• 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 2

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
One thing that might help is to approach the Stevens poem as meditation rather than as 'poem'. Also, reading poetry in general, including Stevens, it helps to hear it in your mind's ear or read it aloud to yourself, since so much of poetry is developed out of the sounds of words and the sounds of nature. Reading it aloud or audially in your mind's ear also makes palpable the rhythms of language on which poetic language depends. Meanwhile also let the images and ideas expressed play against and with one another as they did for Stevens and other poets in the creation of their poetry.

There is an anecdote about Stevens observed by someone in his daily walks to and from the Hartford Insurance Company (where he was an attorney and vice president), apparently drafting his poems on the way. He was observed on these occasions to be deep in thought and on occasion stopping, walking backward a few steps, pausing apparently to concentrate, and then proceeding onward again. The observer speculated that he was working out the metrical scansion of the lines as he shaped them in his mind's ear and that when he stopped, walked backward, paused, and resumed his walk he was rewriting a line or lines to improve the metrics of what he was composing. He perhaps also wrote poetry in his office at the Hartford; in any case his secretary typed up many of his poems. He worked not far from another remarkable mind, the linguistic theorist Benjamin Whorf. They never actually talked together during those years or realized what the other was doing. A Stevens critic named Peter Brazeau published a book about a decade ago based on interviews with Stevens's colleagues at the Hartford. Some of them were aware of his poetry and his having won the National Book Award for his poetry in 1951 and 1955. Others were unaware of all this. One of them declaimed to Brazeau: "What?! Wally a poet?"
 
One thing that might help is to approach the Stevens poem as meditation rather than as 'poem'. Also, reading poetry in general, including Stevens, it helps to hear it in your mind's ear or read it aloud to yourself, since so much of poetry is developed out of the sounds of words and the sounds of nature. Reading it aloud or audially in your mind's ear also makes palpable the rhythms of language on which poetic language depends. Meanwhile also let the images and ideas expressed play against and with one another as they did for Stevens and other poets in the creation of their poetry.

There is an anecdote about Stevens observed by someone in his daily walks to and from the Hartford Insurance Company (where he was an attorney and vice president), apparently drafting his poems on the way. He was observed on these occasions to be deep in thought and on occasion stopping, walking backward a few steps, pausing apparently to concentrate, and then proceeding onward again. The observer speculated that he was working out the metrical scansion of the lines as he shaped them in his mind's ear and that when he stopped, walked backward, paused, and resumed his walk he was rewriting a line or lines to improve the metrics of what he was composing. He perhaps also wrote poetry in his office at the Hartford; in any case his secretary typed up many of his poems. He worked not far from another remarkable mind, the linguistic theorist Benjamin Whorf. They never actually talked together during those years or realized what the other was doing. A Stevens critic named Peter Brazeau published a book about a decade ago based on interviews with Stevens's colleagues at the Hartford. Some of them were aware of his poetry and his having won the National Book Award for his poetry in 1951 and 1955. Others were unaware of all this. One of them declaimed to Brazeau: "What?! Wally a poet?"

I like that story ...

Good suggestion, meditation - I could walk with it ... I'll see if I can find an audio copy or I may try to memorize a few lines at a time.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
We have a lot of possible directions to explore on this fresh new thread ... Where should we go?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

Phillip Goff - good supplement to the paper, history, the state of metsphysics - panpsychism as the way forward and then he tackled the combination problem ... Where the crux of his problem with Chalmers lies

about 15 minutes in he starts with his solution, the crux is:

19:20

"...just one, numerically one thing, multiply located many times that's governing my behavior"

and his analogy is Catholic Saints or time travellers ... multiple instances of one very small thing aggregating to govern behavior ...




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Last edited by a moderator:
from an online discussion

What are thoughts and what do thoughts mean to the wider Universe: Consciousness part II - Page 2 - General Chatter - A Forum of Ice and Fire - Page 2

(emphasis underlined below mine)

In the next part of the argument Goff explains why only the reductive panpsychist faces a combination problem. Our inability to make sense of the construction of a human subject by ultimate-subjects comes only so long as we essay a model on which the sole truths about the composite subject are truths concerning its components. As we found earlier, no such facts will suffice for the obtaining of a unified macro-consciousness. The emergentist panpsychist faces no similar difficulty, however, since he can simply hold that the macro-consciousness arises from the ultimates 'as a matter of brute fact or natural law' (136).

