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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

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I just wanted to say that I don't understand 75% of what I read on this thread, and that I'm not a moron either! WAY too academic and lofty for me to contribute, but to echo Chris O'Brien on a past episode, I am very impressed by the intelligence of the folks involved in this discussion.:p
 
Mr. Fibuli said:
I just wanted to say that I don't understand 75% of what I read on this thread, and that I'm not a moron either! WAY too academic and lofty for me to contribute, but to echo Chris O'Brien on a past episode, I am very impressed by the intelligence of the folks involved in this discussion.:p
Click to expand...

Thanks Mr. Fibuli. We've been finding our way through this multidimensional subject for about two years now, and all of us still have blind spots regarding the multidisciplinary research involved in the still-young field of Consciousness Studies. I recently cited a book that promises to be helpful to all of us and you too, if you're interested, and anyone else who is interested. It's described in this post from Part 4 of the thread:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

I haven't read it myself yet, but I've ordered it since I want to understand what Gallagher's responses and accommodations are to the thinking of a number of other leading researchers in the field today. Whether you read it or not, I hope you'll join us in this thread and feel free to ask for clarifications of anything you read here from the individuals who post it. This would be good for all of us.
 
Constance said:
Thanks Mr. Fibuli. We've been finding our way through this multidimensional subject for about two years now, and all of us still have blind spots regarding the multidisciplinary research involved in the still-young field of Consciousness Studies. I recently cited a book that promises to be helpful to all of us and you too, if you're interested, and anyone else who is interested. It's described in this post from Part 4 of the thread:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

I haven't read it myself yet, but I've ordered it since I want to understand what Gallagher's responses and accommodations are to the thinking of a number of other leading researchers in the field today. Whether you read it or not, I hope you'll join us in this thread and feel free to ask for clarifications of anything you read here from the individuals who post it. This would be good for all of us.
Click to expand...

Ill see if i can get this through the library.
 
As short interview with Shaun Gallagher, my paraphrase of interesting points below:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...sfqJ_gkNqqa9N4FRWfS10GQ&bvm=bv.99804247,d.aWw

front-loading phenomenology

Experimental design is informed by theory, but phenomenological method brackets theories and assumptions. This may result in insights about experience, including intersubjective experience.

Front-loading phenomenology informs experiments with these insights.

example: a distinction between the senses of agency/ownership is recognized by reflection on involuntary movement and this is then incorporated into the design of experiments - so phenomenology is "front-loaded" i.e. incorporated into the design of the experiment. Because no phenomenological reflection or report is used in the experiment itself, it differs from a strictly neurophenomenological experiment.

meditation as a method of neurophenomenology - long-term practitioners may be able to isolate or enhance various experiences or cognitive or attentional strategies in order to allow for the scientific study of these experiences or strategies using, e.g., neuroimaging or behavioural experiments.

*erasing the boundaries between body and mind -
One of the implications of the shift to embodied theories is that we need to re-conceive the concept of mind.

We need a positive vocabulary to describe this ... analytic philosophers have forgotten Wittgenstein and Ryle and are now stuck with belief-desire psychology and representationalism which are inadequate for concepts such as embodied action, enactive perception, situated and distributed cognition, and intersubjectivity.
 
from the same interview with Gallagher

*This one is cruxy so I'll quote Gallagher's response in full:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...sfqJ_gkNqqa9N4FRWfS10GQ&bvm=bv.99804247,d.aWw

The organic, spatial and affective boyd, the body schema, the body image ... these are the bodies that shape the mind. Embodiment is a diverse set of levels of experience, so what really shapes the mind?

I agree that there are different conceptions of the body, and that one should try to get clear about which one(s) count(s) for shaping our experience. de Vignemont recently co-authored an article with Alvin Goldman on embodied accounts of social cognition in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences. What they called embodiment was anything but embodiment. They basically reduce the body to brain representations and rule out any contributions from the body understood as either the lived body (Leib*) or the biological body.
They suggest that everything of importance for human cognition happens in the brain, which they refer to as ‘the seat of most, if not all, mental events’. They then suggest that embodied theorists should not mention the brain, since that is not the literal body; and they should not mention the environment, since that is not the body either.

