever this may be —that you, the subject, represent as having the conscious property in question. When, for example, you experience what it’s like to look at the blue sky, you are taking something —something pertaining to the light at your eyes, presumably —to have the property of phenomenal blueness."
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Soupie here is the apologia I mentioned earlier:
"To sum up. I’ve discussed four features of consciousness that people find hard to explain, the four that Fodor picks out as being those nobody has the slightest idea about: ‘what consciousness is, what it’s made of, what it’s for, and how it does what it’s for.’ I’ve tried to dispel the aura of invincibility that surrounds these questions. I’ve proposed candidate answers, within a materialist scientific framework, that could provide relatively easy explanations for the central phenomena, while at the same time explaining why these answers are far from obvious. These answers may not be correct. But they provide a proof of principle that the hard problem can be solved."
"To sum up. I’ve discussed four features of consciousness that people find hard to explain, the four that Fodor picks out as being those nobody has the slightest idea about: ‘what consciousness is, what it’s made of, what it’s for, and how it does what it’s for.’ I’ve tried to dispel the aura of invincibility that surrounds these questions. I’ve proposed candidate answers, within a materialist scientific framework, that could provide relatively easy explanations for the central phenomena, while at the same time explaining why these answers are far from obvious. These answers may not be correct. But they provide a proof of principle that the hard problem can be solved."
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
They're not hard to explain at all.
Q. What is Consciousness?
A. Consciousness is our experience of the world
Q. What is consciousness made of?
A. Consciousness is made of our experience of the world.
Q. What is consciousness for?
A. Consciousness is for experiencing the world.
Q. How does consciousness experience the world?
A. Consciousness experiences the world remarkably.
The above answers may seem glib. They're not. They show that were not asking the right questions, or that instead of asking questions like the ones above, we should be performing tasks that help build an accurate description of the situation with consciousness. The people IMO best qualified to be on the forefront of this approach are:
- Neuroscientists, primarily in neurophysiology, neurophilosophy, cognitive neuroscience.
- Theoretical physicists, specializing in field theory and supervenience
- Psychologists, primarily cognitive
- Philosophers, primarily in metaphysics, phenomenology and epistemology
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance ... I think you will find something you like from him.
Ennio Morricone, composer of 520 soundtrack albums dead at 91.
From The Mission:
www.vulture.com
Ennio Morricone, composer of 520 soundtrack albums dead at 91.
From The Mission:
- 520 soundtrack albums
- 14 studio albums
- 11 live albums
- 4 video albums
- 61 singles
- 116 compilation
- 15 piano concertos
- 30 symphonic pieces
- choral music
- one opera
- one mass
Ennio Morricone’s 25 Greatest Musical Cues
To say that Morricone was a great soundtrack composer — or even the greatest of all soundtrack composers — doesn’t quite do him justice.
www.vulture.com
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
If the memory is of a self feeling pain, it will need to be conscious, bc selves feeling pain only exist in consciousness.
Right. So there is no problem of mental causation or overdetermination.
The conscious experience itself, instantiated by physiological processes—being a representation of what’s happening in the world—won’t casually interact with the physiological processes; it’s instantiated by them however.
So we might ask, if we allow that some neural processes carry representational content: why do the representations instantiated by some neural processes have a “something it’s like” accompanying them?
Bc that’s the work the representation is there to do for the organism as a whole; to provide for the organism a simple story of what is happening:
Quantum fields comprised of trillions of rippling interactions becomes:
Im cooking dinner and touched the burner and it hurt like hell.
The reason those neural processes carry a “something it’s like” is bc that’s the representational work they’re doing.
From the outside it will look like physiological goings on, bc that’s what it is. But from “inside” the representation, it will feel like something. That’s “where” we—the conscious self—live.