Thus, not only must panpsychists be emergentists, says Goff, but they should be too, since this avoids the combination problem.
Goff's argument is ingenious, but I worry about both sides of it. On the claim that panpsychists must be emergentists: The heavyweight/lightweight distinction swiftly converts anyone who believes in the reality (heavyweight-ness) of (say) tables into an emergentist. If we say there are truths that the table itself makes true, Goff labels us emergentists, since we do not reduce the table to its parts. But almost no one reduces tables to their parts. And almost none of those who decline to so reduce tables consider themselves to be emergentists about tables. I take it a natural view, albeit one facing certain as-yet unresolved complications, is that not only is the table heavyweight, but all that's true of it at a time is made true by the parts it then has.


The difficulty with Goff's argument for panpsychist emergentism is that it spawns all-too-much emergentism. One wants to be able to say that dry goods really exist, but not at the cost of emerging from their parts. There's nothing spooky about tables, surely. Similarly, a panpsychist (well this panpsychist anyway) will want to say that human consciousnesses are heavyweight, but also that they do not emerge from the ultimates. Goff has more work to do to convince me that if we can reductively explain the properties of some whole in terms of its parts, then the whole is effectively eliminated. Why not a view whereby wholes constrain their parts just as parts constrain their wholes,
 
LibriVox

The complete public doman poems of wallace stevens volume 1 of 2

Also found some videos of Stevens reading his poems on YouTube
 
I like that story ...

Good suggestion, meditation - I could walk with it ... I'll see if I can find an audio copy or I may try to memorize a few lines at a time.

I'm fairly sure there is a recording online of Stevens's reading this poem. I'll try to find the link for you.
 
How about starting here:

http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com...34/against_constitutive_russellian_monism.pdf

And Chalmers response if he's made one?

I think that's an excellent place to start. The Chalmers paper on the combination problem that I linked the other night does indeed respond to the Goff paper (in fact several of Goff's papers). It's at

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bat-NiPWiqwJ:http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf

and at http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf

The second section on terminology is very helpful and the third section, entitled "The Comination Problems" is enlightening. Chalmers writes that

"It is common for a proposed solution to the combination problem to address only one of these problems: most often the subject combination problem and occasionally the quality combination problem. It should be stressed that a satisfactory solution to the combination problem must address
all of these problems."

These are challenges that Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory must also meet if it is to be persuasive.

It is important to understand the current limits of 'information theory' for physicists, a situation described well in the following statement by Lee Smolin:

"INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION
[LEE SMOLIN:] As a theoretical physicist, my main concern is space, time and cosmology. The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information.

I can mention two ways in which the metaphor of information and computation may be infiltrating into our thinking about fundamental physics, although we're a long way from really understanding these things. The first is that the mathematical metaphor and the conceptual metaphor of a system of relationships which evolves in time is something which is found in physics. It is also something that we clearly see when we talk to computer scientists and biologists and people who work on evolutionary theory, that they tend to model their systems in terms of networks where there are nodes and there are relationships between the nodes, and those things evolve in time, and they can be asking questions about the time evolution, what happens after a long time, what are the statistical properties of subsystems.

That kind of idea came into physics a long time ago with relativity theory and general relativity. The idea that all the properties of interest are really about relationships between things and not a relationship between some thing and some absolute fixed background that defines what anything means is an important idea and an old idea in physics. In classical general relativity, one sees the realization of the idea that all the properties that we observe are about relationships. Those of us who are interested in quantum gravity are thinking a lot about how to bring that picture, in which the world is an evolving network of relationships, into quantum physics.

And there are several different aspects of that. There are very interesting ideas around but they're in the stage of interesting ideas, interesting models, interesting attempts — it is science in progress.

That's the first thing. To the extent to which our physics will turn out to look like a network of relationships which are evolving in time, physics will look like some system that computational people or biologists using the computational metaphor may be studying. Part of that is the questions of whether nature is really discrete — that underlying the continuous notion of space and time there's really some discrete structure, that's also something that from different points of view — when we work on quantum gravity we find evidence that space and time are really discrete and are really made up on processes which may have some discrete character. But again, this is something in progress.

One piece of evidence that nature is discrete is something called the holographic principle. This leads some of us physicists to use the word information even when we don't really know what we're talking about but it is interesting and worth exposing. It comes from an idea called the Bekenstein Bound, a conjecture of Jacob Bekenstein that there is more and more theoretical evidence for. The Bekenstein Bound says that if I have a surface and I'm making observations on that surface —that surface could be my retina, or it could be some screen in front of me — I observe the world through the screen, at any one moment there's a limitation to the amount of information that could be observed on that screen.