But they then rule out any contribution of bodily action, posture, anatomy, and any preprocessing that the body does. They also suggest that the problem of social cognition is the problem of reading the other person’s mental states. So their question comes to this:

how does a body, without a brain, isolated from its environment (including the social
environment), and unable to perceive the bodily behaviors of others, discover the
mental states of others?

Their answer, what they call the best (or ‘most promising’) candidate for an embodied account, paradoxically, is that social cognition depends on body representations in the brain – paradoxically, because they ruled out appeal to the brain in any true embodied account. In effect, what they call the best candidate for an embodied account is an account that excludes any contribution from the body.

Obviously, if this is considered an embodied account, there is a problem.
If what is at stake is the lived body, I don’t mean to say that this is a different body than the biological body. They are the same body, discussed from different perspectives. The lived body is, and has to be, the same as the biological body.

The perceiving agent exists as and experiences the structures and processes that constitute the biological body, so anatomy, body chemistry, processes of respiration, heart rate, possible postures and movements, all of which can be described from a third-person perspective, are also describable from a first-person experiential perspective, and also enter into our intersubjective (second-person) experiences of others. So when I see a beautiful woman (like my wife) smart man! my heart races, hormones rush around (literal biological changes), and Ifeel this, as a feeling for the woman rather than as a set of objective changes in mybody; and my voice and gestures and postures express something about this feeling.
None of this can be reduced to simple brain processes, as if my brain was not dynamically coupled with changing physiological processes, and feelings, and my past encounters, and the beautiful woman moving in front of me in the golden sunlight or on thesmoky dance floor – that is, in an environment that is significant in specific ways. To say what my experience is, to define cognition in this instance, one needs to consider brain, body (lived and biological) and environment (social and physical), and nothing less.



* Husserl made the terminological distinction between the German words Leib and Körper,
  • the body as an embodied first-person perspective,
  • and the subsequent thematic experience of the body as an object
essentially: to be a body vs to have a body
 
smcder said:
This may be helpful in the meantime:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2294&context=lhapapers&ved=0CCUQFjACahUKEwjM5uPI8LTHAhUCFJIKHU8NAYc&usg=AFQjCNF8LktEKu8SDBeq93_QjwNAgy9Fbg&sig2=fNGHC4ibQivG3ShhkAdzYQ
Click to expand...

In Chapter 6 "Consciousness" Gallagher discusses NCCs:

One basic question is whether there are neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) – neural processes that in some way cause or generate consciousness.

He discusses a debate between Christopher Frith adn Christof Koch:

  • Koch was very straight forward about the whole question of consciousness depending onbrain processes. Once we know the NCCs, there will not be much else to know about consciousness.
  • Frith (what follows is my paraphrase) consciousness is in some way generated in social processes
In the brain ... in the world
  • Koch was answering how consciousness is generated in the brain
  • Frith answered when or in what circumstances consciousness is generated in the world
To clarify, Gallagher compares this to a question discussed earlier in the book:

How are subpersonal causal mechanisms and personal level intentionality integrated in action?

Here the analogous question is:

"... how are subpersonal brain processes integrated with more personal level phenomena that may
involve social or intersubjective factors so as to produce the consciousness that we know
and love?"

At this point Gallagher says we need to expand our concept of causality from "billiard-ball" type causlity:

"... one thing banging into another with the effect of the second thing banging into something else. Put enough of these things
together in a very complex way, call them neurons, and voila, consciousness emerges. A rather impoverished recipe however, with no real way to account for the rich intentionality of consciousness."

He asks if it's possible to say that there are contexts in the world that "call forth" or elicit consciousness ... in that sense causing consciousness to emerge?
 
Excellent that the whole book is available online. At last we have a detailed exploration of approaches to issues of consciousness that we can discuss together. And thank you for the series of extracts you're highlighting. Very cruxy indeed. .

"He asks if it's possible to say that there are contexts in the world that "call forth" or elicit consciousness ... in that sense causing consciousness to emerge?"

I'm going to chapter 6 now to see what follows that question.

. . . On the way to locating that question in chapter 6 I'm reading Gallagher's exchange with Tony Marcel (who seems to be impressively subtle in his thinking about consciousness). Here's an extract from their conversation in medias res on page 93:

Extract

SG: This is also where emotions could fit into the picture.

Marcel: Yes, in the sense that things matter or that you take an interest.

SG: I think Chalmers would say that it is the phenomenal aspect that is the hard problem, and he would think of it in terms of qualia, and in terms of thought experiments like Nagel's bat, or Jackson's story of Mary the color scientist. The phenomenal aspect is hard because objective science seems unable to capture precisely that first-person experience, and any attempt to do so turns it into a thirdperson neuronal process and misses the phenomenal quality of the experience. So it's the explanatory gap that is hard to close.

Marcel: I have to say that I don't personally have a strong position worked out on this problem of there being a first-person / third-person explanatory gap. There are philosophers on both sides of that gap, and you see what they say to each other, and you find that both groups make some sense.

SG: So do you think it is simply a matter of two different discourses that cannot be translated?

Marcel: It's interesting to put it that way. I oscillate between two views. Sometimes I really think it is a matter of two discourses. But, oddly enough, it is not clear that there is any isomorphism between them, or that you can translate them. This is quite common in many disciplines. It is not clear that there is any mapping between the entities – an entity in one discourse may not have a counterpart in the other discourse, and it's not clear how you map between them. So sometimes I do think it is a matter of two discourses. Other times, what I find myself doing, is being caught in between and trying to negotiate or broker a marriage or arrangement. But certainly it is never the case that we can reduce one to the other. I find it an uncomfortable position, but the fact that it is uncomfortable doesn't mean that I would give it up. What I don't want to do is what I feel to be crass and ridiculous. Namely, there are a number of cognitive neuroscientists or cognitivists who take something to be phenomenological, and then say this is equivalent to some "X" in a functionalist or information-processing scheme. I remain terribly unconvinced by that because these are not the kind of entities that exist in personal level or phenomenological discourse – they're just not, and it's absurd to say they're equivalent to such and such, because they're not. For example, here's a concept that emerges in various ways – it doesn't have anything to do particularly with phenomenology, but I think it does have relevance – it's the notion of there being relations, that some kinds of things are relational. Now something that Freud said does bear very much on this – his notion of cathexis – this idea that there is an investment in something. Take the notion of desire. Desire is a thick, heavy term. And I mean that's good. Yet, by desire they [the cognitivists] just mean that the system needs something, or that I have a propositional attitude, namely I perceive that woman, for example, plus whatever it is that I desire to do or happen. But certainly there is more, and there is something wrong about reducing desire to something purely cognitive. They've just got it wrong. And it is not just the fact that there are two discourses, but rather that at least one of the discourses extends away to other things. It extends to existential aspects. Existential discourse is not just a descriptive one. If something is merely descriptive, it could be mapped onto a Naturwissenschaft.

SG: So to the extent that a personal level discourse involves evaluations or evaluative judgments, desires, emotions, a cathexis, and so on, directed outward in a relation toward the world, they cannot be reduced to a descriptive science.

Marcel: Towards the world, but also towards oneself. As you yourself know, an existentialist discourse will raise questions about all sorts of things that simply have nothing to do with Naturwissenschaft, or reductive natural science. By reductive here I don't mean to devalue the term. And actually, such natural scientists usually want nothing to do with those things.

SG: At least when they are doing their natural science. . . ."
 
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Steve, would you give me a page citation to that question of Gallagher's that you summarized above:

"He asks if it's possible to say that there are contexts in the world that "call forth" or elicit consciousness ... in that sense causing consciousness to emerge?"
 
Constance said:
Steve, would you give me a page citation to that question of Gallagher's that you summarized above:

"He asks if it's possible to say that there are contexts in the world that "call forth" or elicit consciousness ... in that sense causing consciousness to emerge?"
Click to expand...

bottom 84/top 85
 
Overview of NCC

Next comes Gallagher conversation with Chris Frith on the state of NCC (book published in 2008) - what follows is a good review of brain imaging, pathology studies, etc.