First of all that amount of information is finite, and it's four bits of information per Planck area of the screen, where a Planck area is 10 to the minus 66 centimeters squared. And there are various arguments that if that bound were to be exceeded, in a world where there is relativity and black holes, then we would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since none of us wants to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I think it's an important clue, and it says something important about the underlying discreteness of nature. It also suggests that information, although we don't know what information is, may have some fundamental place in physics.

The holographic principle, of which there are several versions by different people — the idea was invented by Dutch theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft — is that the laws of physics should be rewritten, or could be rewritten including dynamics, how things evolve in time, so we're no longer talking about things happening out there in the world in space, we're talking about representing systems that we observe in terms of the information as it evolves on the screen. The metaphor is that there's a screen through which we're observing the world. There are various claims that this idea is realized at least partly in several different versions of string theory or quantum gravity This is an idea there's a lot of interest in, but we really don't know whether it can be realized completely or not.

One extreme form of it, which I like, is that perhaps the way to read the Bekenstein Bound is not that there are two different things, geometry and flow of information and a law that relates them, but somehow we could try to envision the world as one of these evolving networks. What happens is processes where "information", whatever information is, flows from event to event, and geometry is defined by saying that the measure of the information capacity of some channel by which information is flowing, from the past to the future, would be the area of a surface, so that somehow geometry that is space would turn out to be some derived quantity, like temperature or density, and just the same way that temperature is a measure of the average energy of some particles, the area of some surface would turn out to be an approximate measure of the capacity of some channel in the world would fundamentally be information flow. It's an idea that some of us like to play with, but we have not yet constructed physics on those grounds, and it's not at all clear that it will work. This is a transition to a computational metaphor in physics — it's something which is in progress, and may or may not happen."

INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION | Edge.org

Note: LEE SMOLIN, a theoretical physicist, is a founding member and research physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada. He is the author of The Life of The Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.


.
 
Last edited:
from an online discussion

What are thoughts and what do thoughts mean to the wider Universe: Consciousness part II - Page 2 - General Chatter - A Forum of Ice and Fire - Page 2

(emphasis underlined below mine)

In the next part of the argument Goff explains why only the reductive panpsychist faces a combination problem. Our inability to make sense of the construction of a human subject by ultimate-subjects comes only so long as we essay a model on which the sole truths about the composite subject are truths concerning its components. As we found earlier, no such facts will suffice for the obtaining of a unified macro-consciousness. The emergentist panpsychist faces no similar difficulty, however, since he can simply hold that the macro-consciousness arises from the ultimates 'as a matter of brute fact or natural law' (136). . . . .


Whose words are these?
 
Last edited:

... Good Background takes you all the way to Russellian Monism

10th video in Dr. Richard Brown's philosophy of mind course. In this video we quickly discuss the developments in modal logic that allow us to state the contemporary arguments against physicalism. We then turn to a discussion of Kripke's modal argument and connect it to several other arguments including Chalmers' explanatory argument, arguments from inverted qualia, zombies, and the knowledge argument. We discuss the way in which some have tried to use Kripke's own work to defeat his attack on physicalism. We then discuss the way that David Chalmers has tried to refine Kripke's argument. We close with a discussion of Russelian Monism, which is being developed by those who are influenced by Chalmers' arguments




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I'll watch/listen to that despite my aversion to getting my philosophy in videotaped lectures. At some point I hope we will have an actual discussion about what precisely seems thinkable/ponderable at this point concerning the microprocesses, entanglement, and potential geometry produced in the microphysical substratum that are being assumed to enable the evolving nature of consciousness within the macrophysical 'level' of reality.
 
Lead the way! I think we're plenty prepared, you don't need the background in the Dualism video. I do think the Goff lecture is valuable, especially the Q/A - and its <30 ... Given the time frame it's an indication what Goff thinks is important.

Where do you want to start on the topic?

Chalmers paper


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I'd like to start with something more specific than the generalities Chalmers gives us concerning microconsciousness and microexperience without, so far as I have seen, an attempt to delve into description of what these general terms mean. Has anyone come to a place where something concrete or specific is hazarded? On what basis (other than 'conceivability') is it claimed that microparticles and their interactions are 'conscious' and 'experienced'? If 'protoconscious' is meant, where is an illustration such as the one provided by Maturana and Varela in biology with the demonstrable autopoiesis of the single-celled organism?

Perhaps Soupie can tell us whether and where Tononi descends to this level of description concerning 'information'.

I don't doubt that entanglement of 'information' generating interactivity and increasing complexity in nature begins in the quantum substrate; I think it also continues in every moment of conscious experience in and among our species and others in our and their environments.

I'm looking for light in the form of some specificity, not offering an answer to the questions I'm asking. At this point I don't care if dualism or monism turns out some century to be demonstrated; I care about the discussion of some grounds in reality (not just in 'conceivability') on which these theories are argued.
 
Last edited:
Too much in the philosophy and neuroscience we've read seems to be written in a vacuum of pure abstraction. To quote Lee Smolin,

"The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information."
 
Too much in the philosophy and neuroscience we've read seems to be written in a vacuum of pure abstraction. To quote Lee Smolin,

"The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information."

@Constance you write:

I'd like to start with something more specific than the generalities Chalmers gives us concerning microconsciousness and microexperience without, so far as I have seen, an attempt to delve into description of what these general terms mean. Has anyone come to a place where something concrete or specific is hazarded? On what basis (other than 'conceivability') is it claimed that microparticles and their interactions are 'conscious' and 'experienced'? If 'protoconscious' is meant, where is an illustration such as the one provided by Maturana and Varela in biology with the demonstrable autopoiesis of the single-celled organism?

No - I haven't seen specifics on the level you're asking ... it seems to me the crux, or rather a crux is here:

To rule out standard forms of materialism from counting as panprotopsychism, these special properties
must be (i) distinct from the structural/dispositional properties of microphysics and (ii) their
constitutive relation to phenomenal properties must reflect an a priori entailment from protophenomenal
to phenomenal truths. -
The Combination Problem for Panpsychism, David Chalmers

On what basis (other than 'conceivability') is it claimed that microparticles and their interactions are 'conscious' and 'experienced'?
Two questions here:

1. what would such a solution look like? In the first part of the video of Goff he notes that science set the mind outside, narrowed the scope of inquiry to what could be condensed to mathematical truth and he disputes the conception of science as being able to capture the complete metaphysical truth (4 minutes) - he notes that metaphysics (philosophical investigation into the nature of reality) is "a mess" with no proper methodology, he notes "common sense" intuition is a poor tool for the metaphysician. Giving up on physicalism he states leads to a methodology:

1. facts about causal structure facts about existence and
2. nature of consciousness from first-person experience (introspection)

And metaphysics is bringing together these two kinds of facts for a complete description of the natural world, he calls this a neo-Cartesian defintion of metaphysics.

Unfortunately, if he had details, he didn't share them in the lecture nor indicate that there are any details in his work ... but it's something to look for - a sophisticated model for using introspection

2. what are the alternatives? What else would consciousness be like? What other options do we have? Is this really an attempt to give up physcialism in a broad way - or is this still just trying to do something with all the little particles we know exist?

You write:

Too much in the philosophy and neuroscience we've read seems to be written in a vacuum of pure abstraction. To quote Lee Smolin,

"The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information."

What do you take from this? A statement about the limits of what's know about information in physics?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
@Constance - how would you most simply answer the question:

"What is consciousness?"

I imagine explaining it to my nephew, who's 12 and pretty sharp:

I would answer: "It is what it is like to be you. And the details of that are lacking. We can't build something that has a quality of being something it is like to be that thing - we have no idea how to go about this whatsoever."

I think most of the other facts recoverable from introspection are at hand for my nephew - accessible with a few questions.

Now, I imagine talking to an intelligent computer and trying to explain what consciousness is without referring to my subjective experience, "what it is like to be" is the single most useful phrase I have in this conversation.

Another answer to what is consciousness? is: an emergent property of the interaction or combination of particles that make up the world and these particles might each carry a little bit of "what it is like"-edness.

Another is: there are two kinds of stuff in the world, mental and physical stuff. We don't know how they work together.

What other answers could we give?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'll watch/listen to that despite my aversion to getting my philosophy in videotaped lectures. At some point I hope we will have an actual discussion about what precisely seems thinkable/ponderable at this point concerning the microprocesses, entanglement, and potential geometry produced in the microphysical substratum that are being assumed to enable the evolving nature of consciousness within the macrophysical 'level' of reality.

I think the lectures are extremely valuable, especially if there is Q&A. Actual classroom lectures may be the most useful - you may get the material presented in a way to avoid the misunderstandings people commonly have or you may get this directly from Q&A and you also get what is most important to the philosopher because he/she is not restricted to the formal requirements of a paper ... lectures, interviews and other material are invaluable in combination with formal papers. Also, I tend to be an auditory learner. Listening to Stevens poems and reciting them out loud has been extremely helpful.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top