He then turns to an interview with Koch by Thomas Ramsøy in 2004 about Koch's work with Francis Crick who had just died.

NCCs
Koch & Crick

Ramsøy asks Koch for the basic assumptions he makes about consciousness:

1. Koch and Crick took consciousness seriously as a "brute fact" to be explained:

"The first-person perspective, feelings, qualia, awareness, phenomenal experiences are real phenomena that arise out of certain privileged
brain processes. They make up the landscape of conscious life."

2. set aside the hard problem

Setting aside the "heart" of the mind-body problem why does phenomenal experience feel like anything? Koch and Crick felt that scientists should focus on the search for the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious experience ... feeling this would be a necessary first step toward understanding the structure, function and origin of consciousness.

3. no zombies allowed:

"The NCC have one, or more, functions, such as planning. Planning involves summarizing the current state of affairs in the world and the body and presenting this concise summary to a system that contemplates diverse courses of action open to the organism. It follows as a corollary that thinking about philosophical zombiesis sterile."

smcder this still doesn't seem to me to say why consciousness is necessary for planning (or other functions) ... and I'm not sure what it means for correlates to have one or more functions ... this may just be the wording and Koch may give more argument elsewhere.

4. all neurons are not equal - focus on local, particular properties of neurons

"While the NCC are embedded within the brain, not all of the brain’ s myriad of neurons and regions contribute equally. Some will be much more important than others. Thus, our emphasis on local, particular properties of neurons rather than on more global, holistic aspects of the brain. "

Ramsøy asks if this approach runs the risk of missing events on a global scale? The possibility that consciousness is a global event (Tononi and Edelman). Koch provides reasons why this is the place to go looking and then Ramsøy asks if it's possible to pinpoint areas of the brain that do or don't have potential to be NCC ...

Koch speculates that, with training, neuronal coaltitions constituting NCC may extend into some cortical areas previously inaccessible to consciousness.

smcder What does that mean?

Koch This would explain how, as people mature, they can learn to introspect (the "know thyself" of Western philosophy) or
to experience the world in a new way. At the level of individual neurons, there is likely to be a great deal of flexibility in which neurons partake in what coalition to generate a conscious percept.

smcder this last bit ties back in with the question of zombies above ...

"However, there is no doubt that given the observed heterogeneity in cortical regions, the essential neuronal coalitions that underlie one or the other conscious percept or memory will only be found in some of these regions but not in others. The latter ones make up what we call the Unconscious Homunculus, the parts of the brain that are involved in high-level, cognitive functions and decisions but that are not consciously accessible."

smcder So we have acknowledgement of high-level, cognitive functions and decision that are unconscious ... this must mean they can narrow down which parts of "contemplation" are conscious and maybe this would help understand why they have to be conscious?
 
smcder said:
smcder So we have acknowledgement of high-level, cognitive functions and decision that are unconscious ... this must mean they can narrow down which parts of "contemplation" are conscious and maybe this would help understand why they have to be conscious?
Click to expand...


That conversation is very revealing. It reveals a slippage in the text [something the poststructuralists have taught us to notice] in the referents of the term 'consciousness'. What causes NCC theorists to blink is the daunting challenge of accounting for how consciousness (and mind) continuously involve the subconscious in both ideation and feeling (which includes relations of resonance sensed in the relationship of consciousness/mind and world at the core of the subject-object relation itself.


Such sensings are difficult to articulate, express, in language [and are often thought to be 'ineffable'*], but they are unquestionably influential in what we are able to think as well as what we more comprehensively feel in and concerning our situated location in the natural world and also in the cultural world that overlays it.


For a full appreciation of what I’m referring to here one needs to read Merleau-Ponty's unpacking of the meaning of the word 'sense' {in French, 'sens'}, which refers to and recognizes the lived integration of meaning in that which we sense and the direction in which it points. That which we sense comes to us from the tactile, visible, audible, and otherwise sensible world in which we exist. Our sensing things and relations in the world points us outward in the direction of the world and then back toward ourselves in the temporal unfolding of our incremental understanding of the nature of our relation with the world {a relation immersed in signification and, as Heidegger recognized, Sorge}.

addendum: How close is this phenomenological insight to the relation you've described at the core of Eastern philosophy, Steve, characterized as "codependent arising"?


*experience that has been thought to be 'ineffable' is part of what neurophenomenology has now begun to explore.
 
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Constance said:
That conversation is very revealing. It reveals a slippage in the text [something the poststructuralists have taught us to notice] in the referents of the term 'consciousness'. What causes NCC theorists to blink is the daunting challenge of accounting for how consciousness (and mind) continuously involve the subconscious in both ideation and feeling (which includes relations of resonance sensed in the relationship of consciousness/mind and world at the core of the subject-object relation itself.


Such sensings are difficult to articulate, express, in language [and are often thought to be 'ineffable'*], but they are unquestionably influential in what we are able to think as well as what we more comprehensively feel in and concerning our situated location in the natural world and also in the cultural world that overlays it.


For a full appreciation of what I’m referring to here one needs to read Merleau-Ponty's unpacking of the meaning of the word 'sense' {in French, 'sens'}, which refers to and recognizes the lived integration of meaning in that which we sense and the direction in which it points. That which we sense comes to us from the tactile, visible, audible, and otherwise sensible world in which we exist. Our sensing things and relations in the world points us outward in the direction of the world and then back toward ourselves in the temporal unfolding of our incremental understanding of the nature of our relation with the world {a relation immersed in signification and, as Heidegger recognized, Sorge}.


*experience that has been thought to be 'ineffable' is part of what neurophenomenology has now begun to explore.
Click to expand...

slippage is interesting, I've got a vague sense of something like this I just read ... not sure I can pin it down ... the example above Koch seemed to just assume that conscious awareness had to be involved with decision making but didn't provide any explanation, somewhat circular by saying the proof of consciousness playing a role is because there are some conscious and some unconscious states, so consciousness is necessary because it exists, a very reasonable starting point, I'm not saying it doesn't but an interesting lapse in logic or in the writing ... and he discusses some unconscious states becoming conscious, so there function before didn't require consciousness so you still have to explain a role for consciousness once they do ... and further, of course this is just a short interview, but Koch doesn't bring up the idea that this could all apply to him and his work ... as you gain depth in a subject, the way an expert thinks is very different than a beginner, this is why teaching is a gift, because once you've changed your way of thinking about something, once you've mastered it, it's very difficult to know what it was like not to know how to do that thing ...

... this is where it gets really interesting for me, in the dicussison with Marcel you see this move from a kind of step wise rationality into intuition and subtlety and you see it in the language he uses, he seems very comfortable and skilled moving back and forth between the two, he'll hit a solid piece and use the logic and then he'll move off from there into any area that uses something very different in terms of how he is thinking ... it seems to me this is where human thinking gets really interesting and about this time, people want to drag it all back out to abc X 123.

The way I've been thinking about this lately is that some of the explanations that do rely on step-wise thinking, the structures get so complex that you can't figure out the internal stresses and they collapse - or nobody can follow that line of reasoning long enough to see if it's true - the work on Fermat's conjecture - it was computer assisted and ran to 1000s of pages and for a time (and maybe still) no one has been able to confirm the result. This is all in the larger context of mathematical theorems being beautiful or good mathematicians having an intuitive sense of parsimony. But what it seems to be about is running up against our limitations. Which I see as a very positive thing. But I can come back to that later.

This seems a pretty natural progression in any field and at the point of collapsing structures - that's where we begin to look for other approaches. The complex explanations work but the underlying ad-hoc nature becomes very noticeable even before a collapse and by that time, all but sub-sub-disciplinarians have been repelled. And that's another question I have run into throughout my life - the rela tionship and responsibility of experts to generalists. We are all more generalists than we are experts, after all.

Phenomenology it seems was a response to the limits of the preceding tradition but it got routed prematurely with advances in computing technology and the analytical approach, instead of dying at that point, was extended because computational power was extended ... but then decades later we run back into those same problems and phenomenology is revitalized.

This is
 
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